I was honored to be the kick-off speaker at New Media Atlanta last month.
The topic I was given to speak about was, "Why Social Media Is Here To Stay." The reason is simple. Social Media is the love child of Social Networking and New Science. I actually wrote about this same topic here on ActiveRain in February of 2007, it just had a different title: "Why ActiveRain Is Working Even When It Fels Like It's Not." That post was about a book, Leadership And The New Science, complex adaptive systems, and the death of Newtonian business principles. My opinion has not changed.
Here's a video of the presentation. Thanks to Dakno.tv for capturing this session.
Yesterday, I finally got around to editing the kickoff presentation I did at REBarcamp Denver.
This morning I received this message in tweet from Jeremy Blanton: "Can you do me a fav & put that video up on AR?" I asked him to tell me why and the following was his response.
Jeff, I would like you to post your video for the members because this is something they need to hear & understand. Especially those that are just starting down the social media road.
Many hear about the new technologies & think that they have to learn & understand each & every one of them. When in all reality, they could be 100 times more effective if they just found one or two ways to effectively market themself in the social media realm and become masters of those.
Like you mentioned in the video, not everything that you or I do will work the same for that member. Each market has it's own specific niche that the each & every person needs to learn. While twitter might work well for an agent in California, it may not do a thing for an agent in Idaho.
This simple principle applied to social media stands true for any type of marketing someone does. Example:
In my area, open houses are extremely ineffective. Agents that do an open house here only hold them to pick up that one or two buyer leads that come in, or the agent does the open house to please the seller.
Just because open houses do not work for here, does not mean that they are a complete waste of time. I have spoken with several people from around the US that use an open house as their main form of marketing & it has been super effective for them.
I guess the main reason I would love this video share is this: Each market & each person have their own individual uniqueness. The key isn't trying to learn how to do EVERYTHING, but to learn what will work & become a master of those.
The following doesn't surprise me anymore. I've come to expect it. The reading list contained in the conversation below was generated in less than 30 minutes on Facebook. What's more, I expect that it might grow a bit from here. I think it illustrates the beauty of YEO. Because these relationships are real, I've come to trust these people that some of my "real life" friends affectionately call "faux friends." I'd strongly disagree.
I asked a simple question and the community was quick to respond. They spoke and I listened. I now have four of their recommendations in my iPhone Kindle app. And I'm looking forward to reading their suggestions!
The Question: I'd love to do some reading (books) while on vacation next week. Any suggestions?
The answers:
Brad Hanks at 8:54am June 18: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Quick read but good.
Jeff Turner at 9:14am June 18: Courtney, just purchased "The Wisdom of Crowds" as well. I think that will do it for next week. :) But don't stop Y'all! Great list forming here.
Sarah Nichols at 9:15am June 18: Well Jeff, I would suggest some classic novels but you just wrote that you don't read novels. Anyway, My favorite novels are: "The Good Earth' by Pearl S. Buck, 'Memoirs of a Geisha', all the Harry Potter books (You won't be able to put those down) - that should occupy you for a while if you opt to read a few fun novels.
Sarah Nichols at 9:20am June 18: Memoirs Of A Geisha is actually a very riveting novel that - while it glorifies the idea of being a geisha - also shows the pain, struggles, and mental anguish that these girls go through when they are torn from their families and thrust (and sold) into this life that they didn't choose.
Angie and I spent a good portion of the first segment talking about YEO and it's origins here on ActiveRain. Her take on the segment: "Jeff Turner coined one of his taglines by accident in a blogpost he wrote for Active Rain…SEO vs. YEO. Although Jeff admits that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is important, he purports that YEO (You Engaging Others) is by far the most essential factor in developing good content and relationships. If you focus on interesting conversations with others, you’ll likely win in all directions."
I thought I'd share the archives of those conversations with you here.
When I talk about the concept of YEO, You Engaging Others, the word "engaging" is used as a verb. This is not an accident.
Reading through the comment stream of my post last week, I occured to me that some were responding to the word "engaging" as an adjective. In it's adjective form, engaging means, "Interesting; charming; attractive, especially of a manner or behaviour." And while I think that's all well and good, that's not what I mean when I use the word "engaging."
To gain over; to win and attach; to attract and hold; to draw.
To gain for service; as, to engage friends to aid in a cause.
To employ the attention and efforts of
To embark in a business; to take a part; to employ or involve one's self; to devote attention and effort; to enlist;
For our purposes, whether or not you are "engaging" is judged by other peoples actions, not by yours. It is not judged by how charming you are, but by whether or not your followers take action on your behalf.
The path to engagement is through awareness and interaction.
Focusing on "engaging" as an adjective may get you to awareness and interaction, but only focusing on the the actions required to make it a verb will lead you to engagement, to someone taking action on your behalf.
One additional thought.
Often, engagement must look like this first. If you want others to engage on your behalf, engage on their behalf.
@HomesByThomas well, let's hope I find the time to write it tomorrow.
If you're being followed by a lot of people, how hard is it to maintain any sort of contact with those people?
Not very hard at all. Why? The answer lies in how we define "contact" and "engagement." And that is different for the 6,000+ followers I have, people who have chosen to "listen" in on my stream, than it is for the nearly 4000 people I follow, people I have chosen to "listen" to.
In this context, "contact" can have a good number of definitions. Each time I post a status update, I have the potential of making contact with some percentage of those 6,000 people. There are many variables that influence what that number will be at any given time. It depends on who is online at the time and their level of interest in me and the content being delivered. It also has to do with the number of people they're following (their own stream noise level) and the pace at which others are posting status messages at that same time.
If I'm consistently delivering value to, the contact happens as part of my daily activities. There is no extra effort required. I call this "ambient presence." My followers are aware of me and what I say and can choose to engage in a conversation or take action on a request, but I don't have to reach out specifically to anyone specific each time I want to make contact.
The more critical question would be this: "How do you maintain any sort of contact with the 4000 people you are FOLLOWING."
Why is it more critical? Because what I have said by "following" those people is this, "I am listening to you." I'm saying that I want to have a conversation with them, that I want to engage with them. I'm saying they are of interest to me. I don't follow everyone back for one reason and one reason only. I want the people I follow to know that I have a desire to engage with them at a higher level.
Thomas sent me a welcome message shortly after I followed him and about 12 hours before the question that prompted this post. I knew this because I got a txt message update using a tool that we built at Zeek for Ben Martin called Twext.me. Twext.me sends a summary of the "mentions" I receive on Twitter and alerts me to the possibility that I might want to go pay attention. Ben expressed his need for a tool like that, so we built it. And it's free. I needed that tool too, because it IS hard to pay attention to 4000 people. It's not as hard as one might think, but it's still hard.
There is a need for better tools to manage our online relationships.
If we are attempting to engage with thousands, this may seem fairly obvious. But even if we're trying to engage hundreds, we will not be as effective if we don't use tools like Tweetdeck and Tweetgrid to our advantage. That's a fact. But even if we do, we are missing systems that would allow us to understand who we have and have not talked with in any given period of time. Current systems don't allow us to see who has and has not acted on requests we've made. They don't give us the tools to help us assess our reach with the messages we're promoting. And while the social side of me says, "who cares. Just engage and let it take it's course." The business analytics side of me says, "it would sure be nice to know."
So, Thomas, if someone mentions me on Twitter, I know about it. I have all the tools necessary to make sure that I can respond and engage appropriately. What's missing are the tools to help me beter categorize the people I'm following and help me me identify who I've not spent enough time conversations with. Sites like twitTangle attempt to make it easier for me to conentrate on certain people, but they don't go nearly far enough.
But this has me wanting to ask a different question.
If you are a local real estate agent, why would you need to follow thousands? Having thousands follow YOU may happen whether you like it or not. If you're interesting, it will probably happen. But why would you need to follow thousands?
I saw this tweet a few weeks ago from @anitamatys. She said, "I am new to twitter and my son told me I needed to get 2000 followers." To which i replied, "Why did your son pick the number 2000? Are there 2000 people on Twitter in Klamath Falls?" I never received a response. She now has her 2000 plus followers, but she has only posted 11 updates. I glanced through a few pages of her followers and who she was following. There was no rhyme or reason to the people she had chosen to listen to. Not that it matters. She isn't really talking to anyone. i don't get it.
Again, do YOU (not the universal YOU, but you specifically) even need to maintain contact with thousands of people in order to be successful in the social media space? What are your goals with Twitter? Facebook? Does the number of people you're listening to support those goals or interefere with them?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Inspired by Rich Jacobson's "The View From Here," I decided to post a photo I took the other day as I was leaving a local park with my kids. I posted this on Monday at In The Viewfinder, but felt compelled to share it here as well.
I love sunsets. Love them. I go out of my way to see them. So as I put my kids into their car seats, I noticed the jungle gym silohuetted against the sun and happily pulled out my iPhone.
Happy Wordless (except for all these words) Wednesday!
Helping businesses grow by effectively using evocative Internet-based services. I am the President of Zeek Interactive and Founder of RealEstateShows.com.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
Posted by 
Angie and I spent a good portion of the first segment talking about YEO and it's origins here on ActiveRain. Her take on the segment: "Jeff Turner coined one of his taglines by accident in a blogpost he wrote for Active Rain…SEO vs. YEO. Although Jeff admits that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is important, he purports that YEO (
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.
;)
;)
