Scobleizer - Latest Comments in The worst question in social media

Re: The worst question in social media

Ari Herzog — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:59:30 -0000

Re: The worst question in social media

Amy Porterfield — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:08:03 -0000

Perfect post! I think it always comes back to KICK-BUTT CONTENT. . . and that is not an easy thing to get right each time. That is why the people that are really outstanding in this area rise to the top. And I love what you said about @replying to the best thinkers in the business--this is why Twitter is so great. You can "talk" to the big shots now. . . and maybe even get a response. Thanks for the great reminder that followers do not matter and content is still king.

Amy

Re: The worst question in social media

Martijn Linssen — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:33:14 -0000

Catchy point Carl. It seems to be a strange goal in life for most people to be famous and rich and have many worshippers / followers

Give me a full week and a lot of clicks and I can get a few thousand followers who just follow me because I follow them
Give me a few days and some interesting tweets, and I'll meet people who like my tweets and me

To me, it's a difference between spam and relationships

Re: The worst question in social media

carlgriffith — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:16:16 -0000

Great post... one might as well ask 'how do I get invited to parties or to the pub more often'?... bottom line is be interesting and be interestED or funny or whatever but just don't look at it as a numbers game. I thought people were beginning to get this now? Strange that people are still asking you this question...

Re: The worst question in social media

dj adelaide — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:53:42 -0000

so true, the number of followers you have is totally meaningless especially if you have a publicly viewable twitter account, it's probably more effective to figure out which keywords your target market is monitoring and hit those keywords in your tweets as often as possible

Re: The worst question in social media

Bruce Stewart — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:47:31 -0000

I only have 2 friends in real life (and that's not family).
I have lots of twitter follows. I Wouldn't follow me if I was them.
I just follow people who I want, not just anyone.

Re: The worst question in social media

Jason McElweenie — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:27:50 -0000

The obvious answer is to get you to link his Tweet while using his question in a post. At first I thought was extremely wrong to single this guy out but you are actually helping him. So that leads me to a few questions

'How can I make a million dollars by Monday?'

'How can I become the first human to achieve unassisted flight'

'Hoe can I win a knife fight against a monkey?'

'How can I be a better linkbaiter?'

Re: The worst question in social media

Tony — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:39:18 -0000

Great story. The race for twitter followers has never made sense to me. This does.
Tony

Re: The worst question in social media

Vince Kuraitis — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:12:31 -0000

Agreed, # followers as a measure is increasingly irrelevant. My dog @WorldsCutestDog has more followers than I do, but she'll follow anybody.

Re: The worst question in social media

Zachary Adam Cohen — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:19:10 -0000

thats a bold number, but can't disagree that 1000 truly engaged fans and
evangelists of your work is pretty powerful...

Re: The worst question in social media

Ahad Bokhari — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:58:04 -0000

Indeed, who needs so many followers in the first place. End of the day you really need 1000 true core fans to have success on twitter or elsewhere with your product or service. Much better to concentrate on people and content - for one I learned that the hard way.

Re: The worst question in social media

ShyamKapur — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:40:41 -0000

I enjoyed this write-up greatly. I have been saying something similar for quite some time now. I believe smart search is the solution. And, we are almost there. Check out the world's first semantic, real-time, social search engine TipTop at http://FeelTipTop.com and perhaps you will also feel confident that a very good solution to the problem is on the horizon.

Re: The worst question in social media

Oscar — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:35:44 -0000

Your crutch words are "see," and "oh,".

Re: The worst question in social media

Zachary Adam Cohen — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:49:40 -0000

That's actually a great idea. What would Twitter be like if no one
knew anyones follower count. I'm sure this question has come up
before. Prolly raised by scoble somewhere. I fear, to be honest, that
knowin follower accounts has effected who I follow and group into
classes. I won't lie. But I also get a lot of pleasure out of
welcoming and championing new people w less than a few hundred
ollowers. I like to give them a chance.

Re: The worst question in social media

therealfracas — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:29:18 -0000

For some, twitter is about the amazing and engaged followers, but for others, well, they want more followers, because they want to get more than $1.30 for a sponsored tweet. It's that simple. When word gets out that shoemoney is making unheard of amounts of cash for a single tweet, people will equate more followers with more money and go looking for ways to get more followers.

Of course there are those others, who believe the more followers they have, the more popular they are. I think those folks are all former myspace users who had 16, 289 'friends' though. I wouldn't know. I can't keep up with my own blogroll, so 16, 289 friends would be a nightmare for me. They'd all just hate me for not paying enough attention to them anyway.

Re: The worst question in social media

Ari Herzog — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:39:50 -0000

Didn't someone close to you once confide that size doesn't matter?

Forget followers. I wish those numbers weren't shown.

Re: The worst question in social media

Ari Herzog — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:38:30 -0000

Better question, Robert: Why should anyone follow you on Twitter when they can subscribe to your blog and read logical (and longer) statements like the ones above?

Then again, you're preaching to the choir about changing things up with big F and small f strategies; for I deleted my 1000+ Facebook friends 24 hours ago and am now going about wastebook entirely differently.

Re: The worst question in social media

Ian M Rountree — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:06:06 -0000

It's been interesting to watch as Twitter evolves from a "What the hell is the point?" amusement into a real Broadcast Yourself (sorry, YouTube) platform. @replies and retweets so we can let people know what we're doing with their info. Lists to show people how we categorize those we follow, what kinds of groupings matter to us.

I spent about two weeks using Buzzom, back in August, and just about gave up on Twitter. Three hundred follows, brought my followers list to just under 50 in a week from ten... But I couldn't read anything! It sucked! Now, lists come out, and for a second I thought "great, now I can follow a bunch of people, get the numbers up, AND manage to keep reading the people I give a crap about." Then I actually looked at the feature and how it was used and - I agree with you - follow numbers don't mean a thing any more. If I follow your lists, I don't turn up in the followers number for any of those people on the list - but I get their stuff anyway. It's awesome.

The entire question of followers, RSS subscriber numbers - just got obsolete, didn't it? Syndication may still be important, but I think this will change how it's viewed.

Re: The worst question in social media

Steven Barchetti — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:01:58 -0000

Well, I think the simplest answer to this question is what Robert touched on towards the end of his post!

The answer is, what ever space you occupy in cyberspace know what you are talking about.

Know matter what tool you use to communicate it would be (IE) writing, podcasting or video blogging.

Pick your tool of choice and then put out some kick butt content for that space!

The reason I follow Scobles is because I love Technology from an early adopter standpoint and Robert feeds me tons of great content about this space!

Because Robert is such a power user, he saves me a ton of time when I'm choosing what new tools I will use next.

So master your space, pick your deliver device and kill it!

If you do that people will follow you in packs!

Steven

Re: The worst question in social media

Adrian McMillan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:24:37 -0000

That reminds me of my question to you a couple days ago, "When do you work?"

Re: The worst question in social media

Zachary Adam Cohen — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:23:05 -0000

Man u r old!! Ha. Jk. Appreciate the dialogue.

Re: The worst question in social media

Paul Blasman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:10:23 -0000

Most fun, no. But it was a fun time 25 years ago. No pressure, could walk away at any time and find another minimum wage job fairly easy. Life in college was simple.

Re: The worst question in social media

Zachary Adam Cohen — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:02:44 -0000

most fun?

Re: The worst question in social media

Zachary Adam Cohen — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:02:22 -0000

paul

exactly right. with twitter lists, follower numbers has taken one more major
step towards basic irrevelance.

I've been revisiting Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and the chapter on
fame is telling in regards to this discussion. At a certain level of fame,
you simply cannot keep up with x amount of people. I recently unfollowed
over 1500 people after listening to Robert's experience mass unfollowing. I
now have less than 2000 people I follow and I hope it stays that way.

Back to Shirky though, would any person (not brand) really want more than 30
or 40k followers. You couldn't even keep up with thanking people for
Retweeting or answering questions addressed to you...and then people start
to resent you a little bit...

Uh Oh! I smell a twitter prediction coming on...that a buck and a quarter
will get me to Brooklyn, but I do declare that Twitter will further segment.
As growth has stalled in the past couple of months I've felt a familiarity
and closeness growing with myself and those I follow and who follows me.
Deeper conversations, more willingness to meetup outside of twitter and IRL,
and my knowledge engine has been revved up even more.

Re: The worst question in social media

Paul Blasman — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:57:56 -0000

One of the jobs I had while working my way through college involved cleaning toilets at a department store. One of the funnest jobs I've ever had...