Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Nobodies are the new Somebodies: Guy Kawasaki on how to use Twitter

Guy’s post on how he uses Twitter is priceless: a brief but complete manual on using the service as a promotion tool.

Here’s my favorite part:

“Forget the “influentials.” You must buy into the theory that products and services reach critical mass because mere mortals spread the word for you. This defies the common wisdom that a handful of “influentials” shape what the rest of us try and what we adopt. In the online world, these influentials include Mike “I can go a week without Twitter” Arrington, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, and to some extent me.

Reliance on influentials is flawed because the Internet has flattened and democratized information. Influentials don’t have as much special access, special knowledge, and distribution as you might think because of the growth of websites, blogs, and, of course, Twitter.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about influentials—if nothing else they can help you get to what some consider “nobodies.” But mark my words: (a) Nobodies are the new somebodies, and (b) it’s better to have army of committed nobodies and than a few drive-by somebodies. The most somebodies can usually do for you is a one day bump in traffic.

One more point: if enough nobodies like what you do, the somebodies will have no choice but to write about you. In this way, the buzz of nobodies begets the attention of somebodies and not vice versa.”

Take that Scoble.

O’Reilly on Twitter (he really, really likes it and so do I)

Like Tim O’Reilly I was an early joiner on Twitter who initially found it useless but now find it indispensable. He pretty much covers the territory in this post.

I’d add that Twitter may become the primary B-B marketing platform in social media. As he notes, its simplicity actually makes it more powerful that feature-laden sources like LinkedIn (which I also use more and more frequently as my social network of choice).

You can follow me on Twitter @martinedic

And connect on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/martinedic

Bob Pearson, VP of Conversations and Communities at DELL

If you had any doubt about the mainstream value of social media you should watch this…

From Jeremiah Owyang:

Are Comments the Next Social Layer?

The nature of commenting in social media is itself changing the way our conversations are interconnected. This change came about as comment aggregation services made it possible to build a reputation via commenting on a wide variety of blogs. First there were the plug-in aggregators like Disqus and IntenseDebate. These systems require the blog owner to add them to their platform and the commenter to register with the aggregator. Once registered any comments made on blogs using these systems would be aggregated on the source site. You can see other comments by a person you find interesting, regardless of whether you’d ever been to the actual blog post they reference.

The next iteration is BackType which does not require the blog owner to participate via a plugin. Their unique and IMHO, brilliant approach, is to track the URL that the commenter uses as an identifier when they post a comment. Commenters need to register at BackType but once registered virtually all of their comments are captured on the Backtype site. Participants offer a Profile and can be followed a la Twitter.

The reason this interests me is that it creates an entire new social layer that connects heretofore unconnected social sources. The commenters themselves become something you follow across a variety of places. What I’ve found interesting is how this builds personal reputation and has for me at least, somewhat replaced blogging as a way of expressing my opinion. Unlike Twitter, commenting has a threaded context (the post that started the conversation) and no limits on length. It includes the discourse elements of Twitter but goes further.

As an example, when forums were the primary conversations on the early web, certain participants became notorious on the forums where they were useful, disruptive and/or annoying presences. The commenting systems take this model and move it out of a narrow forum and into the entire social media eco-system.

Kawasaki on Building a Following on Twitter

Twitter is becoming one of the most useful marketing and networking tools available. Everyday I find myself doing more connecting there with people I know and those I’ve recently met. In many cases it replaces IMing and email for quick responses. Guy Kawasaki has a great post today on building a following on Twitter. While I don’t agree with everything he says (I do not automatically follow everyone who follows me- I look at the quality of their conversations before deciding to fill my page with low quality chatter), however the post is really a great round-up of how to optimize your Twitter experience.

You can follow me @martinedic

The fluid nature of Social Media

Alisa has an insightful post on how conversations in social media are streams rather than locations. This ilustrates a fundemental reason why a monitoring service like SM2 is very different from an indexing service like Google. In essence we are collecting all the information that people are assembling into streams and enabling users to follow streams as they develop- streams that include their brands and reputations. Ordinarily you could only follow a few select users or groups because of time and resource constraints. With SM2 you have a tool that helps track all the streams and analyzes their content, sources and impact in real time.

We also hold our collection effectively forever (that’s the plan) in its original instance. If you Tweet then delete that Tweet, we still have it and if you reference a keyword that one of our users is seeking we will serve up that piece of conversational history along with any available public meta-data you’ve volunteered, any associated data connected with your Tweet by others and we offer up a results page that tells our user quite a bit about you.

Social media is fluid, however SM2 is effectively taking constant snapshots of that flow and and making it possible to return to any given moment.

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The essential introduction to why Twitter matters and how to dive in

Shel Israel has the best description of why Twitter is important and how to use it. Twitter is gaining credibility as a communication tool now that it is finally moving beyond the ‘my favorite doughnuts are fried cakes’ model.

For example Alisamleo at Socialized has been attending a Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose and Twittering about their overwhelming misunderstandings regarding social media.