ThinkingSparks

9 things I do not get about social networking

Last month I did a selfimposed crashcourse in social networking. Read the books, the blogs, the tweets and there are just some things I do not get. Don't get me wrong I like to use social networks but from a personal and professional (marketer's) view I just don't get certain things.

Twitter:

1. Why is it practice to follow someone back who follows you? (Unless you are a celebrity of course, then you follow hardly anyone.) I really do not want to follow everyone who follows me. Especially if the tweets are limited to the summing up of daily activities. Who cares!? Some people you suspected  really had something interesting to say, turn out to be incredible bores...
2. I get that in order to promote yourself you want a lot of followers, but why would you want to follow 50.000+ people? You are never going to pay attention to all of them. It is very unauthentic and unbelievable. And as a personal brand (I hate that term) you definitely do want to be authentic.
3. And is it just me or are some tweets just unintelligble? One person I followed when I restarted Twitter again seemed to be using some kind of secret language. How inviting is that to read? NOT! I bet there are copywriting classes for Twitter already. Copyblogger probably has 10 or 43 tips on how to write catchy tweets.

Blogs:

1. Why are there so many blogs on social networking? There should be a good blog on that topic and then some other with different opinions, so as a reader you can form your own opinion. All these thousands of blogs seem to blur into one another and they all say the same. The repeat themselves and others. How do you stand out if you parrot one another?
2. And what is with the incredible number of posts (or tweets for that matter)? The advice from all those blogs on social networking mentioned in (1) is that you have to be prolific. For me as a reader it is about the quality not about the quantity. I do not want to open my Google Reader to 4 new posts per blog every day. It gives me less time for a wider variety of blogs. I think consistency and a regular frequency are more important than quality. Think about it. It is like bombarding your audience with (advertising) messages.
3. Some SM blogs suggest that you have to give your audience what they want. How does that match with working from your own values, your vision, your expertise, the story you have to tell? Of course you want to have an audience, but should you change the content you think is worthwhile because you do not have an audience? You want to remain true to yourself now don't you? And if you have no audience then there is no demand. Tough but a fact of life. Go do something else.
4. Whatever happened to trackbacks? I loved Trackbacks (after I finally understood what it was and how it worked) but they seem to have disappeared while they are such good ways to connect on content.
5. Blogs filled with absolute truths are being presented. Things are being claimed and stated for which there is no proof. It is all anecdotal or based on lifelong experience. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but combined with # 6 there are some uncontrollable "memes" being created. Blog lemmings! Who would want to be a blog lemming?
6. The last thing I wonder about is the critiquelessness of it all. Everyone seems to have had the same feedback training. It is all so positive that I can almost smell the roses coming out of my laptop. And stardust too. And happy thoughts.... All these readers seem to gobble up what they are being fed. An independent mind or a realistic critique are very seldom seen. One does rather not say anything. So comments vary from: "this is so deep", "this is excellent", "this is the best I have ever read".... Really? Go to a university library and read a book.

Maybe someone can explain it to me. Give it your best shot I say! And if you do not agree, please vocalize it!

Toot!

Some time ago I started receiving emails from different organizations. The emails paid a lot of compliments to my expertise and my great knowledge. The first email I clicked away. More emails followed. And the more they came the more I started to believe what they said. Being Dutch and having had a calvinistic upbringing can be somewhat of an obstacle to overcome in tooting one's own horn.

Always being the critical one, I wondered how all these people all of a sudden had come to the conclusion that I had such a wonderful mind. The answer came with the umpteenth email. Apparently my blog was listed in a Top 1250 english-language marketing blog list at Advertising Age.I checked it out and indeed I was an position eleven hundred and something. I never checked it again until today. And I am happy to say that today my blog is moving up and now ranked #822.

The method of ranking can be found here. I am proud to say that I score high on Todd Points (11 out of 15) and high on Collective Intellect (27 out of 30). The latter calculates the author's authority on the topic. Toot!

I'am happy.

And just a little bit proud.

And ambitious.

And for the moment a bit less Dutch and calvinistic.

Too productive - 2

I have been productive the last half year, but not here. Sparkers did an assignment for the City of The Hague and I became a partner in an import/export company FreshPepper. We sell the food supplement Vital Greens; the Australian market leader in the category "Greens". Greens are food supplement formulas consisting of phyto nutrients.

In the mean time I have taken on another assignment doing employer branding so I am still being productive. Just on other fronts.

More thoughts on FreshPepper, employer branding and the topic of my thesis to come....

Too productive

At the moment I do not have too much time keeping track of my favorite blogs. I try not to have too many of them because too many feeds just do not fit into the time I have. However, the blogs that I have selected, produce so much that it is too intimidating (click on the picture to see the 467 unread...) to open my Feedreader. And when I do I simply close it again as not to be confronted with so much, too much information.

What does that mean? Is it overkill on the part of the productive blogger? Are they becoming ineffective because of it? Or should I have a different approach or strategy? Fewer blogs I subscribe to?

Suggestions anyone?

Molblog

It has been quiet for the last month. I have been "auditioning" for Molblog (Dutch only) over the last month. Molblog is the Marketing On Line weblog of the Dutch journal on marketing. It is also the most popular blog in the Netherlands.

Molblog is different from ThinkingSparks as the latter will try to give food for thought of just present my questions on certain topics. Molblog has much more of a signaling function of what is going on in marketing at the moment. Interestingly enough my posts that come close to what I do on ThinkingSparks generate more comments then when I post current marketing happenings.

My auditioning was rewarded with a spot on the molblog team. :-) It means I have to divide my time between those two blogs. So after this month long break, I will be back.

Citations and trackbacks make knowledge go round

In the university newspaper there was an article on the academics vs. pseudo academics. According to the author the problem is that university academics didn’t go out enough and pseudo academics are taking their place instead with books, articles and speaking opportunities.

The main concern was that these pseudo academics pretty much can say anything they want. Their work is not peer reviewed and so the quality of their work is not guaranteed. The concept of peer reviews in academic publishing consists of anonymous reviewers commenting and giving feedback on a paper that has been submitted for publication.

I can understand the frustration expressed in the university newspaper. The intended audience doesn’t listen, or in this case doesn’t read, but reads someone else’s work, being either brilliant or BS, instead. That probably happens a lot and not only in the academic world. Think of performers who really aren’t the best singers (Madonna) around, but become bigger stars than the talented singer/songwriter.

But how bad is it really to read material from authors that have not been peer reviewed? When something is not peer reviewed it doesn’t mean it is not worth reading. It just hasn’t gone through a peer review process. It also doesn’t necessarily mean that its contents are worthless. A lot depends on the reader(s) I would say. Eventually it is the reader who values the content or not. Of course not every reader is critical enough and I sometimes see authors being hyped while I don’t really get what the fuss is about. Sometimes I read publications or posts that I know to be wrong, while other people think it is just great and even spread the (faulty) word through trackbacks. Fact is that subjective quality is in the eye of the beholder. The beholder being the reader.

In academia, one of the ways to check for quality is the number of times an author’s work has been cited. Citations make the academic world go round as it is an indicator for the quality of the author, the article, the academic institution and the academic journal and its publisher. Academic publishers and libraries have been developing and offering access to citation indexes to subscribers and members of libraries.

Now Amazon apparently has such a feature too. Seth Godin posted on it. I think Godin is giving Amazon too much credit though. This feature is nothing more than an application of the principle of citation indexes that have been around in academic publishing for a long time. On Web of Science (subscribers only) I can check exactly how often mr. Godin is quoted. The good thing about this feature is that this indicator of quality is apparently applied in the non-academic world.

There still seem to be two worlds of knowledge though. In order to make that one world there should be interaction. Fact is that academics interact in their own world of academic publishing. This whole thing of academic publishing is an interesting thing. The idea behind it is that academics have a dialogue with each other through their papers in academic and scientific journals. Their university requires them to publish. They are rewarded when they do. Scientific publishers do not pay the academics for their work; they get the stuff for free. The publishers in turn sell their journals for $ 1000 a subscription to university libraries, who have to offer this material to their staff as well as their students. It is a circular supply chain really! This supply chain has been around for quite some time now. As I said: Citations make the world go round. Some parties have too much to lose.

The possibilities the internet offers so far haven’t seduced academics to break this chain and to directly interact with their audience instead. Even though blogging and trackbacks offer the same as academic publishing does. Trackbacks really are citations too. Both of them make knowledge go round!

If you can't write it....

...you don't know it.

It is a short quote I always used to have on my desktop. After I got a notebook it got lost. For me the quote is so true though. Writing structures my thoughts.

Blogging for 3 months now I realize that I have a only small number of subscribers and that hardly ever I receive comments or trackbacks, but I am having so much fun doing it!!!!!

It is fun and it helps me think. So if no one reads it, it is still worthwile. Even according to Seth:-)