March 19, 2024

Does integrity make you a social media loser?

In three plus years of tweeting, I’ve picked up what I perceive to be the general etiquette for engaging on Twitter. I’ve also done research asking B2B marketers how they engage and how they educate their employees and SMEs to engage. I’ve rolled all that up into an approach that I doubt constantly.

I don’t seem to be alone. Lots of people seem to be having Twitter identity crises these days. Social media a-lister Chris Brogan, who had a policy of following back everyone who followed him, deleted everybody before finally settling on a few hundred people to follow and shifting his attention to the new social network on the block, G+. Another popular blogger, Mitch Joel, worries that he sucks at Twitter because he doesn’t follow everyone back.

Meanwhile, we have opportunist sites like Triberr that let you “grow your reach” by automatically tweeting things that people in your “tribes” write about, as explained (exposed really), by Neicole Crepeau in this excellent post. What a ridiculous notion, that someone’s content is worth tweeting every time. I don’t know anyone whose content I would recommend to my followers every time (and I have 135 feeds I follow in Google reader). Do you?

It’s always been clear that the people who invented Twitter don’t really know what to do with it, but up to now, it seemed like the users did. Now I wonder. I’ve invested hundreds, maybe thousands of hours into Twitter and I’m starting to feel like a loser. Integrity is one of my few talents and I’m afraid it’s wasted on Twitter.

Here’s my list of what seem like the right things to do on Twitter so that I feel like I’m being a good member of the B2B marketing guild—i.e., helping my followers learn and discover new people who have smart things to say about marketing. Can you add your recommendations to this list or tell me why I’m wrong? If you feel strongly about this, maybe we can turn it into a Twitter pledge and share it.

  • I read everything I link to in my tweets and everything I re-tweet
  • I don’t tweet my blog posts multiple times unless there have been comments that I want to alert people to
  • I do automatically schedule tweets but I don’t auto-tweet stuff I haven’t read
  • I tweet links to content, not quotes from famous people
  • Follower counts don’t enter into my decision whether to follow someone
  • I tweet at least 5:1 ratio of other people’s content to my own
  • I tweet thank yous to people who mention me in their tweets

That’s my list. What’s yours?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Post to Twitter

Social media’s Hallmark Moment: the Twitter Auto DM

I take a perverse pleasure in reading my Twitter DMs, 99% of which are of the automated variety, looking for the heartfelt sentiment that goes out to me and thousands of other close personal friends every day from people I’ve started following.

I try to imagine the impulses that motivate the writers behind these parsimonious hanging chads of fake individualized attention. Technology is wonderful isn’t it? It allows us to divide the equivalent of a single “Have a nice day” into thousands of infinitesimally smaller investments of effort and goodwill. Automated DMs are like giving a new acquaintance a sliced off sliver of a single piece of mini-Chiclets gum and saying, “There you go. I hope you enjoy that.”

Since I think that automated DMs are about as useful as egg on sand, I like to parse them into snarky categories (these are all actual auto DMs I’ve received). See if you agree with mine. Perhaps you can add some yourself. (No doubt I’ll have fewer readers after this post—“Gosh, what’s his problem?! I’m just trying to spread a little good cheer!”—so I can use all the help I can get.)

The “You’re lucky to know me” category:

  • “@ me to follow you if I haven’t already.” Yes, I’ll look into that right away.
  • “What do you do?” Okay, so you want to automate the fact that you can’t be bothered learning anything about the people who follow you?
  • “If you miss my tweets, you can catch a summary in my monthly newsletter here.” So good you need to send them twice. Thanks.
  • “[            ] uses TrueTwit validation service. To validate click here:” Will I need two forms of ID for that?

The “I’m genuinely interested in knowing you more—no really I am” category:

  • “Let me know if I can help you in any way.” This is what salespeople say to me at stores. Except I’m usually standing amid consumer electronics or racks of clothing when they say it, so it makes sense. But now I’m on Twitter and I’ve just met you, so what kind of help are we talking about here? Oops, I’ve just invested more attention than he did writing the auto DM. I feel so used.
  • “Look forward to learning about your interests.” And yours, and yours, and yours…

The “I’m totally desperate to get some freakin’ cash out of you or anybody else—can you help with that?” category:

  • “I’m using this to make money on Twitter, I hope you find it useful.” Thanks a bunch. If I wanted fake Viagra pills I would have stuck to email.
  • Looking forward to chatting. Download a free value calculator.” Wow, king of the transition sentence, aren’t we?
  • “Here are links to my book, my blog, my company.” Gives new meaning to the phrase “cut to the chase.”

The “I just wanted to let you know that I’m trying to game my follower count” category:

  • “Plz help spread the word about me! I wana rise to the top!” Yes, spamming is such a competitive field these days.

The “I’m going to redundantly echo the empty sentiment of the act of sending Auto DMs by repeating that empty sentiment in my message to you” category:

  • “Have an awesome day!” But what about tomorrow, and the day after that? I feel so lost.

The “I’m trying to sound humble” category:

  • “I clearly see I’m going to learn a great deal from YOU!” Not if you’re auto DMing me.
  • “We will do our very best to keep you informed and entertained.” Why do I think this person has won an “excellent attendance” award in the past?
  • “Will try to keep it interesting.” Will try? Way to lower those expectations. What about doing your very best—every day! Hey, that’d make a catchy auto DM, don’t you think?

The “I often creep people out” category:

  • “I got my eye on you. Thanks for the follow!! If your on Facebook too hit me up!” Cause hitting peeple up on Facebook is what me like to do.
  • “Smile, you only have one today!” Cringing, not smiling. And what, I’m only allowed one smile today? I guess when you’re auto DMing smiles you have to ration them carefully.
  • “Glad to have you in my Twitstream.” I suddenly get this feeling that I should be ahead of a Twitstream rather than following one.
Enhanced by Zemanta

Post to Twitter

How Facebook’s privacy disasters will change B2B marketing

Have you ever noticed that your Facebook profile page looks like one of those horrible qualification forms that we make our customers fill out? If you go to Facebook and look at your profile, your immediate reaction is going to be that it’s asking for too much information.

Social media is beginning to teach us that long qual forms are going the way of the dodo. I’m still looking to pin down incontrovertible evidence of this, but anecdotally I hear from people that when they get rid of qual forms for their content the amount of engagement increases exponentially. The question that we’re asking Facebook is the question that we should be asking ourselves in our marketing: Do we really need all this information?

Facebook has built its business model around gathering as much personal information about us as possible. And just as our traditional thinking about qual forms is failing, so will Facebook’s personal-information-as-currency model. Both Facebook and we have traditionally believed that the content services that we provide—in our case studies, white papers, webinars, etc.—come at a price. It costs us money to produce this stuff, and therefore our consumers must pay a price. That price is personal information, company information, and buying intent. For Facebook, it’s personal information that advertisers can use to target us.

Customers are less willing to give up information
Especially as social media takes off, we’re finding that prospects and customers have less and less patience for giving us that information. The expectation on Twitter is that 99.9% of the time any link that you put in a tweet is going to lead to accessible content. Twitter etiquette, at least as I observe it, is that if the information that you’re linking to is gated, you take up some of that precious 140-character real estate to inform people of that fact.

It seems that Facebook has staked its future not on the interactions that occur between people on its network but on the idea that the value is in the personal information of its participants. This is a disaster if you ask me.

Now let’s compare your profile page on Facebook with your profile page on Twitter. It’s like the difference between someone asking for your e-mail in exchange for a white paper versus them asking for your salutation, your company size, when you are going to buy, your mother’s maiden name and on and on ad nausea.

The key is the interaction—not the information
See, what I think Twitter understands that Facebook and LinkedIn and all of the other permission-based networks don’t is that the key is in the interaction, not in the information.

I admit it; I’m a Twitter bigot. I find much more value in Twitter than in any of the other social media networks. So take my comments with a grain of salt. But I will tell you that this week I attended an excellent event run by Silver pop called the B2B marketing University in Boston. Because of my Twitter interactions with people in the B2B realm, I had all the information I needed to be able to approach four people I recognized at the event (if you’re reading this, you know who you are!) and engage them in real substantive discussions—even though we had never met.

I don’t know what schools they went to, or where they worked before their current jobs, but I know what they think about B2B marketing and I have re-tweeted their stuff and I know they’re smart. Those interactions on Twitter opened up a possibility of a relationship much more easily than being able to read their profile pages on LinkedIn or Facebook. I learn about them and who they are based on my interactions with them and in sharing content that is of interest to all of us.

Viral vs. permission-based
It’s this viral relationship model of Twitter that wins in every privacy showdown between Facebook and its users. There is a cottage industry developing out there for people who want to protect you from Facebook. Reclaimprivacy.org is a small browser based program that practices a kind of benevolent vigilantism and helps you change your vulnerable privacy settings. It’s a great service, but it only reinforces the perception of Facebook as Big Brother. The privacy issues for Facebook are going to be on the cover of Time magazine next week. There’s would be joy in Twitterville this week if it didn’t seem that the founders of Twitter have none of the ego and contempt for competitors that most businesses seem to have. (Of course, it may be a little bit easier to be this way when your own business model remains rather ill defined.)

I don’t know about you, but I’m always annoyed by people whose first question is what I do or what school I went to. But that is how we’re introduced to each other on Facebook and LinkedIn. I’d rather get to know you based on knowing that I have a shared interest with you. Frankly, I can’t imagine why 300 people would read my blog every week if that weren’t the basis of our relationship.

Ask for a relationship, not information
I think that as social media becomes more integrated into our lives and our jobs were going to see that just as with our content we are going to have to get to know one another through our interactions. We need to ask people for a relationship rather than asking them for their information. What if, next time you offer a white paper or video to prospects, instead of demanding their contact information, you invite them to join your community on LinkedIn, or sign up for an event, or follow you on Twitter? This would be the basis of a much more substantive encounter—and potential relationship—just as I had with my Tweeps this week in Boston.

We should all take a lesson from Facebook and understand that getting information from people is not a zero-sum game. It’s a gradual process—the currency of which is trust and exchange of value.

What do you think?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Post to Twitter

Get Adobe Flash player