Archive for February, 2010

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Heart it Hate it

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Feb 2010

25

heart it hate itAs many of you know, I launched a website earlier this month, called heart it hate it. The idea behind the website is to take controversial topics like Google Buzz, Tiger Woods and Wal-Mart and to gain some user opinion and insight. So far, the results* have been quite interesting.

 

The vote percentages have been surprising to me. Companies that I thought would receive much more hate due to their perception as “evil conglomerates” like Starbuck’s and Wal-Mart are less hated than I would have guessed. Also, two of the most recent tech phenomenons come in the top 5 of most hated: The iPad (80% hate) and Google Buzz (75% hate).

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I hope you’ll take the time to check out heart it hate it and vote on some of the topics you feel strongly about. It takes less than 2 seconds to vote and less than a minute to comment. Maybe more if you’re reading the descriptions :). Feel free to use this post to comment on some of your thoughts on the features and choices I’ve made with heart it / hate it. I’d love to hear your input.

 

* As most of you are aware, I have a background is in research and consumer analytics, so let me offer a few disclaimers here: 1) We’re working with extremely small sample sizes at the moment. Eventually I’d love to put together more representative data sets, but that’s a matter of getting better exposure; 2) The purpose of the website was for entertainment, not statistical analysis. As such, my own biases (in the “heart/hate” descriptions sections) may influence votes, as well as the vote percentage being displayed on individual vote pages prior to voting (which will be changed in the future); and 3) we’re looking at a group of primarily tech-savvy early adopters and a high percentage of digital natives. Because of that, there is certainly some bias to be considered.

 

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Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

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Feb 2010

16

cheaters no one loves them Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

 

Taking advantage of Twitter is easy. Within a week, I could build a Twitter account with at least a couple thousand followers — possibly over 5,000. Within a month or two, that account could have 20,000+ followers. For free (or for relatively cheap). Without all that much effort. I’ve done this on a few accounts to test, and this blog’s Twitter account (not @jaremy) was initially created using one of these methods. I did it because I wanted to see how difficult it was, and how useful it was. Spoiler: it is neither difficult nor very useful.

 

Over the past year, I’ve had a number of people come up to me and ask me “how can I gain a ton of followers quickly?” and “how can I get my message out to people immediately?”, always looking for the quick route to success. My answer is always the same – build a core network, and gain trust, not followers. Unfortunately, people always want a shortcut. So here’s a quick list of why taking a Twitter shortcut by gaming the system is not only borderline unethical, but pointless and a waste of time.

What Gaming Twitter Means

When I say “gaming Twitter”, I mean adding massive amounts of followers by using automatic following tools and keyword targeting. I also mean gaming the Twitter lists function to get added on dozens (even hundreds) of Twitter lists. Within thirty minutes after creating your Twitter account, you can follow hundreds of users who will follow you back automatically, and you can set up following for keywords using services like Twollow and Twollo. Using a service like Twibes, you can be automatically added to tons of lists.

 

For less than $10/month (or, free with a little additional effort), you can be well on your way to a follower list of 50,000 people and added to hundreds of lists. You’ll greatly surpass tons of the people you know who worked for months or years to build up their following simply by taking advantage of a flawed system. Ain’t life grand?

Problem #1: Followers Aren’t Listeners

The first, most obvious flaw is this: sure, you have 50,000 followers, but how many are actually listening? Use yourself as an example: you’re following 50,000 people – how many are you listening to? Probably none. Because you’ve just created an account to game the system, and you don’t actually care about the people you’re following – you just want them to care about what you’re saying. Considering you’ve built up a follow list of people who just because they auto-follow, how many of those folks do you think are *actually* reading your posts or are interested in your product? Well, you could do some analysis to find out. I did my own experiment last June on the importance of making friends, not followers.

 

Even without putting together the numbers, it’s pretty obvious though – the VAST majority of your followers are likely to be bots, people just like you, or people who have too many followers to read what you’re saying anyway. Most of the people you want listening to you are using filters, and guess what? You’re being filtered out.

Problem #2: It’s a Trust Thing

Personally, I lump in people who game Twitter with people who email spam and people who put flyers on my car windshield. They’re taking advantage of an easily-manipulated system. In this situation, rather than using social media as it was meant to be used (to empower users), Twitter abusers take advantage of the public and use goodwill to shove their message down an unsuspecting consumer’s throat. If I’m following you and I realize this is what you’re doing, I immediately lose trust and respect for you, and I will most likely never become your customer. Assuming your end goal is finding customers (not followers), you’ve got a problem.

 

If you think the power of Twitter is having one account that has thousands of followers, who will read your posts, you’re dead wrong. The power of Twitter is in its viral nature. It’s having your tweet spread like wildfire across a multitude of different communities. The power of tweeting an update to thousands of followers pales in comparison to the power of having that update retweeted across dozens of accounts, reaching potentially hundreds of thousands of followers. The first will get you dozens of clicks, the second will get you hundreds to thousands of clicks. And what you want is clicks, not followers.

Problem #3: You’re Obvious

It’s pretty easy to tell when someone’s gaming Twitter. Nothing says abusing the system like a following of over 10,000 and less than 100 tweets. Or having 90% of the lists you’re on say “Twibes”.* For those of you Xbox LIVE gamers, that’s like having a gamerscore of 10,000 but having played Avatar: The Last Airbender, King Kong and Madden 2005, 2006 and 2007.** Anyone who know anything about gamerscore knows you’re just trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Plus, any good analytics package like Twitalyzer or Klout will quickly show you what your influence really is.
*I had the misfortune of using Twibes, and now the lists I’m proud to be a part of are drowned by tons of Twibes lists. If only I could take it all back…
**Sorry for the Xbox LIVE reference. It’s what happens when you work there for a year. You get indoctrinated :)

 

Again, once people figure out that you’re gaming the system, you’ll lose all credibility. Sure, you can game the system and have it be a part of your legitimate following/userbase, but what little gains you make from it pale in comparison to the potential of losing all trust. At least in my opinion.

Problem #4: You’re missing the point

Good marketing and use of social networking is about building relationships. Relationships with your customers. Relationships with friends. Relationships with other marketers. If you’ve built up a good relationship with people who legitimately care about what you do and what your product represents, you will succeed far, far beyond what you do by gaming a flawed system.

 

If you end up burning your bridges by engaging in suspicious behavior, you’ll do more harm to yourself and your brand than you know. If you spend a few months organically building connections, networking with others and building TRUST, you’ll be much happier than if you try to take the shortcut. Shortcuts are always appealing, but shortcuts have a tendency to get you burned.

Conclusion

Truth be told, on my main account, I don’t have a lot of followers. I don’t have 10,000, or even 1,000. I have just over 500. But I take pride that I’ve never had to engage in any suspicious practices to create my twitter network. I take pride in the fact that many of the people who follow me filter me in and are truly listening. I take pride that I’ve never had to “auto-follow” to build those connections. And lastly, I take pride in the fact that when I create or write something worthwhile, those people will spread the word. Those 500 small connections has done much more for me than 50,000 mindless followers ever would. And that means a lot to me.

 

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Buzz is What I Always Wanted From Twitter

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Feb 2010

12

what's-the-buzz-about

 

There’s a lot of feedback about Google Buzz since it launched. Some positive, some negative, and some just hilarious. There are some great things about Buzz, and there are certainly some flaws. But even if Google does nothing to change/modify Buzz, they’ve created a product that gives me everything I always wanted from Twitter, but never got. Don’t misunderstand the point of this post. I still really enjoy using Twitter, and will continue to do so. But Buzz offers some incredible features that I always hoped would come from Twitter.

 

Smaller, more genuine friends list. I don’t follow back on Twitter. At least not on my personal account. So the idea of building up “networks” of 10,000, 50,000, and 100,000 followers made of 50%+ spammers and bots really never appealed to me. I wanted Twitter to be about connecting with the people and the information I cared about. I choose to follow people that interest me, and my hope is that people follow me for the same reason – not with false hopes that I’ll follow them back.

 

Social media is not, and should not be about a popularity contest. I want genuine friends to connect with. I want smaller, not bigger. Google Buzz gives me that. I would be shocked if I end up following more than a couple hundred people on Buzz. Ever. Because I’m not going to let random people I don’t care about fill my inbox. Sorry, not gonna happen – I get enough email traffic as it is.

 

Threaded, not linear. Linear posting was fine to start, but with hundreds or thousands of followers, it’s obnoxious to not have threaded conversations. A system where I can’t easily see who else has replied to a certain post? That makes absolutely no sense. With Google Buzz, they take from the initial Google Reader system of “Like” and “Comment”, and it works beautifully. It’s this reason that I liked FriendFeed, but FriendFeed just never really got enough critical mass or interest for me. Linear posts are an anachronism, and Google Buzz does away with it.

 

Spam be gone. I have to imagine that most people will take my route and not follow back with their Buzz accounts. If that’s the case, there will be no market or growth potential for spammers on Google Buzz. Twitter was an easy breeding ground for spam accounts due to the ease of use and the existing (broken) social contract of following back. With no such contract in place (the only people I follow back *automatically* are the ones already in my contact list – who I clearly have had some sort of interaction with), spammers are screwed – you have to opt-in to follow them, something that will no doubt happen quite rarely.

 

Right where I want it. I already use Gmail as my primary (personal) email account. This means I don’t have to go download another application like Tweetdeck, Swift or Seesmic if I want to see my Buzz account. I don’t have to load up Facebook.com or FriendFeed.com if I want to view those live feeds. I’m already there. And it’s on my mobile phone, too. Listen, I’m lazy. The less clicks I have to make and websites I have to remember, the better.

 

Feature integration. Easy, intuitive integration of blog feeds, Twitter, Google Reader, etc. make this an easy win. You can integrate a number of feeds into Twitter as well, but the ease of use for Google Buzz is unparalleled, in my opinion.

 

Mobile done right. Buzz is perfect for mobile use. With an easy tie-in to Google Maps, it will easily (and quickly) provide extraordinary relevant and up-to-the-minute results. Now I fully understand why Google just decided to kill off their location-based Dodgeball. Buzz would have destroyed it anyway.

 

Imagine the possibilities with the Google Maps tie-in over time. First off, the Android platform will continue to take off, which will add a lot more users. Add live results to search – so when you’re searching for “mexican restaurant seattle“, you don’t just see the results, reviews and websites, you see a heatmap of what places are really hopping. Will this happen? Who knows, but I sure hope so.

 

The people I want to connect with. I don’t know about you, but most of my friends are already on Gmail. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but many of my friends and I connect over Gchat, and pretty much all of my friends from college exchanged our Gmail addresses when we left off to move on to the real world. This means that without doing anything, my FRIENDS are already connected to me through Buzz. Sure, there are plenty of additional people I will have to add, but this is a great start for me.

 

bad bee 225x300 Buzz is What I Always Wanted From TwitterThe negatives. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows for Buzz. There are still a handful of things it does worse than Twitter. But my hope is that over the next few iterations, some things will change. And if not, there’s no reason I can’t still use Twitter – it’s still a great program.

 

Mass dissemination of information. By only following a tightly-knit circle of friends, news stories will take longer to get to me. Think of the idea of six degrees of separation. On Twitter, you’re really only 2 or 3 degrees away from a big story, because chances are you’re connected to one or two people who have hundreds of thousands of followers. When someone with a megaphone gets the news, it spreads like wildfire. News will take slightly longer to break on Buzz, but then again, does an extra 15 minutes REALLY matter? Plus, once you get the news, you can comment on it using threads, making things much more neat!

 

Social media marketing campaigns suffer. Twitter was really easy to use when it comes to mass marketing a social media campaign. Stories were extremely easy to share (retweet), and a company with multiple products could create multiple accounts in order to divide and conquer. Buzz takes a step backward there. I don’t foresee many TV shows saying “Follow us on Buzz!” the way they did with Twitter. Could happen, but seems less likely. But marketers will find a way to penetrate Buzz, I’m sure. It’s just a matter of time.

 

New friend discovery. One of the advantages of Twitter is that it really introduced a lot of new people. Without Twitter, I may have never met some of the amazing people at SMC Seattle. Buzz makes it more difficult to discover those kind of people. But there are still opportunities using the Nearby feature on mobile, and by browsing other user comments. Frankly, it can be a more targeted networking solution – you meet friends of friends, rather than complete strangers. But the downside is that it really gets rid of some of the fun discovery process of meeting total strangers and connecting.

 

Automatic opt-in. I know a lot of people who don’t (or really won’t) care about Buzz. Being opted-in automatically isn’t ideal for them, as they really don’t want the extra clutter. But for those people, it’s not all that difficult to ignore. Seriously. Plus, now some people will be introduced to social media who never would have gotten started in the first place. This could turn out to be a good thing.

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My Nintendo (NES) Business Card

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Feb 2010

04

So most of you know by now that I’m a huge dork. Some of you don’t. For those of you skeptical, I’ll prove it. I made personal business cards that look like an NES controller for fun. I mostly give these out when I attend gaming conventions or computer game events, but also to friends.

 

I made these because I wanted to come up with a creative and memorable business card that everybody could appreciate. What do you think?

 

my nintendo business card

 

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