图灵beta计划：Twitter Power样章

FOREWORD

Every day 60 million e-mails are sent out around the world. My-
Space alone has over 186 million users! Technology has given us
so many ways of communicating, but are we truly connecting or
just corresponding? Are we adding people into our lives who share
our values or merely collecting a list of profiles? Are we deepening
relationships or just maintaining them?

As much as we want to nurture every relationship, advances
in technology have given us access to more relationships and less
time to deepen them. And yet what most of us know, and what I
have discovered working with more than 3.5 million people from
over 80 countries, is that the quality of our lives is the quality of our
relationships. And since life is relationships, relationships follow
the rules of life—they either grow or die. Your relationships are as
strong or deep as you choose to make them. If you spend quality
time in your intimate relationships, if you connectwith your families
and your friends, those relationships will flourish. If you nurture
your relationships with your clients and really meet their needs at a
higher level, you build long-lasting connections. Conversely, if you
don’t grow your customers, you go out of business. If you don’t
reach your family or friends, those relationships get stripped of the
substance and texture they deserve.

Ken Blanchard once described life as a game of Monopoly—no
matter how many properties we buy or how many houses we build,
at the end of the game “it all goes back in the box.” All we have
ultimately are the relationships that we nurtured, the lives that we
impacted, and the ones that have touched us. All we have are the
experiences that we have shared. When two people meet, a third
world is created. And with today’s technology, that world can grow
exponentially.

Technology such as Twitter has the potential to give us more
than just an opportunity to tell others what happened in our day. If
we understand and appreciate what Twitter is capable of, we can
use it to instantly share our lives with others, and we can use it to
reach more people in a meaningful way. Imagine if you could share
the magic moments in the days of your kids or family that otherwise
you would have missed. Imagine if you had cost-efficient and fast
marketing tools that met existing customers where they are and
that also helped you acquire new customers. Imagine if you had
the power to build a network of like-minded peers, a community of
shared ideas and creativity.

In Twitter Power , Joel Comm provides us with the tools, tech-
niques, and benefits for growing our network of resources to create
even more fulfilling connections. He shows us the powerful uses of
Twitter for brand expansion, building a community that ultimately
enriches us personally and professionally and allows us to grow and
contribute beyond ourselves.

Joel explains the effortless ways we can make a contribution
by being a mentor as well as sharing in the interests and passions
of others. In Twitter Power, Joel teaches us how we can use
technology not just to correspond, but also to connect. He shows
us how the Internet can give us the freedom to experience the
depth of relationships, and how it can help us achieve and sustain
an extraordinary quality of life—a life of meaning.

With deep respect,
Anthony Robbins
Peak performance coach
Chairman, Robbins Research International, Inc.
Author of Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within

PREFACE

The Power of Twitter

November 26, 2008—Mumbai Rocked by Shootings
The first news headlines and photos of the devastating terror
attack in India shocked the world as more than 300 people lost
their lives and countless more were injured.

Once again, we banded together as civilized people and poured
out our compassion and aid for those affected by this senseless
tragedy.

But what was equally amazing was the medium in which those
first headlines and photos were delivered.

It wasn’t CNN.
It wasn’t National Public Radio.
And it wasn’t The New York Times.

No, the first accounts of what was taking place in Mumbai, and
the headline stated above,werewritten by regular peoplewhowere
on the scene. Theywisely used aWeb site called Twitter to broadcast
breaking news.

Justminutes after the initial attack, the followingmessages were
broadcast on Twitter’s site:
Urvaksh: “mumbai is in chaos. 18 dead, 40 held hostage
at Oberoi, a five star hotel, firing going on at a JW Marriott.”
11:33 AM Nov 26, from the Web
Fossiloflife: “gun battles happening at two strategic points of
south Mumbai” 10:34 AM Nov 26, from the Web
It was hours later before the first reports of the terror attack
appeared on broadcast news.
CNN eventually ran a story titled, “Tweeting the Terror: How
Social Media Responded to Mumbai.”

While I gave careful, thoughtful consideration to beginning a
business book using this terrible tragedy as an example, nothing
better demonstrates how technology has changed the way we com-
municate and interact.

We now live in a time where ordinary citizens are empowered
to be conduits of information to the masses like never before. The
major media outlets can not report as quickly or accurately as those
who are actually on the scene.

And whether we are talking about breaking news or opportu-
nities to harness this same technology to grow your business, it’s
clear that the future belongs to those who embrace social media as
regular part of their lives.

Just as breaking news is now more breaking than ever, busi-
nesses can harness the immediacy of Twitter to innovate and build
relationships like never before.

That’s powerful.
It’s Twitter Power.

INTRODUCTION

What Can Twitter Do for You?

Online marketing is a fantastic way to build a business. You can do
it from your own home, at your own pace, according to your own
schedule and sometimes even without startup costs.

Providing advice and promoting products across the Web has
helped me to build a successful seven-figure company. It started in
my bedroom and has since taken me on speaking tours across the
country and around the world.

But creating an Internet business—even a small one—does
require work, and part of that work involves staying up to date
with the newest tools and the latest online innovations.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. Not every “next big thing” turns
out be a giant. The Web is littered with links leading to services
that promised a great deal, delivered little, and faded away. Part of
building a successful online business means knowing which tools
are likely to be useful revenue-generators and which are going to be
major time-wasters.

Sometimes, that’s obvious. It was pretty clear when Facebook
and MySpace came along that they were going to be both power-
ful and useful. The ability to renew old friendships and maintain
current ones with very little effort—and for no cost—was always
going to attract large numbers of people. And the ease with which
entrepreneurs could use those sites to build networks and keep
their market interested and engaged meant that an understanding
of social media has become hugely important for online marketers.
The value of Twitter was far less obvious.

The system really couldn’t be any simpler. It lets anyone send a
message no longer than 140 characters that answers the question
“What are you doing now?”

You can send that message at any time, from your computer or
from your mobile phone, and it can be seen by anyone who has
chosen to follow those messages.

That’s really all there is to it.

I told you it was simple.

It doesn’t sound like much, and for Internet entrepreneurs used
to writing 300- to 500-word blog posts several times a week, it also
sounds painfully restrictive.

What on Earth can you put in 140 characters that could possibly
be worth reading?

Surely you can‘t promote products, build a brand, generate inter-
est in your company, and keep people reading with such small
amounts of content?

The answers, it turns out, are “a lot” and “yes, you really can!”
Twitter has proven itself to be incredibly addictive and, for busi-
ness owners, very valuable too.

Ever since I stumbled onto Twitter, I’ve spent many hours
thumb-typing messages. I do it frequently and I love it. It’s fantastic
fun, like writing a personal blog but without the effort.

The pleasure alone would be enough reason for me to recom-
mend Twitter, but Twitter isn’t just good fun. It’s also proven to be
a very important and easy way of finding new users and customers,
a powerful networking tool, and an excellent way of picking up
useful information.

It’s helped me to build deeper relationships with my partners,
my clients, and other entrepreneurs.

It’s extended the reach ofmy brand,making the name ofmy busi-
ness known to people who might never otherwise have heard of it.
It’s brought me advice and suggestions from experts I couldn’t
have reached any other way.

It brings me a steady stream of additional Web site users and
provides a channel for me to alert people who have visited my sites
when I’ve uploaded new content.

And it’s brought me some fascinating reading and a bunch of
wonderful new friends, too.

In this book, I’m going to explain what you can do to get the
most out of Twitter and make microblogging—the sending of tiny
messages—work for your business.

I’ll start with a quick introduction to social media. Twitter grew
out of the online networking craze that had given sites like MySpace
and Facebook such giant valuations. Although Twitter can work
wonders when used alone, it’s at its most powerful when combined
with other social media tools. This book will focus on Twitter, but
I’ll begin with an overview of social media sites so that you’ll find
it easy to connect your microblogging with other forms of online
networking.

I’ll then describe Twitter. I’ll explain how it works, what the
service can do, and exactly why it’s so powerful. The site might
look small, but it packs a surprising punch. I’ll explain the reason
behind Twitter’s super powers.

Then I’ll start to get practical. I’ll talk you through signing up to
Twitter and selecting a username. Both of those are fairly straight-
forward (even if it is easy to make expensive mistakes), but Twitter
also lets its members create profiles to introduce themselves to
other users. The profiles are pretty basic. You won’t find any of
the fancy bells and whistles that you can expect to see on other
social networking sites. But that doesn’t mean you should stick to
the fundamentals.

Your profile is an importantmarketing page.With a little thought
and just a touch of creativity, it can function as a useful entry point
to your commercial site and help raise the profile of your business.
I’ll discuss what to include, how to design it, and how to make the
page pay.

I’ll then talk about themost important thing you’ll need to know
on Twitter: how to build a following.

That’s vital. Although every message—or “tweet,” as they’re
called on Twitter—is public, if no one knows you’re there, no one
will know to read them.

There’s a huge list of different strategies that Twitterers are
using to build up followers, make new contacts, and keep in touch.
Some of them are very simple. Others are a little more complex
and require a bit of thought—and sometimes even a little expense,
too.

I’ll talk you through some of the most effective ways that I’ve
discovered to build up followers.

Finding followers isn’t difficult. Much harder is keeping them.

That’s only going to happen if you create the sort of content that
people actually want to read.

There’s nothing new about that. Anyone who has ever tried to
generate revenue with aWeb site knows that content is king.When
you can write articles and posts of any length you want, upload
videos, and show off your images, there are plenty of options and
lots of flexibility. When you‘re restricted to a message of no more
than 140 characters, though, creating interesting content sounds
much more challenging.

It is more challenging, but it’s also a lot more fun. You can
do it quickly, without making great demands on your audience
and—once you get used to it—without a great deal of thought.

I’ll explain what makes good Twitter content and talk you
through some of the sorts of messages that successful Twitterers
are sending.

Tweets, though, are just a means to an end. The goal of using
Twitter is to build relationships—especially relationships that can
benefit your company. In the following two chapters, I look at how
connecting with two different types of followers can bring those
benefits.

I discuss connecting with customers on Twitter by problem-
solving, winning referrals, and supplying support; and I talk about
using Twitter to communicatewith teammembers, especiallywhen
they’re scattered in different places.

Once you’ve built up your following and are enjoying using Twit-
ter, you can start to make all that effort pay off. There are a number
of ways to do that, and I’ll talk about them in detail as well.

The first is brand extension. Twitter can be a very effective
branding tool for any business, and it’s been used by some of the
world’s largest companies to drum up publicity for their products.
I’ll discuss ways you can use your tweets and your followers to
extend the power of your company’s name, as well as the rules for
effective brand-building with Twitter.

Blog posts can also be promoted using Twitter—an impor-
tant way to turn your followers not just into visitors but also into
cash—and so can stores and other retail outlets. Although Twitter
is not strictly a commercial area, with carefully written content, it is
possible to directly increase your conversions and make extra sales.

And like Facebook, Twitter has also created a network of add-ons
and applications that help its users get evenmore out of the service.
I’ll introduce you to some of the most useful and, in Chapter 11,
explain how to add powerful solutions to the Twitter platform.
Finally, I’ll provide a 30-day step-by-step plan for dominating
Twitter that will take you from a Twitter Johnny-No-Friends to a
powerful social networking force in just one month.

Twitter is very restrictive. It doesn’t allow users to make videos,
upload rich media content, or do any of the fancy things you might
have become accustomed to on other sites.

Nor is it a sales arena. Although businesses are using Twitter to
increase their revenues and make money, thinking of the site as a
low-cost—even free—way to advertise is not going to bring results.
In fact, that’s just going to cost you time you could have spent
doing something far more rewarding.

At its most basic, Twitter is a communication tool. It’s a channel
that lets you speak to lots of people and enlighten them about your
life and your work.

You can think of it as a giant virtual water cooler. It’s a place
where people come to get to know each other, to make friends, to
network, and, most importantly, to converse.

It’s not a place where people come to sell—and pushing sales
hard on Twitter just isn’t going to work.

On the other hand, if you do manage to build up friends on
Twitter, you should find that those friends see you as the first stop
for the products or services they need.

People always prefer to do businesswith people they know, and
they get to know them by talking to them and swapping ideas with
them.

On the Internet, people are doing that on Twitter.

While I will provide you with various examples, I will use my
own experiences with Twitter as an ongoing case study throughout
this book. After all, Twitter is about relationships. It only makes
sense to provide you with an up-close look at how I have used the
site to build relationships and grow my business.

 

 

Chapter 1

An Introduction to the Social Media Landscape

Once upon a time, anyone could be a media publisher. All you
needed was several million dollars, a team of editors and writers, a
printing press capable of shooting out a dozen copies a second, and
a distribution network that would put your publication in stores
across the country.

Unless, of course, you wanted to go into radio or television. In
that case, things were just a little harder.

The result was that information came down. We didn’t talk
among ourselves; we were talked to by writers, editors, and pro-
ducers, who chose the subjects and told us what they thought. If
we liked what we were reading, we kept tuning in and the company
made money. If we didn’t like it, we stopped buying the maga-
zine or we switched channels. When that happened, advertisers
turned away, and all of the millions of dollars required to create the
publication disappeared.

Today, it’s all so very different. It can cost literally nothing to cre-
ate content andmake it available for other people to enjoy. That low
cost means that it doesn’t matter if it’s not read by millions. You can
focus on a small market—even one interested in stamp collecting
in Mozambique—and still find enough people to form a community
andmaybe evenmake a profit through advertising and product sales.
It’s called the “long tail,” and the Internet has made fantastic use
of it.

But the low cost of publishing online has had another effect:
We aren’t being talked to by professional writers and publishers
any more; we’re talking to each other.

Average folk like you and me—the kind of people who didn’t
study journalism at university, who never spent years as a cub
reporter covering local court cases, and who were never even very
good at Scrabble, let alone putting together articles—are writing
about the topics they love and sharing their views.

And they’re hearing back too. The conversation is following in
both directions.

Anyone nowcan launch aWeb site,write articles, or even create
videos and put themlive. And anyone can comment on that content,
affecting both its nature and the direction of the publication.
That’s social media, and it’s a publishing revolution.

So What Exactly Is Social Media?

Social media can be all sorts of different things, and it can be pro-
duced in all sorts of different ways. Perhaps the best definition
of social media, though, is content that has been created by its
audience.

Facebook, for example, is not a publishing company. It doesn’t
create any of its own content. It doesn’t write articles or posts, and
it doesn’t upload films or images for people to view and enjoy.
It allows its users to do all of that on its behalf.

It’s as though Fox were to fire all its actors, producers, news
anchors, and scriptwriters, throw open its doors, and tell the world
that anyone is welcome to come in and shoot their own programs.
And then let them broadcast those programs on its networks for
nothing too.

Of course, if that were to happen, you’d still have to tell people
what channel you were on and when they could see your pro-
gram. You’d still have to produce content that other people might
actually enjoy. And inevitably, the people who took the most pro-
fessional approach, put time and effort into what they were doing,
and connected with their audiences would be the most successful.
But even thatwouldn’t allowviewers to take part in the program,
something which forms an important part of social media.

Create a group on a site like Facebook and you won’t be
expected to supply all of the text and all of the images. You’ll
be expecting other group members to add their stories and
photographs too.

Even bloggers, when they write a post, expect their readers to
join the discussion by leaving comments at the bottom of the post
that take the argument in new directions and add new information.
This is the “social” part of social media, and it means that pub-
lishing is now about participation.

Someone who uses social media successfully doesn’t just create
content; he or she creates conversations.

And those conversations create communities.

That’s the real beauty of social media, and while it may or
may not be the goal—depending on the site—the result of social
media can always be firm connections between the people who
participate.

When those connections are formed around businesses, the
results can be the sort of brand loyalty and commitment that sales
professionals have been dreaming about since the first days of direct
marketing.

The definition of social media then is a vague thing. At its broad-
est, it describes a form of publishing in which stories are swapped
rather than published and the exchange of content happens within
a community, rather like a chat in a restaurant.

At its narrowest, it describes one way in which publishers and
marketers can put their messages in front of thousands of people
and encourage them to build strong connections and firm loyalty.
However it’s defined though, socialmedia has proved incredibly
popular.

Facebook claims to have over 60million activemembers—that’s
active members, not just people who created a profile and never
used it. It’s averaged 250,000 new registrations every day since the
beginning of 2007, doubling the number of active users every six
months. More than half of those users return every day and together
they generate more than 65 billion pages views each month.

According to their own statistics, MySpace, which went live
shortly before Facebook, is even more popular, with more than 110
million people using the site at least once a month. One in four
Americans is said to be on MySpace, and in the United Kingdom, as
many people own a MySpace account as own a dog.

The site has generated around 14 billion user comments and
10 billion friend relationships and sees more than 8 million images
uploaded each day.

Twitter, which was launched more than two years after
MySpace—a lifetime in Internet terms—isn’t quite in the same
numeric league, but it’s growth has still been phenomenal. As a com-
pany that currently relies on venture capital, it can be pretty cagy
about its membership figures, but in March 2008, it was believed to
be sendingmore than 3millionmessages a day betweenmore than a
million users, of whom 200,000 were active on a daily basis. Those
users have created more than 4 million connections. By October
2008, TwitDir (www.twitdir.com), a directory of Twitter users, was
reporting that it knew of 3,262,795 Twitterers.

There is another fact about Twitter that’s particularly interesting,
though . . .

It’s massively underused.

According to the site’s own blog, around half of all Twitterers
follow and are followed by just 10 people. The top 10 percent of
Twitterers have more than 80 followers and follow more than 70
people.

To join the top 10 percent of Twitter users, then, you just need
to attract 80 followers!

To put that into perspective, as of this writing I have almost
5,000 followers and follow around 1,700 people! (I get about 25
new followers each day.) It’s not difficult to do, and when you know
how, it shouldn’t take you much time at all.

All of these figures just scratch the surface of the popularity of
social media. YouTube attracts more than 60 million unique visitors
each month. They tune into the 10 hours of video footage uploaded
to the site every minute.

Throw in the countless numbers of blogs (Technorati tracks
more than 100million English language blogs alone), and it becomes
pretty clear that socialmedia is amassive phenomenon that’s chang-
ing the way all of us create and use content—and the way that
businesses use that content and their distribution channels, too.

Social Media, So What?

Why Social Media Really Is a Big Deal

Sowe can see that socialmedia sites can be big. Really, really big. But
so what? There are lots of people in the telephone book, and that’s
very big too. It doesn’t make it a particularly useful marketing tool.
Social media sites don’t just list people, though, and they don’t
just list any old people.

Each site lists a very special group of people.

At first glance, that might seem a little strange. Whether you’re
browsing through Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, or Twitter, you’re
going to see small pictures of people, small messages to and from
people, and profiles in which those people say certain things about
themselves, such aswhere theywork,where they’re from, andwhat
they do in their spare time.

Look a little closer, though, and you’ll start to notice a few dif-
ferences. Although the sites may seem very similar, in fact, each site
has its own unique feel and its own unique demographic.

Because Facebook started at Harvard, for example (it had signed
up half the undergraduate population within a month of going live),
and because initially it was restricted to university students, it has
a high percentage of well-educated members. The site boasts that
it has an 85 percent market share of four-year universities and that
“more than half of Facebook users are outside of college.”
Clearly, that suggests many of Facebook’s users are still in
college—a fantastic market for companies hoping to pick up cus-
tomers, start those customers in the habit of buying from them, and
stay with them as their income rises.

Facebook isn’t unique in having highly educatedmembers. Twit-
ter’smembershipmight currently be smaller than that ofmany other
social media sites, but it appears to be very selective—even if it is
self-selective.

Tracking Twitter’s demographics isn’t easy. Although some peo-
ple have had fun following the frequencywithwhich certainwealth-
related terms (such as well-to-do neighborhoods) turn up (they
found themselves following lots of local lawyers as a result), there’s
no way to easily conduct a demographic survey of the site’s users.
However, Hitwise, an Internet monitoring service, did manage to
produce some very interesting and some very impressive results.

Writing in Time magazine in August 2008, Bill Tancer, Hitwise’s
general manager of research and author of Click: What Millions
Do Online and Why It Matters, noted that he had discovered that
Twitter is 63 percent male and, at that time, 57 percent of its U.S.
visitors (although not necessarily its members) were Californian—a
statistic that likely reflects the site’s large attraction to high-tech
workers. Twitter itself points out that 60 percent of its Web traffic
comes from outside the United States, though—in particular, Japan,
Spain, and the United Kingdom. It also notes that had it looked
at other ways of accessing the site, such as SMS, the international
breakdown would have been very different.

More interestingly, according to Bill Tancer, Twitter’s largest age
demographic is now 35- to 44-year-olds. They make up just over
a quarter of its users, a shift from its starting point among 18- to
24-year-olds.

Most fascinating of all, though, Tancer also says that just over
14 percent of Twitter’s visitors are what he calls “Stable Career”
types—a “collection of young and ethnically diverse singles liv-
ing in big-city metros like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Miami.”
Another 12 percent are “Young Cosmopolitans”—40-somethings
with household incomes of over $250,000 per year.

That means that Twitter isn’t just used by young people as an
alternative to SMS. The site has a large following among older, pro-
fessional audiences, too, and a full quarter of Twitter’s users are
high-earners, a valuable piece of information that makes the site a
must-use for any serious marketer.

So we can see that social media sites aren’t just attracting kids
looking for places to chat with their friends and find free music
downloads. They’re also attracting smart, educated people with
money to burn.

And they’re attracting experts, too.

You can see this most clearly on specialist sites like Flickr, a
photo-sharing service. Although Flickr, too, isn’t very forthcoming
about its demographic details, spend any time at all on the site and
you can’t help but notice the number of professional photographers
who use it.

Figure 1.1 Know what these StumbleUpon users are talking about? Me neither . . .

Part of the site’s appeal isn’t just the pictures; it’s the advice
enthusiasts can pick up from experts working in their field and
ready to share the benefits of their experience.

Even a social bookmarking site like StumbleUpon can generate
some very expert comments in the reviews of the sites submitted
by users.

So we can see that social media sites attract absolutely huge
numbers of people. We can see, too, that many of those people are
highly educated, are paid well, and are experts in their fields.

You should be able to see very clearly then that social media
offers a gigantic opportunity for any business owner to promote his
or her products to exactly the sort ofmarket he or shewant to reach.

The Different Types of Social Media Sites—

Content to Suit Every Market

One of the reasons that social media has proved to be so popu-
lar is that it’s available in all sorts of different forms. While the
networking sites with their tens of millions of members might be
the most familiar, there are actually all sorts of different ways of
creating and sharing social media content:

BLOGS

Yes, blogs are a form of social media too. They’re written by peo-
ple on every topic you can imagine. And only a tiny fraction of
them are produced by professionals, even though all have the
potential to generate revenue. Even my mother has a blog that
she uses to describe her travel experiences. (You can see it at
TravelsWithSheila.com—tell her I said “hi.”)

What really makes blogging part of social media is that it can
cost nothing to use. Sure, if you want to have your own domain
name and place the blog on your own server, you might have to
pay a small fee—and when I say “small,” I mean less than $20 per
month. And there are strategies you can use to bring in readers that
will cost money too.

But you don’t actually need to do any of that.

Figure 1.2 My blog’s home page. I write it, you read it . . . and
comment on it.

To become a blogger, you don’t need to do any more than sign
up at Blogger.com or WordPress.com any of the other free blogging
services and start writing.

Withinminutes, you’ll be creating content and you’ll forma part
of the social media world.

However, blogs do take some effort. They have to be updated
regularly, andwhile you can put anything on a blog, fromshort posts
to feature-length videos if youwant, you’ll have towork to keep your
readers entertained, informed, and engaged. It’s fun stuff, and it can
be very profitable stuff too but it’s not a sweat-free business.

Most importantly, while you can accept guest posts and hire
writers, and although your comments will be a crucial element of
your site’s attraction, it will still be you guiding the content and
setting the subjects.

Blogs are a form of social media, but it’s a society with a clear
ruler.

MEMBERSHIP SITES

That top-down feel that can be present in some social media chan-
nels is also present inmembership sites. There are far fewer of these
on theWeb than there are blogs, but there’s still no shortage of them,
and like any social media site, they rely on the members to produce
the content that’s the site’s attraction.

My ownmembership site, for example, is TopOneNetwork.com.

With just under 1,000 members, it’s a long way behind Facebook,
but it’s not intended to be a site for the masses. It’s meant to be
selective and targeted only toward peoplewho are really determined
to succeed at online marketing.

I use the site for coaching and to share valuable marketing infor-
mation with other top marketers, but the heart of the site is the
activity that takes place between its members.

I might like to believe that it’s my advice and lessons that keep
everyone coming back, but a quick look at what people are dis-
cussing in the groups shows that there’s a lot more to it than that.
My members have been swapping fantastic ideas and creating the
sorts of connections that lead to valuable deals and joint ventures.

Figure 1.3 My membership site at TopOneNetwork.com functions
in much the same way as a social media site. Just check out the
number of friendships and comments my members generate.

That wouldn’t happen if the site was much more general. If
TopOneNetwork.com wasn’t carefully targeted, it would be too
difficult for marketers to find each other, network, and share the
information that keeps them on the site.

But that doesn’tmeanmembership sites can’t bemassive.Dating
sites like Match.com are a form of social media, too. The content
that people are paying to use consists of the profiles and pictures
that the site’s members have created and uploaded.

Match might have an online magazine, but no one is paying $25
every month to read the magazine. They’re paying that price month
after month to read the descriptions and look at the photos that
other people have posted, and to contact those people.

It’s not the site that’s the attraction of social media sites; it’s the
society.

SQUIDOO

Squidoo doesn’t look like a social media site. You don’t get to make
connections or build giant piles of friends in the same way that you
can on other social media sites. But what you can do is create your
own content and act as a hub through which people looking for the
information you’re supplying can pass.

Figure 1.4 My lens on Squidoo. All my own work.

 

The site is intended to be the first stop for anyone looking for
information on any topic. It’s a place where experts can provide
basic information and tell people where they need to go to learn
more.

I’ve been on Squidoo for some time now, and I’ve found it to
be a lot of fun and pretty rewarding, too. The site provides you
with a free Web page—it calls them “lenses”—which you can con-
struct using their modules, so it’s very easy to use. All you have
to do is place your own content in those modules. You even get a
share of the advertising revenue, depending on the popularity of
your lens.

And that’s where the social aspect comes in again. Yes, Squidoo
depends on its members to produce the content that users want,
but it also depends on the community to identify which lenses are
worth viewing. That makes networking vital.

While you can’t add someone as a contact on Squidoo, as you
promote your lens, you will inevitably end up making plenty of new
friends.

PHOTO SITES

Squidoo relies mostly on links as the most important form of con-
tent on its lenses. Lensmasters are intended to help users find
the knowledge they need somewhere else, rather than supply all
of that information themselves. Squidoo only provides one page,
after all.

But links certainly aren’t the only form of content that can be
shared or that require active networks to make sure that they’re
seen.

Ever since cameras went digital, there’s been a need for a low-
cost—or even free—way to share those images with anyone who
wants to see them online. Both Facebook and MySpace allow their
users to upload their images, but neither of them is a dedicated
photography site. Images are just one form of content that users are
free to share on those sites, togetherwith videos, personal histories,
group discussions, etc.

There are sites, however, that specialize in photography. They
depend entirely on the photos that users upload to bring in other
users.

Figure 1.5 Flickr is the big daddy of photo-sharing Web sites.

That broad-based content sourcing already makes sites like
Flickr—one of the most popular photo-sharing sites, and now
owned by Yahoo!—part of the socialmedia phenomenon, but Flickr
also has the networking power of those sites.

Like Facebook and MySpace, it’s possible to create long lists
of friends, and you can join groups where you can submit images,
enter competitions, and join discussions about the best way to light
a child’s portrait or which lens to use in which conditions.

Flickr also allows its members to mark images as favorites and
to place comments beneath them. Both of those activities can be
valuable ways of adding new friends. Pro members, who pay a sub-
scription fee of $24.95 per year, can even see stats that indicate
how many views, faves, and comments each image has produced,
and even where their visitors came from.

All of that networking is vital to success on the site, and
that success can have some spectacular results. In 2006, Rebekka
Gudsleifdottir, an Icelandic art student whose images and network-
ing had brought her a huge following on Flickr, was spotted by an
advertising executive on the site who hired her to shoot a series of
billboard ads for the Toyota Prius. Many of the images used in Win-
dows Vista, too, were bought from photographers commissioned
after they were discovered on the site.

Figure 1.6 Yes, I have a Flickr stream too. You can even see my
house on it.

Every day, images are licensed and prints are sold on Flickr, and
it’s all based on content created by the site’s users and promoted
through careful networking.

That’s classic social media.

MICROBLOGS

And finally, we come to microblogging. This is a whole new thing
in social media. In some ways, it’s the exact opposite of everything
we’ve seen so far.

Social media sites tend to want their members to contribute as
much content as possible. They may restrict that content to just
photographs (or, on Flickr, video now as well), or they may restrict
membership to a select few (in the case of my membership site, to
dedicated Internetmarketers; in the case of dating sites, to dedicated
singles), but on thewhole, theywant theirmembers to offer asmuch
content as possible.

Microblog sites place strict limits on the content that can be
uploaded . . . and they find that those limits encourage creativity.

A Closer Look at Microblogging

Just as there are many different kinds of social media sites, so there
aremany different ways tomicroblog. One of themost popular now
actually takes place within the larger, general social media sites.

When Facebook realized that many of its members loved the
idea of being able to update their contacts in real time, they added
their own microblogging system.

Facebook’s system only works within the site, though, so unlike
Twitter, which can broadcast your tweets to mobile telephones as
well, updates are only visible to friends who happen to be on the
site at the time.

Figure 1.7 Facebook catches up with microblogging.

For Facebook users, though, it’s still very powerful—and
Twitter users who want their updates to reach further can use
Facebook’s Twitter application. This lets them send tweets from
within Facebook itself. I use it and I think it’s great. You can find it at
www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2231777543, or by
searching the apps for Twitter.

Facebook isn’t the only social media site to try to add micro-
blogging to its list of features. LinkedIn, a social networking site
geared towards professional connections, has integrated a system
that lets people share information about what they’re working on.
Just as importantly, the site also lets its users track what peo-
ple are saying in those posts with a very neat application called
“Company Buzz.”

This is the first time that microblogging has been geared
specifically to a business audience, and it’s easy to understand the
value this could have for a firm that wants to understand what its
employees, customers, and suppliers are saying about it.

Figure 1.8 Microblogging the LinkedIn way.

Figure 1.9 Spoink is microblogging in rich media.

SPOINK
Pownce does what Twitter does and expands it by removing the
restrictions and increasing the type of content that can be sent.
Spoink (www.spoink.com) takes the trend even further, allowing its
users to do things as complicated as posting audio content through a
telephone. It also allows instantmessaging across a range of different
platforms, and e-mail too.

For a microblogging service, it’s complicated. That certainly
doesn’t mean it’s useless; it has a lot of different uses. But unless you
have a particular challenge you need to overcome in rich media, I
think it’s likely to be most effective as a communication tool to
join together different platforms than a main way of keeping lots of
people informed.

YAMMER
Microblog services thrive most when they ask users to answer
a simple question and allow anyone to see the answer. Yammer
(www.yammer.com) keeps to those microblogging roots, but
narrows the focus of the question—and the audience, too.

Figure 1.10 Yammer’s restrictions make Twitter look like a
free-for-all.

Instead of inviting people to share what they’re doing (and
receiving answers thatmight range fromsaving an oil-soaked bird to
eating an avocado sandwich), it asks users to explain what they’re
working on, like LinkedIn. But it only reveals those answers to
people on the network with the same corporate e-mail address.
Thatmakes it a useful tool for communicatingwithin a business,
but it’s not so handy for mass marketing.

PLURK
Plurk (www.plurk.com)might have a terrible name, but it does have
some excellent ideas. You can think of it as MySpace to Twitter’s
Facebook. Instead of presenting posts (which Plurk naturally calls
“plurks”) vertically, the site displays them horizontally so that they
appear as a timeline.

Figure 1.11 Plurk puts the blog back in microblogging.

In addition to seeing what people said, you get to see when they
said it, and in the process, pick up a feel for their day.
Plurks can also come with qualifiers—colored tags such as
<shares>, <asks>,or <says>—that mark out the nature of the
content, and while they are limited to 140 characters, plurks can
include images and videos. You can also restrict them to “cliques,”
small groups of friends with something in common, like a network.

Less useful is the “Karma” feature, which unlocks features as
users are more active on the site. Although it’s clearly intended to
encourage people to stay active, it can also be a source of frustration
for anyone who wants to get the most out of the site right away.

Plurk has only been around since May 2008, and it will be inter-
esting to see how it develops and how many users it picks up.

It’s likely that while Twitter will continue to attract well-to-do edu-
cated types who want to network professionally andmix with other
experts, Plurk could become a fun microblogging forum.

Introducing . . . Twitter!

And finally, we come to Twitter—the site that has really set the
standard in microblogging.

The service was founded by programmers Evan Williams,
Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone in July 2006. Williams was a serial
entrepreneur who had founded a company called Pyra Labs that
made project management software. A note-taking feature on that
software went on to become Blogger, the free blogging service later
bought by Google. According to one theory, it was Williams who
first used the term“blogger” to describe peoplewhowriteWeb logs.
In 2004,Williams left Google to formpodcasting companyOdeo
and, two years later, created Obvious with Biz Stone, a programmer
who had joined Blogger after its acquisition by the search engine
giant. The new company bought Odeo, which it later sold to a
company called Sonic Mountain. It now focuses on Twitter.

The original idea for Twitter came from Dorsey, an Odeo
employee. In an interview for ReadWriteTalk.com with Sean Ammi-
rati, VP of Business Development and Product Management at
mSpoke, Stone described the moment when they first discussed
the idea:

“A fewof uswere thinking aboutwhat are some interesting
ways that maybe we can merge SMS to the web,” he said.
“[Dorsey] had come upwith this ideawhere if you just look
at only the status field of an instant message application
like AIM, and you just look at that as a sort of really small
version of what people are already doing . . . and you just
make it super simple, ‘Here’s what I’mdoing.’ . . . [W]e kind
of went off in a corner and we worked for two weeks and
we created a prototype. We showed the rest of the team
and everyone just sort of giggled. They all kind of loved it.
It was really fun. We used it over the weekend. We found
it very compelling and we decided that we would keep
working on it.”

That was in March 2006; initially, Twitter was used by the com-
pany’s employees as a fun form of internal communication. (Tech
companies, it seems, might have lava lamps and space hoppers, but
they never seem to have water coolers!)

The service launched officially in October 2006, picked up a
South by Southwest Web (SXSW) Award in March 2007, and by
April was a separate entity headed by Dorsey.

Figure 1.12 Twitter’s iconic “fail whale.” Designed by Yiying Lu,
the beluga whale supported by twittering birds is now a brand in its
own right after its frequent appearance on an overstrained
Twitter site.

Helped by the publicity generated by the SXSW award, boosted
by references on Blogger (where the company had good connec-
tions, of course), and most importantly making itself attractive with
an open platform that let other developers extend the service, the
site started to take off.

That has led to some problems. In 2007, Twitter was reported
to have had just 98 percent uptime—a loss of three whole days
over the year—and tended to suffer particularly badly during
major tech conferences (which says something about many of its
users, too).

It has had some very impressive successes, though. Some of the
world’s leading personalities, corporations, and government bodies
are known to use the service, including BarackObama (twitter.com/
barackobama), Whole Foods Market (twitter.com/wholefoods) and
the British Parliament (twitter.com/UKParliament). The American
Red Cross (twitter.com/redcross), too, now uses Twitter as a fast
way to communicate information about local disasters.

There are two things that really distinguish Twitter, though.
The first is its simplicity. Although the service now has piles of
additional tools and add-onswhich extend its use, at its core, Twitter
remains nothing more than a way of describing what you’re doing
in no more than 140 characters.

That brevity and simplicity have always been key, and they’re
what brought Twitter its second characteristic: critical mass.
The hardest moment for any social Web service is at the begin-

ning. In this chapter, for example, we saw how Plurk offers some
promising, fun features, but people are going to be unwilling to join
in until they can see who else is there and in particular, whether
their friends are on the site.

It takes a special push to get a social media site snowballing to
a size big enough for everyone to feel comfortable about climbing
on board. For Facebook, that was its marketing at Harvard and from
there to other universities.

For Twitter, it was the boost it received with its SXSW Award,
which had everyone talking about the service as the next big thing.
As long it has that critical mass—and with more than three mil-
lion members it certainly has that—Twitter is always going to be
the microblogging service to beat. In the next chapter, I’ll explain
exactlywhy it’s likely to retain that position as the leadingmicroblog-
ging service.