TechShots - Latest Comments

Re: Social Contracts and Why I Won’t Follow You Back on Twitter

ClinicalPosters — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:46:37 -0000

I didn't get the memo but apparently, somewhere in the Twitterverse, a printer sold out of bumper stickers that stay: "He that has the most followers wins." It's not *humanly* possible to have 10K *friends*.

P.S. You have come to the same realization I wrote about here: http://clnpstr.com/bAck2mE

Re: How to Track Facebook Link Shares

Ser Iulián Armenta Legorreta — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 19:10:25 -0000

Thanks

Re: How to Track Facebook Link Shares

Ser Iulián Armenta Legorreta — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 19:10:10 -0000

Thanks :)

Re: How to Track Facebook Link Shares

Joseph Sunga — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:54:30 -0000

This was super helpful. Thanks for sharing.

Re: The FTC is Doing it Wrong

Jake S. — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 12:16:12 -0000

Great insight and analysis on the FTC's recent decision. It truly will be an interesting and defining time for web analytics.

Re: Segmented Networks and Recognizing Your Audience

Andy Tillo — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:46:13 -0000

I'm in Chris's boat - I liked FB/Twitter at first to test it out, but figured it was overwhelming on Facebook. Twitter you can post 10 times a day without annoying people (IMHO), whereas anyone in my FB feed that posts that much get hidden ASAP. I currently have 'selective' linking to Facebook via #fb from Twitter, and had autopublish from Youtube to both FB and Twitter, but I've weened them off too. Everything has its own home as they all have unique audiences. Good writeup!

Re: The Value of Perspective

Stephen Reinstein — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:36:53 -0000

welcome back Jaremy!

Re: Segmented Networks and Recognizing Your Audience

Jaremy — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:04:01 -0000

Thanks for the comment, Chris. Re: FriendFeed, eventually it has to be entirely rolled up into Facebook, right? I used to use FriendFeed a lot more, but since Facebook bought it last year, I've pretty much abandoned the platform, figuring that eventually support for it will wane.

Re: Segmented Networks and Recognizing Your Audience

Chris Cree — Tue, 04 May 2010 11:52:08 -0000

Early on I connected my Twitter feed to my Facebook profile. Disconnected it within a day because I tend to have conversations on Twitter and felt it was obnoxious to update my Facebook that often.

I do push my Twitter stream over to LinkedIn though. It was one of those "set it and forget it things" since, at the time, LinkedIn was much less effective as a networking platform than it is becoming. Interestingly enough I get comments over there from people who don't pay any attention to Twitter.

One site you left out that I think has a lot more potential than most folks realize is FriendFeed.

Re: Segmented Networks and Recognizing Your Audience

Jaremy — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:19:07 -0000

See, that's so interesting - just goes to show you that every audience varies specifically according to the person.

I also like Buzz for that reason (threaded responses), and I hope that it's something that Twitter is able to eventually implement successfully into its stream (though I'm not sure how well it would take).

The same thing happened to me with Facebook, as well. I think it's a factor of the fact that we started on Facebook when it was ENTIRELY college (and elite college at that)-based. So we went from a private network where people felt free to share silly photos and silly status updates to a public network with coworkers, parents, relatives and more. Just think how much Facebook has changed since we first got it at Oberlin in 2004 or so.

Re: Segmented Networks and Recognizing Your Audience

LH — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:26:49 -0000

I also keep Twitter and Facebook separate because of different audiences. Over the past few years I have become Facebook friends with a large number of coworkers and extended family members, and as a result my Facebook status updates have become much tamer than they once were. My twitter account is a much smaller audience, and is composed almost entirely of friends, (and spammers I haven't gotten around to deleting yet). I save the most "interesting" posts for twitter, because my mom's cousin doesn't need to read about my late nights out on her Facebook feed. As for linking Foursquare to other networks, I had similar logic, but the opposite result. My Facebook feed is comprised of hundreds of high school and college friends scattered around the world, whereas my twitter audience is about 1/5 the size, and almost entirely made up of people in or around the city where I live. My twitter is my more localized audience, so it made more sense for me to have Foursquare push to Twitter. Buzz pushes nowhere, but I have a group of friends who are very active on it. There is a group of about 25 people who post, and comment on each other's posts every day. It's a lot like twitter, except with threaded responses and no 140 character limit. My Tumblr blog pushes to Twitter.

Re: Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

Jaremy — Sun, 02 May 2010 13:45:01 -0000

Hi Chris - thank you so much for your comment!

The problem with naive social media users is that they expect unrealistic results in an unrealistic timeframe, not realizing that sometimes building a social media profile is a long, slow process as opposed to an overnight event. I wish you luck in explaining that to your clients :)

Re: Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

Chris Cree — Sun, 02 May 2010 06:45:27 -0000

Heya Jeremy! Your post here is spot on. I work in social media and have been telling clients for more than a year now that gaming Twitter is pointless at best and potentially a very bad idea from a brand perspective.

I especially appreciate your point about trust. Trust is something that takes a lot of time and energy to gain, but can be lost in a single bad decision.

Unfortunately what I run into is large numbers of naive folks new to social media who are not only impressed by large numbers, but want to build those numbers for themselves quickly and with as little effort as possible. Even though I tell them why it's a bad idea in no uncertain terms they still want me to show them how to do it. A more noble man would simply refuse.

Thanks for the reminder. Oh, and I followed you on Twitter myself this morning.

Re: Facts about Jaremy Rich and Techshots

Kevin Cole — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:10:09 -0000

Appreciate the thoughts.

I too like the technology - but I'm not sure I like everything that's being done with it. Some of it, certainly.

The piece you wrote a week or so back for (I believe) the SMC Seattle page pointed out some of what seems will work well for business but I think could have very negative consequences for humans - the emphasis on appearance of existence rather than its substantial quality. Seems to be a great ticket to faux socialization but real alienation for some. "Generation Virtual" was a particularly apt nickname, I thought.

Color me concerned... But interested. :) And thanks for the thoughtful reply. I appreciated that very much.

Re: Facts about Jaremy Rich and Techshots

Jaremy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:55:49 -0000

What can I say... I like what I like :).

I have not written any posts on the social consequences of virtualizing the world, but it's obvious that they are (and will continue to be) vast. However, I think it's such a constantly-changing space that we won't really be able to predict what will happen until we're there. Will we become a society where we hardly interact with one another on a physical basis (like in WALL-E)? I doubt it. But the dynamics will change.

I think that there's always a need for that type of in-person social interaction, and all of the web-based groups that I've ever interacted with have eventually organized some sort of live meetup. People want to interact on a face-to-face basis, and I've found personally that the social interaction has allowed me to connect with a great deal of people that I might not have ever otherwise met.

Only time will tell what the consequences will be.

I don't know if you made it out to the last Social Media Club: Seattle event, but there were some interesting suppositions on the future of social media and CRM (customer relationship management). I wrote a recap for SMC Seattle here: http://smcseattle.com/futur...

Re: Facts about Jaremy Rich and Techshots

Kevin Cole — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:48:00 -0000

Nice to run into you via Twitter today, Anchovy-lover. Took a peek at the bio here - made me curious... Ever write anything on your view of the social consequences of virtualizing the world? Sounds like a lot of wannabe-jargon from a phony, I know, but I did news for a long time and developed the habit of paying attention to things. I'm no Luddite, but not everything I'm seeing in the way of virtualization of social life is settling well. With your background, I'd love to hear/see/read your thoughts on that...

Thanks!

Re: Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

Bruce Wilson — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:50:25 -0000

Good points, thanks! I haven't been setting up enough filters, either lists or columns, sorry to say. Seems like yet another platform to maintain, haven't bitten the bullet yet. Was using Brizzly for a while which had a similar "groups" feature, with the difference being (as I understand it) that the lists weren't published to the world.... I'm also kind of toying with the idea of just unfollowing people rather than relegating them into "more and less primary" lists.

Re: Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

Bruce Wilson — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:47:55 -0000

Edit: oops, meant to post a reply.

Re: Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

Jaremy — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:45:36 -0000

I do follow around 250 people. And to be honest, even that (relatively) small volume is too much for me. That's why I use TweetDeck - it allows me to filter that list down to around 150, which is much more manageable.

My favorite quote from last night at the #SMCSea event was "Thank god for Twitter Lists!" - which aboslutely rings true for me. I think a lot of power users are starting to use lists to track people rather then their lists of "following". This is all qualitative evidence though, of course. I would also love to see a survey on the matter.

Re: Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

Bruce Wilson — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:45:35 -0000

Thanks Jaremy, as a first hand account (having walked both paths) this is convincing. The issue of "how to get massive numbers of followers" has become an annoying part of the noise surrounding Twitter - including people who think that they "should" take this approach, casting about for ways to accomplish it, and people for whom it somehow discredits Twitter as a tool.

I'm also interested in the filtering ("listening") question. It would be marvelous to see a study (survey?) about the most common approaches to filtering the huge volume of social media many of us subscribe to, and how likely it is that someone following X number of feeds will read a randomly selected post from any one of them.

So what do you think, how does someone following only as many as 250 people (to choose a random number) on Twitter keep up the the volume?

Re: Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

Jaremy — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 04:55:37 -0000

Thanks for the comment (and the follow)! I agree that Twitter will definitely have some issues when it comes to paring down their userbase. Right now it really seems that they're doing the minimum when it comes to spam control, and I think that's a big issue.

Re: Why Gaming Twitter is Stupid (and Pointless)

Jack — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:18:53 -0000

Totally on-point post. Twitter cheating is what I think has the biggest chance for potentially dooming the service. I don't think Twitter really cares enough about the integrity of its userbase, and I think that is why competing services like Google Buzz may eventually win the social media wars.

By the way, I'll follow you now :-)

Re: Buzz is What I Always Wanted From Twitter

Tony Zerrer — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:26:52 -0000

I agree with your post. There are lots of things I like about Buzz, but there are some frustrating points. First, I had no idea why my Picasa photos were showing up on my Buzz timeline after I changed the privacy settings in Web Albums. I ended up spending about an hour working on my profile only to be frustrated with what was showing up. I don't feel I have complete control over what the public is seeing.

Re: Buzz is What I Always Wanted From Twitter

Jaremy — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 06:21:01 -0000

I'm glad it helped! It will be interesting to see how the product and its usage evolve over time. Google does a great job of making important edits in later iterations, so I'm sure things will change.

Re: Buzz is What I Always Wanted From Twitter

Jose Enrique Escardó Steck — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:28:56 -0000

This article has helped me a lot to change my points of view on buzz and I am closer to using twitter and buzz for different purposes. Thanks a lot!