DISQUS

The funny part is - I don't know these people. I know Chris Brogan (he even tweeted me once!) but microfame sits within the long-tail niches of society - which is where we are headed with our social media.

As you point out, it's what you do with your "fame" that is important. By 6 degrees, we are all connected somehow. But how have you helped those in your immediate circle to improve their lives?

Most of the "famous" I know of do little except celebrate their own fame. I spent over 20 years in Hollywood and had some connection occasionally with these. A lot were great people. However, the guys on either side of me did more for their associates, in general, than the famous did for their "many adoring fans". "Getting press" isn't a reason for living.

As Penn points out, fame is really a distraction and an expense. So does one want to become even micro-famous?

TweetGrid turned out to be the best for its update for me. Tried Twitter search, with multiple queries, but the refresh was annoying. Checked out several others that had auto-update but Tweetgrid seemed the fastest - and took up the least space for tweets, so I could scan and keep up. Also, allowed quick replies and passing information.

As for the news media, they were very slow and very inaccurate. At least until they started contacting eye-witness tweeters directly. Even then, they tended to repeat what other media were saying. @drmani has more specifics on which local news got it wrong.

@CNN posted an article today which said social media got it wrong and was constantly requoting MSM sources, but more that @CNN itself was hesitant to publish something until they got it verified. And so *they* kept repeating from @breakingnewson and others had already said (which itself wasn't completely accurate).

The best source for real, concrete data was Wikipedia - which gave its sources, was regularly updated, had a map, and actual links. Objective and fast. (MSM could learn...)

Best help was RT of phone numbers and hospitals which needed blood. And these didn't come from MSM, they came from tweeters. Even today @conniereece is still making sure these numbers are available, as well as others.

Most annoying were reports that reporters were themselves interfering by trying to get live interviews from victims - instead of letting them get treatment.

While there were rumors and inaccuracies, I think overall Twitter performed at a faster level and with better eye-witness reports than MSM. If you take Wikipedia and other social media into account, we shined - while MSM..., er, ahem, uh - didn't do very well.

Keep up the great work, Monty. I had no idea about all this good stuff. Our MSM really only keeps us filled with the terrifying and catastrophic - for over 90% of the time. So when you come out with this great stuff, it does my heart wonders.

I always believe that American Ingenuity is more vital and powerful than any amount of politics.

The key to our auto industry and any industry is to become more facile and capable of change. Your mentioning that these plants could be changed back and forth in hours from trucks to cars is relieving. I thought labor contracts have been hamstringing you all into oblivion - but obviously Ford management has some sensible ideas that they are actually implementing.

If Ford wants people to drive their cars - at least in my book - they have to do two things - and both at a local level:
1) Improve service after sales - even on other vehicles (I was laughed out of a Ford dealership last summer when I went there for a Chevy truck part by accident.)
2) Locally get this message across about test-driving. I've heard it from you and by people who talk about you - but not from my local dealer in his ads.

When I was a kid growing up here, we drove nothing but Fords. Simply because there was great service after the sale. Now we drive none - same reason. The mechanic we use personally hates Fords (for whatever reason) - but he doesn't work for a dealership, he's independent after years working for one.

There's my two bits.

PS. And could you suggest they come out with something as durable and easy to repair (not to mention flex-fuel-friendly) like the Model A? If Ford came out with a simple model that was easily customizable by after-model kits, it would rule. (Remember how people used to customize the old Beetle Bug?!?) And people would line up for a chance at driving a modernized Tin Lizzy (say, with mag aluminum wheels and a rumble seat, painted yellow...as long as we could still get Sync as an option.)

Now, this is a measured rant - and well-taken point. I would extend @Brian 's point and say that you should probably first stick your tongue out when meeting some of these people for the first time. Best defense is a great offense...

No telling how many people I've dropped off following/subscribing because it was all buymebuymebuymebuymebuyme all the time.

Now, this doesn't mean you shouldn't offer stuff of value, but it's not going to be a demonstration of a hand-shake buzzer...

More subtle - like, "If you like that rainbow over there, I might have some you could take home with you, let me look around here - no, pots of gold aren't included..."

Exactly the point. Precisely targeted communications is the path to real ROI in this (or any) economy.

Our ability to use the various social media to filter and bring us new data - and opportunities - is our greatest asset. And that's something where larger corporations and governments will be late-adopters.

In short, social media relationships are the way to profit during this interesting downturn we are experiencing.

Diversity is the spice of life. It factually is how we keep learning - and perhaps why. Otherwise, we would simply be satisfied with the same ballgame being played over and over every Friday night, beverage in hand. Factory and cubicle life for all of us, doing the same thing over and over and over.

Besides - maybe my fishbowl is more interesting than yours. Cows do in fact seek greener grass on the other side of that fence, not just because it's taller - but because it has something that they are missing in the grass they're eating: fact.

Chris - cheers and huzzahs and whatnots! Great stuff. Hope you christened the ship...

Us freelancers and start-ups will be watching/waiting/RSSing/following with bated breath to see what develops.

Good Luck!

Running commentary, the ability to get pre-digested feeds in pithy prose.

Yea, but social media is such FUN - at least for some of us "who simply don't get it" early adopters...

As Richard Reeve covers (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-matter-of-scale/...), the tribal analogy converts to the General Assembly analogy. Our problem is a lack of models for this.

Consider: the General Assembly is a top-down organization. There is a parliamentary order which can stifle origination from the floor.

People can/do belong to several long-tail tribes.

Scobelizer points out they scale for broadcasts.

But others point out that blogs are essentially broadcast - however Chris, you use yours for interaction and spiking community involvement.

Perhaps Amazon is another model - people can get any book they want and leave reviews, contact the author or her publisher, etc. They can read the book any amount of times. And everyone can be told when another installment from that author is coming out (even though books are so few and far between...)

Certainly, while blogs and social media are technology-new, the tribal basis stored in our genes is using these new outlets for expression.

Social media both scales and doesn't - as Scobelizer says, it depends if you want to drink beer or talk about it.

To scale or not to scale --- whether 'tis nobler...

But people scale in different ways. Can Chris scale his commenting and sharing?

Steve Rubel has already scaled to over 600 feeds he monitors daily. And his (fewer) comments are still welcome.

Gladwell notes in his "Tipping Point" that there are (at least) three different types of people required to do this social media stuff we revel in. Some "connectors" have hundreds and hundreds of people they interconnect. His "sneezers" have fewer, but are concentrating on their sources for new trends and ideas.

To that relative degree, the Dunbar number is an inexact estimate - more inexact if you consider the different uses "tribes" are put to, and the different functions a person has in the various tribes he belongs to.

Long Tail niches play a part - in that we are part of oh-so-many interconnected and loosely joined tribes when we do that. This is why social media is thriving and broadcast "MSM" is dying, ever so slowly. Even politics is affected by these long tails - people are elected by collecting votes of confidence from tribal elders, while their followers tend to go along (for the most part).

And yet you see politics with just two main parties tending to fissure on both sides of that fence. So many more "undecideds" this election year - and so many more who admit they really only decide on that day. Are we breaking the mold of our own political social media because it won't scale? These two parties possibly can't actually represent the expanding diversity of their namesakes? So many are "conservative" on one subject and "liberal/progressive" on another. I heard one analyst call for a great party of the center and let the extremists of each side form their own...

Is it scaling - or evolution we should look to? As only change is constant, would we be better spent looking for that ideal wave to surf toward the shore, or better to take what we have in front of us, then paddle back for more when it winds up spent on the shore?

Those are the questions we ask about social scaling...

And the answer comes back yes - and no. Depends.

Chris, thank you and yours. Extra present under your tree this year.

Better to give than subscribe.

Thanks, Chris -

We actually are what we change and improve. Marketing and Conversations are one and the same - with politics being a poor cousin.

We are the meaningful change.

When you look around at the world, you see something which is speeding up immensely. Now we have the capability to affect things through small actions. And ignore, shun those things which are unimportant - and so, contribute change to those as well.

Social Media is heavy on "social". Any society is composed of it's individual parts. As each of us seeks meaningful change in our own lives - and contributes this forward - we then become larger than ourselves and the meaningful change we want builds momentum.

So: Thanks in advance to all those who've helped; and Congratulations to everyone who have made it! There's more great days ahead!!!

Keeping the main thing the main thing, as Chris recently said...

True - go for it and keep going for it until you make it. And then pick out another thing to go for and get that. And so on.

Very, very nice post. Great stuff.

That's the point.

Everything else is marketing.

And is marketing all there is to anything these days?

When is a writer supposed to write, afterall...

Plan your work, work your plan - analyze your life in small boxes...

As usual, another great post.

To read 100 other blogs outside your own realm, try this:

Set up a search on twitter (search.twitter.com) and then take the RSS feed of that search and put it into your reader. You'll be able to pull any particular phrase out with any relevant link and explore in a nearly random manner...

Let's hear it for diversity!

Good point.

And thank Gawd for corrections. Did you know that if you're off by just a couple of miles you can miss Hawaii - forever?

Good thing there's breadth and depth to journalism. Hate to think if CNN or CBS ever reported something erroneously - or the NYT???

First discussion/comment section I read all the way to the end and everyone in the middle, too!

My 2 bits:

brand - keyword - positioning - association - personal story - elevator pitch

How are these so much different? We seek understanding by figuring out the relative value of someone or something in relation to ourselves.

True, Madison Avenue is divorced from reality, so "Branding" (capital B) is completely different from the reality of needful conversations as in the "Cluetrain Manifesto". That's their problem.

"Chris Brogan" is a brand which I follow as he produces routine value which I can use. "Stephen King" is a brand I do not, because I don't like that genre.

Branding occurs by any name (although some roses smell better than others) - and all of us are doing it all the time. Politics is -rank- in it.

The trick is in taking responsibility for the effect. Corporations which are actively listening on Twitter are getting a clue.

Jack Humphrey, among others, are profiting off this understanding.

Branding got a bad name (even cows don't like it) because of the lack of responsibility. Trust fails. And so goes their "market share".

Oh, another point - germane to the above. Marketing isn't just sales. It has a great deal of promotion in it (as well as other actions), as several people have pointed out.

Example: I've said that social media can't be used for marketing (or something to that effect) - better, it is that social media can't be used for the "whole cycle" of marketing. Meaning, yes - you build trust and get people curious about you and what your company produces, but carrying out the conversion of leads to sales has to take place offline, out of the social media area proper.

Lots of deals may have been forged while on the golf course - but they weren't playing golf at the time. They were doing a deal, even while leaning on that golf club or talking over mixed drinks at the club. But even then, the paperwork was concluded back at the office.

Social media promotion is completely acceptable - within the rules of that particular social media. Mostly, this is in the form of giving high-quality, valuable content - with a link to your website, blog, or email.

Digg used to be "hell on wheels" in this regard - stuff was voted out of existence and removed. However, it's become so big that now you can digg your own stuff and it stays there for a long time with no one except the search engines noticing. Other sites are similar.

And you don't have to be extremely popular to effectively promote your stuff - we are all mostly working on long-tail niches to be successful in online marketing after all.

The point is social media promotion, yes; full-cycle social media marketing, no.

Hope this clarifies...

Charles (and everyone),

Excellent post. And a very good way to start a conversation about conversations.

Key point is that social media is with a Capital "S". That's what it's for.

I'll try to keep this pithy:

Statement 1: Social media isn't for marketing as most people know and practice marketing. The "Cluetrain Manifesto"explains this best for those who want to understand how most people were trained to market - and how they are going to have to change it.

Social media is for socializing. Period. You can't get into a sales page or landing page from there directly. Like the life insurance salesmen who belong to all sorts of groups - they get prospects and leads, but take their sales "offline" and don't do it in front of everyone at the group meeting.

I've posted this earlier in using "breadcrumbs" to turn social media contacts into sales.

Generally speaking, you don't get direct sales from social media.

Reason: they are there for the experience. If they were there to buy something, they'd be at an auction site - a community for buyers and sellers.

Social conversationalists (we need a term here - not "socialites") will look you up if they respect your content, your posts, your comments, your videos. Also depends on volume and frequency as well as contribution to the community - something people want and are looking for.

Statement 2: "Link love" is a dead/dying SEO strategy. Google is moving away from their old algorithms such as pagerank, which is what link love was supposed to influence. It's dead because it became a spammer tactic. The continuing successful strategy is quality content - which cannot be spammed, because it must be original and creative.

If you want top search engine positions, just submit great content using and about your keyword phrase to several social media - because Google sees that fresh original content is still King.

Statement 3: Someone broke down social networks into three types, which I believe go: a) bookmarking media, b)social media, c)review media. I think there might also be one just for networking, such as LinkedIn - but this is probably just a subset of social media - Facebook itself is used for both. The bookmarking aspect of StumbleUpon is changing over to a network function, so you can find out what other people are finding - not just popularize your own links (as above).

Statement 4: True. The term "edutainment" encompasses all three. Also - tell a story. This is the way people actually think (and change their minds) - by comparing their stories to others. (And why a movie tends to "stick around" in your mind for days - you're still digesting the story line and character interaction.)

Statement 5: If anyone was ever trained into thinking that you just needed to shout your message a given number of times and it would be accepted, they've been grossly mistrained - or are just hacks and spammers. True, 2-3% will buy out of any offer presented, but this simply won't work in social media - any shouting like that will get you kicked out of that network/media.

The community polices its own. Unlike newspapers and other media which are profit-based, not trust and communication based. Cluetrain Manifesto again.

Statement 6: OK. Manners apply, for instance. Netiquette, and so on.

Statement 7: Sales do not come from social media per se. See the breadcrumbs post above. Your content and persistent contributions gain trust - then they go to check out what you're all about. You get sales from your other pages, not the social media. ("You don't get down from an elephant, you get down from a goose." - old joke repurposed...)

Statement 8: What was known as "traditional SEO" can almost be dropped on its head and forgotten. SEO has evolved and continues to - since it follows search engine evolution. The only standard has been good content. Social media allowed us to spread that content around in more entertaining formats - rather than just text (WWW vs. Usenet.) Current best SEO tactics are page themeing (LSI) and social posts - which brings us back to square one above, high-quality conversations.

The first question any SEO-er should ask: "How can I best serve the Internet community as a whole?" and then, "What can I give others that will improve their experience?" From that you get niche-strategies, as we can't all be Amazon.com's. (Long Tail.)

Statement 9: Branding IS trust. It's not positioning. Leave that to marketing. SEO's job is to deliver the goods of a) traffic, b) potential leads, c) conversions. ROI is defined in terms of these three, although Conversion is a team effort and beyond simple SEO.

A note here - opt-in traffic from social media has proven to be very fickle and flighty. Opt-in is just as quickly opt-out. People "here for the experience" are not people "here to buy something." So your target isn't just volume traffic - you have to get people to buy enough that you can afford those bandwidth spikes.

Statement 10 - You have to actually become a member of that community first. Note that all communities are filled with niches. There is no generic "Tweeter" or "Stumbleuponner" or anything else. Do you homework first - and then join those networks where your particular niche is. But then you must really find out what that niche wants and deliver it. At THAT point, you can work on attracting leads and conversions on your own site.

- - - -

OK, too much ramble - but I hope you've all gotten something out of this. Thanks for your patience for reading this far.

Robert

I'd have to agree with Hershel - mostly. Your term "late adopters" is a mis-nomer to others who follow product cycles and other academic explanations. (And who like to drop ten-dollar words around...)

Scoble's Glossary:
early adopter = bleeding edge - before it hits even the pre-radars
late adopter = early adopter - just hit the radar screen and becoming popular
mainstreamer = peak adopter - everybody does it
really old hat = actual late adopter - everybody's been doing it for years, now something else is really popular
dinosaurs = trivia collectors - long after everyone else has moved on to that something else

Another idea - try keeping a blog, open at all times. If you have the Google Toolbar, you can "send this" to Blogger and cut-paste your ideas that way. Flock (based on Firefox) has a built-in "Blog This" feature which will sign you into Blogger or any other service you have.

Blogs are a great way to just get it all out of your system. And keep tabs on it as well.

I use Blogger, Gmail, and Desktop Search to be able to find anything I've ever blogged. Blogger sends it to Gmail, which automatically archives it, then Desktop Search will search emails as well as my desktop - so my posts are easy to find.

But the time saver is being able to blog, even if you have to stop and pick up the idea again - it's already half started. Use an outline so you can figure out where you were headed with that idea...

Two solutions to sending programs:
1. Compress the file - send it as [filename].zip
2. Create an RSS 2.0 feed, where someone can send any type of file via subscription

Oddly, I'm not noticing a lot of outnesses in my mail with Gmail (my Yahoo account is a lot worse on handling spam).