Social Media Mavens / Experts

You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members. There is already an unofficial site called The Twitter Blacklist that lists 329 known spammers on the service (see screen shot below). That has nothing to do with Twitter officially and is just a public service.

But Twitter also has its own official blacklist. It is not clear how you get on it, but perhaps if you are blocked by enough members you get inducted.

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.

But now Twitter is simply suspending the accounts of people it considers spammers, but it will notify them. According to a discussion on the Twitter Development mailing list:

We’ve been considering this issue here at Twitter HQ, and we’re planning on simply removing the accounts of users who have violated our Terms of Service, as opposed to freezing their account as we’ve done in the past.

I just hope Scoble isn’t on that list. Taking away his Twitter would devastate him, especially after the whole Facebook banning incident.

In this guest post Steven Snell (who writes about social media at Traffikd) examines the topic of generating readership for your blog through social media.

Image by shoothead

If you spend much time on social media websites, I’m sure you’ve noticed that you tend to see many of the same websites and blogs on the front page receiving the most exposure. A few months ago I wrote a post at Daily Blog Tips that posed the question Do Small Bloggers Have a Chance with Digg? Through my observations and through the comments from many readers, it’s clear that large websites and blogs have a distinct advantage over smaller blogs when it comes to social media. Obviously, this can be frustrating to new bloggers who are looking to get some much-needed exposure from social media, as it seems to be the rich just getting richer.

One question that needs to be addressed is, what is the most significant factor that leads to the success of these large websites with social media? Is their content just that much better than smaller blogs? In my opinion, many times this isn’t the case. Is it because they have a larger existing audience? I’d say this is often a bigger factor than the quality issue. Very popular blogs tend to do well with social media, and with their incredibly large subscriber bases, they have a distinct advantage.

Take for example the front page of Delicious. Typically it takes about 100 bookmarks within 24 hours or so to get to the front page. It seems like almost every day there is a post from Smashing Magazine or Zen Habits on the front page. With over 60,000 and 50,000 readers respectively, a small percentage of subscribers can easily put these posts on the front page with a bookmark. On the other hand, a smaller blog with only 100 subscribers would need one bookmark per subscriber to make the front page.

So how does this affect smaller bloggers who want to get better results from social media? Essentially it shows that great content alone is usually not enough. It takes a gathering to build a crowd. Meaning, your gathering of existing readers and your network of friends can help to result in a bigger crowd that comes from social media sites.

New bloggers that are targeting social media, or those who have just been disappointed with their results to this point need to focus on building the gathering before the crowd will come. Networking is probably the most significant activity for bloggers in terms of gaining social media traffic. A blogger’s network includes readers and subscribers as well as friends and contacts who are bloggers themselves. Members of your network will be much more likely to vote for you on social media sites, plus you can openly ask for their help when you need it the most.

There are several different ways to get social media votes:

1 - Visitors of social media sites can see your link at the social media site and vote there (example, a Digg user visits the upcoming page, clicks through to your link, returns to Digg and votes for your post).

2 – Visitors of your blog can vote by using a button, widget, or link on your blog.

3 – Visitors can use a toolbar to vote (examples, StumbleUpon and Delicious toolbars).

4 – Social media users can share your post with their friends (example, the shout feature at Digg).

5 – Bloggers can email (or IM) others in their network to request a vote.

The only one of these that is not affected by the existing “crowd” of a blog is #1. Getting votes from the upcoming page is not really affected by how many readers you have at your blog, rather it is affected by how many people see the item on the upcoming page, the quality of the title (in terms of attracting clicks), the quality of the content once people click-through, etc. Certainly there are some small blogs that have success this way without a network, but this seems to be the minority.

All of the other four are affected by how many people are seeing the page and how many people are in the blogger’s network. Let’s quickly look at each one. For #2, the more visitors a page has (which is impacted by the number of subscribers), the more opportunities it has to get votes through a button. If a post only gets 5 visitors, the most votes it can possibly get through a “Digg This” button is five. On the other hand, if the post gets 5,000 visitors, its potential for votes just multiplied by 1,000. The situation in #3, visitors voting using a toolbar, is exactly the same scenario.

Item numbers 4 and 5 are both impacted by the blogger’s network of friends and contacts. If you have a large existing network and you’re willing to ask them for some help occasionally, you can get some quick and easy votes. Whether you’re using a share feature at a social media site or simply sending a private email, your success will depend on the quality and quantity of connections you have made in addition to the quality of the content itself.

I Don’t Have a Crowd. What Can I Do?

Understanding how all of this works is good, but if you’re a new blogger with a limited network and a small base of subscribers it doesn’t help you very much, yet. If you’re looking to improve your results with social media, do what you can to get one step closer to blogs that have a bigger reach than you. Work on building your network and send as much traffic as possible to your posts.

Here are a few tips:
1 – Still focus on content

In order to build your crowd you’ll need to give them a reason to consistently read your blog. Publishing high-quality content is the best way to do this. Although I said earlier that the existing audience is often more important than the content itself for social media success, the content still needs to be of a certain standard of quality.

2 – Dedicate time to networking

Most bloggers network casually whenever it happens. This is fine, but you can step up your network by making it a priority. Use social media sites and other blogs as opportunities to connect with other bloggers and get to know others who share some of your interests. Be active on blogs in your niche and make an effort to get to know those bloggers. Don’t limit your involvement with just A-list bloggers. Make an effort to get to know other bloggers who are at the same stage in the blogging lifecycle as you. In this case you’ll be able to help each other as you both grow your blogs.

3 – Funnel traffic

Most bloggers create posts from time-to-time that they expect to draw some attention from social media. When you have a post that you want to get some exposure, don’t just focus on getting Diggs or Stumbles. You can use smaller social media sites and niche social media sites to funnel traffic to the post. As visitors come from other social media sites they may also Digg or Stumble your post. If you have some other way to get traffic to these posts, such as getting a link from a friend or from a community website, do so. The more visitors you can get to the page, the better your chances will be of getting some votes.

4 – Don’t be afraid to ask for a vote

Some bloggers and social media users don’t like to ask others for a vote. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, I’ve found that other social media users who are legitimately your friends (not just someone you added as a friend at Digg) will be happy to give you a vote if your content is worthy, and you can return the favor for them as well. I get a decent number of requests each week, and as long as it’s from someone I know and not just a spam request, I’m happy to at least consider the vote.

After The Gathering is Built

Once you have built a gathering of subscribers and those in your network, drawing the crowd from social media will be incredibly more realistic. Not only will it be more realistic, but it will happen more frequently, as you can observe from the larger blogs mentioned at the beginning of this post.

What’s Your Approach?

How do you go about getting votes for social media? Is your success with social media impacted by your network?

Twitter is a new social media service that is being used by many power bloggers to keep in touch with their audience on a more personal level. It is called “micro-blogging” and rests somewhere between Blogging and Email. The basic concept is that you can subscribe to get short and brief commentary in the form of live alerts from other members by SMS, Instant Messenger or Email. These people can send it to you via their mobile phone or IM. You too can become someone who others choose to follow and get updates from… but it is very hard to create a large fan following on Twitter from scratch, unless you already have a huge audience that subscribes to you blog. Twitter picked up in popularity around 2007.

By following many individuals on Twiter, you can get a very fragmented experience of opinions, events, news, ideas and feedback. You can very easily follow thousands of users and listen and enter into conversations happening between multiple users at any point of time. By using Twitter actively, you can also push out messages to others and use it as a self promotion and marketing tool. Twitter can be used for both a professional and personal life, and its addictive - but once you understand how to use i, it can be a very effective tool.

Catch me on Twitter my URL is http://twitter.com/mediamavens and be the First to know everything, even before it is posted on this Blog….. Yes it’s Cool!

Definition from Wikipedia (skip this if you know this stuff already)

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, as well as a United Kingdom number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email

But how exactly do these peer influences work? What motivates a person to share a piece of media with a group of friends or participate in an online community? How does one person’s purchasing behavior affect another’s?  Who are the consumers doing the influencing? And how can you design for influence? In this article, I discuss the motivations to share, how the location of a person in a network plays a role, and whether you can market to those influencers. I then provide tactics specific to the retail sector to take advantage of peer influence.

Motivations to Share

Abraham Maslow emphasized that personal value precedes network and social value in his hierarchy of needs theory. He argued that most people are not selfish but self interested  – they are always searching for an answer to the question – what’s in it for me?  This applies to the web domain where people don’t share and allow peer influences to take place just for the sake of it. People share online when they are incented to and when there’s potential for personal value to be realized.

Clay Shirky and Peter Kollock also point out that once a person has been able to derive strong individual benefit from a particular experience, the motivation to share increases significantly. This happens as the user realizes that through the collective action (or experience) there’s opportunity to derive even more personal value from it.

What are the implications of this? When you design a website or online marketing campaigns, remember that if the experience isn’t valuable to one person, it won’t be to a hundred, a thousand, or a million people. Tied to that, consumers must be able to derive greater value through the act of sharing for them to make that effort. For example, a person would be more likely to share a piece of media to influence a peer if the act of sharing enhances his reputation among those peers or if it encourages the peers to participate in the social activity too.

Location in the Network

Not everybody is inclined to play a role in influence either. People use the Internet in different ways, and their usage patterns dictate how likely they are to share information and influence each other. But more than that, their location in an online community or social network heavily influences their likelihood of playing a role in influencing others.

The closer a person is to the center of the conversations, and the more people he is connected to, the more likely he is to influence his peers. Because he is directly involved in many different conversations, his peers typically treat him as a credible or appealing information source. They get used to getting information from him and get used to sharing information with him, providing him with something to respond to in turn.

As a result, this person is in a much stronger position to influence a peer than someone who only occasionally participates in the conversation or is just loosely connected to the group. In fact, this is how the influential bloggers work too – because they are at the center of conversations sharing a lot of information themselves, they have lots of influence.

The same philosophy applies to networks of friends and how they share information online. Why does this matter? It is important to recognize that not every Web user is a candidate for peer influence. Only those that are at the center of their networks communicate actively and regularly with their peers and can play this role. Look for those people, and meet their needs as you design for influence.

Influencers are not Brand Advocates

A report from JupiterResearch highlights that nearly 25% of all online adults are brand advocates. They are more likely to research and purchase products online too. But as the reported pointed out, these brand advocates focus on gathering product information and purchasing them, rather than spreading the word through social media sites. They are not the most important influencers.

Rather, the most important influencers are the people who play a role further down the purchasing funnel. They are the people who are solicited for advice while a consumer is in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision. These people are in the consumer’s network – online and offline. They serve as validation points sharing their own experiences of a product with the consumer, pointing the consumer to resources that can affect the purchasing decision, and weigh in with their own opinions. How do you reach them?

Contrary to traditional word-of-mouth marketing strategies or even viral marketing, you don’t. You let your potential customers, who are in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision, reach out to them. Why? Because these influencers don’t vary by product, rather they vary by consumers. And it is difficult for you as a marketer to know who the core influencers for a brand consideration or particular purchasing decision are. In some cases, it may be the consumer’s parents or it may be the friends, or peers at work or relatively anonymous peers in a discussion forum, or maybe a combination of all these.

Tactics for Success

So if you cannot reach these important influencers that are having a far greater influence on purchasing decisions than any other form of marketing, what can you do? You can formulate your web strategies to allow for those peer influences to take place. I introduced some tactics in my previous article, here are some more but specific to online retail experiences –

1. Integrate more deeply with the social networks. Yes, your consumers are spending a lot of time on these social networks, and that won’t change anytime soon. Office Depot allows consumers to post messages directly to their Facebook profiles, or into their newsfeeds, about products they are interested in. It does this from the product page on its site. It makes it easier for a consumer to solicit feedback from his peers.

Other e-retailers should follow by integrating directly with the social networks allowing consumers to get feedback more directly during their purchasing process. For example, a consumer should be able to take a product from a retailer Web site, post information about it in his social network, and solicit feedback via a poll from his network seamlessly. No one does this today.

2. Point customers to third-party review sites. Consumers are going to go to third-party review sites regardless of what you tell them on yours. So rather than trying to stop them, point your consumers to the most authorative and credible ones out there. They will appreciate this and return to your site once they are ready to make a purchase. Most sites point to favorable product reviews in the mainstream media, but that’s not enough.

By pointing to the blogs and review sites themselves, consumers will know where to look for more information, and they’ll find communities of peers looking to make similar purchases. These are peers that can positively influence them.

3.Tie more directly with the offline shopping experience. Consumers move between the online and the offline space as they make product purchasing decisions. The iPhone and other mobile devices that simplify web surfing are making this happen more. In fact, Google has seen a 20% increase in searches from mobile phones in the last few months.

Therefore, as you think about an online shopping experience, keep in mind those offline scenarios and how social influence can support them. A consumer might be surfing to your web site or broadcasting to his Facebook network asking for advice while standing in a retail outlet looking directly at your product. So for example, consider publishing the customer reviews for a particular product that were originally published online in the retail store itself. Staples is already doing this successfully.

4. Make the product a strong discussion point. We’re used to thinking of products in terms of features and specifications in relation to other products on retail Web sites. Separately, we think of online communities and social networks as places where people talk to each other. Those two worlds can blur if you allow for more conversations around the product. It’ll lead to more peer influences.

Amazon has started doing this with their Customer Discussions. These aren’t customer reviews, rather, they are forums to discuss the products and everything about them. They are designed to enable conversations about a product that people are interested in.

5. Leverage your employees to build online communities. Both Best Buy and Circuit City in different, but exciting ways, encourage their employees to participate in their online communities on their retail Web sites. These employees answer customer queries about specific products, advise each other on technical issues and demonstrate that there are real, authentic people who care behind the brand.

Why does this matter? Because when these employees play authentic and personal roles in online communities where consumers are making purchasing decisions, they blur the lines between sales representative and peer influencer. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily which is why these retailers, and others, should encourage their employees to participate in third-party online communities too – as long as they do so honestly, authentically, and appropriately.

Social Influence Marketing™ takes many different forms. As we’ve seen, at the root of Social Influence Marketing™ are the peer influences that can positively affect brand affinity and purchasing decisions. Taking advantage of social media, by tapping into the Social Influence Marketing™ concepts, requires a more rigorous understanding of those peer influencers. Only through a focused understanding and appropriate design tactics can you take advantage of one of the most important dimensions to marketing today.

Embracing blogs to connect with a company’s network of customers is fait accompli for the tech industry, but what about the rest of the planet that doesn’t put its every movement up on Twitter?

Here are four retailers that are using blogs and social media in an attempt to better connect with customers.

Revenue: $375 Billion
# Locations: 6,800
Notable URL: http://www.checkoutblog.com/
Notable post: “Great News About WalMart’s Milk” (over 230 comments)

After several failed attempts at blogging, most notably the reviled “WalMarting Across America” shill blog, the planet’s largest retailer might be starting to get its act together.  In 2007, the Bentonville, Arkansas company launched the “Checkout Blog,” a group blog penned by nine of its corporate buyers that covers topics from the garden to video games to sustainability.  A definite step in the right direction for the company, with actual employees communicating about their individual areas of interest, with minimal company shilling taking place.

Revenue: $23 Billion
# Locations: 30,000+
Notable URL: http://csr.blogs.mcdonalds.com/
Notable post: “A Trip Down Memory Lane” (Good handling of a troll in the comments)

WalMart wasn’t the only retailing behemoth to receive derision for its initial forays into blogging.  McDonald’s, too, had its challenges. (Hopefully, you missed the fake “Lincoln Fry” blog, about a french fry shaped like the 16th President of the United States.  Yes, it was as abysmal as it sounds.)

The company behind the golden arches now has a “Open for Discussion” blog with weekly postings on topics regarding “Corporate Social Responsibility.”  While certainly better than the LIncoln Fry, there are still some challenges here:

1)  It looks to me like someone at McDonald’s headquarters has committed to some sort of MBO of “one blog post per week.”   As such, the posts are infrequent and not heavily trafficked.

2)  While it’s great to spread the wealth, all the most recent posts on the site (March-April 200 are from different authors.  Accordingly, each post is starting with a “who I am and what my role is” statement.  This also means that the revolving cast of characters hasn’t a chance to connect with readers.  It’s drive-by blogging.

3) To their credit, comments on the blog are open.  However, the paucity of comments makes me think that either (a) the blog is receiving almost no traffic or (b) the comments are being heavily moderated.  The bold TERMS AND CONDITIONS of the blog also state: “McDonald’s owns any comments or other content that you post on this site. That means that McDonald’s has the right to make, have made, offer for sale, use, sell, copy, distribute, perform, transmit, display, modify, adapt and otherwise use your submission(s) throughout the world in perpetuity in any manner that it sees fit without compensation to you. McDonald’s also has the right to use your name in connection with any use of your submissions.”  This is not the best method to develop trust and a long-term relationship with a customer.

Revenue: $9 Billion
# Locations: 15,000+
Notable URL: http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/
Notable post: “Vote For All Day Bold” (Giving contrarian viewpoints their due)

Of the four retailers profiled here, Starbucks has gone the furthest with respect to using social media to not only connect the organization to its customers, but to enable customers to rally around ideas as a community.  Their “My Starbucks Idea” site is a venue where customers can submit suggestions to the organization, vote on the suggestions of other individuals, and see which ideas are going to actually be implemented by the organization.

The best part of the site is not the technical implementation but, rather, the cultural one.  Starbucks does not seem to be censoring comments about their organization in any way, even when the feedback is less-than-stellar.  For example,  one representative comment on the site states:

“Decaf drinkers want strong coffee also. I go (or used to go) to Starbucks because of the decaf Sumatra, Verona etc. I can get Pikes Piss coffee from Tim Horton’s or McDonald’s. My grandmother makes stronger coffee. Starting today I am no longer a customer of Starbuck’s coffee except for whole beans. I urge everyone reading this to follow my lead and make Starbuck’s understand that the reason we (used to) spend our money on their overpriced coffe is because it is the best and no one else offers a strong decaf. There is strength in numbers - walk away today!”

The key thing that Starbucks realizes is that these conversations are taking place anyway.  If this site didn’t exist, customers such as the individual above would be making these comments in other forums that were removed from the organization, or on his or her own blog.  With My Starbucks Idea, the organization is getting the feedback in realtime, and has the opportunity to address issues in a rational and constructive way.

Revenue: $4 Billion
# Locations: 270+
Notable URL: http://wholefoodsmarket.com/socialmedia/blogs/
Notable post: “Slow Down and Green Up” (Rich conversation)

Although their CEO got himself and the company in some hot water by commenting negatively about a competitor using a pseudonym (n.b. the investigation into his actions has now been concluded), Whole Foods has a farmer’s market full of blogs, podcasts and videos they are using to give customers a variety of methods to learn more about the organization.

Last week, I started reading more on how you can drive traffic to your website using Twitter. Several bloggers that I read use Twitter daily to help find new readers and meet new people. I really didn’t grasp it at first, but I definitely got sucked in to Twitter quickly.

For those who don’t know the Twitter factor, I will drop a few stats on you.

Last week, I started actively using Twitter. Not really to drive traffic to my site, but to find new blogs that I could personally read and start following.  Immediately, I noticed a huge traffic spike to the blog. So I decided to look into it a little further.

• Since I started actively using Twitter (last week), I have increased my RSS subscribers by 32. This isn’t an unheard of increase, but I know that most of those new readers should stay around awhile.
• My website views have increased by almost 300 hits a day. Once again, if you are a large blog, that might not seem like much. But for an upstart, that is quite a bit of traffic inflow.

Those are just the raw traffic numbers from the website. What I wasn’t expecting were the tons of compliments via Twitter, users going to my band websites from my About page and complimenting my music, and meeting several people who I have since had nice and meaningful conversations with. I have also found many, many new blogs which I have subscribed to and read daily.

So, how did I do it?

These are the steps I went through in order to build the traffic and increase my followers. There are a few people who look at these types of methods as spamming, but they key to it is to NOT spam, and use your newfound connections properly. I have yet to post a link in a tweet (which is a message) attempting to drive traffic to the website. I may from time to time, but this method works to build a grassroots following similar to how I used to promote my band on MySpace.  When I promoted my music on MySpace, I would find a similar artist to my music. I would go through and then attempt to add their friends and message them. The mindset was ‘If they like this artist, there is a better chance they would like my music than if I picked a random person off the street.’ Instead of spamming them, I would message them personally and ask them to check out my music. It worked well, until people took advantage of it and start spamming relentlessly. So far, I have found that not to be the case on Twitter. Here are the steps.

1. Make sure you profile has up to date links. I made sure that the blog I wanted people to go to was the first link on the profile. In the biography section of the Twitter profile, I added a link to the websites About page. This way if people wanted to find out about me, it would take them to my blog. (Keep in mind, I do not have advertisements on my site, I am more interested in sending them to the website so they can see what I write about, and if they like the content, will add my site to their RSS reader. However, if you are displaying ads, this is a good way to increase hits and traffic)
2. Find someone with a similar business or blog and attempt to add their followers. It seems pretty simple and it works fast. In my example, I immediately cruised over to the profile of Maki from DoshDosh. He has a wonderful social media blog, his writing is top notch, and I like his overall style. I went one by one and added every single follower. You can do it faster than you ever could add a MySpace friend. After I had added all his followers, I went to a few more profiles and added similar followers. My thinking is if someone is following another blog, they quite possibly could be interested in following my blog.
3. Download and install an application to help manage Twitter. I personally use Twhirl. It helps me manage replies and messages in a chat like setup. It is great for responding to messages.
4. Respond to every single message and tweet. You will get a fair amount of backlash from adding people so fast. The reason is because many assume that you will just be spamming them. Take interest and respond the messages. You will ease their mind and if they like your content and tweets, they may become a reader.
5. Don’t spam incessantly. One thing I have noticed, is the people who spam get removed very fast. So if you intend on building long lasting relationships and not just quick traffic spikes, make sure not to spam.
6. Give back as well as take. You will have an opportunity to meet a wonderful community and find many new friends and blogs. Make sure you give traffic and subscriptions back. I assure you that you will find something you’ll love.

I hope this continues and I am able to grow more relationships with bloggers!

Most social media websites give you an individual profile page alongside the option of befriending other site users. The adding of someone as a ‘friend’ on a social media website is not just an empty gesture. Usually when you add someone as a friend, you’re giving them greater access to you through the social media channel.

For example, some Digg users set their message inbox as ‘friends only’, so you can only ’shout’ or communicate with other users through the site when they have added you as a friend. Only when someone on Twitter ‘follows’ or adds you, will you have the ability to send them private messages or view his/her updates, if they are protected.

In sites like Facebook, adding someone as a friend allows them to see more of your profile (depending on your settings). Befriending users on Youtube allows you to follow their rating and favoriting on videos, while also allowing you to more easily share content with one another.

In general, when someone adds you as a friend on a social media service, you gain some or all of the following benefits:

1. Access to more data. You get to view more data on the user, some of which may be intentionally obscured from the public or other non-friend users. This allows you to network with the specific user in a more intimate and personal setting.
2. Greater communication options. Depending on the social site, when someone adds you as a friend, they open up more avenues of communication. This adds a greater level of interactivity: you can connect with the person who added you through private/direct messages, instead of the highly visible public channel.
3. Recommended content. When someone adds you as a friend (and vice versa), your activity or actions on the site may be recommended or ‘pushed’ towards the other person in some part of their admin panel or profile. This means that you’ll get greater visibility automatically whenever you use the social website.
4. Greater Social Proof. An auxiliary advantage of having many fans on social media websites is social proof, especially when the social site itself ranks the users according to the no. of followers/subscribers they have. Popular and visible users tend to accumulate friends more easily than unknown users.

Basically, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain when someone adds you as a friend on any social media website. They are giving you permission to share messages with them while bestowing attention on your recommendations/actions within the social site.

If you’re trying to get maximum visibility for your message, develop a popular social profile that has a large amount of fans in order to take advantage of the innate advantage that comes from communicating with a large number of people at once through a specific action.

You can see this most easily in highly subscribed Youtube channels. A video can easily rack up over 10,000 views in one day if it is released by a highly subscribed channel owner. Similarly, marketers or web personalities enjoy increasing their Twitter fanbase because they benefit from the influence they derive from consistently wielding a large amount of attention.

Are There Benefits to Having Mutual Friends on Social Websites?

Image Credit: mario party

Depending on their level of particpation, some of these users will become part of your inner circle: the people you interact with the most on the social site. You’ll notice that you’re often talking to the same people on Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook. More erratic or non-regular users will connect with you less, only when they use the site.

This brings to mind something that is rarely discussed by social media marketers. Are there benefits to mutual friendship on social media websites? Should you only befriend people who befriend you and make sure that you only have mutual friends?

There’s no simple answer for this question because it depends on two things: The infrastructure of the social media site and your goals or how you want to use the site.

Let’s use StumbleUpon as an example. Some have suggested that it’s important to only have mutual friends on StumbleUpon since there’s a friend limit of 200 users. I think that’s just a really limited perspective on how to develop popularity on StumbleUpon.

I don’t recommend this strategy because the only feature-based benefit that you’ll get from a mutual SU friendship is the use of the send-to feature on the toolbar. This option is not used by most active users, does not help to increase traffic significantly and is liable to be abused by spammers who send you multiple pages of content irrelevant to your interests every day.

Who you befriend on Stumbleupon influences what pages you see when you click the stumble button: this means you should try to add users who often stumble content within your field of interest, in order to improve your user-experience, regardless if they are friends or not.

What one needs to understand is that friend networks serve different purposes on each social media site so the value of mutual friendships will differ. This is something you’ll instinctively realize when you spend a lot of time on using each specific social channel.

Next week, I may talk about some friend network building strategies you can use. Feel free to leave a comment and pose any questions you may have!

You may have heard of Greasemonkey, the Firefox extension that lets you customize the way a web page displays using small bits of Javascript, but are you using it to its fullest potential? There are hundreds of scripts available for installation from userscripts.org, so it can be difficult to know which ones are must-haves.

News and magazine publishers are already using the wildly popular site Twitter to distribute their content online. If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, check out our What is Twitter? blog post from yesterday that explains why and how publishers are using Twitter to distribute their content. PCMagazine.com also has a fairly in-depth review.

Bloggers are doing incredibly well on Twitter, but we thought we’d focus this article more on traditional print publishers. Twitter is a no-brainer for any publisher who is trying to step up their game on the Internet. If you have an RSS feed, you can instantly be connected to anyone on Twitter that chooses to follow you. Here are some traditional print publishers who are using Twitter to increase their online presence:

The New York Times: (3,390 followers)  Updates every half an hour automatically with the latest story title and link back to the article on their website.

Craft: Magazine: (642 followers) Automatically feeds their HOW TO and blog articles with titles and a link back to the article on their website.

Washingtonian Magazine: (68 followers) Has a “voice”; of Washingtonian that talks about current events within the magazine, upcoming interviews and articles, and links back to specially selected articles and guides.

CityWeekend (49 followers) Has a “voice”; of City Weekend that “tweets” new job listings and magazine updates.

PCMagazine (38 followers) Started a PC Gaming Twitter that feeds from the gaming section of the website.

New Media Age Magazine – (34 followers) Automatically feeds the latest media news that includes the article title and a link back to the article on their website.

Yankee Magazine – (29 followers) Automatically feeds the latest new england news that includes the article title and a link back to the article on their website.

OK! Magazine: (24 followers) Automatically feeds the latest celebrity gossip that includes the article title and a link back to the article on their website.

Other magazines such as InStyle have a good amount of followers, but they don’t update their feed. With something as simple as TwitterFeed available, they could be banking on that audience. A “follower”, by the way, is a person who is subscribed to your Twitter account and gets your updates amongst the rest of their other friend updates.

Personalizing your Twitter feed increases followers

There are also other approaches being taken by the industry including personal Twitter accounts by the publishers themselves. Bill Palmer from iProng Magazine has racked up 2,098 followers, and even Carlos Gutiérrez who is an editor at PC Magazine has 228 followers.

Personalization is obviously key here and if you have someone you trust to be the “voice”; of your publication, you should be nudging him or her towards Twitter.com.

What online publishers are saying about Twitter

We recently started talking to the co-author of the upcoming Twitter Handbook, Warren Whitlock (who Mequoda’s own Editor & Publisher Amanda MacArthur happened to have met on Twitter). After a few exchanged emails, Amanda asked him how he thought traditional publishers should be using Twitter.

“I’m currently co-authoring a book on Twitter (TwitterHandbook.com) with a colleague I met on MySpace and introduced to Twitter. The open collaboration has now involved hundreds of people and we have had offers other publishing deals based on the buzz we are creating. Twitter is a fantastic tool for connecting with the media people that are using it. I’ve done several interviews based on connections made on Twitter. In on promotional experiment, I offered a few copies of a new book. In minutes, we had people talking about the subject of the book, and telling their followers about the promotion.”;

Whitlock feels, however that it’s important to engage your community. He told us “The best use of Twitter is when I listen. I open the feed of people I’m following and get news fast, a feel for what is important in other parts of the nation and world and see new opportunities. I read with an eye towards helping my friends. When I see a question, I answer. When there is an interesting blog link, I go read and comment, adding as much value as I can in a couple of minutes to build relationships with others. When I engage in the community, listen to them and respond, I find that a simple link to my blog entry, or question about a project gets immediate response from real friends. In the past few months, I’ve gained hundreds of friends. Met up with some at live events, talked to many by phone, and done business with a few.”;

David Berlind from ZDNet, in an article he wrote on the “Twitterization of mainstream media“; said, “Publishing one-liners takes only as long as it takes to type the one-liner. Subscribing to a source of one-liners the way an investor might subscribe to Bloomberg’s information services takes only seconds as well. Whereas Bloomberg puts a sophisticated system in the hands of an exclusive group of people on a private network, Twitter and Pownce make such a system available to everyone on the Web.

Twitter tools that make it easy:

Twhirl: A Twitter client that looks like an instant messenger and makes it incredibly easy to update from your desktop, post links and respond to other Twitterers.

Twitter Updater WordPress Plugin- A plugin that sends a “tweet” to your followers every time you post a blog using tinyurl technology.

TwitterFeed - Automatically streams your RSS feed into Twitter and posts with your article name followed by a tinyurl link to your article.

I think Twitter is a game-changer for movies.

Last night Iron Man opened here in several theaters around DC, and most of the Tweets getting thrown around were by folks eager to head to the theaters or trying to meet up with friends at the advanced screening of the Marvel movie.

Within seconds of the movie finishing, the reviews came pouring out - nearly all positive, at least, according to Summize, where a quick search aggregates all the Tweets about the film.

We experienced a taste of this when Cloverfield finally came out after an immensely successful viral marketing campaign. Fans who had desperately clamored to see the premiere instantly shared their reviews and opinions - many of them less than glowing - on Twitter, which resulted in a big opening day, but a quick fall-off.

And it’s that instantaneous feedback that will begin to shape the success of films. If it’s a winner, then the Twitter crowd will only help ticket sales on opening weekend, which is really the only weekend that counts. If the film is a dud, then the studios have even less of a chance duping moviegoers into even checking it out, as Twitter users have effectively killed the lackluster movie before it even had a chance.