Posts Tagged ‘Twitter

Facebook is the new gym

It’s January.  How do you know?  Go to a gym.  It’s pack with people who have made this year the year to lose those extra pounds.  Where were they last month?

This happens every year.  Everyone is enthusiastic in January.  People join aerobic classes.  People sign up for gym memberships.  People commit themselves to showing up at the gym every night.  A month goes by, that long wait for a treadmill disappears.  Another month goes by, the classes become less crammed.  By March, well, no one keeps resolutions anyway!

It’s easy to make resolutions, but it takes dedication and commitment to keep them.

It’s easy to make a jump into the social media bandwagon.  It takes dedication and commitment to maintain them and make social media work.

This was the thesis of Tom Fishburn’s cartoon this week.  He highlighted a particular example where his local diner still calls attention to a Facebook page that hasn’t been updated for months.  A Facebook page doesn’t run itself.  Online dialogues with your fans won’t magically happen.  Just like those extra pounds won’t magically disappear.  You have to commit to make it happen.

Coincidentally (or perhaps timed purposely), Tom launched his Facebook page today.  Go friend him!

Photo Credit:  Tricia Wang

Tags : Facebook, Social media, Social network, Twitter, Web

Twitter is a Public Plaza

Why hasn’t more companies adopted social media? Because social media is not social at all.

According to a recent study, only 20% of tweets are meant to share information. 80% of tweets are private thoughts that just happened to be shared with the world. However, that’s still a private transaction. That social media network is a small group of friends, and that tweet is the electronic version of a private conversation.

Consider my version of the real-life equivalent: An email conversation is completely private. That’s like a group of people in a closed door room having a conversation. A tweet, for these 80% of people, is a conversation that happens in a public place. Since it’s a public place, sometimes people overhear and chime in. “Sorry, I hear you’re talking about that new restaurant. I was thinking about going, you say it sucks?”

So, yes, private conversations can be extended to strangers. However, these are still strangers. At the end of the conversation, each party goes back to their separate ways.

Now, if this stranger happens to be Oprah, you may all of a sudden call Oprah a “friend”. “Oh yeah, Oprah and I the other day was talking about restaurants. She suggested that I should go try the one on ABC Street.” Now, of course, this doesn’t have to be Oprah. This could be a local celebrity, or a celebrity within a specific circle. Or, just someone, someplace, something that’s well known and well regarded within a specific audience.

Or, if you happen to run into this particular stranger everywhere, you may begin to be interested in getting to know this stranger. Obviously, you have like interests. (For example, I have made it a point to get to know someone after seeing that particular person at various art shows around town.)

My hypothesis is that social media works the same way.

If you are strangers, you will remain strangers. There are a few ways to overcome this. One of which is to form an offline relationship. Be the Oprah that they want to get to know better. The other way is to engage your audience in their natural habitat and keep “running into them”. That’s why musicians were successful with myspace. Recruiters are successful with LinkedIn.

This may also explain why Twitter is particularly challenging for marketers. There are no specific purposes for Twitter. Twitter is a public plaza. Many different conversations happening, but it’s virtually impossible for a marketer to form an engaging relationship with any one of them. It’s very similar to a marketer holding a product demonstration in a public plaza. People may just ignore them, or they stop, watch, and move on because they’re there to meet someone. They don’t have time for marketers.

That doesn’t mean that Twitter doesn’t have value to marketers. What’s a better way to disseminate news about a crisis than to use a speaker over a public plaza? No one putting up a flyer would ignore the public plaza, because at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game and there are a lot of eyeballs in a public plaza. Twitter works the same way.

In conclusion, social media has its value, but as always, it’s only a part of your marketing mix. Perhaps even only a small part.

Link: STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me

Photo credit: New York Public Library Outdoor Plaza, originally uploaded by celikins.

Tags : Social media, Twitter

Did Facebook forget the basics?

I’ve been reading a lot of Al Ries recently, and I have learned a lot from his books. If I have to pick one lesson to highlight, it’d be focus, focus on being the best you.

Today, Facebook bought FriendFeed.

Big news for the social web.

The objective for Facebook purchase is assumed to gain FriendFeed’s search capabilities to better compete with Twitter. *This is simply a speculation. Maybe Facebook would not utilize this acquisition to make itself more like Twitter, via new search functions. But then, why buy FriendFeed?

However, why can’t Facebook define a separate but distinct niche from Twitter altogether? Why can’t the two be complimentary to each other and in fact grow the usage of social web in general? It is the whole growing the pie versus growing your own slide of the pie story.

(Hmm… pie…)

In fact, Facebook and Twitter probably already occupy different spaces in users’ minds. This article on Mashable highlights a great discussion on this topic. Facebook is for people to connect with friends. Twitter is for people to follow complete strangers. So, what purpose does it serve to make them look more alike? Shouldn’t they instead play to their differences and to their respective brand equities?

So, Facebook, instead of striving to be the best Facebook, it is trying to be the best Twitter. Hmm…

Why are branding basics so counterintuitive to us marketers / business owners, in our constant quest for the more, more, more?

Photo Credit: Pie chart, originally uploaded by net_efekt.

Tags : Facebook, Twitter

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