Turner's Perspective

Last Thursday I wrote about Why Twitter Follower Counts Mean Nothing.

The post touched off some interesting public and private discussions. The number huggers are everywhere and their logic, in a very comfortable, that-sounds-like-something-i've-done-before, kind of way, can certainly appear sound. They ask questions like, "Why broadcast to 10 people when you can broadcast to 10,000?" Who could argue with that, right? <raises hand> The clue to the answer lies in the question itself.

Broadcasting?

Is that really what we're doing in the social media space? Some think so.  I don't. I received a direct message from Matt Rathbun this morning that contained a link to a page selling a Twitter Mini-Course Book. I'm not sharing his site. I'm not giving Snake Oil salesman link love. Matt wasn't kind in his analysis.

The people who will succeed by treating Twitter, Facebook and other social networks like electronic direct mail are people who are selling “magic” solutions for growing your business to people looking for “easy” “I want results now” answers. And those successes will be short lived. Because that’s not how effective social media marketing works.

Engagement Is The New Marketing Metric.

Engagement through Social Media is aligned with how trust is built, how real relationships form and transactions result. "Working to build relationships (over time)" is not as easy to sell as "attract more customers now!" But those who see its wisdom will profit in the long run.

In 2008, Forrester Research rightly stated that "engagement" was the new marketing metric. "Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers' actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding."

All the numbers that really matter are related to engagement. Forester proposed a four "I" concept for measuring engagement.

• Involvement tracks site visitors, time spent, page views and more (old-school stuff)
• Interaction measures the contributions to blogs, photo and video creation and uploads, and purchases
• Intimacy tries to understand consumer attitudes, perception, and feelings about a brand through surveys or monitoring technology as well as applications providing an interactive environment between brand and consumers
• Influence measures the likelihood that consumers will recommend or advocate products or brands

I'm not against numbers per se. But the numbers must mean something. Would truly engaging with 10,000 be better than truly engaging with 10? Of course. But the key to the value in that statement is the word "engaging." How many people can YOU truly engage? It's going to be a different number for you than for the next person stumbling onto this post.

YEO (You Engaging Others) is not focused on YOU. It's focused on OTHERS. YEO is about communicating in a way that allows you to be heard above the noise. It’s about listening more than talking. And it's impossible to listen when all you're doing is broadcasting.

Ashton Kutcher is about to pass 1,000,000 followers on Twitter.

I'm happy for Ashton. And I mean that. He plans to do some great things with the account and I hope he does. But you're not Ashton Kutcher and neither am I. Unfortunately there are a whole slew of Twitter geniuses out there encouraging you to focus almost exclusively on getting as many followers as possible. It's fools gold. And I'm about to illustrate why.

Getting followers is easy. Building a community is hard.

A phone call with Jim Marks about creating some fake accounts (an entirely different post) prompted me to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time. People ask me constantly, "How do people get all of those followers on Twitter?" To which I always answer, "if all you want is followers, I can get you 10,000 followers easy. Building a community is hard."

I created two fake Twitter accounts.

@jwmont and @holachick are not real. Furthermore, 99% of their tweets were randomly generated.

I set both of these accounts up last Thursday. It took all of about 30 minutes to make up profile information and populate Twitterfeed.com with the RSS feeds that generated the random tweets to their accounts. @jwmont was set up to focus on iPhone twitter search results and @holachick was set up to focus on affiliiate marketing twitter search results.

So, how did I get 2900 and 2500 people to follow accounts that were just a series of randomly generated status updates in less than a week? Click here to learn how I got thousands to follow two fake twitter accounts and why you should ignore Twitter follower numbers.

"The computer is a moron." - Peter Drucker

A few days ago I received an email from someone who was comparing Real Estate Shows to another company. They wanted to know if we automatically distributed our Shows to the 10 or more social networking sites that another tour company distributed them to.

My response was a simple. No. 

And we have no plan to do so either. Why? Because doing so would simply encourage our clients to let the machine control their behavior instead of having their behavior control the machine. There are no technical barriers to making this happen. It's actually quite simple. But just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

What I explained to them was this; unless presented in the context of a conversation with potential clients and referral sources, links to social media sites have almost no value. In fact, they probably have negative value. Social networking sites are organized around conversation, not advertising. The more your page looks like an advertisement, the less successful you will be. Guaranteed.

What happens when you let the machine control your behavior?

We don't have to look much further than right here on ActiveRain to find out. No doubt you've seen the "Announce new blog posts on your Twitter feed!" section of your settings here on ActiveRain. It's a convenient little setting. Once you've set it, you don't have to think. That's the problem.

Sure, it takes a few minutes off of the process of posting your AR blog posts to Twitter, but it also encourages some really silly behavior. I can't tell you how many times I've encountered the following, but I saw two just like it today alone.

In all fairness to Bill, this image was captured four months ago. He has begun to do more than just post his ActiveRain posts, but at the time of this writing, Bill's twitter stream is still dominated by ActiveRain posts. I'm not sure what this use of the tool accomplishes, but I'm 100% certain what it will NOT accomplish. It will not accomplish engagement.

The machine wins way too often.

In the case above, what Bill and hundreds of other like him have become is a big billboard for ActiveRain. I like ActiveRain as much as the next guy, but I don't want my twitter page to be another cog in the ActiveRain promotion machine. And the crazy thing is the same exact result could be accomplished by simply posting an ActiveRain RSS Feed to Twitterfeed.com.

Instead of every tweet starting with "Just posted on ActiveRain:" he could have had each tweet begin with, "Just posted by Bill Arce" or "Real Estate Latino." Then his Twitter page would be a billboard for himself. I mean, if you're not going to use social media to be social, you should at least be promoting your own brand and your own keywords and not those of another social networking platform. The result will be exactly the same, of course, but you might get some Google love from it.

The Focus Should Be On You Engaging Others - YEO

The only thing that matters is you, your clients and your clients needs. The temptation to take short cuts will always be there. And some automation tools can be extremely helpful, if used with the right focus. The right focus is engagement not expedience. Is it expedient to be able to post to 10 different social networking sites without thinking? Sure. But being able to automatically post to 10 different social networking sites only has value if you are actively engaging people on 10 different social networking sites. I know very few people who are successfully doing that. Actually, I don't know any.

Don't let the tools dictate your behavior.
Don't let the machine control you.
Make the machine work to help you engage others.

_______________

BTW... This is an anniversary post. Two years ago today I wrote this, "It's Not About SEO. It's About YEO."

At the time, I was simply looking for a catchy headline to grab some attention in the Project Blogger competition. The competition has long since ended, but the concept of YEO continues to resonate. I'm glad it has.

(aside: It would be great if the gang here at ActiveRain allowed you to put in your own "Twitter lead-in," like Twitterfeed allows you to do.)

And one last thing. Bill, I hate pointing out a problem without offering a solution. So, if you'd like some suggestions on how to make Twitter work for you, please send me an email or send me a direct message on twitter (@respres). I'll be happy to help.