DISQUS

HBTY. HBTY. HBDC. HBTY! :-)

<3 -LJ

cute! :-)

This is a solid writeup of what a blog-focused social media expert should know, but I think we're fast learning what I've argued for a long time. Roles in social media need to specialize, just as they always have in media generally. You'd never ask your art director to do the ad buy, etc. Even social media marketing (as opposed to social business, enterprise and other deeper uses of social media) expertise crosses many emergent discliplines: community management, monitoring and response, blogger relations, social network marketing, video and other multimedia, integration with other social platforms, widgets and streams, and more.

Also, if the position being hired for is an executive who will build a team, some of the nitty-gritty hands-on skills are overkill and less important than the ability to recruit the right people, inspire change, articulate the opportunities and to good old-fashioned just "lead."

i'm thinkin, build shit that motivated, hardworking people can turn around and build their own businesses on. now more than ever. get talent closer to markets. get markets closer to value.

Thanks for this! Amazingly enough @guykawasaki is one of the folks who, by virtue of being willing to listen to and acknowledge my wild-ish ideas about Twitter, helped me gain credibility in a big way. It was a pleasure and a privilege helping him see the value and get started on Twitter in the first place.

Once again, thanks for the call-out and the kind words.

oh my. i'm profoundly touched and humbled to be listed among this cohort. you pretty much just made my week. thank you.

This is a GREAT analysis. Some of the stats and tracking you suggest, while not yet available, could be built onto the tracking & stats already available in tools like bit.ly or budurl, and i hope that they do so.

I'd also like to see some powerful authoring tools that make it fast and easy to select tweets for inclusion in posts - both your own tweets and others. Right now the (manual copy and paste) process is slow, awkward and produces unattractively formatted results.

Wonderful idea Kate. Kiva is terrific. I also love Heifer.org and CharityWater.org (obviously :-) ).

Happy New Year and thank you for doing this!

Warmly,
Laura

@mathiepe there is a way to donate via mobile (Obama used it) but it has to be set up directly with the carriers to get the donation to go onto your mobile bill. I think such systems are more advanced in Europe, but I am not sure if anyone has a service to make it easy for a charity to take advantage of the mechanism.

Once you have a @tipjoy or @twitpay account, of course, you may donate via SMS to absoltely anyone on Twitter by SMS/txting p $dollar amount @username...

Follow @Wellwishes progress here: http://bit.ly/f0PW. We're over $15,000 and on track to raise $25,000, an audacious goal, by my birthday January 21st. Just ~$3700 more in TipJoy gets us there!

Imagine, hundreds and hundreds of people giving a median of $2 each and an average of $8 will give safe clean water to five entire villages!!!

THANKS for this rundown of all the options and wonderful charities that are being supported in this way. Twitter is very powerful for fundraising as many have proved. The big difference with @wellwishes (and now @tsaredkettle and @glxp) is the ability to pay right *on* Twitter. This allows for very tiny amounts to be contributed without substantial loss on fees. ($2 via PayPal is just $1.66).

This subtle change makes a PROFOUND difference. It means charities can spread the load much more widely and ask for very little - a serious boon in tough times. It also makes mobile giving very simple - @tipjoy a buck or two to your favorite public radio station if something you hear on the way to work adds to your day. That and the social nature of the giving makes its long term prospects really interesting.

Warmly, Laura

Happy Birthday Laura! and what a wonderful story of the two of you. Thank you both for sharing it. Happy 2009!

Warmly, Laura Fitton

I took a survey on this (but never got a chance to publish the results), and people were pretty clear about HATING auto-dms with "links to my stuff" "free eBooks," or anything self-promotional. Most people agreed that a simple "thanks for following" was okay. Feelings towards companies using these tools were pretty specific and different from the "rules" for personal Twitter accounts.

Realistically, I think they're probably not nearly as irritating when they are in frequent. For most users, they're just not that frequent. For accounts that are fast-growing, they are a real annoyance.

I also think the numbers we saw are probably outdated, as in the 6 weeks since I did the survey, use of them has become MUCH more prevalent.

Facenook's just getting so goddamned MySpacey. i've preemptively opted out of Facenook Friend Connect all together because after disasters like Beacon and Social Ads, there is just NO way i trust them to "not be evil" with something as potentially pervertable as my "social graph" data on other sites.

i've said it many times & i'll probably say it thousands more times, but "give me the right 5 readers, and i will change the world."

it is NEVER about the numbers. :-)

in a very real sense, i don't even know what you all are talking about. i'm just over here dancing around in a slightly erratic manner, genuinely mystified by the ripple effects it is triggering. and trying to make myself useful.

others can - and will - project upon it what they feel a need to project, and make the arguments with it (such as this post) that they feel a need to make. and what anyone makes of it says more about them than it does about me.

i yam what i yam. i'm just this girl. no, really. really.

Three important points that I didn't see in the post:

1. Twitter BREAKS follow links sometimes. I have had this happen dozens, if not hundreds, of times, from BOTH sides of the fence. It's a bug.

2. Qwitter's "___unfollowed you after _____ (your last tweet) structure is ludicrous and misleading, as the majority of unfollow decisions factor in MUCH more than your last tweet. I have seen people say "why did ____ unfollow me because I said _______?" I shake my head in disbelief that people buy into the idea that it is that simple.

3. There are MANY ways to follow someone's tweets: FriendFeed, RSS subscription, visiting their page, on their Facebook profile and more. Someone may have a specific reason to unfollow you (maybe you tweet as much as all their other followees combined; maybe they are piping their entire stream out on their blog and your style is not a good fit) on Twitter itself and yet remain totally engaged with your life and Tweets in other ways.

Overall I feel these unfollow notification tools are damaging and I recommend strongly against their use except in certain very specific situations (example: you are trying out TwitterFeed or an ad service and want to see if it turns readers off en masse).

I wish more people understood that tremendous follower churn is normal on Twitter. If someone flips the dial away from your "radio station" for whatever reason, there is no reason to break your own heart over that. I have real world friends that don't happen to feel like reading my Twitter stream, or who use RSS or actually visiting my page to do so.

Keep on keepin' on. It's about love, not fear.

Three important points that I didn't see in the post:

1. Twitter BREAKS follow links sometimes. I have had this happen dozens, if not hundreds, of times, from BOTH sides of the fence. It's a bug.

2. Qwitter's "___unfollowed you after _____ (your last tweet) structure is ludicrous and misleading, as the majority of unfollow decisions factor in MUCH more than your last tweet. I have seen people say "why did ____ unfollow me because I said _______?" I shake my head in disbelief that people buy into the idea that it is that simple.

3. There are MANY ways to follow someone's tweets: FriendFeed, RSS subscription, visiting their page, on their Facebook profile and more. Someone may have a specific reason to unfollow you (maybe you tweet as much as all their other followees combined; maybe they are piping their entire stream out on their blog and your style is not a good fit) on Twitter itself and yet remain totally engaged with your life and Tweets in other ways.

Overall I feel these unfollow notification tools are damaging and I recommend strongly against their use except in certain very specific situations (example: you are trying out TwitterFeed or an ad service and want to see if it turns readers off en masse).

I wish more people understood that tremendous follower churn is normal on Twitter. If someone flips the dial away from your "radio station" for whatever reason, there is no reason to break your own heart over that. I have real world friends that don't happen to feel like reading my Twitter stream, or who use RSS or actually visiting my page to do so.

Keep on keepin' on. It's about love, not fear.

You rightly point out that some people will weigh the quick buck vs their social capital and credibility in the community and maybe decide to grab for the beer money. But those amounts are surprising for a reason. There's just no way they are sustainable.

I've been watching clickthrough rates on my tweets for a long time via Tweetburner. They're highly context sensitive and fine-tuned to the degree of genuine usefulness in the tweet or implied in the link.

Twitter readers don't care who you are or how many followers you have when it comes to click-through-credibility, they care if the link sounds compelling.

So as the advertiser, paying magpie what sounds like a fairly high CPM, is probably NOT going to be happy with results and continue the advertising at that rate. The platform on the other hand (your tweet stream) will go down in value by losing followers and by losing click through credibility among followers. We'll go blind to the #magpie tag just like we are to banner ads. For that matter, Twitter clients will probably offer settings to simply filter out the adtweets.

I believe, firmly, there are ways for Twitter to make money and for people and businesses on Twitter to make money, by working within the cultural system there.

+ = "plus" which conveys more sense of benefit and bonus than & = "and"

it's aspirational too. latin "plus ultra" = ever more; always higher.

I love that you're listening to the discussion. I love that you're doing a poll about it. I love that you get that there is "no one way" to do Twitter right. But I have to cast my lot more or less with those saying this technique "misses the point."

For one, i feel slightly "used" in that those of us who've decided to politely follow folks back, are suddenly getting connected with people who are just in it to jack up their numbers. No big deal, just, meh.

But more to why I say "missing the point" it's a matter of maybe not thinking through the results of this. Will the follower numbers you end up with really serve your goals in the end? Maybe so, maybe likely, no.

The slow organic growth of a network here lets you get to know people. I've found the periods of rapid growth caused me to miss a lot of genuine opportunities to really meet people within the streams. Jumping into 600 streams at once, I really have to wonder how many people adding those 600 will ever really *see* any of those 600. How much incremental traffic will it really drive, and how many of those Twitter connections will last if they were done "just to connect" instead of because there was some interest in the contents and or person.

Again, while my basic reaction to the technique is to (sadly) shake my head, I have to give you some credit for sharing the idea and hearing out the responses.

That village thing has been almost entirely misunderstood by the simple shift from my concept of *many* villages to the misinterpretation that Twitter is a single village.

My point was that the tools permit you to create your own public space of random interactions between those you are loosely connected to, a space in which those connections are permitted to naturally flourish or wither, as time and interactions naturally dictate. This is something we just do not get when our contacts information lives in static databases where we're not chatting with one another. I see this as a potentially massive revitalization of community, not the death of it.

As to making a business out of explaining the potential to others, not only did that move into my life as an irresistible force, it did so for reasons well beyond business, that I hope will become apparent in the coming years, my dear. Hint: not for reasons of self-aggrandizement or enrichment.

OOOOHHHHHHHH. The Pets.com sock puppet. Sorry, I had the wrong washed-up irrelevant sock puppet in mind when I watched it.

There's definitely something in common between the little bits of content, advice, attention, feedback that are expected to be "free no matter what" and the tragedy of the commons.

Each individual perceives that they are consuming only a negligible quantity of the commons -- the blogger's ideas and intelligence, the event's value add, the colleague's "brain to pick" (OUCH, I think, EVERY time someone asks to pick my brain) -- and yet cumulatively it overloads and degrades the resource. It's not sustainable. Sometimes the beneficiaries of the commons are not happy with the kind of tradeoffs (price) they really *should* expect to pay in order to partake of the commons.

in ye olde anciente tymes, ye olde pandae were regarded as ye royal bearers of lighte. thus the spectrum issues forth from their ... oh hell, no i don't know. too frigging funny. probably punk'ng us all.

I agree. I am an extremely low maintenance traveler (Ask me about the night I slept on the streets of Paris), but even I asked to be moved from the Sahara. It was an embarrassment to Vegas, from check-in (or lack thereof until 3 pm) onward. No place to sit and work while I waited for check-in, archaic wifi access, dirty room, dirty common spaces, unhelpful staff.

I know, I know. "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln?" It was a great play.