Bad things happen. Every industry attracts bad players.
It’s sad, but I have to believe that there’s still more good than bad out there.
“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
- Tyler Durden
Happy Birthday, Twitter. 7 years old today. You have changed the world.
I’ve been on Twitter since almost the beginning. I can honestly say that Twitter has changed my life. I would not be where I am today professionally, nor would I have the friends I have today if it wasn’t for Twitter.
New research suggests human memory prefers spontaneous writing favored by users communicating online to grammatically polished text found in edited material. This the gist of the findings presented in a paper called Major Memory for Microblogs, which details the results of a research comparing memory retention of Facebook updates to book excerpts and faces.
One of the tests involved 32 people and assessed participants’ memory for Facebook posts in relation to their memory for sentences from books. The Facebook updates were stripped of images and removed from their original context. The result: participants remembered them one and a half times better than the edited sentences taken from books.
“These kinds of gaps in performance are on a scale similar to the differences between amnesiacs and people with healthy memory,” said Dr. Laura Mickes of the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick (U.K.).
Our memory prefers spontaneous, gossipy, or, as some may say, trivial, bits of information.
It all goes back to how we evolved. “We learn about rewards and threats from others,” she says.” So it makes sense that our minds would be tuned to be particularly attentive to the activities and thoughts of people and to remember the information conveyed by them.”
Blogging Without Analytics
I used to be a pretty ambitious blogger. I wrote 500+ posts every day at least once a day. I measured everything. I measured site traffic, comments, replies on Twitter and the blogs Facebook page. I measured where my traffic came from and what topics did the best. I wanted to grow my blog as big as I could. And it worked (kind of). I grew my blog to a respectable size and even had a handful of friends who contributed on a semi-regular basis. It was fun but it was a lot of work. And at some point it started being more work than fun.
You see the problem is, that you can never grow your blog big enough. You always want it to be bigger (okay, maybe not *you* but I sure did).
So when I moved everything over here I purposefully did not set up Google Analytics or Feedburner for my RSS feed. I don’t care how big this blog gets (at least I keep telling myself that in hopes it will be more true than not).
I don’t want to get caught up in the analytics. I want to write and share the stuff I like and those who want to join along are invited to.
I’ll be honest. I still glance at the available analytics. I still notice when I get comments and how many reblogs and likes I get. I can’t help it. But I try really hard not to pay too much attention to it and just focus on having some fun.
I once wrote, years and years ago, that I’d still blog even if no one was reading it because I get so much personal satisfaction from the act of writing. And starting all over here kind of feels like that. I know some people are following along but I have no idea how many and that’s kind of nice for a change.
Some Advice for my Social Media Friends
Get out of “social media.” That’s my tl;dr version.
Earlier this week I announced my new job change. Actually not just a job change, but a career change. I’ve had a few people ask me (mostly people who don’t know me very well) after investing so much time in social media, why I would get out.
I believe that in another 3-4 years there will be very few jobs left for “social media” people and most of those will be community managers. Even the community manager role will only exist at companies who put most of their marketing efforts behind social media, or big companies with enough need for a dedicated team. But with very few exceptions, there won’t be many senior level jobs as community managers. Community managers will report up into marketing or PR.
For the next 3-4 years all of the social media strategists will continue to evolve into social business strategists, which is their way of moving up the ladder. This is the right move to make but as more strategists do this, there will be more fighting for the limited social business work. In 5-7 years, social media and even social business, strategists will be all but extinct. What will be left is just business/marketing strategists. If you can’t talk credibly - with the experience to back it up - about complete business strategy, then the best you can hope for is implementation. Implementation will done by a variety of agencies who have strong digital capabilities, not “social media” only agences.
I’m not saying social media will go away, I’m saying social media will just cease to be a thing because it will be part of everything. Social media will disappear like the Celts, not because they were killed off, but because they assimilated themselves into every other European group of people. They’ll take over from the inside.
This is good if, like me, your job has been to integrate social media into the rest of the business. But my advice is to move so you’re working from the other side. Stop integrating social media and take a role where you can use social media (and every other tool that makes sense) to drive your business forward.
Don’t believe me? That’s fine. You still have a good 3-5 years ahead of you, depending on how good you are. But when it’s over, if the only thing you have in your resume is “social media” experience, potential clients or employers will look at you and say, “yeah and what else you got?” Because everyone else will do social media AND other stuff.
Advertising Execs Make Twice As Much As Social Media Execs
I don’t think this will last very long. I think digital and social rates will increase some mostly because there aren’t that many senior level social people with the same kind of experience the ad guys have. But I bet creative shops will have to start dropping their price.
A senior digital executive at a New York-based shop bills clients an average of around $350 an hour. Senior creatives on the traditional side of Madison Avenue can bill nearly twice as much.
In other words, for all the fretting over a digital talent gap in adland, many digital and social-media positions, mobile developers or technologists earn far less than their old-school counterparts.
The Convergence of Paid Owned and Earned Media is the Key to Unlocking the Influencer-Advocates
I believe the reason we haven’t been able to effectively identify and engage with these bottom up influencers/advocates is because of the silos that exist inside companies. The answer lies in converging Paid, Owned and Earned media and collapsing the barriers between PR, Adverting, Marketing and Social.
“There hasn’t been a scalable way to capture and use information about the ‘fans’ you’re engaging with on Facebook, Twitter and other social channels,” Wildfire co-founder Victoria Ransom wrote in a recent AdAge guest post “The End of the Facebook ‘Fan’ As We Know It.” “This will require new technologies that enable marketers to develop rich data profiles of the consumers they’re interacting with on social networks.”
Wildfire’s new study doesn’t tell brands how to find superfans, but it makes a compelling case for their impact. Based on 10,000 Facebook campaigns that ran over the past nine months, Wildfire determined the most active campaigns were driven by what it calls an advocate. An advocate is a user whose online sharing of content results in someone new engaging with a campaign. It’s the new “engagement” that’s worth a lot, and Wildfire claims for every 10 advocates who share, 13 entirely new people will interact with the brand by clicking a link, entering a contest, etc.
Why is there no real competitor to Google Reader
Seriously, Google Reader is so much better than anything on the market it’s rediculous. I think competition is a really good thing but no one seems to be stepping up to challenge Google here.
From Louis Gray:
My Top Ten Favorite Google Products
“Though it may sound crazy, I believe the quality lead Google Reader has over its competition exceeds even that of Google Search’s quality lead over its relative competition. I would rather have Reader and be forced to use Yahoo!/Bing than use Google Search and use some other RSS reader.”
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LouisgraycomLive/~3/4cOyYFR5KYc/my-top-ten-favorite-google-products.html
The New Math is Twitter
An interesting press release http://smub.it/dyga
ST. LOUIS, Sept. 18 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The following comments were delivered today by Dr. Benjamin Ola. Akande, dean of Webster University’s School of Business & Technology, to introduce Twitter creator, co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey as the University’s “Success to Significance 2009 Person of the Year.” The event was presented by Webster’s School of Communications and School of Business & Technology.
My favorite equation in mathematics is the original equation, one from which all other equations evolve. In my opinion, it is the holy grail of mathematics. The irrefutable law of mathematics. It is the convention in conventional wisdom. 1+1 equals 2. May I dare suggest to you that this universal truth may become something of our recent past? The reason: Twitter.
Twitter has successfully created a new equation which states that, 1+1 equals countless possibilities.
1+1 is equal to 3, to 300, 3 million. It is equal to the power of the written word — 140 characters, succinct, precise and concise. Twitter is equal to the possibility to make a difference, to be a contributor to society for the greater good of mankind. Twitter is becoming the definitive equation of our time not just for its simplicity but also for its exponential potential of increase.
One of the ways in which we verify the overwhelming impact of a product and an idea is when it becomes a verb, a part of our lexicon.
Much like Google, Twitter has become a universal descriptor for sharing ideas in a concise format that speaks to universality, democracy, immediacy and transparency.
Twittering is a conversation between two people yet the definition of two is singular, infinite and boundless. Twittering has become a language unto itself. Words and symbols strung together in a deliberate order to create spontaneous, and sustained, bursts of ideas.
Twitter has in effect dismantled the constraints and boundaries of time and space between us. It is an enabler of ideas that has empowered the young and the young at heart to share and stay connected.
Twitter has fundamentally transformed the way we talk and listen to one another; the manner in which we inform each other and has extended and strengthened the power of the written word.
If I were to state the impact on society in 140 characters or less, I’d tweet “Twitter is to our generation what Guttenberg’s printing press and Bell’s telephone was to theirs.”
In just three short years, Twitter’s 40 million users have made it a public forum for the discussion of politics, business, culture, news, celebrity, gossip and idle chatter.
People are tweeting to raise money, to recruit talent, to make government more responsible, to find and distribute news, to discover knowledge, to build personal or business networks, or to just kill a little time with friends and family.
In the new book by Shel Israel, entitled Twitterville, the author makes a convincing case that Twitter’s worth is not only the ability to broadcast short messages, but also the ongoing and transformative conversation that these tweets can ignite.
You know, every generation produces individuals who come along and make life better for those around them. They are notable individuals who rise from small and big places. They come from humble beginnings, unrecognizable even while in our midst. They are innovators, doers, ordinary people who enable others to achieve what has never been done before. The new math is Twitter.
This is your life
Is it weird to quote yourself? I don’t know but I keep thinking about this last part of a post I wrote.
To paraphrase Tyler Durden:
You are not the contents of your Twitter stream.
You are not your blog post.
Nothing is static. Everything is evolving.
I say never let me be an A Lister.
I say may I never be Social Media Famous.
I say evolve and let the tweets fall where they may.
This is your life and it’s ending one status update at a time.
Fight Club is my all time favorite book. Lord of the fliesis a close number 2 (sense a theme?) The Dust Brothers did an amazing song for the moving using many of these quotes in their song. It’s my theme song. I listen to it at work. A lot.