Give more than you take. It’s as simple as that. If we embrace this one powerful principal in our lives, individually we will enjoy meaningful, vibrant relationships and collectively create a culture of abundance. If we can’t, we end up with an empty jar.
We can all point to a friend or colleague who breaks the rule repeatedly. They call only when they need something and they only show up or participate when it benefits them. They forget that the act of taking from the jar implies that they will one day put back more than what they took. In many ways selfishness is failing to recognize that when you chose to benefit from the effort or contributions of another, you become part of a self-sustaining cycle of give and take, and that your actions alter the system’s balance. In the fog of self-absorption we can loose sight of the truth and reality of the circumstances of both others and ourselves. When we take more than we give, everyone that depends on the contents of the jar loses.
Remember that every one of your relationships has its own jar. We fill them with our time, energy and love. Sharing, participating, and giving before we take signal our good faith – they are small promises that when it is our turn to take, we have not forgotten our responsibility to keep filling the jar. What we do take, we should always strive to return with interest. This simple principal is as true for individual relationships as it is for groups, families and communities of any size. When we agree to be a part of the group, whether the group is 2 or 2 million, we accept an equal and shared responsibility for the jar.
Social scientists have a name for the incessant online contact we experience by consistently immersing ourselves in social media. They call it “ambient awareness.” For better or worse, the label accurately captures the main benefits of being social on the web; Using popular tools like Twitter and Friendfeed to engage groups of people online gives you an enhanced awareness of what’s going on within the digital ecosystem (for people and topics you care about) in near real time. The only problem is that it can feel a lot like drinking from a fire hose.
The benefits of social media, no doubt, far outweigh the costs. Being able to “follow people” instead of just “following blogs and news” is tremendously informative and fulfilling, and being able to actually engage people of like mind who are having an impact on the world who share passions in your fields of interest etc is rewarding. Social media has given us an unprecedented amount of access to people and ideas, and for that I love it.
But drinking from the fire hose isn’t all sunshine and roses (I wouldn’t use the fire hose analogy if it was) . Participating consistently comes with significant trade offs and cons that are important to be aware of and manage if we want to get the most out of our days. I’ve learned some lessons this year from being hyper connected that I’d like to share. I think they’ll resonate with many of you… Read More
The iPhone 3.0 upgrade software was just released and, within minutes, #iPhone and #iTunes popup on the trending topics list as the iPhone community rushes to their computers to upgrade their phones. Between the time I ran the search and took this screenshot, there were over 1000 new twitter posts mentioning #iTunes – literally in the space of a minute. Hundreds of people are all having similar problems, asking questions, helping each other. Amazing. And Apple is no where to be seen in the stream. Lesson learned…get your community manager and techies monitoring Twitter when someone pushes the “RELEASE” button. Read More
There’s a lot we can learn about best practices for creating and releasing software or web services to the masses from watching the video gaming industry. Successful video game companies know how important it is that they engage and immerse users quickly because they know they aren’t just in the software business, they’re in the fun business, and there’s nothing fun about sucking at a game. Recognizing this, they’ve developed innovative methods for getting complete novices engaged and enjoying the product as quickly as possible. I call this the “zero to fun” metric.
Getting a user from zero to fun as fast as possible isn’t just a gaming industry must. Everyone wants to enjoy the experience of using software and the web, and how much we enjoy the experience is largely a function of how adept we feel as users. Making a user feel like an expert is key to making their experience remarkable, and for that reason, giving a user that feeling quickly should be one of the primary goals of any company releasing software or web services to the world. Read More
I recently made the decision to stop feeding my Twitter posts into Facebook. The reason is simple – I continually get negative feedback from my non-Twittering Facebook friends on how I update my status. Some hated how often I updated, some didn’t get what “@” and “RT” was, some didn’t like that they couldn’t join in on conversations that weren’t actually taking place inside Facebook’s walls, and some people didn’t like how “impersonal” most of my updates were (I use Twitter like a shared feed reader a lot).
Not all the feedback was bad, of course – I don’t mean to exaggerate. I’ve gotten quite a few Facebook friends into Twitter because they noticed the difference in how it’s used and saw the value. No, my choice was because there’s a significant difference in status culture between the two platforms, and, because I’m a heavy Twitter user, I would continue to violate social rules inside of Facebook (and piss off my friends).
Recognizing the emerging differences in status culture is an important step to understanding how people behave on either platform and how we can shape interaction with good design. In this post I’ll offer some insights into the differences between Twitter and Facebook, how they change people’s behavior, and argue that the differences in public-ness and prive-ness cause fundamental and important shifts in how people interact and use each platform.
Friends vs. Followers: How We Group Contacts And Establish Relationships Matters
How we establish and organize our relationships makes a difference to how we interact on any platform. The design of the connection mechanism drives who we (can) connect with, how we connect, and how we display our (implied) relationships (and social responsibility to others). Makes intuitive sense, right?
Twitter’s got a fundamentally different connection model than Facebook that allows for both one-way and two way relationships, whereas Facebook forces a mutual relationship at the point of connection. The difference can be illustrated in the following way (I’ve split these into 6 different types A-F)
Twitter Relationships:
- Type A: I follow you, but you don’t follow me and anyone can see both of our updates. (Public one-way “Follower” = weak relationship)
- Type B (A reversed): You follow me, but I don’t follow you and anyone can see both of our updates (Public one-way “Follower” = weak relationship)
-Type C: I’m Private, You’re Public: I follow you, but you don’t follow me AND my updates are protected so that you can’t see them (Private one-way Follower = Weakest relationship)
- Type D (C reversed) You’re Private, I’m Public: You follow me, but I don’t follow you and you’ve protected your updates so I can’t see them (Private one-way Follower = Weakest relationship)
- Type E: We follow each other publicly, and anyone can see our updates/conversations (Public Friends = Stronger relationship)
- Type F: We follow each other privately, and only we and the people we explicitly approve can see our updates/conversations (Private Friends = Stronger relationship)
FacebookRelationships:
- Type F: We follow each other privately, and only we and the people we explicitly approve can see our updates/conversations (Private Friends = Stronger relationship)
As you can see, Twitter’s connection-creation model allows a user to create a large combination of weak and strong ties to other users online based on their own interests, regardless of existing real-world relationships. For example, I can follow celebrities like Diddy or Shaq around and send them “@” messages and interact with them, without implying a strong relationship between us (Type A & B). This stands in stark contrast to Facebook’s model which implies a strong relationship from the get-go – a user has to physically “accept you as a friend” before any interaction occurs (Type F). Across vast populations of users creating hundreds of relationships, these subtle differences create very different community streams and drive human behavior in very different ways (which I’ll cover in a second)
Side note: Andrew Chen has a great post titled Friends versus Followers: Twitter’s elegant design for grouping contacts that highlights some of the strengths of Twitter’s one-way follow design. If you’re interested in interaction design, I recommend it. Here’s a nugget from his post that illustrates a little bit of what I’ve covered above:
...[Twitter's one way follow model] makes it possible to have interactions with lots of people (@replies), but your time line only has information you care about, as you don’t have to follow folks you’re not interested in…[additionally] some profiles are inherently appealing to a cross-section of users – these include celebrities, companies, media content, etc. – and the one-way follow design supports all of these nicely…
Public-ness vs. Private-ness: How Where We Interact Changes What We Share And How We Behave
I had some great conversations with friends on Twitter and FriendFeed today on how status culture is evolving in the online socialsphere. There was a strong consensus that, although many of us started out using our Twitter and Facebook status updates in similar ways (i.e. for personal updates AND for conversations over ideas/interests), the cultural differences between public (Twitter) vs private (Facebook) spaces has shifted the way almost all of us craft and share our posts in the following ways:
- Personal status updates that are an expression of “self” and “real-life connection” are a cultural norm and are expected when (only) strong, private relationships (Type F) have been established and mutually agreed to as part of the system’s design. However, these types of updates are frowned upon when weak public relationships (Types A-D) are also included in the overall social structure. When someone builds an audience of users based on weak-relationships (Types B & D), being personal too often is seen as violating the cultural balance of “signal to noise” (noise = personal minutia).
- Status updates that are an expression of ideas and shared interests tend to dominate status culture when public, weak relationships are built into the social system. In these cases, discussion and information sharing is the norm and a user’s authority is built around participation and adding value. Personal minutia (in the name of adding value) is therefore kept to a minimum as a sign of respect for the overall community (Jeremiah Owyang has a great landing page where he explains how he uses and doesn’t use Twitter that is instructive).
In addition, when what we post starts changing based on the structure of our relationships (as shown in the bullets above) it also changes how much we participate and how we use each platform:
- Platform Usage Splits: In general, we conform to social norms and separate “personal and private” from “less-personal and public”. When discussing the differences between how they used Facebook and Twitter, my friends Vada Dean and Stephen Christopher said it perfectly in under 140 characters – we get a split in how we use each platform – one gets used for “self” and “personal connections” (Facebook) and the other gets used for “ideas” and “interests” (Twitter). While there is some overlap, the reasons we log on and use each platform are fundamentally very different, despite the similarities in the status functionality.
- How Much We Participate Changes: When expressions of “self” and “connection” dominate the status culture, participation (seems to) decrease; Both the number of updates per day as well as the discussion around updates remains lower. This may be because users have less to connect over (personal status is used as news that people keep up with, not discussion points). Conversely, when common ideas and interests domainate, participation increases significantly; Both the number of updates per day as well as the discussion increases. This may be because more updates are used as discussion starters.
While there are clear differences in the types of updates we send in public and private space, it’s always always always about increasing ambient awareness for the user – it’s just that the type of information and interaction that we’re looking for and expect to find when we log on changes.
Public Vs. Private Space – How It Changes Who Participates and Affects Adoption and Why The Differences Are Important
Most people fear Google and privacy is gold. In my opinion that’s one of the reasons Facebook has amassed close to 180 million users. For most people, not all virtual space is “safe” space where they feel comfortable interacting. When people feel safe, not only do more of them sign up, they interact more and share more of themselves, in more ways, and both the variety and volume of user-generated content (hint: data!) you get increases. For that reason private space will always win the revenue game (at least for the foreseeable future). The majority of people out there will completely opt out of ANYTHING public simply out of fear. The knowledge that someone you don’t know (or worse, someone you DO know and don’t like) can find you and judge you will always freak out the majority of people – because exposing themselves represents a lack of control over who sees and uses their content. Facebook has spent millions putting up walls to create “safe” space for it’s users and implementing elegant organization of privacy controls and THAT is why they’ll win.
[Privacy] is exactly why people tell me they use Facebook instead of Twitter. So, Facebook has the numbers (about 180 million for Facebook vs. about 10 million for Twitter). It is also why Rob Diana is right: people will put more intimate stuff, like having a baby, into Facebook rather than Twitter. Only weirdos like me like sharing intimate stuff in a public forum and having conversations. Hint: for every weirdo like me, there are 1000 who are like my wife and only want to discuss that stuff with their “true friends.”
In short, the appeal of privacy is something developers and social media services need to look at closely, because it seems to be something that the majority of people want, and may be a prerequisite for mass adoption in the future on ANY social service. Most of the world isn’t comfortable yet with the idea of living in public, and my never be. Afterall, Facebook has shown people that control is possible and made them USED to it – and they’ve set the bar high for the rest of the services out there. It’s a cold hard fact: Google-protection and strong privacy controls so significantly lower the social costs attributed with adoption and interaction that most social services cant afford to NOT to build them into their systems because of all the potential users they’ll lose that demand it as a prerequisite to adoption.
Summary
I’ve made a lot of arguments in this post, so I’ll try and sum up with a few bullet points.
- How we establish and organize our relationships makes a difference to how we interact on any platform. The design of the connection mechanism drives who we (can) connect with, how we connect, and how we display our relationships. Across vast populations of users creating hundreds of relationships, these subtle differences create very different community streams and drive human behavior in very different ways.
- What we share and how we interact are products of community’s culture. Communities where strong private relationships dominate seem to favor interaction around “self” and “personal connection” whereas communities where weak public relationships are the norm seem to favor interaction based on “ideas” and “interests”.
- When what we post starts changing based on the structure of our relationships (as shown in the bullets above) it also changes how much we participate and how we use each platform.
- The lure or strong privacy controls for users may increase adoption on social services and improve the variety and volume of interaction on a variety of levels. This an insight that is important for developers of social media who are concerned with generating large user bases because they seek to build revenue streams based on selling data.
While this is a lot to digest, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on any of these points in the comments. I’d also like to thank Matthew Clower, Nic Luchiano, Stephen Christopher, Vada Dean and Mikey Reiach for their significant contributions to this discussion.
As the popularity of blogging, social media and open source development continue to explode, widgets are taking root as a mainstay of the online social experience. The interdependency of self-publishing, social media and open source platforms are ensuring that widgets, those bits of code that allow us to aggregate, publish and share a wide variety of different content/information in one place, are here to stay. In fact, the rapid growth in online cultural trends like lifestreaming, microblogging and social browsing is creating increased demand for ways users can pull information from a diverse array of profiles and information sources, aggregate them and publish them quickly and easily. Said simply, widgets help us glue the web together, and as online social ecosystems become more complex, and as web sites and web based applications rely on more underlying services, widgets will prove to be a core component of the self-publishing culture and infrastructure.
For all of these reasons, we can estimate that companies will continue to throw a lot of time, money and energy at creating widgets and widget-like applications that online goers want to use. That said, not all widgets are created equal, and only the very best widgets spread (which is the whole idea). In this post I want to explore what makes a remarkable viral widget and offer developers some design tips…
#1 It’s Not About You.
Widgets that are perceived as ads rather than tools lose, plain and simple. Widget design should always be about the publisher/user and their content. Developers can put a small trademark on it, a link back to their service and a “grab this (for yourself)” button, but that better not be the focus. Subtlety in marketing is critical. It’s easy for developers to get excited about building an “ultra viral” widget that promotes the heck out of their service and brand, and it’s natural to want to put their mark in a prominent place that steals the show. Big mistake. Widgets that win put the user’s content front and center. Self-publishing isn’t like fashion. There are no label whores. Users want to highlight their stuff, not yours. The moment a reader sees a widget, interacts with it and THEN thinks “can I get one of these and do this myself?” is the point that they’ll start looking for a trademark. That moment should be the first time they notice your marketing. Viral is about the utility of the tool, not the marketing.
#2 One Size Fits Few
If you think you can make a popular one-size-fits-all widget these days, you’re dead wrong. The one-widget-for-all model is dead. More and more amateurs are diving into code and are customizing their blogs and social profiles in all kinds of different ways. People know that creating a unique web site design is key to blogging and online-social success. Radical individualism IS the norm when it comes to web design. For that reason, users want widgets that fit in a variety of spaces to fit THEIR unique design, so make it easy for them to get what they want. Developers should consider designing an easy to understand installation wizard that allows users to easily create a widget of any size they chose TO THE PIXEL, no matter how wacky. Flexibility will win out over standardization. Maybe even offer a few shape-formatting options. Help them look good and they will love you for it. You’ll be sewing the seeds of evangelism.
#3 Make It Customizable & Reflective of The User’s Personality
Personalization and being different is everything on the web. Widgets need to fit that trend. Give the publisher every facility you can to personalize the widget so their instance of it is different than any other user’s instance. This could be as simple as letting them select a fixed color scheme OR as complicated as pulling the user’s account data in from other services (for example, FriendFeed’s feed widget pulls delicious tags, twitter updates, Flickr photos etc all into one feed).
Giving people tools to make their site(s) more engaging should be a primary goal of every widget developer. A lot of developers out there seem to forget this, which baffles me. Good widgets are useful tools for the user FIRST and branding for the developer a distant second. Users should see an obvious value proposition when they ask themselves “How can I use this to enhance MY brand/message/content mix?”. On the flip-side, readers who engage a user’s widget are asking “What does the information this widget delivers say about the author?” If the answer is “nothing”, reader engagement completely vanishes and wont return. You only really get one chance to convince a reader that your widget is something they should pay attention to (and might want for themselves). If they decide that it’s not, readers will simply remember that the widget is there, and that they should ignore it and skip to primary content. Ad blindness works the same way. It’s the developers job to turn a widget into a node of interaction, and the way to do that is to allow widget users to create and display THEIR content with it. When readers see fresh streams of dynamic, user-created content in a widget, they’ll remember it, return to it and interact more.
#5 Make It Simple Stupid and Easy To Maintain
Simplicity of installation is just one part of the challenge. Making a widget easy to maintain is the other. To keep a widget engaging, a user needs to keep creating dynamic content, which is not easy these days given the complex array of things we do online in any given day. Developers need to be sensitive to the fact that most people who blog and use social media are dying for simplicity – many have too many accounts and use to many services to manage it all consistently…the time and effort required to add yet ANOTHER widget (and new behaviors) that they need to manage will (in most cases) lead a user to decide against joining your widget community at all. Widgets that win will allow users to create content by doing the things they already do. For example, a widget that showed the most recent items in my Netflix queue would update automatically as I updated my queue in Netflix, and not require any additional work on my part. AdaptiveBlue’s widgets are a great example of this.
#6 Individualization and Community
One last point before I wrap up. Widgets often represent a user in a greater community – sometimes they act like a badge that identifies the individual as part of a tribe (think mybloglog). Although I’ve discussed above how making a widget personal and customizable is important, developers should also remember that if a widget is about community building, allowing users to highlight their affiliation and status within that community is also very important. People don’t want to just stand out from a crowd, they want to belong to your community. Let them show that affiliation proudly.
In short, the above are just some thoughts I have on building great widgets based on my experiences and observations. What are yours?
Twitter is one of the most powerful community building tools available today for two reasons – simplicity and transparency. With the right tools and techniques, you can use Twitter to find people who are like you and share your passions, and build strong networks quickly, effectively and cheaply. The ability to form tight networks in this way is almost unprecedented, and is one of the main driving forces of the Twitter Revolution. In this post I will discuss tools and techniques for using Twitter for effective personal networking and building a tribe, not for using it as a marketing tool.
For People Who Want To Use Twitter as a Marketing Tool
There are several ways to use Twitter as a tool, and they require fundamentally different mind-sets and strategies. If you wish to use Twitter is a marketing tool (that is, to decentralize your efforts and get your message out to as many people as possible, quickly) there are tons of posts already on the web that are great resources for you. Here are some of the best that I’ve found from a couple of Twitter superstars:
How To Use Twitter As A Marketing Tool, by Guy Kawasaki – Easily Some of the best advice on the web about how to develop a large following quickly and getting the word out about your brand.
For People Who Want To Use Twitter For Personal Networking and Building A Tribe
Effectively building a personal network with Twitter requires a very different mind-set than the ones covered in the posts above. Doing it in the right way requires you to take a long term approach, to be discerning about who you spend time connecting with, to let go of the “you need 10,000 followers NOW” approach, and to focus and target your efforts on connecting with the right people in order to create deeper and more meaningful relationships. Remember, effective networking is about building a tribe/community of people who trust you, believe in your message and actively engage you and your brand.
Networking Isn’t About Broadcasting A Message, It’s About Creating Relationships
There’s a great video clip on YouTube (included below) where Seth Godin answers the question “Is Social Networking Important For Business?”. I’ve transcribed his response because it perfectly illustrates the difference between networking that works and networking that doesn’t. He says:
“There’s two kinds of networking. There’s the networking of giving your business card out to lots of people, showing up to lots of cocktail parties, friending a lot of people on Facebook, counting how many people follow you on twitter. That’s worthless. It was worthless in the real world and it’s worthless in the online world. The networking that matters is helping people achieve their goals. Doing it reliably and repeatedly, so that over time people have an interest in helping you achieve your goals, ’cause they have a stake in it.
You can do that offline
You can do that online…by leading a tribe, by connecting people, by giving people access to the information and resources they need. Because then over time, they’ll do the same for you. You’re not doing it for the punchline. You’re doing it because the act of doing it is so beneficial.
What I really don’t like is online is the superficial networking, that all the thousands of people are [doing]…friending everybody else…why? Right? That doesn’t count for anything. It’s just a waste of time.
With Seth’s words in mind, I’ve crafted the rest of this post to provide answers and insights to deeper questions that people who are concerned with personal networking should be asking themselves, like:
How do I find other people like me, who care about the same things?
How do I find and connect with authorities and influencers?
How do I determine who the most important people in an influencer’s network are?
How do I become an authority/influencer myself?
How do I build and lead a tribe?
Excited? Here we go…
How and Where To Find People Who (Are) Like You
I want to make one quick point before diving in. The brackets in the heading above are purposeful. When we say I like you, most of the time, what we’re saying is I am like you. One of the most rewarding things about taking part in social media is finding and connecting with people who you (are) like, and who (are) like you. The surest way to quickly build a tight-knit online tribe is to find like-minded people and engage them. Being online is a lot like meeting up face to face. People who are like each other, connect with one other a heck of a lot quicker online than ones that don’t. Chemistry and mutual interest come out in text too, even in 140 character chunks. You can form faster, tighter connections with people you are like because you share passions and interests, care about the same things etc etc. People who are like you are everywhere, and being able to identify those connections and use them to your advantage to network effectively is key.
Doing this well takes some up-front work on your part. The key to finding people that are most like you is that it requires you to take a good hard, honest look inside yourself. Ask yourself what are the things you really care about? What are you passionate about? What communities are you already a part of that focus on those things? If you try and discuss things you’re not that into, just because you want people to think that you’re into them (for whatever insecure reason), you’re going to have a tough time with building and strengthening your tribe. People will figure you out quickly and you’ll come off as disingenuous. Being authentic is the web’s #1 rule. Becoming an authority and leading a tribe requires you to take a long term view and concentrate on topics you love for months, even years. So figure out who you are, find your voice and then project that consistently.
Fortunately, if you have an internet connection and a browser, you already have free access to every tool you’ll need to find people who are like you, you just have to know where to look. Here are some of the best.
1. Twitter’s Search Function
This is the best place to start when you don’t know where to start. It’s easy. Pick a topic you love, and hit search.twitter.com. It’ll show you all the people that are talking about that topic in real time. The more targeted your search keywords are, the more likely you are to find what (or who) you’re looking for. For example, I’m a blogger and web designer and I love WordPress. “WordPress themes” is a good keyword phrase because people don’t talk about WordPress themes unless they’re bloggers. A search on this phrase is going to find me bloggers who use the same platform as I do. I instantly have something to connect with those people over. You can do this with any topic, but target your keywords to search for activities and things you love, software or platforms you use etc. Searching on keywords like “vacation” isn’t necessarily going to find you a hardcore traveler the way that “backpacking” would. As soon as you hit search, see who’s talking, find a conversation you like, follow that person and jump right in.
*Tip: If you consider yourself a power-user and want to kick the search up a notch, you can also use Monitter, which provides a Tweetdeck-like Twitter monitoring service.
2. Take Advantage of Existing Community Clusters
People gather around experts, companies and services; They listen to and learn from experts, and get news from companies and services they care about. For example, people who are interested in venture capital probably follow high-profile VC bloggers like Fred Wilson, Brad Feld or Guy Kawasaki. Likewise, users who follow WordPress‘s Twitter stream are likely to be bloggers who use WordPress. Finding these experts and services that talk about topics and news that you are interested in is the first step. Once you do, find the cluster of people who follow them – you can access these lists for free at the top right of any Twitter account’s home page. Think of them as qualified leads. The more nichey the expert, service or company, the more targeted the audience that they’ve drawn will likely be.*
*Tip – avoid following services or companies you find in a follower’s list – these users are following only to get noticed and will not add value to your network. They may reciprocate, but it’s a dead node that will probably never interact with you or anyone from your community.
3. Use Contextual Networks (Social Browsing) To Find People Like You
One of the web’s most useful social networking tools for finding and connecting with people like you is Glue. Scott Gilbertson of Wired recently called it “the single most useful social networking tool [he's] ever encountered” and it’s one of Read Write Web’s Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008. Glue integrates seamlessly with Twitter and allows you to network with people around objects (like books, movies, stocks etc) as you browse many popular sites on the web and you can easily post your interactions directly to your Twitter stream. The guys over at AdaptiveBlue have done a terrific job with Glue, and they are about to roll out some new conversational featuresthat will make the service even better. I’ve written a long, very detailed post about the benefits of using Glue to network with people and how it works with Twitter, so I won’t spend too much time on it here. I’ve found it to be an indespensible tool that should be in every Twitter user’s toolkit. (If you’re already on Glue, you can find my profile here)
Below is a video that gives a brief overview of some of the main features of Glue.
How Do I Find And Connect With Authorities And Influencers (In My Niche)?
The Twitter revolution has given us more opportunity than ever before to find, follow and engage influencers and authorities. There are dozens of services on the web now that use Twitter’s API to access rich, searchable data that lets anyone sort through the clutter to find out who matters and who doesn’t in the Twittersphere (for any given niche). My favorites are:
Twitter Grader – This is one of my favorite “find’em and friend’em” services. Not only does it give you a variety of useful statistics on your own Twitter account (authority, rank etc) it allows you to search for other users world wide for any keyword or location and ranks them by authority. Need I say more? It’s not always clear how twitter grader calculates power and influence, but this is a great starting point to find influencers by niche and geography.
Twellow.com – The Twitter Yellow Pages. Twellow’s website is not quite as slick as Twitter Grader’s but their search function works almost as well and allows you to search by keyword AND location simultaneously, which is a powerful, unique feature. Like Twitter Grader, it returns user results by authority score and gives you instant access to a lot of user profile info like websites and bios. These guys get a hat tip because they’ve done a lot of the work of finding users by topics and categories in a yahoo directory-like way. Need a realtor in your area? Need a web designer? Twellow’s a good place to start.
Mr Tweet – This guy’s gotten a lot of press for good reason. MrTweet’s Service will analyze your network, suggest good people and followers you’re missing out on, recommend influential users to you and update you regularly with stats on your account. The service currently has close to 70,000 followers on Twitter. While MrTweet’s service is valuable, I wouldn’t suggest using it until you’ve been on Twitter for a little while and accumulated a substantial following. Because the data is based on your existing network, the more existing connections you have, the better the results will be. Also, the popularity of the service gives it some cons. The results won’t likely be instant. My request sat in a queue for 4 or 5 days before I got the analysis results back. It’s worth being patient, though. You’ll likely find lots of good people to follow that you wouldn’t have otherwise.
The three services I’ve mentioned above are, of course, not the only ones available to you. There are dozens. The three above are just the ones I use most. Here are some other notable services that I’ve come across that deserve honorable mention:
How Do I Determine WhoThe Most Important People In An Influencer’s Network Are?
Now that we’ve covered how to find people with the most authority and influence on Twitter, let’s dig deeper. Building strong networks isn’t just about finding authorities in your niche, it’s about leveraging their networks too. Here are two great ways to gauge who the most important people in an influencer’s network are:
1. Dig For The First 20
Did you know that Twitter logs people you follow in chronological order? That means that the very first person someone ever followed will be the very last person you find in their “following” list. Use this to your advantage. Even when an influencer follows thousands of other users, find their first 20. Those are likely the people that the influencer cares most about (and likely knows well offline). No one starts following randomly when they first create a Twitter account. We always start with our favorites (people we already connect regularly with) when we first started using a service.
2. Use Social Network Analysis and Social Graphing
If you really want to go hardcore to find out exactly who matters to a Twitter user, check out Mailana’s social network analysis tool for Twitter. It’s the most advanced tool for this around – way better than anything anyone else has come up with so far. You’ll get detailed statistics on the top 20 people a user messages the most (including DM’s which arent public), as well as a social graph you can use to analyze the users social network. The tool, of course, isn’t perfect because it’ll only show you the people that the user communicates with most, but the two techniques I’ve talked about together will give you a great overall picture of who matters. Here’s a snapshot of Pete Cashmore’s social Network, just so you can get a preview of what the tool does:
Final Thoughts: How To Build Your Tribe and Become An Influencer…
Finding people with whom you have a lot in common and proactively engaging them on Twitter is the first step. Becoming an authority requires you (as Seth Godin said) to consistently help them, refer them, set them up with each other, teach them and give them access to the information and resources they need. But more than anything, it requires you to cement deep(er), long(er) lasting relationships with people based on common interest and cause. This is why building a tribe requires a long-term mind-set. True fans aren’t made overnight. This is THE LIE that gets bought into way too much on the Internet. Superficial friending is useless if you’re trying to develop a strong personal network (of people who would actually be of use to you offline). With that in mind, here are three thoughts I want to leave you with:
Be Consistent and Relevant – To be viewed as an authority, you have to consistently communicate relevant and useful information/help/resources to your chosen area of expertise. Remember, you’re building a personal brand. If you’re connecting with people who love WordPress, for example, Tweet about that a lot. Pretty soon, you’ll become known as a go-to guy. Using targeted information resources like Alltop.com, popurls.com or news from top blogs in your niche to find and aggregate and link to news is a fantastic strategy for developing a consistent, credible voice that people respond to.
There’s No Substitute For Making Offline Connections – I can’t stress this enough. Services like Meetup.com are excellent for finding people on Twitter who get together offline and organize events around mutual interests. Find those groups, join them and attend the meetings. You’ll be glad that you did.
Always Be Linking – Tweetbacks are like trackbacks on blogs. When you consistently link to interesting, relevant resources that your tribe cares about, you show up on those blog posts! Be consistent and people will start recognizing you everywhere as they read. Linking in your twitter posts also establishes credibility and shows your community that you keep up with news they care about.
Give more than you take. It’s as simple as that. If we embrace this one powerful principal in our lives, individually we will enjoy meaningful, vibrant relationships and collectively create a culture of abundance. If we can’t, we end up with an empty jar.
