Developers have tried a variety of different methods to not only increase usage of their application but also to encourage other people to join. Facebook and others suggest friends, you can find who you went to school with, or search by emails. LinkedIn uses a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon approach to see who your friends’ friends are and Twitter uses the poison Kool-Aid approach by showing your cult followers. There’s a simple enough explanation as to why –ad revenues of course. But one can quickly see through this thin veil that it is. Now for most people social media isn’t really for making money. Instead it really is a way to stay in contact with friends or find friends you lost way back when. But for those of us trying to capitalize on the popularity of social media to increase traffic to our websites and blogs or just to increase our sphere of influence the number of followers or friends becomes important. Now don’t get me wrong, sheer numbers can be effective but probably not as effective as truly having a group of friends and acquaintances with whom you regularly engage in real conversation. But this is where so many get it wrong when it comes to social networking. They race to have the most friends and followers but quickly forget why these people were your friend to begin with. If you are not providing relevant information or at least something interesting to talk about then you are disengaging. You basically are weakening the structure of your SOI and you want a strong base not a weak one.
Look at two celebrity examples for a minute Ashton and Oprah. I could care less really about either of these people but there is a big difference in how they Twitter. Ashton really talks using Twitter. He talks about something relevant and it’s really him (or at least we think it’s him) talking. Oprah on the other hand just joined Twitter thanks to Ashton and she (or most likely her handlers) doesn’t get it. Look at this recent post over at Tech Crunch analyzing what Oprah has had to say since she joined Twitter. It’s not interesting. Its absolute junk. Sure she got a million people to follow her and probably got millions more to join Twitter but is she engaging her audience? Is she doing anything interesting? That’s a big fat no. If she actually joined in a conversation or even for a moment letpeople peek into her personal life she might be surprised at the number of followers who actually follow what she has to say!
This is all fine and dandy for celebrities but none of us are famous. We can’t have a one way conversation and make social networking work for us. It has to be a real conversation where we are talking to and engaging the people who follow us. If you dig through Facebook blindly each day trying to add hundreds of new people to be your friend they will never be your friend. They don’t even know you! They are just befriending you simply because it’s a mouse click. There is no energy expended. But you are wasting a lot of energy trying to make friends with people who could probably care less about you. Instead if you actually spent some time each day engaging in conversation you would be strengthening these relationships.
Still think it’s all about sheer numbers?
Ok enter from Twitter stage left Sockington the cat. Yes it’s a cat and it has more followers than any of us could imagine. It’s not a person. It’s probably not even a real cat and yet it has 500,000+ followers! Why? It just goes to show that following people on Twitter works exponentially. Once you break some imaginary barrier the numbers shoot through the roof. Now that’s great to have that many followers. I only have 60,000 people that even live in my city so that would be a big chunk of Wisconsin following me. But unless I could find some way of truly engaging all those people I might as well be a fake cat because it’s not going to get me more business and it’s not going to mean much other than maybe a story about me over at Tech Crunch.
If you can take anything away from the lesson of Sockington, Kutcher or Oprah it’s that of those 3 try to be like Ashton and at least provide something interesting to talk about. Don’t try to race to a million friends instead truly make some friends out there. You might find more meaning in one real friend versus a hundred so called friends.
As to why follower models don’t work? It’s simply plastic fantastic. (Fake)
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
If you own a website or are at least familiar with the battles than can ensue over domain names then you probably have heard the term squatting. It’s when someone takes a bunch of names and basically sits on them until someone else is forced to pay a pretty penny for the name. It used to be primarily around domain names. As they first hit the internet the more tech savvy or at least the ones who knew there was gold in them their names decided to buy them all up, especially names associated with products or brand names. Twitter being no different has started to see people coughing up to get particular names. Now there is even a place to trade or buy them.
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
Ok that’s enough Twitter for today. Anyways the service is seeing rapid growth as has been reported much about this past year and even more so with the recent celebrity endorsements from AK and O.
Here are some stories about what has been going on with all things Twitter.
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
I don’t own a Mac but I do try to let people know when cool stuff comes out or any other articles I come across that might be relevant, call me a nice guy if you will I don’t mind! J
So blah blah blah Twitter this Twitter that right? Well it is gaining traction and lots of people are using it so being a real estate agent who is also a Twit is important and finding the right tools is important as well. Tools and applications can make your Tweeting presence more powerful and make it easier for you to Twitter on the go or just make it quicker. We are all short on time so all of these things are important to us.
While probably everyone has heard of TweetDeck and if you have an Iphone you might have heard of Tweetie but now it’s available in a desktop client. Here is an article with more information.
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
But there is more to this story than a meaningless race because Twitter is seriously considering getting rid of the public display of followers. The basic argument for this is quality over quantity and who cares if celebrities can get a million followers. There is no way you can actually listen to the conversation of 1 million people tweeting and that’s where Twitter starts to lose focus. With lower quality and people racing to get more and more followers the whole thing becomes meaningless. Many months ago I wrote quite a few posts saying how I really don’t care about getting more followers. I guess its fun to get the numbers up and I admit I played the game here and there to get more people to follow but what does it really mean? More numbers certainly adds leverage to getting even more numbers but for my business it doesn’t really add anything to the bottom line. People ask all the time what’s the big deal about Twitter and that’s a good question. If it’s merely to collect sheep and you aren’t being paid to be a shepherd then there is no point.
But for the heck of it I tried to be the millionth person to follow him. I managed to see number 999,997 and that’s when I pressed the follow button. I also had a Firefox window open and pressed it there too. There was a huge glitch at the time and the profile kept going down. When it came back up the number was 1,000,060 or so. I then looked and realized it had not counted my follow. So instead of being entered in the contest it was as if I had not pressed the button. But what really sucks was that on my screen it showed a successful follow. I actually had a very good chance of winning. I know I pressed it and was within 5 spots of it up or down. But because of the overload on the server who knows what the real numbers were and obviously it could not handle the traffic. But I figured if I had won it was my 15 seconds of fame or however that goes and without being famous you probably are not going to get any sort of cult following on Twitter.
I was happy to hit 100 last night and yet only about 3 people following me are actually from my city. I guess for an actual sphere of influence in relation to real estate I should stick to Facebook but for tech writing I get a lot of people looking at what I do. I do enjoy working on tech related issues and whether I ever get paid to do that remains to be seen.
For now I think Twitter has a serious dilemma, either make the network higher quality and risk lower membership (after all they are seeing huge numbers because of the hype) or just keep it the same and Twitter for the masses remains much of a one sided relationship where you follow whoever but they might not care to hear what you have to say.
Maybe the news that Oprah is endorsing Twitter will bring it even more mainstream. Well of course that’s what will happen. A huge wave of her fans will now want easy SMS phones and Tweeting will become synonymous with her book club and O magazine.
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
There has been a lot of news today about the virus that was being sent around Twitter. I guess news spreads as quick as viruses on a social network. According to Tech Crunch Twitter has fixed the issue. I saw another post on Slashdot that linked to this story which says the owner of Stalk Daily created the virus out of boredom. Apparently his defense for doing this was that his site is a great site so what does it matter if he forces people to go there against their wills. I normally suggest joining as many social networks as you can but I would think security would be an obvious issue as anyone who thinks so little of security probably would have no qualms about getting paid for the email or password list for their website. In fact I would highly advise against giving this guy any more business or even associating with his network.
Tech Crunch says the owner of the site had nothing to do with the incident and I am not sure at this point who is to blame but I do find it odd that the worm sends people to a specific place and that site claims it has nothing to do with it.
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
Biz Stone the Co-Founder of Twitter appeared on the Colbert Report last night. I didn’t get a chance to see it but I see that Tech Crunch covered the story. I have included the clip that was from the show as well as when the Daily Show recently covered Twitter. No I am not copying it’s just that it’s the only 2 instances of Twitter really being mentioned on both shows. It looks to be a pretty good interview and it will be interesting to see what happens to Twitter in the future especially considering that Google might buy out Twitter or not.It is interesting that they would not take 1 Billion for the company especially when they already sold Blogger to Google and are already extremely wealthy. I guess it might be worth far more than that in the future.
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Buy or Sell, I’ll Treat You Well! (In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
Well the rumor mill has been flying in the past few months about someone buying out Twitter. For a while it was rumored that FaceBook was going to acquire the company but that seemed to not happen. The speculation there was that Twitter was saying it was worth so much more than it is. What is funny is that this same speculation was rumored about Google acquiring FaceBook, that is FaceBook was saying it was worth far more than what Google thought it was worth.
Well those rumors subsided and then in the past couple weeks it was rumored that Google is going to buy Twitter and this seems like it might really happen. I was just sort of messing around with the title. That song popped into my head and I figured what the heck. It’s probably not as bad as it seems and it could actually be a really good thing. For instance Google has an incredible ability to make sure that Twitter would stay online and they can obviously handle any amount of traffic. Reliability is important. Also some are hoping that the acquisition would be handled similarly to YouTube in that the name stays the same and basically everything stays but it just moves over to Google.
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Ok at first when I read this my first thought was wow are they crazy or what? Then when I figured out how it works I wasn’t quite so shocked. Apparently they are working on a way or are going to just integrate Twitter into OnStar so that you can Tweet while you drive. Sounds dangerous right? Well it actually works using a voice activation system so that it is entirely hands free. Still sounds a bit dangerous to me but much less so than Tweeting with your fingers. I would think it is distracting though but probably no more so than talking on the phone. But that is dangerous too. Hmm…
Anyways if you just have to Tweet this much then having this setup in your car might be the thing for you. I guess I never realized how much people are in love with Twitter. Apparently it’s so much that engineers are making it even easier for people to do it everywhere they go!
If you have something to say please leave a comment. If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
Twitter turned 3 years old the other day and for most people that number probably seems strange because for most people Twitter is rather new. I admit I didn’t know about Twitter 3 years ago but I guess I was into social networking when hotmail was new and am only getting back into it now because of necessity. Not to be anti-social but I really don’t like it for the most part. I do enjoy meeting new people from all over the country but being poked 12 times a day is rather tough to deal with when you work a lot.
So what else is new with Twitter?
Twitter is being taught in UK schools. Can you believe it? I can and I wish it were being taught in our country as well. Not just Twitter but more advanced computer knowledge such as web programming and design and things like that. Why? Because computers aren’t going away and a typing class just isn’t cutting it anymore. Typing is like breathing and Tweeting is like speaking. If you are human you have to learn this stuff, even if it’s just baby steps.
Twitter broke recently. You might not have noticed since apparently it happened at night. I must say for a service that sees exponential growth to only see it go down occasionally isn’t bad. Whoever is behind the scenes does a good job.
Twitter in the news! That is Twitter might start serving up local news. I think that’s a good idea. I can see it being popular and convenient.
Twitter in the news again! Ok this time it really was in the news. In fact it’s been all over the news. If you have been watching you might have noticed that quite a few news programs etc are starting to Tweet and gaining followers. I guess its going mainstream. What it is doing is driving incredible traffic to Twitter.
Twitter starts serving up ads. This was probably inevitable. No one is going to keep pumping money into this no matter how popular it is unless it can make some money.
Twitter serving text ads. This goes with the one above. I guess it’s just a different approach or a solution to the same problem.
Twitter is growing and growing on businesses. How much is a lot of traffic from Twitter worth to you? This is an interesting question but certainly a big reason why so many people are using Twitter and trying to get a massive cult following.
How much is Twitter worth to you for increased revenue? Well here we have an answer and apparently its $250,000! That number seems large but if you read the story you can see that it is quite lucrative to have a big following or at least some are willing to gamble that it will be in the future. 250,000 clams to be a suggested Tweeter to follow might seem hard to swallow but it’s true.
Twitter in the future? As this article points out what better way to find out what Twitter’s future plans are other than looking at who they are hiring! Ahh tricky!
I don’t know if that was a dozen but it was pretty close. I think I could have found a few dozen more. Those stories were just from this month!
If you have something to say please leave a comment.
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001today or send me an email.
