social media Archives - Page 17 of 31 by Mark Murnahan

Social Media Irony: Does Twitter Hate Facebook?

There surely must be some tension between the social media giants, Twitter and Facebook. After all, social media is a fiercely competitive and also very profitable industry. Once in a while, there is a blaring case of irony to make us laugh.

Irony: “… situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions.” (source: Wikipedia)

Maybe you will not find this as amusing as I do. After all, I laugh at a lot of absurdities that I discover online. Social media is fantastic for a laugh, and I may never get the pictures of people with back-boobs and front-butts out of my head. Yes, that’s right, I said back boobs and front butts. See for yourself at your local Wal Mart store, or follow the humorous links I provided.

NOTE: I know some fine people with back boobs and front butts, but let’s face it Snuggies are cheap, and they could disguise that stuff better than Spandex!

Now back to this social media irony of Facebook and Twitter. We have all heard that we should be using Twitter, right? Anybody in the marketing industry will, at a minimum, recommend reserving your brand name at Twitter.com.

Twitter grew like influenza since 2007, and millions of people flocked to the service to find out what a “tweet” is all about. I must say that it was not without merit, and I have participated quite heartily in the conversation surrounding Twitter.

Long before Twitter … centuries before Twitter (in Internet time, of course) we had Facebook. Facebook really hit the world by storm, and grew to over 500 million users in short order. Do you realize how big 500,000,000 is? It is big … very big!

Obviously, Facebook has a stronghold in the social media industry, but we still cannot overlook Twitter for its complex simplicity. I like Twitter enough that I wrote a book about the service, so this is certainly not a bash on Twitter. It is just an observation.

I also like Facebook, and I can spend hours spying on the lives of nearly everybody I ever knew. Then, of course, there are those many companies who do not even see it coming while I am compiling the information I need in order to crush their business with marketing intelligence that I pick up on Facebook.

A logical and meaningful bash against Facebook is like slapping a hungry grizzly bear with a slab of meat and then hoping I can outrun it. It is one of those things that sounds stupid even when smart people say it. Facebook is a winner in the information age. Knock Facebook if you like, but 500 million kind of speaks for itself.

No, this is not a bashing, but I question how they see each other. What is a good way to open a dialog of speculation on how the two social media giants view the others’ service? Make up your own mind on this (and please share your comments), but to me it seems that a look at each of their usage of the others’ service should say something. What it says could be taken different ways, and I will let you chime in with your thoughts.

Twitter on Facebook

Twitter has a Facebook account with hundreds of thousands of fans. My logical assumption would be that Twitter may actually have something more than 140 characters (the character limit on Twitter) to say to all of those adoring fans. Sure, they have a blog, and of course they have Twitter, but it seems that Facebook is not just “the competition”, and it could serve some great uses for Twitter. It seems that Twitter did not ask for, nor act upon my opinion … or the opinion of the 714,256 people who elected to “Like” them on Facebook. As the image below illustrates, “Twitter has no recent posts.” Surely they have something available if you click on “older posts”, right? No … nothing at all. They signed up for an account and did not use it, just the same way as the overwhelming majority of accounts created on Twitter. Irony? Just wait, because there’s more!

Facebook on Twitter

I guess I never really pay much attention to Facebook on Twitter, but they are there, and using the service. When I want to know more about Facebook, I either look at Facebook or find it on one of my favorite Facebook-focused blogs. Facebook really does not need Twitter, but they apparently found value in embracing Twitter as another tool. I commend them on the choice to use Twitter, and it just makes good sense to me.

In contrast to Twitter’s blank Facebook page, Facebook sends updates using Twitter. As illustrated in the image below, Facebook is not a huge user of Twitter, but has sent 683 tweets since their account was created in March 2007.

Does Twitter Really Hate Facebook?

I guess it is a stretch to say that Twitter hates Facebook, but it is pretty clear that they do not have anything to say to the people who chose to “Like” their Facebook page. It seems that they could at least try it out and perhaps come out and say “tweet”.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Use Follow Through to Increase Your Influence

I realize upfront that a lot of people do not want to address the topic of the things they neglect to do. It is uncomfortable to think about all the tasks that we forget, or put off until another day. Even the mention of it will probably make a lot of people think I am looking right down my finger at them. Don’t worry, this is not a message of scorn, because you are not the only one who is guilty of that thing you know you should have done but hoped nobody would notice or remember your failure to follow through.

Have you ever been stood up? Maybe it was a date, a business meeting, a telephone call, or many other possible ways that somebody did not follow through with what they told you. Do you remember how that made you feel? I can tell you that it is one way to end up in my recycle bin, and I am not the only one who feels this way.

When people do not follow through on their words, it often becomes a personal matter. It is insulting. It can even strangely cause a sense of shame or guilt for the recipient, with thoughts like “Well, I guess I was not all that important to them.” More often, it will bring about a dismissal of the individual’s words, both past and present. It destroys trust, and in business, that is a tragic fate which often negates even the best marketing efforts.

This topic comes up in my business and personal life once in a while, and the person I discuss it with is my wife. We have operated businesses for decades, and we have each encountered liars, cheats, and thieves on multiple occasions. We have also encountered a lot of people who are not quite classified as horrible, but rather what we call “flakey”. You do not have to look very hard to find flakey people. They are the ones you look at with a cautious eye when they tell you something that will require them to take action beyond the moment at hand.

Losing Influence is Easy

There are a squillion examples of what I call “flakey”. I’ll give you a quick example, but it can be far more subtle. In this example, it is the customer who lost influence and trust. I make this point because it can go both ways, and we each determine our own individual influence which we carry everywhere we go.

My wife and I own a thriving cakes and confections business. Mad Eliza’s Cakes and Confections has become quite a hit in our town, and I have found that cakes are about the easiest thing to sell that I ever brought to market.

Somebody recently placed an order for custom cupcakes from Mad Eliza’s and expressed urgency to pick them up at a specific time on Halloween Day for a party he had scheduled. The time came and went, and that afternoon, my wife rang him on the telephone. He quickly blurted “I’ll call you back in just a minute.” Did he call? No. Did we have some nice Halloween-themed cupcakes to hand out to friends that day? Yes, we did, and people loved them.

Being “flakey” in this case involved a blatant lie, right? Well, probably, but we cannot be so sure. Maybe he was in a terrible accident with a hair dryer and a bathtub. We do not know the whole story, but what we do know is that the lack of follow through took this person down a few notches on our “listening scale”. This guy clearly lost influence. He may not ever need any influence, but what would it look like if I saw him in the waiting room of a friend’s business applying for a job? Stranger things have happened!

With the massive popularity of social media, there is an even more profound importance of doing what you say you will do. People talk about things they find distasteful. Although you may think that lacking the integrity to follow through on simple tasks may not be conversation-worthy, you can bet that if your name comes up, there will be significantly less excitement for somebody to say great things about you. If lack of follow-through becomes a common problem within your company, even with “insignificant” tasks, it can destroy your influence. In more extreme instances, you can end up looking horrible when somebody searches for your company name.

Increasing Influence is Easy, Too!

Trust is a tricky thing. I wrote about the topic of building trust a while back, and it included some good food for thought. The article was titled “Building Trust Comes First in Business, But How?“.

Influence has a lot to do with trust, but influence can also be relatively easy to build if you do what you say you will, even when it seems insignificant to you. Being consistent and always following through with even the “little things” can build up over time.

About a decade ago when my company, YourNew.com, was new, I asked my wife and business partner what made us different. I was trying to distill what would set us apart and make our company great. She had a nearly immediate and very definite answer. She told me “I can sum it up in a single word … Integrity!“ That has always stuck with me, and I think of it every time I tell somebody I will call them back, email something, meet for coffee, or anything else when there is an opportunity to let somebody down by not following through.

I am certainly not a saint, but I try really hard to make a priority of keeping my word, regardless how trivial a matter may seem to me. It may matter a lot to somebody else. I hope that you will try hard, too.

Do you have an example of follow through building your confidence in a person or a brand? Do you have examples of it destroying your confidence? Please share your thoughts.

Photo credit to DigiDi via Flickr

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

SEO and Social Media: Picking Chicken Poop from Toothpaste

I have heard many arguments separating SEO and social media by trying to decypher which is more valuable. Many of the people arguing this point are on one side or the other, and miss the point that they are both tactics which work together toward an overall strategy. Many people also seem to miss the fact that they are largely the same thing.

Here are a few questions that marketers use for producing arguments:

Which is more important … SEO or social media?
Which discipline provides the higher return on investment?
How do you calculate the ROI of social media?
SEO? Isn’t that some sort of fairy dust?
How do you separate chicken poop from toothpaste?

OK, that last one was my own personal interpretation, but seriously … how can people get this so mixed up that they stand in their corner arguing their respective knowledge without coming together in the center and having a big group hug?

SEO opens a lot of doors for companies. Having their greatness spread across the Internet in a way that people will find it when they search for something is extremely productive. People still ask me the question “how will people find my website?” To me, the question seems pretty easy … they will search for it! Having great information on a well prepared website and making it available to search engines is a “no-brainer”. Well, it is a “some-brainer”, because a lot of people still don’t really grasp it. In any case, it is very valuable, and backed up with a lot of facts. It also provides a lot of value to back up your social media marketing endeavors.

Social media is a great way to discover the people who may be interested in searching for you. It is often a proactive approach where you can add yourself to the mix. It is also a great way to learn more about those people who are already searching for you, will be searching for you, or may never search for you but will take a recommendation from others they trust. It also provides a lot of value to your search engine optimization endeavors.

I find that a lot of people get these two fields very confused, both by trying to separate them and by trying to merge them. SEO and social media both have their own unique qualities, but the reality is that trying to separate them is about as easy as picking chicken poop out of your toothpaste.

Both of these areas of Internet marketing are the same in many ways. Search engines use popularity of a website measured by incoming links pointing to the website content as a major factor for ranking. Social media also uses the popularity of website content as a major factor for ranking. What a lot of people fail to realize is how much they both work the same, and they both work in synergy.

I would be pleased to carry on in my typically lengthy way of writing until my brain hurts from extolling the values of these various marketing tools, but I have already done that. After all, have you seen my blog title? It is titled “SEO and Social Media Marketing Blog“ for a reason.

Today, I want you to jump in and help me to explain how both are intertwined yet diverse.

If you can offer a better way to describe the relationship of SEO and social media than to say that it is like trying to pick chicken poop from your toothpaste, I will offer you a kiss full on the mouth. I have nice fresh breath, but I can assure you that I have found a whole lot of “chicken poop in my toothpaste”.

I still brush regularly.

Photo credit to andrein via Flickr

Twitter Boom; Twitter Bust; Twitter Revival?

Are Twitter’s networking and conversation possibilities still compelling, or is Twitter mostly for link sharing and SEO now? The experience of Twitter is different for each individual, but maybe there is also a collective answer.

If you have used Twitter as long as I have, you have surely seen a lot of change. I opened my first Twitter account in April 2008, just over two and a half years ago. I used Twitter to announce my racing starts and results, and to let people know when my auto racing webcast was live. I was too busy on race tracks to use it for much else.

In the beginning, I was pretty unaware of the great value of Twitter, as most of us were, but then I decided to take a little closer look when I created my @murnahan account. Twitter’s usefulness really struck me after I learned about a fire that happened on the roof of my kids’ school, about 100 yards from my home, in a Twitter update. No, I didn’t learn about that fire by hearing the fire trucks or standing in my driveway and seeing flashing lights. I discovered it on Twitter. This was when I decided that Twitter was really worth a closer look.

Witnessing the Twitter Boom

There was a time, about a year and a half ago, when you were “nobody” if you didn’t use Twitter. It was a sudden craze that dragged celebrities in by the hundreds, and all that publicity coaxed people to check it out. Many of the huge boom of Twitter users were pretty skeptical of Twitter, but they just had to know what it was all about. It was a really amazing tool back then, for those who learned how to use it to meet people and build a network.

The Twitter boom was in full swing, but the majority of new users did not return more than a few times, and Twitter experienced massive losses of users. The number of new users was still skyrocketing, but the number of people actually using the service looked bleak. The loss rate was high.

Twitter is still pretty close to the same service, overall, and the tools surrounding Twitter were made better since that time. What has changed is in how it has been used, which is unique for each of us, but has a collective affect on Twitter as well. Like any tool, it can be used in productive ways, or in unproductive ways. A hammer can build a home, or it can destroy one. Unfortunately, many users have been influenced by the “dark side” and have been less than productive for themselves and the community as a whole.

There are many people who will choose to use Twitter to “build a house” rather than destroy one, but there are enough hammers swinging that it can be pretty challenging to recognize the difference. The confusion and frustration showed many Twitter users the door, and they left.

Twitter made it really easy to meet people, but this had a downside, too. I have met a lot of great people using Twitter. I have also met thousands of people who have no more use for me than to add another number to their Twitter follower count in hopes that I will click their link and buy something from them.

Are the Good Days of Twitter Gone?

Twitter became the easiest network of all for gaining a following of people. I called it the Twitter Follower Frenzy in an article from June 2009, and it just kept growing from there. I found that for a lot of users, it felt like an obligation to refollow anybody who loved them enough to follow their Twitter feed. Heck, I never sought followers, but somehow I ended up following over 20,000 people, mostly just because they had followed me and I wanted to seem politely accessible.

The Follower Frenzy led to a huge pitfall. Call me an ass for pointing this out, but it is really true, and I can tell you why. Twitter gained a lot of it’s popularity among marketers because it was fun, interactive, informative, and because it was a really easy way to bring thousands of people to a website. Once people seemed to “figure out” that anybody and everybody can be a “marketing expert”, Twitter was the low hanging fruit. Twitter would become the place where anybody could be a success by pushing out advertisements, or so they hoped.

How extreme was the lure of Twitter? Back in early 2009, when I would send a Twitter update I could watch anywhere from 500-2,000 visits to my blog from a single “tweet”. Less than 300 unique visitors attributable to a given tweet meant that Twitter was down.

It was apparent that anything worth a tweet was going to be quite visible. Twitter was really useful for bringing attention to websites, thus it became highly abused. It can still be useful for sharing information, but nothing like early 2009. It was really very astonishing.

I had a lot of fun with Twitter back then. Here is a video I produced reflecting the fun I had: Twitter Kids

Is Twitter Really Damaged, or is it Just Me?

It was easy for me, at first, to question whether I had just become less useful or interesting. I ruled this out, because all of my other networks and my blog were still doing fine. Perhaps I have become less interactive with Twitter, but that was actually more of a reaction than the cause. I slowed my use of Twitter as a conversation and networking tool when it started looking more like just another link sharing network.

I questioned whether it was just me who noticed a lot less interaction on Twitter, but I can definitively answer that this was not the case. There was a collective damage by many users, and there was actually a defining moment when Twitter started going down hill for me, and for a lot of others. Ironically, it was right about the time I launched the book “Twitter for Business: Twitter for Friends” which so many of my Twitter friends urged me to write.

I still find usefulness to Twitter for it’s search functions and for communicating with a few friends. I like Twitter, I really do, but where I have noted troubles with Twitter is in the number of people who took their follower count too seriously and it became a shouting contest where millions of people tried to get their 15 minutes of fame or to sell their goods and services. It started to look like a huge business opportunity to millions of people.

Collective Benefit of Reviving Twitter

The question of whether Twitter is worth “reviving” is a matter that is up to each of us to answer. We each use Twitter in our own ways, and we each see different results. A revival of Twitter is something that we each do on an individual basis, and it largely affects only our own experience with the service.

At the same time, I still hold some belief that if enough people took the initiative, there would also be a collective benefit. It took a collective effort to cause the damage and subsequent loss of interest in many people. Similarly, doesn’t it seem possible that there could be a collective repair and restoration of people’s interest if we reversed some of the damage?

I think there can still be a lot of great conversations and relationships built, but it will take effort. It will likely require close attention to follower/following connections, and making lists to manage all the information.

The days of massive website traffic and huge allure to inexperienced and shotgun-blast marketers has dwindled. The allure to spammers is still there, but it seems less pervasive because they realized it is no longer the goldmine they hoped for. The useless garbage is easier than ever to filter out if you make the effort.

Perhaps now if people will concern themselves less with unrealistic popularity and inflated numbers, and more with purposeful popularity within a core group of interesting people, Twitter can still be a great networking tool. That is, if we can bring back some of the interest of those great people who just became bored, irritated, and deaf from the static.

Well, what are your thoughts? Don’t be shy!

P.S.

I hand-picked a small group of articles I have written about Twitter over time. I hope you will enjoy these:

How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful (humor)
Did Twitter Go Deaf With Broadcast Static? (I saw this a long time ago)
Twitter is Useful but Blogging is Better (interesting statistics)
Twitter: The Tweet About Retweet (the old days of Twitter)
Follow, Unfollow, Re-Follow … What?! (sensible thoughts on follower numbers)
Twitter Like The Twitterati … But Get Me a Bucket! (humorous yet tragic)
Dear Tweeps: I love you so much … (humor)

Photo credit to SlapAyoda via Flickr

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How SEO and Social Media Are Like Sex Drugs and Nigerian Scams

Achieve Stronger More Enjoyable Campaigns

The majority of the world’s population do not need sex drugs. Likewise, the majority of the world’s population do not need SEO and social media marketing. If you try to convince a spammer of this, their ears turn off. They just don’t get it, because they know that one in “X” squillion people who receive their message will respond.

It is easy to compare the propagation of false and misleading information about SEO and social media marketing to the false and misleading spam of sex drugs and Nigerian banking scams. It is also easy to compare the changes of social media’s growing spam to the way email turned spammy. A huge problem I see is that social media propagates the spam of social media. When SEO and social media is flooded with deception, it devalues the industry and creates much skepticism of these useful services.

I suppose I should define what it is that I am comparing to sexual aids and Nigerian bank scams. In case you have not seen the same kind of spam I see every day, I will just give you a quick note on each of these “sex drugs” and “Nigerian scams” of modern day.

SEO is search engine optimization, and it deals with creating higher ranking in search engine results, increasing website conversion, data analysis, and much more. Most of the world’s educated population do not have any idea what SEO means, or what it involves. This fact opens the floodgates for abuse and fraud by “SEO experts” who will stop at nothing to get your money and provide disastrous results in return. There are a lot of crooks out there actively selling SEO with a pitch consisting largely of “You need meta tags on your website to improve your listings in search engines.” Of course, that is a lie, and I can prove it, but I guess lies are easier than the truth for some people.

Social Media Marketing means marketing. Most of us realize that Twitter is not just for spouting off about what you had for lunch, and that Facebook is not just for talking about your kids, your spouse, or how drunk that dude got at the party last night. They are also not just for making more “friends” to pitch your goods to. Against popular adoption of the term, social media marketing does not mean spewing your latest specials and acting like a used car dealer. It means respectful, targeted, creative marketing and other customer communications that can withstand the scrutiny of others and provide sustainable value to a brand.

SEO and Social Media Are Like Futuristic Sex Drugs

The sex drug market took off like a rocket and ridiculous numbers of (low-life, sleazy, bottom-feeding, law-breaking, unethical) people wanted a piece of that market. It was presented as a fast way to get rich, and for a relatively tiny few, it came true. People like sex, and they like money, so this seemed like a perfect plan to get rich. You have probably been a victim of this dreadful pandemic.

If nobody has ever hit you up with their sex drug specials, you are an exception, and I will kiss your ring and address you as my Supreme Leader!

Perhaps the biggest craze to ever hit the Internet is the lure of easy money, and there are squillions of people who will insist that easy money is out there for the taking if you just sign up for their “plan” and give them a credit card number. Many will even tell you that they can make anybody rich with little effort and in just a few hours per day. SEO and social media are the obvious vehicles of choice for carrying out these get rich quick plans, and so they have become extremely popular. The glimmer of hope to have more tomorrow than they have today is just enough to create a spark in people that sets off an explosion.

I have to question the course of seo and social media marketing over time. Of course, it is my job, so it matters to me. It should really matter to a lot of the “innocent” people out there, too. I realize that most people have not been around the Internet or as utterly consumed by it for as long as I have, so the question may seem a bit innocuous to some. A lot of things seem pretty harmless until they get as annoying as a swarm of mosquitoes or actually reach out and cause you direct harm.

I have a lot of questions about the direction of this Internet space we all love. A concern that regularly comes to mind is how it seems that social media is moving the way of email. I remember when email was simple, and required relatively minor adjustments for email spam. Of course, that did not last long. As the use of email spread wide and fast, a lot of sleazy people found ways to make it far less productive, and eventually very costly to consumers. Once the sex drugs reached the market, email hit a really rough spot that it has still never been able to fully overcome. Now it is estimated that over 97 percent of email is spam. The overall percentage of unwanted business social media communication is likely even higher, as the world has been introduced to the “everybody is a marketer” craze and more people are dying to get their hands on all of that easy money available on the Internet.

The truth sucks for a lot of people, but I like to share it anyway. There are millions of people trying to market millions of products, while only a small percentile will take the care to be successful at it, or develop the required marketing talent. There is often no way to prove this to somebody other than to just give them time and watch them give up and fail. Tragically, this demographic are often lured back in when along comes another “plan”, another great “deal” that will make them successful … but this time it is different, and it is a “sure bet”.

I certainly love to dream big, and I never want to squash anybody’s dream. Instead, I just wish for them to have more dedication and better planning for their dreams than to assume it is as simple as what many people will claim.

The allure of easy money is strong, and because of this, it is easy to prey on people’s emotions by offering them an easier solution. That strong demand for a perfect answer to making more money has driven the need for SEO and social media marketing. In reality, SEO and social media are useful marketing tools, but unfortunately the candy brought in a lot of cockroaches.

The majority of the unwanted and spammy social media communication that I witness are attempts to either sell SEO and social media marketing services, or to recruit others to do the same spammy things with an expectation of earning a profit. With an eye on the future, does this really seem like a good plan for success? Sure, we can say that it will die out as more people figure out that it is largely fraudulent, but then, I seem to still find a lot of sex drug offerings in my email every day (thousands per day).

Is Social Media Going The Way of Email?

Social media has revealed and honed some brilliant creative marketers, and the gap between good and mediocre is constantly widening. Pareto’s principle of 80/20 will always apply to marketing, just as it does in any industry. The tragedy is that there is a constant spread of misinformation that SEO and social media marketing creates easy profit and that anybody can do it just as well as the next. I believe that as long as there are still people falling prey to these lies, the integrity of the industry will largely be shrouded in mystery and doubt.

What are your thoughts? Are you fooled by the “easy money” hype of today’s social media?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download