positive disruption by: Tom Martin | New Orleans based Social Media Consultant

Are you listening or following?

Yesterday this tweet from @MackCollier reminded me of a post I’ve wanted to write for a while.  There is often an ongoing discussion on Twitter regarding the number of folks you can or should follow. 

Chris Brogan has a great post on the subject where he discusses Dunbar's Theory, which states you can only really relate and keep up with 150 persons. I think that is a fair thought but I also think Twitter gives you tools to expand that number.

First, let me say this: I define “following” differently than does Twitter. In Twitterspeak, you are following anyone whose tweets you subscribe to. But in Tom speak, I cal that “listening.” Currently I listen to about 2,500 people and hope to grow that number significantly over the next year. But I also think that one of the single greatest things about Twitter is the ability to create relationships with folks I’d never meet in real life, especially as I don’t do the conference circuit as much as I should. In Tom speak, I follow these folks. So how can I listen and follow at the same time? Enter Tweetdeck.

In the screenshot below from my Tweetdeck, the folks I listen to are the farthest left hand column titled All Friends. Unfortunately, Tweet deck won’t let me rename that column.  On an average day, about 4,000+ tweets will filter through that column and I might actively check on it once or twice a day. Doing a quick scan. I find that two things draw me to a tweet. First, a link. Links mean content and I tend to spend a few seconds checking out any tweet that has a link. The second thing that I use, rightly or wrongly, the avatar. If it is something stupid or sexually oriented – seen lots of those lately – I move on. In my mind, that person isn’t serious about Twitter, they’re likely telling me what they had for lunch. Once I find something interesting, I tend to quickly check out the user’s profile and a sampling of their tweets. If it looks good, I usually add them to my “following” list where I can keep a closer eye on them to decide if I want to just accept their content or maybe begin a deeper dialogue or full blown relationship.

The next column, “Following” is reserved for the 50 or so (and growing) folks I truly follow. These are people that I regularly converse with on Twitter or whom I find tend to repeatedly participate in good conversations or share great information.  This is the column I religiously monitor and where I usually find great insight and conversations. On an average day, 500-1,000 tweets might scroll through this column. While still a lot, it is at least manageable.

Next is the Replies column where anyone who includes @TomMartin shows up and finally the Direct Messages reserved for those folks that want to have a private conversation and then the far right column, a constant search where I monitor any reference to “Tom Martin.” These are obviously the three most important columns because any tweet here is someone trying to talk to me or about me. I’m pretty good about replying to everything I see here and if it is someone talking about me, RTing a story I wrote or a link I shared, I’ll either send an individual “thanks tweet” or maybe a blanket thanks tweet with a bunch of folks @’d. By doing so, I’m able to maintain a relationship with these folks – which as noted above is important to me.

By using a product like Tweetdeck, I can expand my ability to manage relationships past Dunbar’s number. More importantly, I can use Twitter to achieve my goals.

Now, back to my buddy Mack. In my estimation, Mack represents one of three primary Twitter archetypes that I’ve seen emerge over the last year.

The Relationship User: This is Mack. Mack has a huge follower base because he’s a smart guy who shares a ton of good information. But Mack isn’t primarily using Twitter as a knowledge acquisition tool, he’s using it to create strong relationships with folks that can either hire him or send him business or help him serve his clients better. Therefore, Mack doesn’t automatically follow everyone that follows him. Further, he doesn’t process followers (more on that later) because he’s probably picking up 50 or more a day, and just doesn’t have the time. So if you’re following a guy like Mack, and you want to get into his Dunbar number, you have to @ him to get his attention. In fact, you might have to @ him a couple of times. Once you engage him in a conversation or share a link with him, he evaluates you [my words] and decides to add you to his “follower” list.

The Scanner User:  These are folks like me. I’m certainly on Twitter to make relationships but more importantly, I use it to cast a long wide antenna to find new information and to test ideas. To do this, I need to not only grow a large follower base (you need numbers to field surveys) but also I need to listen to a lot of folks. The more folks I can listen to, the better chance I have of coming across a great piece of information or finding that new thought leader that only has 20 followers on Twitter because they just started. So I use an auto follower service, SocialToo and automatically follow back anyone that follows me. Then using the filtering capability of Tweetdeck, I can decide if a person will move from my listening column to my following column. In working this way, I can achieve my two primary goals for my Twitter time. I can cast that long wide antenna and build relationships with smart people.

The Prospecting User: This is a person who manually processes all followers. Honestly, this used to be me before I did my Mardi Gras experiment. I was only getting 10-20 new followers a day, so it was pretty easy to manually click on each person’s name, check out their bio, avatar and a sampling of their tweets to see if it warranted a return follow. My goal here was to find high quality folks that could teach me, hire me or help me. Honestly, it made for a higher quality tweet stream but it also was taking 20 minutes or more a day. Once I started my Mardi Gras tweets, I was getting a couple of hundred new followers a day, which meant I could no longer manually process everyone as it would have taken an hour or more a day to do so. So on the advice of @ChrisBrogan, I switched to SocialToo and rather than opting high quality tweeters in, I now unfollow low quality tweeters. Each week I’ll spend some time looking through my “listening” column for low quality tweeters and then stop following them.

Is there a right way and a wrong way to use Twitter? Are there other types of Tweeters? Are folks using it in ways I’ve not yet figured out? How are you using it? Wondering minds want to know. So let them know via the comments section.

Facebook is fighting the wrong battle

There has been much written of late suggesting Facebook wants to be the new Twitter. So I won't rehash it all here, if you're interested in what's been written, click here.

Suffice to say, the new Facebook interface is certainly designed to facilitate more real-time sharing and updating. And I guess you could say that is an attempt to mimic Twitter. But if that is Zucker's goal, I'd certainly encourage him to look left.

Facebook's bigger opp if you ask me is to attack LinkedIn. While LinkedIn is great as an online resume, it kind of sucks beyond that in terms of a true networking site. Sure they're letting link my Slideshare decks and my blog, and I can answer questions so I seem smart, but other than that, it just lacks really good networking tools. In fact, if I had a dollar for everytime I heard someone say, "So what do you think about LinkedIn? I have an account but I don't go there much." I could blog full-time!

Facebook is much better positioned to serve as an online destination for all things Tom. I can roll in my Tweets, my Slideshares, Flickr pics, videos of my talks, etc., etc. And now that FB is letting me filter my wall by lists, they have taken one of the two important steps they need to take to bring LinkedIn down. The second step is to let me tag my content by list. So my business lists only see my business tagged items. Of course, you have to worry about other folks tagging you on their stuff, but that is easily solved by just defaulting all content to "personal" lists. If I want to share anything with my Business List, I have to manually make that change myself. Problem solved.

If FB can figure out a way for me to create a Chinese Wall between my professional and personal contacts, they could in effect do away with my need for LinkedIn. And let's face it, who among you would not love to have one less Social Network to manage?

So to Facebook I say, don't fight the battle you can't win. You've already got me using you to manage my personal contacts, help me use you to manage my business contacts too.

What do y'all think? Anyone out there a LinkedIn heavy user? Chime in.

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• LinkedIn's Obsession with Guarding its User Data will Alienate its User Base (socialmediatoday.com)

Can Ad Agencies Handle the Truth?

Great marketing and sales strategies are basically common sense. Unfortunately, today sense is anything but common. Companies look to us advertising folks to guide them. What they often get is largely pontification and "rules of thumb." There is talk of proprietary models, trademarked and in some cases patented approaches, and proven processes. Companies come to us for answers. But we seldom give them a straight answer to anything in advertising because frankly, there are no straight answers. And those rules of thumb, they are largely bullshit. But rather than dish out that truth and educate clients, we "get the biz" and figure it out later. And before you go clicking on that comment button -- yes, I know, I'm painting with a really, really broad brush right now. But stick with me for a minute.

Read the rest at Ad Age.

photo credit: http://www.jack-nicholson.info/

Sometimes you just get Lucky

My kids' school used to do this every year at the fair. Each kid had to sell 5 tickets @ $1 a piece. On the last night of the fair, they pull ten names and those ten folks get one shot each. First one to make it, wins. I was number 6. The number 7 guy had bought 120 tickets and practiced for 3 months. Just goes to show you... prepare all you want, but be willing to accept that sometimes God just wants the other guy to win. ;-)

A Manifesto for Change

About five years ago I had a Jerry Maguire moment and wrote down my own thoughts for changing how to take a client's brand to market. Found it this morning, updated it a bit for relevance and posting it here for you to read and comment on.

My personal mission is to improve the world one brand at a time. By creating rich, consumer-focused brands we improve the consumer experience. By improving the consumer experience, we improve the
consumer’s life. By improving the consumer’s life, we improve the world. Yes, it’s a bit hokey but it’s a good reason to get out of bed every day and come to work. Let me know what you think.

Download Toms Manifesto - Final.pdf (47.3K)

The Future of Media Content

This morning @Armano pointed Twitterville to this Ad Age post from Bob Garfield, which talks of an apocalyptic future for media. For awhile now I've become more and more convinced that what we're seeing in the world of media is a de-duping process. One that will eventually reach its logical end.

Why does my local paper and local news cover national news? Why do they cover sports? And weather? And such. The simple answer is that in the pre-Internet, digital days, they had too. Otherwise I had to subscribe to lots of hard copies of content to get all my news. But this has led to duplication of effort.

And who is feeling this pain? Local newspapers, etc.

I think in the future and by future I mean like in a couple of years maybe - we'll look to content providers by content type not delivery channel. So for local news I might look to WWL (my local CBS affiliate) or the Times Picayune (my local paper) but for sports I'll turn to ESPN -- including local sports and for weather, maybe Accuweather.com. And so on and so on. These information streams will come to me via an RSS reader like Google Reader or Netvibes or I'll be able to have them delivered to my printer or email via services like HP's Tabbloid (which I love by the way).

In the future, he who duplicates dies I think. I just don't have time to wade through duplication in search of new information. So I'll let the Internet do that for me.

So what do y'all think?

For every rule there is the exception

Image via Wikipedia

A few months ago I was tweeting with a well known and very well respected member of the social media/SEO crowd. He tweeted that any serious blogger only uses a real domain ie., tommartin.com versus a managed domain like I have tommartin.typepad.com.

I inquired because I wondered if content by any other domain would be the same? He went on to say it was a SEO 101 kind of issue and he couldn't possibly explain it in 140 characters. I disagree, I think I called him on it and he didn't really have an answer. He had an opinion, one he liked to pronounce as an absolute rule by which all others should folllow.

No worries. It's what experts do. They make pronouncements and by virture of their reputation as defined by numbers of times they present at industry conferences, numbers of readers of their blogs or total followers on Twitter -- people just accept that these "rules" are truth.

Please don't do that. Subject every thought to Intellectual Darwinism. Push it, break and and see if the thought really stands on its merit. Hint, lots of times, they don't.

For instance, that SEO 101 about using a real domain versus a hosted domain for your blog... this morning I went and Googled myself. Funny, my hosted domain doesn't seem to be hurting my SEO efforts very much.

Just saying...

Using Twitter to Change Brand Perception

As promised, I've finally completed the long-form version of my Mardi Gras Twitter Experiment results.

The week before Mardi Gras, I invited you to “Come to Mardi Gras. My Tweet.” It was as much a Twitter experiment as an Embedded Journalism experiment. Just as reporters in the Vietnam War colored our perception of the war via their nightly reports, I was eager to see if such an embedded journalism approach could shape the perception of Mardi Gras. Specifically, I started the test with three goals:

1. would the promise of content to grow my followership?
   
2. could positively change the brand perception of Mardi Gras?
3. can product placement can be done via twitter?

For those that have never been to Mardi Gras, there is a whole side of Mardi Gras that is very family oriented and looks more like the world’s largest tailgate party than a scene from Girls Gone Wild. And that was my primary goal. To see if I could reduce my followers’ negative brand linkage (Mardi Gras = crazy & flashing) and/or increase their positive brand linkage (family & tailgating). Everything else (goals and learning) was secondary in my mind.

So I spent the final five days of Mardi Gras sending out Tweets that included links to photographs (via TwitPic) I took at Mardi Gras. In my Tweets I’d give a bit of context, humor or just descriptive copy to let my followers know what the picture contained. Over the course of the five days I sent up a 185 Tweets and responded to a number of followers that made comments, Re-Tweeted or asked me questions.

Primarily my tweets were of family/crowd, parade (float/riders) and food/drink. And in the totality of the photostream you see a distinct “family” editorial angle with lots of pictures of kids, kids in ladders and families.

Over the nine-day experiment (4 days of advertising the tweetfest and the five days I tweeted) I learned a lot about Twitter and how to use a Live Tweet strategy to market a brand. And while I can’t share everything here, after all a girls gotta have a few secrets, I have included about 85% of the what we learned in hopes of instigating discussions around Twitter and more importantly, embedded journalism as a marketing concept.

So here we go... this is what I learned.

Relationships matter. To help me spread the word, I recruited my “Select Six” consisting of @ChrisBrogan, @MackCollier, @LisaHoffmann, @Armano, @BethHarte and @AmberCadabra. The strength of my “relationship” with these folks spans the spectrum from none (asked one of the others to recruit him/her) to very good (he/she once Tweeted with my six year old son as a favor). I assigned each of these helpers a unique tracking URL so that I could see how often they Tweeted, as well as the results (click-thrus) of those Tweets. After reviewing their activity, there is an almost perfect linear relationship that follows the strength of my relationships with them. My closest “friend” was the most active and the recruited Tweeter that wasn’t following me prior to the experiment was the least active.

The power is in the long tail. While I thought power Twitter’s like Chris Brogan would easily generate the most new followers or click-throughs to the blog post announcing the experiment given his 50,000+ followers, that wasn’t the case. Don’t get me wrong. Guys like Chris can send surges of followers. In fact, on the Monday prior when I sent out the “overview” with a link to my blog so each of my Select Six could get a better view of what I intended to do, Chris loved it so much that he did was Chris does – he Tweeted it. And within in 60 seconds, 43 new followers showed up. Later in the week when he “officially” tweeted it well over another 100 followers showed up. The same kinds of bursts of sign-ups occurred when each of the remaining Tweeters tweeted or encouraged their followers to follow @TomMartin.

The interesting learning though was the power of the “long tail.” Over the course of the experiment, many new followers would tweet me to say how excited they were to follow or looking forward to the tweets. In each case, I’d respond to them and included a trackable BUDurl and remind them to tell their followers. The BUDurl I created and used produced 3x’s the clicks of the most active Select 6 Tweeter. Now in fairness, Chris Brogan didn’t use his URL, instead he just told folks to go see what @TomMartin was doing, so this may not be a truly apples to apples analytical study but the point is clear – don’t ignore the long tail. There are decreasing returns due to smaller follower bases, but given the ease of engaging people on Twitter, it is well worth the effort. In retrospect, I wish I had chosen a Select 100 – I truly think my follower growth would have been significantly higher. 

Consumers will follow you for content. Prior to the experiment, I had 759 followers. By my first Tweet (4 days later), I had 1,610 and by the end of Mardi Gras I had crossed over 1,700 followers. I was simply promising two things. First, you’ll see Mardi Gras though the eyes of a local and second, you’ll see the results of my “experiment.” There was no register to win a free gift, or the person who helps sign up the most friends gets a trip, no there was none of that. I just promised I’d entertain and enlighten. That is a powerful piece of learning, in my estimation. Whether you’re trying to grow a Twitter following or Facebook fans/friends or website/blog traffic, content is king. At the writing of this post, some two weeks after Mardi Gras, I’m at 2,092 followers and honestly, I’ve done very little Tweeting since Mardi Gras other than point out my Ad Age results summary post had gone live last week.

Content humanizes.

I don’t have hard stat s on this one so maybe some of my followers will chime in via the comments below, but I’m convinced that my Mardi Gras Tweets helped me to develop a stronger relationship with my followers. Since the experiment I’ve noted a significant rise in folks @’ing me, retweeting my Tweets and helping me when I  toss out a question that I need an answer for on the fly. I even had folks express sorrow that “Mardi Gras Tom” was gone. And one reporter requested information that she could use in an upcoming article… yes, she requested everything via Twitter. Since then we’ve talked of a few other articles she’s writing and I’m sure that I’m now “in her Rolodex” or Twitterdex as it may be.

Things will go wrong. For a brand trying to live Tweet an event like Mardi Gras, expect the unexpected. For instance, on Saturday right before the first major super krewe’s parade, AT&T’s 3G network totally crapped out on me. I ended up taking pics of the parade and the next morning, I Tweeted them one right after another, the Tivo version of the parade if you will. I also had Twitter hiccups and battery challenges. So just know that technical difficulties will occur and back-up technology/plans are a must.

It takes a village to Tweet an event. There was so much I missed, from Zulu landing to Saturday’s Uptown parades to the perfect shot I couldn’t get because I was uploading my last Tweet. I had a great one of Joann Rivers on a float but couldn’t take it because the last Tweet was still uploading. If you’re going to live Tweet an event even close to the size of Mardi Gras, you need a village. Heck, I’d say any event or festival will require a village. Had I had a few more folks on the team, I could have shown a greater level of detail or could have created a Mardi Gras Tweetfest landing page where we let you follow areas of Mardi Gras or stuff like that. I could have even added video coverage to the Tweet/Pic coverage. You get the picture.

Attention Deficit. I sent up about 185 Tweets over the five days. On the post Mardi Gras survey, we asked folks to estimate how many tweets they read/viewed. 73% reported reading/viewing 50 Tweets or less. Only 8% estimated they viewed/read 75 or more Tweets (which is roughly equal to 50% of the total MG Tweet count). Twitter is like a river and folks pop in and pop out throughout the day. So if you live tweet an event, keep that in mind. Repetition is probably ok.

Lifespan of a link on Twitter. One of the great things about using trackable BUDurls was that I could pull a link report to see not just click-throughs but time stamps of those click-throughs. I’ve been playing with “lifespan of a link” for a while and the results from my Mardi Gras experiment continue to support what I’ve seen in previous tests. On average, if you Tweet a link, you’re going to see 75% of the click-throughs within the first 30 minutes. You’ll see another 10-15% within the first hour and then for the most part, crickets. The link is dead. It would be even more interesting to see this same analysis done by follower counts, ie., see how long a link lives in the Tweetstream of a power user (following 500+) versus a lite user (following <125).

If you watch some Twitter users, they’ll Tweet the same link and often the same Tweet 4-6 times throughout a day. Usually when they are promoting their own blog. Yes I too am guilty of this practice. But if you consider the lifespan of a link and the fact that folks tend to pop in and out of Twitter throughout the day, the practice makes sense and likely won’t annoy anyone, especially power users because most likely they didn’t see your previous Tweets, which are now buried in their 1,000+ Tweets a day Tweetstream. 

Embedded Journalism can drive next year’s traffic. Again, while not statistically proven, I had a number of folks make a comment along the lines of the Tweet I received from @LisaHoffmann:

“Thank you! And, on behalf of all MG fans, thanks for working to change its image. I never had an urge to go before now. You definitely changed my perception of the event!”

Not only had I successfully changed their perception, but in showing them a side of Mardi Gras they had never seen before I enticed them add Mardi Gras to their travel consideration set. Think about that. I didn’t have to spend thousands of dollars on an ad or fancy brochure. I just needed Twitter, an iPhone and my own time.

If you’re a festival, destination or hell even a movie or concert tour, there is absolutely (IMHO) a chance to use this same type of embedded journalism approach to drive traffic to next year’s festival or the next tour stop or for a movie, maybe even opening day. In fact, feel free to contact me for more detailed thoughts on this subject. I’m on the lookout for my next event to Live Tweet so I need a good guinea pig.

Product placement.
  I think there are product placement opportunities in using content as advertising. I purposely showed a lot of food shots and as you will see in the results below, linkage between food/Mardi Gras improved dramatically. Further, I included daily “sponsored by” Tweets, which were jokes – no one sponsored this or paid me any money – half expecting to get a snarky comment here or there but not only did none arrive but we actually saw a spike in number of views of the TwitPic if we mentioned a brand name like Dominos or Michelob Ultra. Go figure. But based on what I saw in the data, I truly think there is a way to do product placement in a manner that won’t offend followers.

Twitter is an activation agent. In the post survey I asked folks if they’d like it better if I used Flickr and just uploaded pics there instead of Twitter/TwitPic combo. Interestingly, 39% thought that would be a worse solution and 28% were neutral. When asked why they felt the way they did, the most common comment was that Twitter acted as an activation agent. My Tweets reminded them to check out the TwitPics. The second most popular response was that folks like the dialog the Tweets created. My prose gave the pics context and “flavor” that you couldn’t get from the picture alone.

And last but not least… You can change perception using Twitter and embedded journalism. Much like reporters during the Vietnam War colored American’s views via embedded reports from the battlefront, you can use embedded Twittalism (I’ve coined a phrase) to change brand perception. Here are the metrics for the key brand linkages I was trying to effect.

Linkage            Before          After
Flashing               57%            36%
Crazy                   70%            58%
Family                 19%            30%
Tailgating               9%            20%   
Food                    56%            70%*

                 Pre-Survey: sample size was 181
                Post-Survey: sample size was 115
* while not a goal of the experiment, for fun I included a lot of food shots.

Notes on samples: Demographically speaking, the samples are almost identical.

Question:                                                        Pre        Post   
Have you been to Mardi Gras - NO:                70%        60%
Have you been to New Orleans – NO:            39%        33%
Male:                                                               36%        37%
Married:                                                           56%        54%
Single:                                                             34%        33%
18-24:                                                              14%        12%
25-34:                                                              35%        39%
35-44:                                                              29%        30%
45-54:                                                              16%        16%
55+:                                                                   5%          3%
Children in household-YES:                            46%        44%

And there you have it folks. Would love to hear your thoughts or comments. While I don't think this is a perfect study, it does in my mind strongly suggest that Twitter and Embedded Journalist (Twittilism as I'm calling it) can shape brand perception. If you're a company or brand interested in learning more, give me a ring or drop my an email to tom.martin at z-comm dot com.

I'll have one more post in this series. The fine folks over at Radian6 are helping me with some tracking data and once I wade through that, I'll post the last in this series of posts. Stay tuned.

Sometimes corporate travel rocks

If you travel much you know that it can be a pain. But every so often you get a surprise. Like today, when I arrived in Chicago to visit with my client, The Drake Hotel, I got this little surprise. My client had put me in one of their nicest suites. So I thought I'd share my good fortune with you via my first video blog. I knew that Flip Camera would come in handy!

Enjoy.

The Drake Hotel from Tom Martin on Vimeo.

Blogger Advertorials

I just read Jeremiah Owyang's post on Forrester Research's new report Add Sponsored Conversations to Your Toolbox. I have a lot of respect of Jeremiah. I read his blog and follow him on Twitter. So the following is by no means a dis to him. I'm just honestly confused and his post prompted the confusion, so I'm using it to get into this little missive.

But honestly, after reading his post and the associated post by Sean Corcoran that Jeremiah points us to, II still don't get it.

In his post, Jeremiah points out that Forrester has determined paid blogger content is fine so long as

“1) sponsorship transparency and 2) blogger authenticity.

Sponsorship transparency means that both the marketer and the blogger must make it absolutely clear to the reader community that they are reading paid content – think of Google Adwords “Sponsored Links.” Blogger authenticity means that the blogger should have complete freedom to write in their own voice – even if the content they write about the brand is negative.”

Did it really take a Forrester team to figure this out? Is it just me or is this common sense? As a consumer, if you're giving me good content on a passion I care about and you're clear that you're getting paid by a brand that benefits from my reading the content -- I'm fine with that. What consumer wouldn't be? Now if you're just a shill... then of course, that is out of bounds. And if you're just a disclosed shill, I'll figure that out soon enough and stop visiting.

Jeremiah points out that  "Sponsored conversations, although controversial,..." which is equally interesting to me. Interesting because I'm not sure why any blogger or Social Media person would really have an issue with properly disclosed paid blogging. Hell, even the Pope has a sponsor but that doesn't make his message every Sunday less valuable.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this or if I'm just tossing something disruptive out there in hopes that you, my readers can help me get my head around this "issue" and why it's so complex that Forrester felt the need to actually write a report. If you've got some thoughts, please share them. Seriously. Thanks.