If you haven’t yet understood why social media tools are transforming the way we do business, in the video above Steve Cunningham from Polar Unlimited reviews The New Community Rules book which talks about why you should care and how to start using social tools for your business.
Another related book summary you should watch is Trust Agents by popular blogger Chris Brogan which ties into the video above and it’s definitely worth the buy.
The Miami Herald reported on a new study about Twitter psychology:
"The communication and information professors, Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase, found that there tend to be two types of Twitter folks. The majority, or 80 percent, were what they called ‘meformers’ — Twitter users who sent out messages that revolved around themselves, updating others about their activities or sharing thoughts and feelings.
The other 20 percent are ‘informers’ — people who were actually sharing information. Not surprisingly, the informers tended to have larger social networks and be more interactive."
So which is better?
I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer here. Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are very much still in their infancy and as a brand or individual what it all comes down to is: are you’re someone people want to be friends with?
What you should really be focusing on is being a real friend. Conventional marketing wisdom will tell you to always be selling but in this day in age we have it so easy to make more personal connections with consumers that consumers themselves are ‘demanding’ more interaction from brands.
Whether you are and ‘informer’ or ‘meformer’ and consumers are looking to interact with you, ask yourself: what actions can I take to create lasting relationships with my followers?
A good friend is a mix of a useful ‘informer’ with a fun and relevant ‘meformer’.
What is this whole social media stuff everyone is talking about?
Popular marketing blogger John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing updated his popular Social Media for small businesses ebook to let you know just that.
You should download and read it because if you don’t quite get what this whole social media stuff is and don’t know where to start, John did a great job of putting all the basics together in a very useful and easy to understand way.
In this updated version he’s added new information about Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and also included some thoughts on managing the social media flow.
We highly recommend it and you should download the ebook.
A new tool released by Edelman called Tweet Level can tell you how popular you are on Twitter. What this tool does is it scans your tweets and measures your influence based on 3 key factors: popularity, engagement and trust.
It’s important to note that the number of followers you have is completely irrelevant, what really matters to you is your trust factor or more specifically how many times you are retweeted. Remember that on Twitter you are entering a vast network where there a lot of people broadcasting their stuff, building trust is THE most important thing you should be thinking about before you put your stuff out there. That’s why a good rule of thumb before entering Twitter is to start by listening to what people are saying and then slowly join in on the conversation and start making some friends.
Then if you post credible and interesting stuff for your fellow tweeps, they may ‘like’ it enough to retweet it.
As you can see from our analysis, we have a low trust factor. This might be because we’ve only been using our Twitter account for the past few months or because we might have to do a better job of engaging in conversation with our tweeps to build credibility and help our chances of being retweeted.
Either way we all start from zero and it’s important to understand that building a brand on Twitter takes time, you just don’t go and buy twitter followers.
Also don’t get discouraged when you see the top Twitter user list, most of these have built their brand way before Twitter was popular. For example accounts such as Mashable’s that has a low engagement score but still scores high on popularity, this is because their content is the most retweeted out there and the main way people engage with them is through their website.
We recommend you read Edelman’s tips on how to be more influential on Twitter.
Here is a 20 minute wide ranging discussion on all things social media with people such as Brian Solis, Laura Pexton, Caleb Zigas, Jeff Pester and Cheryl Contee. Some of the interesting topics that are touched on include looking beyond Twitter as the only relevant channel and some of the fallacies that surround social media such as the so called experts that promise things that are just illogical.
Video by PBS MediaShift.
