At the beginning of September last year Clive Thompson published an influential article on NYTimes called “A Brave New World Of Digital Intimacy“. In the article, Clive discusses an interview he had with Facebook’s Founder Mark Zuckerberg on how Facebook’s newsfeed (dominated by short status updates) has been central to the sites success. He asks…
“In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?”
Clive cleverly pokes fun at the Facebook status culture with the line “I’m so totally, digitally close to you!” and points out that…
Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood [etc] through the little things he does…
Understanding the dynamics of ambient awareness in the digital world is crucial to using social media effectively. In fact, increasing others’ awareness of YOU is what signaling and brand building on Twitter is all about.
I think we’ll all agree that, at least in its infancy, status updates were Twitter’s main MO. I think that’s changed as the UI and culture has developed and I’d argue that many people have evolved away from using Twitter to tell everyone what they’re doing all the time. Beyond socializing and sharing information, Twitter for many of us has become an essential tool for signaling, creating community and self branding. By engaging the social web correctly with Twitter, we can find and target individuals and groups and signal to them that we share interests and goals, that we belong to common communities and tribes. This type of signaling is the most effective way to build relationships and community over the web. Why? Because you can sincerely engage people based on mutuality and reciprocity.
How To Use Twitter For Effective Signaling On The Social Web
Signaling and branding are two of the most important uses for Twitter that work hand-in-hand, and while most people “get” how to use the tool effectively to broadcast and communicate, they miss hundreds of opportunities to create value and social capital for themselves and to network effectively. Here are some ways you can create the most value for yourself as you post to Twitter…
When You Share Content, Don’t Forget To Also Credit The Author Publicly
If you’re like me, you read constantly and you’ve got a list of favorite blogs and communities that you go to as much as daily for your information. I share noteworthy articles and posts I read on Twitter daily. Sharing ideas and content is the primary way I use Twitter and almost all of my my favorite writers and blogs have Twitter accounts. In fact, now that Twitter is mainstream almost anyone who is actively creating content on the web is on Twitter. Knowing this, we can create value for ourselves as well as the those whose content we enjoy. All we have to do is include the author’s Twitter account in the tweet when we link and share content (or even say “read X on @techcrunch or @rww” if you would rather credit the blog – most big blogs have Twitter accounts too). Not only does the author or person running the online community’s twitter account instantly see that YOU have shared the content with your community, they can also see that you’ve promoted them and given them credit. Win-Win, right? As Tara Hunt would say, you’ve just created a little bit of Whuffie. Kudos to you.
This can have huge benefits if you do it consistently. Over time, going the extra mile to give credit for content that you share by simply adding “by @[username]” or “on @[blog'stwittername]” when you link to content tells the author that you’re interested in their work, that you share interests and that you’re a regular reader. It’s validating for them, it helps them with their writing/blogging goals (they want to spread their content) and you’ve identified yourself as a member of their tribe and given them a reason to be interested in creating a relationship with YOU. This is serendipity at work. As a blogger, I love when people who read my stuff let me know who they are – there’s no need for anonymity anymore – real time public sharing and credit giving creates friendships quickly and effectively. I always reach out to regular readers and I find that when I consistently credit other writers, they also reach out to me. I have many good now-offline friendships that started this way online. Now contrast this with a Twitter post that has the same link with no credit – You’re not directly creating a trigger point to start a relationship so the chances of the author being aware of you is much lower so the ball never starts rolling. While it required the same effort to post the Tweet, the mutual benefit of the author and reader are much much lower.
Ok, so now that the meat of the point has been established, here are some other ways that you can use credit to create social capital -
Make Public Introductions with the people’s @usernames: For all the reasons stated above, introducing people, along with a short description of why you think they should know each other on Twitter benefits everyone. Not only are you creating goodwill by endorsing BOTH parties, by introducing them in a public way, you are also endorsing them to your followers. Introducing people on the web is a high value action for all.
Recommending Someone On #FollowFriday: We all know what #followfriday is for – it’s for finding the cream of the crop in the Twitterverse using the crowd as our guide. And of course, it’s not completely altruistic in practice, is it? Follow Friday is about you recommending others for mutual gain. You receommend someone, they get followers AND it signals to them that you’re aware of them, that you endorse them etc etc. I find that people create the most mutual value on Follow Friday when they focus on a single person and give explanations why they are making the recommendation. Tweeting a message like
“@globalpatriot inspired me this week. He writes a great blog on Global issues that I frequent #followfriday”
Now that I’ve outlined a few ways to use Twitter for effective signaling, I hope your creative juices are flowing and you’re starting to think of other ways that you can use Twitter for signaling and creating relationships in the future. Remember, including people’s names in posts helps them find you and can often be an indicator of mutual interest and be used for mutual benefit. Giving credit and making recommendations in positive ways consistently can only benefit you in the long run…So go forth and crank up that antenna.
Google Trends is one of my favorite tools to come out of the Google Labs. While we data junkies are forced to envy people like Bill Tancer who have access to tons of rich, real time data about what’s going on on the web, Google Trends is the best thing that we can get for free, and it’s still very useful for basic analysis and research. In this post I’ll show you a few great ways you can use Google Trends to do research on the web like a pro and give you a quick list of hacks you can use to build your “Google Ninja” skills. 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.
All you systems theory buffs out there are probably familiar with the concept of “emergence”. For the rest of you, here’s a quick and dirty definition: Emergence describes the way that complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. The idea of emergence, although it might sound complicated, is important when thinking about social media because it helps us understand how cyberculture has developed and how our rules and rituals that we use when we interact online continue to evolve. When social scientists who study cyberculture find a new pattern of behavior or ritual that is unique to the online world, they often call it “an emergent behavior”, which is a fancy name for a social rule that a lot of people follow that no one person mandated. I’d like to talk a little bit about this in the context of a platform we all know well: Twitter.
The Evolution Of The Retweet
Since it’s launch in July 2006, Twitter has grown to over a million users. According to TechCrunch, as of March last year, Twitter users were firing off around 3 million tweets a DAY. Chew on that for a second. There’s a community out there of over a million people generating millions of tiny messages daily from a variety of different devices and applications (web, mobile, desktop clients etc). What’s important to realize (for the purposes of this discussion) is that the creators of Twitter never published a list of social rules for its users, and said “GO”. No one ever told us how to use the platform. We just did. We figured it out as we went along. We watched others. We copied. Those of us who were innovators tried new ways to “tweet” and other people noticed and copied us. Over a year and a half after Twitter’s launch, over a million of us that use Twitter know that it has social rules and etiquette – these are the patterns that emergence describes. We reinforce those rituals every time we use Twitter by following the rules we’ve made for ourselves (and by reprimanding those that don’t).
Retweeting is a perfect example of one of these emergent, ritualistic behaviors in Twitter culture. Retweeting has rules associated with it, and the behavior has evolved over time. I remember when it was common for people to full-on write “Retweeting @username” in front of a tweet, burning up their 140 characters just to give another person credit. Necessity for brevity, of course, has resulted in “RT” being the universally understood indicator over time, but there was no rule that said they had to give another person credit at all… but they figured out a simple way to do it because they wanted to. Because it’s the right thing to do. Within months, everyone was doing it. Now it’s a mainstay of Twitter culture…at least until someone else comes up with a better, briefer way to re-broadcast someone else’s message while giving credit. Who knows…maybe it’ll end up being just R @username. Culture and social rules are always evolving.
Why Entrepreneurs & Developers Should Care About Emergent Culture:
Since Twitter opened up it’s API, countless numbers of entrepreneurial-minded developers have released applications and services that integrate with and build on Twitter (my favorites include apps and add-ons like Adaptive Blue’s Glue, Tweetdeck, and Tweetsville for the iPhone). Here’s the problem – because of Twitter’s growth and popularity, there are A LOT of people developing apps that don’t really do anything different! Some of them look neat, and the UI is pretty, but the fundamental functionality across many apps is the same, which is BORING. There is nothing remarkable about something that takes what everyone does already and repackages it into something that just looks prettier. What a waste of creative energy. A shiny new UI that does the same thing still makes it difficult for consumers to decide what to use. The applications that DO stand out, however, are ones that have taken into account new, emergent behaviors and built them into their design.
Tweetdeck and Tweetsville are perfect examples of apps that stand out for this very reason. They were some of the first to incorporate cultural trends and add automated “Retweet” functionality into their UI. The developers saw an opporuntity to take an emergent behavior that was cumbersome (cutting and pasting someone elses message and adding “RT @username” to the message) and automate it. Brilliant. THIS IS DIFFERENT. It adds value. In all the noise, these were apps that got noticed and talked about because they were fundamentally more useful because the developers were in tune with the culture.
Some Insights for Developers and Entrepreneurs:
So what can we learn from this example? Here are some quick insights for entrepreneurial-minded developers that want to pack a punch in the market…
Developers, when you build a completely new application or service and release it into the world, people will use it in unexpected, unanticipated ways. Watch the crowd. Notice the patterns. They are tell-tales for what your next design steps should be. Never stop tweaking.
Entrepreneurs, if you’re building on top of an already-popular platform, you need to be keenly aware of the existing culture and tailor your service or app not only to what people are expected to do, but to incorporate emerging behaviors into design decisions. Repackaging existing functionality into something that looks good isn’t enough and won’t get you noticed. Culture is always evolving. Finding emerging behaviors that create needs that haven’t been addressed yet by others is a golden opportunity ripe for exploitation.
Every platform has it’s own culture, social rules and etiquette, but many online social rules are common across platforms. Take these common patterns into account. These are your staples that should never be ignored.
Heavy Users who are very popular on a social service act like beacons that guide the behavior of large followings. Watch them for patterns. They are the ones that will pick up on new and useful behaviors and broadcast them to the rest. They are people who turn early patterns into mainstays of culture.
When a service forces people to interact in new ways, new patterns are born. Innovators aren’t always the people who are heavy users from the beginning. They are just the creative ones that see and exploit opportunities to use a service in new ways, sometimes unintentionally. Because these people aren’t necessarily popular, you’ll have to work hard to identify them and engage them for feedback. Make giving feedback easy. Contact people directly who are doing new things with what you’ve built. Ask them why. The answers you get might floor you.
Credit Where Credit is due:
Tim O’Reilly was the very first person I ever saw “Retweet” someone else’s message (it must have been some time around ETech 08, because that’s when I found out about Twitter) so I just wanted to offer him an “innovator” shout-out. I remember seeing that word “Retweet” and thinking “huh, a twitter-footnote! How honorable and transparent!” From then on I did the same. Tim, if you’re reading this, do you remember who the first person you ever Retweeted was?
I link, you link, we all link. So why not do it the right way? Following a few simple rules when you create links helps search engines, helps your site rank, and boosts your credibility as a blogger. If you’re still creating links that look like this – “You can read more about linking by clicking HERE“ – you’re going to look like a noob, insult the intelligence of your readers, confuse search engines and lose any SEO benefit you might have gotten from creating a quality link. Bottom line, how you link is just as important as what you link to. Here’s a few quick tips for good linking etiquette:
Search Engines Are Dumb. Help Them Out.
Fortunately, Google’s systems haven’t become self-aware yet, and while spiders can recognize and assign relevance scores to your links based on the words you use, they aren’t smart enough to derive meaning from language the way a reader can.
Let’s say you’ve just written a life-changing post about how hot Margaret Thatcher is. To add value for your readers, you decide to link out to Margaret Thatcher’s Wikipedia page (so that people can see her photo and instantly agree with you). If you link like this…”Check out Margaret Thatcher’s smoldering pic here“, web crawlers see this -
Any human can tell you that the relevance of the keyword “here” is ZIP, but the search engine’s can’t. So instead, you want the robot crawling your site to gobble up a nice keyword-rich link by using the most relevant keyword for what you’re pointing to like this -
<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_thatcher“> Margaret Thatcher</a>
Kudos to you. You just made the search engines a bit brighter by pointing them in the right direction. Same work, relevance = 100%.
Boost Your Rankings
If you link correctly, the quality and relevance of the links in your site can have a positive effect on SEO rankings. Search engines use algorithms to determine a site’s relevance and popularity in relation to what people are searching for. One of the factors affecting the site’s ranking for any given search term is how many relevant links are contained within the site.
There are two types of links – internal and external. Internal links are those which link one page of your site to another. Internal links show search engines the breadth and density of your site and highlight important sections for search terms people use. External links, by contrast, are those where your site links to another site, or when another site links to yours. Both types of links are important to search engines, but with rankings, relevant external links (both in-coming and out-going) matter more. In-coming links, of course, matter most, but relevant keyword-rich linking out definitely helps.
Readers Appreciate Good Linking Habits
Whenever I find a person using the phrase “click here” for a link, I cringe a little. Not only is it just a little too early 90′s, it insults my intelligence as a reader. Everyone gets how linking works. There’s no need to explicitly point a person to the link with your words. We all know what links look like. We all use them. Besides, when you change the flow of your sentences to include calls to action like “click here”, the whole thing just doesn’t flow as well.
Aside from not having their intelligence challenged, readers also appreciate being able to scan your posts for keywords. While it might be shocking to bloggers who are a liiiiittle bit too enamored with their own writing skills, not everyone reads every word. In fact, studies have shown that most people don’t read at all – they scan (I know, right? How dare they! pfff) – so making relevant keywords pop out of the text is a good thing because it allows visitors on your site to skip reading every word and find what they’re looking for fast.
Ok, netizens…go forth and link with style and purpose!
At the beginning of September last year Clive Thompson published an influential article on NYTimes called “A Brave New World Of Digital Intimacy“. In the article, Clive discusses an interview he had with Facebook’s Founder Mark Zuckerberg on how Facebook’s newsfeed (dominated by short status updates) has been central to the sites success. He asks…
When You Share Content, Don’t Forget To Also Credit The Author Publicly
