social media | 6/6 | Ian M Rountree

Deconstructing Social Media: The Nuclear Option

January 25, 2010 by Ian 17 Comments

As I’m writing this I have 323 followers on Twitter. Last night I had less than 300. This morning I had more than 350 – and then, one by one, the difference disappeared as I deleted used-nonce and pure noise followers. Obviously, Twitter’s request to some services to stop using auto-unfollow has not kicked in properly.

This isn’t a bad thing. Not one bit.

Get this straight. I don’t really care if you follow me on Twitter.My numbers don’t mean a thing – now. I’m just a dude who writes. I’m not a pundit or journalist like Jeff Jarvis, a massive tech god like Robert Scoble, or a marketing whiz like, well, at this point half of Twitter. I’m a participant, not a trend-setter. That’s what I’m about, that’s what I do. So I don’t really care if you follow me. But you’d better damn well bet I’ll be impressed with YOU if you respond to something I’ve said, the way Jarvis, Scoble and a few others have.

I don’t care about follower numbers because until Twitter and blogging and other things of the sort become a career instead of a hobby, I’m always going to win the engagement war against bigger stars in the social media arena. How, do you figure, that is? For the same reason that Liz Strauss and I agree Conan O’Brien won out; he didn’t forget his core audience. There’s no value in the followers metric, at all, any more. If there ever was. I care about conversation.

I can account for eight of my twenty subscribers. I speak to these eight people fairly regularly – half of them are on Twitter, and about the same number reliably hit my blog from the links I post there. Of these, two or three comment regularly. Of all of the numbers, this is what matters to me the most, because I value contribution, even when it’s small. Lots of bloggers say they live in the comments – I dream of one day having a comments section to call home.

Robert Scoble just dropped a bomb about the differing benefits of creating content versus curating content produced by others. It’s one of the best he’s done in a while, taking apart the work of going to a big event, and why following it in broader scope is an important job too. I agree – but doing this work does not help Scobleizer’s engagement. He sits at his screenbank, aggregates, and curates. A necessary job, yes, but it places him even more in the ivory tower others have built for him – it’s entirely his personality. But it makes the idea of engaging him, of insinuating oneself into his circle nearly unimaginable.

Having a massive following is great – hell, if I hadn’t engaged on Twitter, I wouldn’t ever have interviewed Mark Dykeman, Liz Strauss wouldn’t know who I was, and Steven Hodson wouldn’t be putting out perspective on my writing. It’s awesome, all of these people rock.These people are why I win.

Participation is something we can’t lose. Participants are like me, engaged, interested, involved. Meta-curators, the human aggregators, are more like Scoble. They can be very interesting people, but they’re spending so much time outside themselves, in their lists, being the activity more than the action, that the focus of what they do moves beyond participation to something bordering on obsession.

Something to think about. I’m participating – and winning, but that’s me, and my role. Some might be better served by meta-curating, as Scoble is.

Have you given any consideration to what you’re doing with your in-public presence online?

Photo by Brian Auer.

What Does That Mean, Exactly?

January 20, 2010 by Ian 7 Comments

I have a problem with buzzwords.

Can you name the last five buzzwords you heard? What about the last ten? Don’t worry about the order, just try to come up with something recent, some term you’ve run across, that really didn’t seem to stand for anything, but was intended as a broad generalization of a concept, and applied to a very simple, elemental ideal.

I’ll help. Here are some: Rights. Reform. Liberty. Justice. Freedom.

We’re used to seeing ideas like blogging, the social web, networking, entrepreneurship come up in the discussion of overarching, nebulously defined ideals, but the trouble is that so much of our society is predicated on these vague shorthand terms. I wonder sometimes if buzzwords in general are part of the problem, or not. How are we supposed to communicate in general if we can’t communicate these ideals in the specific?

The whole point of language, especially codification and good lexicography, is to make sure that communication is reliable, understandable and universal. Dialects and slang aside, raw core ideals should be easy to transmit in short bursts, to make conversation breathable. But throwing in buzz, or any kind of highly emotional lingo, ruins a part of this because, like it or not, no two people speak the same language. As much as we convince ourselves we all speak (for example) proper English, it’s a crock.

I’ve got a better vocabulary than a lot of people I know. This can come in handy, as I spend a decent amount of my time being a translator. Working in the core has drawbacks – immigration rates and cheap housing mean that the down town area, at least of Winnipeg, is saturated by people who speak English – this supposedly common language – to varying levels of success. Having strong command of the language lets me do my job effectively whether the people I’m speaking to own the technical command or not. But every so often, I run into trouble translating, and it’s usually because of the wide adoption of buzzwords.

We don’t all use the same ones.

Perfect example: patch cords. What does that mean, exactly? You wouldn’t believe the number of times in a month someone asks me for a patch cord, then gets incensed when I ask what kind they mean. You know, a patch cord! For hooking up a TV! This isn’t a buzzword for me. I work with a lot of kinds of cords: coaxial cable, analog RCA, S-Video, component video, DVI, HDMI – and that’s just the video cables that fall under this category. If you want audio, there’s also RCA, but then we get into things like quarter inch mono and stereo, eighth inch for the same, digital coaxial, optical cable. See where this is going? In one eight foot section of my shop, we’ve got easily twenty different kinds of cords that all fall under the broad description of “patch cord.” Don’t yell at me because you can’t bring yourself to specify.

Don’t yell at the system because it can’t either.

If we get so confused over one term relating to two dozen kinds of AV cabling, imagine what someone from outside our sphere thinks when they start hearing terms like health care reform, universal justice or rights and freedoms. Often, these words either mean nothing at all, or can mean so many different things that even with context the lack of specificity is damaging to communication. It gets worse when we bring up the broad ideals, but don’t concieve for ourselves what possible specifics we might mean.

Our culture – the entire western hemisphere, everywhere from western Europe to Canada, the USA – produces buzzwords at an alarming rate!

I’m still waiting for someone to explain the job qualifications of a Director of Community. Or a Social Networks Manager. On the surface, it seems like such a simple ideal – but like any good category, it has to leave room for details that haven’t been conceived of when the buzzword is created. Which is part of the problem, I suppose. Specificity is great, but exact language requires a lot more time than most people have these days. It’s worrisome that our language has begun to so accurately accommodate the velocity of our society.

As someone wise is reported to have said, there is more to life than increasing its pace.

I’d encourage you to be more careful of why you use buzz along with your words. The shotgun approach to conversation doesn’t serve everyone as well as it does stereotypical politicians. Some of us have to back up our statements with fact.

Photo by HVargas.

Hack Analytics, A Participants’ Guide

January 15, 2010 by Ian 8 Comments

So you’re a blogger! Good for you. You’re successful, and you’re interested in staying that way. Why else would you be here? You probably know your formula already, you know when you’re posting and when it’s effective. You’ve got your theme set up and it looks awesome, your ads are placed in all the best places… But how can you be sure exactly how efficient your posts are?

The dreaded numbers. Analytics.

Numbers can be depressing sometimes. They’re not consistent, they fluctuate, and if you don’t know what to look for, anything but a nice clean hockey-stick shaped graph in your visits and pageviews can look discouraging, or worse, stagnant.

When was the last time you looked up from your subject material to make sure people were reading?

I mean it. Anyone who’s managed to make a name for themselves as a blogger likely stopped paying certain kinds of attention to numbers long ago, because it becomes inherent in what we do. We make sure that, in order to keep up the quality of our writing, we watch the reactions we get from certain pieces, certain subjects and certain approaches, in order that we don’t slip.

But what about those of us who aren’t so good with tracking? When was the last time you looked at the visitors report on Google Analytics, or whichever other package you’re using to listen to your site, and had a small stroke because traffic had dipped for a day or two, just when you thought you were posting your best stuff this month?

Numbers can be the bane of your existence if you let them. Seeing any dips can be very discouraging. But it doesn’t have to be so hard. I’ve spoken before about using some free tools and easy metrics to develop a routine around analytics – especially when you’re just getting your steam going – to figure out where all that traffic is going when the dips appear, and why it’s just not that big a deal.

Do you know where your traffic comes from?

FeedBurner isn’t much on metrics – those subscriber counts and reach numbers can get a bit overly vague, especially to the untrained. But are you making sure you’re making the most of your use of services like this? You could, after all, just leave your feed at your own site, and not route it through a service like FeedBurner. But why wouldn’t you, when its so easy to set up? It can also provide a bit of encouragement when you’re looking at your numbers.

Sometimes page view counts dip. Do you look to other places on those days? FeedBurner, right on its dashboard for your site, has an “Uncommon Uses” button. There aren’t usually any uncommon uses to be had, but this page will show you how many exact accesses of your feed have been made in the day. Often, on days when your page views counts are down, the Feed Uses numbers are up. People are using aggregators or readers like Google Reader of Viigo to access your site. They haven’t abandoned you, trust me! What this means is not down traffic, it usually means down new traffic instead. If that’s the case, you might want to look at how available you’re making yourself outside the echo chamber of your own blog.

Social Media is a time sink, but it has massive value if used with intention.

We can’t all be hyperactive tweeters. But, if we’re careful, we can let Twitter do a lot of work for us. Fully one third of my traffic comes from Twitter referrals, and I usually never tweet about a story more than twice. You don’t want to sound like a douche, right? But every so often, depending what I’m writing about, I’ll see a massive spike in Twitter traffic. What happened? Someone with a bigger following passed on a post. But how do you know when this happens?

Bit.ly is your best friend.

One of the brilliant things about some URL shortening services is that they give you simple, off the cuff metrics to work with. If you tweet a blog post using Bit.ly for example, within seconds you can see how many people have clicked on it, and you’ll see continual running numbers appear as it goes. Bit.ly also aggregates all of the links generated through it, and shows you not only how many people clicked on your link, but also the total clicks, as well as who’s tweeting about that aggregated link! Retweets, new engagements, sporadic short comments – all of which would normally never make it to your blog, show up in near real time on the info pages for your links. All you have to do is go to your account, or add a + to the end of any given bit.ly link to see all the info made public about how that link has performed. If you want a way to get this stuff off to your blog to use as social proof, you can do that too.

Disq.us is your best friend’s wing man.

There isn’t a huge amount of community to be had just around commenting, but Disq.us does this fairly well; in addition to providing a socialized segment for comments (on which more below) Disq.us will aggregate Tweets and other reactions to your posts and drop them into a very nice looking segment below the comments. It separates and gives semantic meaning to comments made about your blog, even providing shortened URLs as cited in these reactions. This is of huge benefit when you’re trying to figure out the path of sharing. Even if you only see one referrer – say Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook, depending on your chosen venue for the original share – having the reactions cleanly collated has value lots of people miss.

Disq.us also has the side effect of exposing you to others, if you let it.

I’ve been using Disq.us for less than six months on my blog. While it doesn’t do too much for the blog itself – you can style your comments section however you want, and a lot of the things Disq.us does are homogenous – it does provide some interesting long tail benefits. For example, any registered Disq.us user who comments on your site gets a bit more visibility, because their profiles are viewable, comment counts in some cases, and some other contact information. I’ve made a number of good connections with people through their Disq.us profiles, and found a lot of good blogs to read as well. This is beneficial because, as we all know, commenting on others’ blogs builds great community, is good for your link juice, and ensures that you get involved outside your own echo chamber.

Not so threatening, is it?

Socializing your blog is a big deal if you want more traffic. Whether you’re a big name in the self-publishing world, or the tiniest of niche bloggers, traffic is paramount. But in order to make sure you’re focusing your efforts in the right arenas, you have to pay more attention than just looking at pages viewed and revenue earned. It doesn’t just come down to volume. If you really want to make the most of your efforts, learning to make use of small, fast tools to measure efficiency can make a big difference in the impact of every post you publish.

Photo by Ionusho.