Source: Shutterstock I believe if Social Media warranted a mantra, it would look something like this, “Always pay it forward and never forget to pay it back…it’s how you got here and it defines where you’re going.” This is the credo I live by and something that has only been reinforced as part of my daily regiment, online and in the real world. Paying it forward and paying it back is the balladry of reciprocity, the undercurrent of social media…
Finding Influencers in Social Media
Source: Shutterstock Guest post by Dan Zarella, author of “The Social Media Marketing Book,” published by O’Reilly. When you’re trying to find targets for a social media marketing campaign, you should be looking for two types of people, influencers and audience. Your audience is the people you’re trying to sell to, this is a wide swath of potential users, clients or customers. They may or may not be heavily involved in social media and they may or may not have…
The Twitter Star: Nova or Supernova?
Source: Shutterstock Nova: a star showing a sudden large increase in brightness and then slowly returning to its original state Supernova: a star that suddenly increases greatly in brightness because of a catastrophic explosion that ejects most of its mass I recently wrote about reports on the documented decline of visitors to Twitter.com. A good friend encouraged me to take a deeper look at the reports as a way of discerning hype from reality and to also examine the potential…
The Social Media (R)evolution: Your Time is Now
Source: Shutterstock The Future of the Social Web is here today and we’re learning that engagement is not a matter of if or when, but to what extent, how and what value can we deliver and derive from it. The Social Web is much more than a window into information and interaction, it is a completely transformative medium that is changing how we forge relationships, interact with one another, and distribute and discover information. In many ways, the online social…
On Twitter, What Are You Doing Was Always The Wrong Question
What are you doing? Perhaps, Twitter asked the wrong question all along. In all honestly, who cares…it was really never about “what you were doing” that inspired your network to stay connected nor was it the siren for attracting new followers. We chose to follow you because you moved or encouraged us to do so – with every update. For many of the users on Twitter, the question that engendered a response and also also aroused a cultural movement was,…
On Twitter and Social Networks, Brands Benefit from Conversations
Source: Shutterstock A recent study revealed 20 percent of tweets published are actually invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers or directly by brand representatives. Now we learn that Twitter users are actively paying attention to brands on the popular information network. According to research conducted by Performics and ROI Research, about half of Twitter users who were introduced to a brand on Twitter were compelled to search for additional information. The companies studied the activity of 3,000…
The Golden Triangle
Source: Shutterstock Prior to keynoting the PACA conference in Miami, Maria Kessler, president of the PACA Association, asked me if I had read a recent post by Fred Wilson entitled “The Golden Triangle.” We were deep in conversation as I was seeking an alternate title for my next book that identifies the divide between brands, information, and consumers and how we can, as social architects and engineers, build the bridges between people, contextual relationships, and technology. While “The Golden Triangle”…
With Klout Comes Influence: How To Find Influencers on Twitter
This is the uncut version of my latest post on TechCrunch… Measuring individual influence in Social Media is as coveted as it is elusive. While many tools claim to calculate authority, it is the definition of influence that requires clarification in order to grasp the relevance and differences of existing tools and services. For the sake keeping this discussion on track, let’s define influence. According to Merriam-Webster, influence is having the power or capacity to cause an effect. San Francisco-based…
Twittfaced: Your Toolkit for Understanding and Maximizing Social Media
While the title invites a predicted round of wordplay, I will spare you the attempts at low hanging witticisms. During this past summer, I was in the throes of promoting my current book and writing my next title (which I won’t officially announce until January 2010.) As I was deep in the zero hour, I was approached by Clay Bridges Publishing to discuss my level of interest in writing the foreword for a new book on Social Media. Even though it…
Guess How Many Tweets Fly Across Twitter Each Day
Source 1 million, 5 million, 10 million…? If you guessed 10 million, you weren’t even half right. According to new data from Pingdom, Twitter users are averaging 27.3 million tweets per day with an annual run rate of 10 billion tweets. Just last month, Caroline McCarthy of CNET reported that the 5 billionth tweet posted. Pingdom’s report highlights the pattern of tweets, which appear to spike during waking hours in the U.S. However, it’s important to note here that Comscore…
