Who is in control of your brand?

I must preface this post with the fact that I love the concept of FriendFeed, bringing all my online world together, hence why I jumped on ages ago. Jimmy Wales also named me “more famous that scobleizer” a couple of months back thanks to a conversation I had with him on FriendFeed AND I do & will continue to use the service…

There has been SO MUCH NOISE about Facebook buying FriendFeed which makes FriendFeed seem like a fantastic service. However,  since I’ve been using it I’ve realised it’s fairly useless in a real & practical way; i.e. if I removed my account today, my life wouldn’t be any different.

So here are the three reasons why I think Friend Feed sucks:

• It’s cluttered
  The fact that everything is in one place makes it noisy, confusing and cluttered
• It’s soul-less
  There’s hardly any dialogue between users (or you can’t see it), which is WHY we use social media
• It doesn’t drive traffic
  Twitter drives 20-30% of traffic to my blog & in the last 30 days Friend Feed has delivered 1 visitor

If you do like FriendFeed, tell me why & how I can use it differently to realise it’s awesomeness.

If you haven’t tried it, maybe give it a go.

Here’s my profile http://friendfeed.com/simontsmall/

And here’s FriendFeed’s biggest advocate and international nerd superstar, Scobleizer, on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer. Clearly he’s doing something I’m not.

In a recent report prepared by Sysomos and it indicates that we’re beating massive countries like Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, France, Indian & South Africa in terms of new user sign ups on Twitter.

Full report here: http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/appendix

I visited a site where lots of people are able to contribute content about Twitter. I posted the content below on the 14th of April and to my surprise there haven’t been any since.

1. Twitter should be an extension of your social media communications plan, and a connector throughout the plan

2. Just because you’re followed by 45,052 people, it doesn’t they all want to buy your product

3. Aim to be followed by ONLY people who could buy or influence to buy your product/service

4. Twitter is becoming more populated, everyday there is more quality content for you to compete with

5. It won’t be the marketing magic you’ve been looking for, but it will extend your current activity

Twitter is certainly raising the profile of social media, although marketers/brands don’t know what it is, it does get them asking questions – which is a win for social media generally.

However, I and lots of other pessimists doubt Twitter’s phenomenal growth and how it’s changed the world. For me it’s profile is partly due to it’s value to the publishing community – basically it helps journalists find stories quick, which makes their lives easier, so they write about it lots.

However, a Hubspot report, which surveyed 4.5 million Twitter accounts gives us a good indication of the uptake of the new craze.

Some of the key stats from the study are:

• Currently 32.1M users, up from 1.6M 12 months ago
• The average user has tweeted 119.34 times in total
• The average user has a following-to-follower ratio of .7738
• 24.14% of users have a bio in their profile
• 31.32% of users have a location in their profile
• 20.21% of users have a homepage URL in their profile
• 45.12% of users have tweeted at least once
• 47.29% of users have at least one follower
• 44.50% of users are following at least one account
• You can read more here: http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/sotwitter09.pdf

On the surface there’s been a growth in user-base from 1.6M (12 mths ago) to 32.1M (now) – a 2000% increase in 12 months – not bad. But as we all know not all the users are active, so lets consider the inactive accounts – inactive account could be defined many ways, I’m using ‘have not followed anyone’ as a broad measure. Hubspot tells us that 55.5% of people aren’t following anyone, which brings the active user-base down to 14.2M.

Assuming all of the original 1.6M users were ‘active’ the growth year on year is 787%. Now which ever way you want to skin that, or define ‘inactive’ that’s still impressive growth. Maybe it’s not as big as Facebook or MySpace, but how often do MySpace & Facebook get press based on their ‘active users’?

I still believe that Twitter is an over-hyped application, however, it is changing the game – and making marketers & businesses sit up and atleast ask questions.

Other discussions on the report

• GigaOm: Ironic But True – Many on Twitter are Just Silent
• SFGafe: Most Twitter Users are less than Twitter-obsessed
• VentureBeat: Twitter Study Finds More Lurkers than Active Users
• Mashable: Are Twitter Users Inactive?

Moving away from the tech crowed, Twitter has become THE buzz word of marketing managers over the last two months – and I mean old skool marketers, who haven’t used any form of social media before…

One of many reasons why Twitter isn’t going to solve your marketing problems is that of the definition of followers… It might sound fantastic that I, some guy from Melbourne, have 920 followers and that I have the power to reach 920 people with any given tweet – right?

If it was an email database, which achieves 20-25% open rate, you’d expect to reach 230 people at most.

If you’re talking about a Facebook page you might get 1-2% interacting with your page after a message, so 10-20 people.

But with Twitter, due to its nature and the speed at which it moves, you’re only going to reach anyone who is on Twitter at the moment that you post the message, which could be from 0.1-0.2%. Which varies massively depending on the day of the week and time of the day. However, 920 followers might result in 5-10 people viewing your Tweet. (This all assumes you’re posting boring content, that those 5-10 people wont ReTweet on to their followers – which is the true power of spreading your message on Twitter)

Now if you’re not focusing on reaching lots of people, then good, great, you understand social media and the importance of building strong connections, however, if you’re looking to reach thousands of people, Twitter aint for you.

On top of that I would estimate that 20-30% of my and everyone’s followers are spammers, they’re people who follow anyone and everyone and don’t really care about you…

There are a few reasons why people might follow you on Twitter, TwiTip thinks there’s 6:

1. Because they’re a follow whore! Meaning they follow anybody in the hopes they will get a follow back.

2. You just might actually have something interesting to say…that’s a big might!

3. You either have Internet fame or you’re some form of celebrity outside of Twitter.com

4. You’re one of the people that Twitter automatically recommends an user adds when they first sign up for Twitter. Basically meaning your one of the “Toms” of Twitter.com

5. You were tagged in the #FollowFridays train. Which in this case you probably have internet fame and just joined Twitter.com or either have something VERY interesting to say or your friends were tired of you stealing all their followers and/or watch your follower count lingering below the double digit count

6. Because you used a Twitter spammer site like twitterfollower.com or the others. If you don’t understand that refer to “Real” reason number 1.

All this means, is that 10,000 people following you on Twitter isn’t the same as 10,000 people on your email database or Facebook group.

UPDATE (20/5)

Jack Dorsey comments on the difference between Facebook & Twitter users here, including this comment from O’Reily

The feature has skyrocketed the popularity of users who get that endorsement — netting an average of 53,000 new followers in an account’s first week since being featured, O’Reilly writes. But it’s not the ideal solution for the user retention problem, Dorsey said.

In this last 3 weeks I’ve given little love to my humble blog and it’s because I’ve been busy at a new exciting job. I’ve been working hard giving clients advice, reviewing campaigns, developing strategies and other work related things.

It’s no news to anyone that there is a difference between doing and talking, and a combination of the two is great. However, in the Australian social media arena talking out weighs the doing, see example #234 of 237 from yesterday.

Doing vs talking over time

Are you a blogger or a consultant, an entreprenuer or an academic? Or a combination of them all?

Social Media Marketing in Australia needs all of the above right now, but bring on some more doers. Being a blogger doesn’t make you a Social Media Marketer, using Social Media to spread a mesage for a brand makes you a Social Media Marketer – a doer.

Idea of graphing my thoughts inspired by Jye Smith.

UPDATE (13/04/09): This video is semi-relevant but moreso a nice example of doing, by Honda.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS8S_OJMzh0]

Leave comments here or on Twitter @simontsmall

This is a little follow up post to my predictions for social media in 2009.

People always ask the question “social media sounds good, but how do we measure it?” and there are two parts to monitoring.

1. Business outcomes

When doing social media activty its critical to measure it against ‘real world’ business outcomes like sales, perception, market research, whatever. Without that top level realisation of value, social media is near pointless for organisations.

2. Detailed analytics

Currently you can see how much traffic content generates and where it comes from, which is great, however, someone important might post about you and millions of people see it, that’d be great to know about. And when people Tweet on Twitter about your content, or update their facebook status, this is all indications of good content.

And this is where I’m getting a bit too excited, as some smart Canadians, have built a tool that does all that for you automatically and create a quality score.

They’re called PostRank, and more than anything else I love their approach/philosophy.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking. By collecting interaction metrics in these categories the overall engagement score is calculated and the PostRank value is determined.

Clicks are only one part of the rank, and they actually count clicks as the least valuable type of activity! NICE!

Activities like clicks and page views indicate lower engagement because they’re passive interactions. Clicking a link to read a blog post doesn’t require much work, and you’re not giving anything back except your reading time. It is an intentional act, however, and thus indicates a mild level of interest and engagement. Which may grow after the item is read.

So get over their, start ranking your content, see how it compares to others, and link that back to real business results. Lovely.

I’m just surprised, that these guys have been around since early 2007 and people are still asking about how we measure ‘social media’… Its here, its easy and its well awesome.