The Fallacy of Qwitter

If you haven’t heard about it, Qwitter is this application that tracks when someone unfollows you on Twitter, and then sends you a notification along with the last tweet you sent before the unfollow.

Why, people, why?

Twitter is about building a personalized, authentic online community that ultimately leads to building better relationships with people – either personally or professionally. It’s not about numbers, and it’s a different experience for everyone. As unique as your individual social circle.

So how come we’re so obsessed with knowing when someone leaves? There’s a big fallacy being perpetuated by Qwitter: that the tweet they send you is the *cause* of said person ceasing to follow your tweets, and that their unfollow is in direct relation to the quality of your Twitter stream. Each day, I see dozens of people fretting over the last person to drop them, and speculating about why. Some fret about it nearly obsessively. (In fact, a quick Twitter Search query revealed one person – I’ll spare them here – that had over a half dozen tweets in a ROW about being “qwit”. Yikes.)

People of Earth, stop the madness.

Twitter should be about crafting your own experience.
Not unlike a real, live social situation, conversations ebb and flow on Twitter. Sometimes you’ll find yourself at the party, drifting in and out of smaller groups. Some you go back to with frequency, others you don’t. It’s purely a matter of personal choice, and it’s about making the evening’s experience as rich as it can be for you, based on your own tastes in conversation.

If someone’s following me on Twitter but I’m not creating an experience that’s valuable to them for whatever reason – they hate social media, my sense of humor bothers them, I share too many links or tweet too often – I *want* them to walk away. I want this experience to be as rich for them as it is for me.

It reminds me of The Law of Two Feet established by PodCamp. If you’re not finding value in what’s happening around you, get up, walk out. It’s nothing personal, it’s about creating a quality-saturated personal experience.

If you’re participating authentically, stop obsessing.
If you’re not a junk peddler, or a craptastic spammer, or just a generalized jerk, you are probably participating in Twitter in the most authentic way you know how. You’re having conversations on your terms, based on your personality and how you’re hoping to frame your experience within the Twitter community. That’s the essence of this, and its how it should be.

And if you ARE one of the offenders of being pitchy or smarmy or belligerent or rude, do you really need Qwitter to tell you why people stop following you?

It’s impossible to please everyone.
Instead of focusing on the myriad reasons why a particular person might decide that you’re no longer someone they want to follow, why not concentrate on bringing something really valuable to the people that are still there? They’ve asked for your attention, and they’re voluntarily giving you theirs.

Rather than expending so much energy overanalyzing the few, why not figure out how to bring an incredible experience to the many? What are you doing to make sure that the followers you HAVE are finding something in you, every day?  Carpe diem and all that.

I’m sure you can provide me with a bunch of reasons why Qwitter is educational or enlightening or something, but I’m just not buying it. I will never be able to make the entire world love me, so I would much rather take the community I’ve built around me – the ones who are there because they wish to be – and deliver something wonderful to them each and every day. Twitter for me is about connecting, sharing, learning. So I’m going to focus on those elements, and stay far away from masochistic Qwitterland.

On Cafes and Social Media Serenity

Balance, Grasshopper.

Sleeplessly, I was reading Chris Brogan’s post on cafe-shaped conversations in social media. The premise is that these smaller, more intimate conversations between companies and customers work when you’re small, when those conversations can be parsed into smaller chunks. But what about the guys who make aluminum foil or laundry detergent or anything that’s stamped out by the mass-millions? The companies whose customers and revenue numbers have copious zeros trailing? Are these tools realistic for them, or even relevant to how they do business at volume?

I thought perhaps that the question cramped by brain because of the late hour. But here I am, 12 hours later still chewing on it. And here’s what’s stuck with me.

Conversational Intent
Often, the intent of engaging in social media can be more compelling than the mechanics of how its applied. Fundamentally, a company has to embrace the value of having more personalized, transparent communication with customers, and be committed to trying to execute that on a large scale (more on this below). It’s the intent of that participation – the desire to forge a more human-based bond with customers and prospects – that is a critical component of whether that can be achieved at any volume. Put simply, if the company doesn’t care about those small scale relationships, it just doesn’t matter.

Commenting on Chris’ post, I mentioned that traditionally mass marketing is dependent upon a top down approach. We cast the net wide and “funnel” the mob through varying stages of commitment from introduction to sale and back again. But community-based conversations are rooted in a bottom-up approach that includes finding smaller pockets of individuals that are compelled by a brand or a company, and nurturing those relationships so they grow organically. Tending the roots, if you will.

The Issue of Scalability
The trouble with social media happens when the resources required to nurture relationships – and the time involved in cultivating same – become more and more cumbersome. It’s far more difficult to tend to a massive commercial farm than a backyard garden, so you have to adapt some catch-all tools in order to do that. It doesn’t negate the need for each individual plant to receive it’s nourishment, but it allows some of that tending to happen en masse while more delicate tasks must be tended to by hand.

If your business is starting small, you can evolve from a highly personalized approach to a larger scale one more easily. Your resources to tend to the relationships grow as the business and relationship grows along side.  But what happens when you’re already AT scale? Can you truly find ways to revert to more concentrated conversations with smaller pockets of customers? Can you actually allocate adequate resources to same without slowing down the perpetual train of more automated transactions?

The Bridge Between
I’m not averse to mass communication. In fact, I’d call a blog mass communication: you’re on one end, sending out a message to a concentration of readers that’s larger than you. That’s mass.

The difference is what happens to activate the tractor beam and keep those eyes, ears, and hearts coming back time after time. If I’m engaging with Best Buy, I know I’m not the only one they’re talking to, and I’m ok with that. But what I need to know is that when I choose to exercise my voice and ask for a response, someone is on the other end to pick up the phone (or email or Tweet or text or whatever).

The blog has transcended our ideas of mass communication because it does something that a mass mailing never did: allow us to respond instantly and individually.  Same with press releases. They used to be tools for the media, shotgunned out into the world. Now, companies like Ford are making their press releases a dynamic part of their social media newsroom. By tweaking the mass communication mechanism, they’ve opened up the possibility of dialogue with more than just a bunch of journalists, and given their readership an immediate and public voice.

It’s at that point that the mass gets broken down into those cafe tables that Chris was talking about. Some people will never, ever choose to sit down at that table for a conversation. But the challenge for the larger companies is that somewhere, someone *will* want to do that. The trick is in enabling the self-selection. Providing the choice.

Sales will continue to happen en masse on a transactional basis for companies that operate at that scale. That’s just the dynamics of supply and demand, and as long as the demand is there at a fundamental level, mass will continue to work for some. But as deconstructing more personal relationships from the masses becomes more and more a prevalent method of communication for businesses and a driver for long term loyalty in a fracturing commercial world, the big businesses are going to have to adapt. I believe that they’re going to need to learn to take their mass approach and allow the neighborhood-style communications to filter out, and have someone there ready to respond when they do.

How they participate in these communities has to be different. They may not be able to be in every cafe waiting for the conversations to start. But they need to have the intent and willingness to notice when those conversations start to happen on their own, and stop in to join the conversation once in a while.

Serenity Now
As a parting sentiment, it’s important to reiterate that not every mechanism works for every business (or every person for that matter). And vilifying those that choose to continue to operate in more collective mentality is fruitless unless you can honestly and accurately claim that there’s a fundamental reason for them to change (i.e. if it ain’t broke…). Understanding that dynamic for a juggernaut of a company is hard work in and of itself, and making incremental changes even harder.

Do I believe individualized communication has deeper impact? You bet I do. Do I think the evolution starts now? Yes. Am I naive enough to believe that no balance exists between the massive and the microscopic? No way.

Perhaps we need a social media serenity prayer: Let us have the temperance and humility to accept that there is no such thing as universal truth, even when it comes to the human element in business. Let us have the courage as bright, sophisticated stewards of social media to change and evolve the businesses who can embrace this and thrive. And above all, let us exercise the patience and wisdom to know the difference.

Photo Credit: :mrMark:

Thanks, From Me to All of You.

Those of us who are dorkily passionate about the power of community jump up and down all the time about the importance of connecting with customers because it builds your business. This is true enough.

But today, I’d like to pause for a few moments of professional gratitude. It’s a rather thankless world right now and it seems that blessings are few and far between for many. But perhaps, like me, you’re in business for reasons beyond the bottom line. 2008 saw the first days of my business, and it’s been an incredible year in so many ways.

Lending a Hand
Teaching is the great joy of my job, and it’s largely why I embarked on this professional adventure to begin with. There are few things more gratifying than helping someone learn and understand something they didn’t the day before. The best part is that not only do I get to share my knowledge with people every day to help them improve their businesses, but I nearly always learn something in return.

The Means to Change Lives
Everyone has their job so they can put a roof over their head, food on the table, and keep the heat on. The rest is gravy. But I’ve also been involved in non-profits and the arts for many years, and for me part of the value of business success is in having the means to give back to my community. Trite as it may sound, there are so many who are less fortunate and struggling for their very survival. And the arts are in grave danger of being swept aside in our communities as a “luxury” instead of a pillar of developing well-rounded youth.

Charitable giving is and should be very personal. Please find a cause that resonates with you and give. Trust my former fundraiser self when I tell you that even a few dollars can make a difference. If you’d like some recommendations for organizations that could use your assistance, I’d be happy to help.

Being Inspired by Others
Since I entered the entrepreneurial arena, so many people have inspired me, selflessly shared their knowledge with me, and supported me when I was unconvinced I had what it took. Now, as my business grows, I am overwhelmed each day by the people that connect with me and each other for the betterment of business as a whole. At the root of every “job”, no matter how mundane it may seem, is the capacity to change someone’s world for the better, solve a problem, enhance an experience, or provide something of value. So to those of you who have been my personal friends, and to those who have blogged, built, created, shared, improved, participated here, invited me to your place, and given more than you take, I say thanks.

Rediscovering People as People
The roots of my passion for all things social media are driven by the idea that we’ve been marketing behind a wall for many years, sticking people in buckets and “demographics” and “target audiences”. We’ve looked at our brands through the bottom of our own kool-aid glasses. We’ve graphed and charted and analyzed and reported, and somewhere along the line we forgot that we were talking to people.

My aim as both an advisor and a doer is to gradually right the ship and reintegrate the human element into corporate communication. As a consumer, that’s what I’d want. As a company, that’s what I’d strive for. And every single solitary crazy day, people around me are proving that it’s possible.

And so to all of you – clients, friends, colleagues, lurkers, talkers, curious travelers and those I’ve yet to know – thank you. From the bottom of my heart. For letting me come to work every day and share my passion with you.

Happy Thanksgiving, to you and yours, wherever you may be.

ROI Begins At The End

I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to post on ROI, because it’s a saturated subject right now that I think needs time to marinate. But I cannot, CANNOT get past a niggling issue of mine that keeps getting missed. So I’m going to concentrate my perspective here.

You cannot calculate a return on anything unless you know whether or not your goals – and your definitions of both Return and Investment -  are the right ones.

As a marketer or a communicator, you may determine that you want to drive traffic to your site, increase subscriptions to your newsletter, get people to blog about you. We’ve often measured success in marketing based on eyeballs. Awareness. These things are measurable. But sometimes they’re based in our own corporate egos.

Is that what makes your customers do business with you? Do you know for sure that those 25 blog post mentions are moving them closer to you? Is it enough to increase their affinity to your brand, or is a sale the only metric that “really counts”? What about the journey toward that sale? Does that have value?

And have you asked your customers these questions?

I’m not talking about a sterile survey. I’m not talking about a misappropriated focus group (sorry, Frank Martin – I’m talking about those that are ill conceived). I’m talking about rolling up your sleeves and digging in with your customers, on a one-on-one basis. Giving them mechanisms to tell you, and listening to them. It’s time consuming. It’s difficult. It’s subjective. And it’s irreplaceable.

Finding the right goal – the one that actually allows you to map success – is the only thing that matters. You can put up all the fan pages or Twitter accounts or blog posts or “viral” (cough) videos you want. But if the only reaction to that is a momentary, fleeting attention span based in superficial curiosity that does nothing to bring that customer one step closer to buying from you, it’s wasted. Yes I said it. Wasted.

Relationships require nurturing. Your goals must be based on this notion, and the “Return” that you’re calculating based on your “Investment” needs to be about your customers’ ideas about what moves the needle for them. Not yours.

(Incidentally, if you’re going to try and tell me that we have to report on these misguided metrics because that’s the way that we’ve always done it, or because that’s the “reality” of the way the corner office sees it, then you haven’t been reading about why I think social media is as much about education and culture change as it is execution. It’s time we quit using our flawed notion of relevant metrics as a scapegoat and started changing the game to reflect the way it’s actually played.)

True return for any communication effort – whether social media related or otherwise – had better have its roots in the natural progression of relationships and the tendency for humans to make their decisions based on personal feelings of trust, affection, loyalty. If you haven’t figured out what that means to customers in their own words, then throw all the darts at the board you like, and go ahead and measure where and how often they hit.  Graph them, craft reports, make PowerPoints.

The darts will still miss. And the true ROI will continue to elude you.

The Social Media Hat Rack

Jason Falls penned a great post last week about Six Steps to Becoming The Social Media Champion At Work.  (For the record, #6 is a gold in itself).

That champion role – whether you’re an employee or an agency – comes with several hats you have to wear. Each are equally important, and I don’t think they can survive independently. If you think this role is one for the faint of heart, or suited to just some dude with a blog in his basement, think again.

The Psychologist
Barriers to social media in companies abound, and many of them are legitimate (if frustrating). Embarking on the great ship Social Media requires the ability to understand those hang-ups, from a business as well as a human perspective. For companies who have been doing things the “old” way for ages, these sea changes represent elements of fear, uncertainty, skepticism.  It’s up to you to listen carefully to those concerns and get to the root of them.

The Librarian
Research, research, research. Nothing will allay the fears of the doubtful like business-oriented, grounded proof positive. As a social media advocate, it’s going to be  your job to amass as much evidence of real examples as you can. And don’t kid yourself that it’s all about demonstrating successes.  It’s just as important to document examples of what DIDN’T work. Not only does it lend credibility that you see things from a balanced perspective, but it just may prevent you from making the same mistakes.

The Architect
Winging it isn’t the way to do social media, neither is a shotgun approach. You must create a plan that includes elements of:
* Listening: Understanding what’s being said about you, or not
* Readiness Assessment: What obstacles are you facing, and how will you deal?
* Goal Setting: A map is useless without a destination
* Resource Planning: It may not cost much in dollars, but human resources are critical
* Internal Education and Training: You’ll need your colleagues to understand why this is important
* Immersion: Getting out into the community to get your feet wet
* Participation: Actively using social media for your business and contributing to the community
* Measurement: How you’re defining success
* Learning: What works, what doesn’t, and what you’re going to do about it.

(If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen it, the incomparable Chris Brogan has a post about getting started that trumps anything smart I’d have to say here.)

The Teacher
Once again: our role is to educate and empower. There are lot of misconceptions about social media, and a great deal of explanation and guidance necessary to steward it properly for business application. You’re going to constantly absorbing knowledge about this space, so bring that value back to your company or client by sharing it.

The Cowboy/Cowgirl
Even the smartest cows (?) wander off the path. Guiding social media within a business framework means that you’ll spend plenty of time corralling wayward cows and keeping the herd on the trail.  And on occasion, when it’s needed, you’ll need to be the one to shove that herd across raging rivers, over mountains, or down a brand new path in order to find your way home.

The Cheerleader
You can skip the salty outfit (unless that’s your thing), but truth is, you’re going to hit stumbling blocks. Failure is part of playing the game, and someone needs to keep finding the positives and the opportunities. As cheerleader, you’ll want to encourage your colleagues and clients in the face of the inevitable challenges to reassure them that social media is as much about the journey as the destination.

So what say you? What other roles do you find yourself taking on in order to encourage social media adoption with your company or clients? Let’s share. I’m gonna go fetch my cowgirl hat.

Photo Credit: Dave-F