Twitter's Follow Friday- The Rules You Need To Know

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The Best Part of each Friday is when I log on to Twitter and see 52 links to posts about the rules for using social media. Many of these posts are written by self proclaimed Social Media experts who claim to make their living by advising businesses and people on their social media strategy. Color me dubious but I don't think that most of these experts are earning a living through their social media work.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe more than a few people have managed to capitalize on the social media gold rush. Maybe some of these experts have figured out a way to leverage the interest into something that pays. It wouldn't be the first time that I have been wrong, but judging by the ongoing posts by mommy bloggers about a desire to be paid for their work there is little evidence to suggest that I am.

It is probably unfair to poke fun at those who designate themselves as Social Media Experts but I almost can't help myself. What sort of qualifications does it take to become an expert in the nascent field of Social Media. Are universities offering a B.S. in Social Media. Can you earn a masters or a doctorate. Maybe you can. Maybe I should google it and see what happens. A little research is often the difference between a blogger who has credibility and those who do not.

But we'll save that discussion for a different day. Instead let's talk about Follow Friday and whether it serves a purpose or not. As indicated by its moniker Follow Friday is a weekly event on Twitter. In theory it is a way for your followers to find new people to follow courtesy of the recommendation that you offer by promoting them in your twitter stream. The real question is whether the theory translates into a practical and useful application.

During the past year or so I have read a number of posts by people who think that it doesn't work anymore. The central tenet of their complaint is that Follow Friday has turned into a time in which people churn out lists of names without supplying a reason why people should follow them. I can't say that I completely disagree with it. Sometimes when I review my stream it is nothing but names.

I am not pressed for time that works for me. I'll click on a name and review their profile to see if they're someone that I might be interested in following. But given a choice I'd much rather see a reason for following than just a name next to the Follow Friday hashtag. The extra effort lends more weight to your recommendation. It makes it a little bit more credible and enhances the likelihood that I'll follow them.
But I wouldn't say that this is a rule for using Twitter because I see Twitter the way that see most social media. There are no rules to refer to. At best there are guidelines that you can follow or to use tired business jargon, Best Practices.

For me it all comes back to a question of whether I am making effective use of Twitter and other social media tools as they relate to my personal goals. I am not sure that the current practice of tweeting lists of people for Follow Friday is doing that for me. It has some use for building a communal feeling among the daddy bloggers, but beyond that I am skeptical.

What do you think?

Posted via email from thejackb's posterous

The Great Twitter Experiment Explained

Want to know more about The Great Twitter Experiment? Press play and all will be revealed.

140 Characters- Teaching Boys To Be Men

(Hey Jeff Pulver, if you are ever in need of a character at a 140 Conference I can convert this post into a short presentation. Just saying. )

It is after midnight and the room is dark.  I am wearing an old headset, a sweatshirt and the shiny shorts that shone for the Shmata Queen. Don't ask, it just kind of worked.

I am listening to Desperado and imagining that the song was written about me. Hmm..., maybe I should be listening to Carly Simon sing You're So Vain. Anyway, the song catches my eye and my ears because of the combination of lyrics and music.

"Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table.
But you only want the ones
That you can't get."

It makes a lot of sense, the idea of being happy with what you have. It is not always easy to do and not because of social or cultural messages. Sure those things have an impact upon our thoughts so it would be foolish not to acknowledge them.

But what I think is a bigger issue is the challenge of understanding ourselves well enough to know what it is we need versus what it is we want. If you are one of the 17 long time readers of this blog you have seen the posts that tie into this in which I ask you to tell me what brings you joy, what makes you happy.

I ask those questions because I am truly interested but also because I have spent a lot of time searching my own soul for my answers. Some people grow up and know that they want to be doctors or astronauts. They have a dream and they follow it from the time in which they are little until they are so called grown ups.

I have had a lot of dreams. The first was to play outfield for the Dodgers. I still think about it, but at 40 I am slowly coming to accept that it is not very likely. Neither is playing for the Lakers. Both of those would have made me very happy and brought me great joy, but they aren't part of my reality.

Blogging is a pleasure and an outlet because it provides an easy way for me to vent and gain a greater understanding of myself. This is where I learned that I really am interested in writing a book. This is where I learned that I want to write a screenplay.

Twitter ties into this because of the restriction on characters. 140 characters, that is all you have to work with. It forces you to take your message and to simplify it. Trim the excess fat off that puppy and make it easy to understand.

Brevity isn't my strong suit so it is a great exercise for me.

It also ties in well with the lessons that I am trying to teach my children. The goal isn't to try and have more toys than the other kids. It is not to have better toys, but to be happy with what you have.

But when I think of this I am thinking about this from a long term perspective. What can I do to help the kids figure out what makes them happy. How can I help them find their passion because isn't that what we talk about. Don't get a job, find a career.

Figure out what you love and then figure out how to make money doing that. Now some of this might sound like goofy, feel good crap, but it is significant.

To be clear, I don't expect my kids to know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. I expect that their dreams will change and evolve the way that most of ours do. If they happen to be the exception I'll be happy for them, but really it doesn't matter that much now.

The important thing is to give them the tools to use to figure it out and then get out of the way. At least that is the general idea. I get to spend the next 100 years watching them to see how well they learned the lessons or conversely how well I taught them.

Either way it is an interesting ride.

How Twitter Has Impacted My Blogging Part II

Thirty days ago I wrote How Twitter Has Impacted My Blogging.  At the time I didn't have any metrics to use to measure its impact upon my blog. And a month later I still don't have raw data that I can crunch and massage and that's ok.

I'm the client and I am perfectly fine with the research methodology I conducted for this exercise. All I wanted to do was gain a better understanding of the practical uses of Twitter as they apply to me. Here is what I learned/confirmed.


My blog has always been used as a place for me to explore thoughts/feelings, write stories and share links that I think are interesting. Since making Twitter part of my daily routine I am less likely to put together short posts about some of the wacky stuff I find.

That's not say that those posts have been eliminated, they just occur less frequently than they did. Instead I tend to share that kind of stuff on Twitter.

There is a direct correlation between traffic here and Twitter. Since I became more active there I have seen an increase in the number of unique users that come by. This does not include former employers who stalk me here (yes, I see you in my stats) or assorted other sundry characters.

At the moment I have more than 1,100 followers. That number grows daily. I am curious to see what happens in six months. I expect that the growth in readers will continue, but we'll confirm that down the road.

On a side not since I monetized my Twitter stream I have noticed a steady flow of income. It is not enough to write home about but if it follows the same curve as followers and blog traffic it should cover my coffee and that is worth something to me.

How Twitter Has Impacted My Blogging

At long last the incredible story about how Twitter has impacted my blogging. Yes, the post in which the world famous TheJackB pulls back the curtain and demonstrates that the wizard is a just an ordinary man.

It is a thoroughly unscientific analysis. I joined Twitter in December of 2008, but didn't really start using it with any regularity until somewhere around March of this year. For those keeping track that left me a hair shy of my fifth blogiversary.

If I am not mistaken I have chosen to tweet and not blog about certain stories. I suspect that if I took a hard look I'd find that those were the stories that I classify as caught my eye. A collection of odd stories is really what it is.

That doesn't mean that I don't still blog about them, I just do it less frequently. If you consider that the pace at which I blog has slowed down it is reasonable to wonder if there is any correlation between that as well. It could be that it is more coincidental than anything else.

On a slightly different tack I have noticed that traffic to the blog has been progressively increasing. It seems to follow the number of Twitter followers.

So in the final unscientific analysis I'd have to say that I am pleased with Twitter.I find it to be an interesting source of information and a useful tool that I can rely upon.

How Many Blogs Do you Read?

I don't know about you but with the proliferation of all of the time saving devices I seem to have less time than I did before. In addition "real life" obligations have taken away a chunk of time that I used to have as well.

I just don't have time to read the way that I used to, or should I say that I don't seem to have time to read and comment as often as I'd like to.

Anyway, I am curious. How many blogs do you read and do you think that Twitter has had an impact upon that?

Twitter's Impact on Blogging

About a month ago I ran Tweeting About Twitter- One Blogger Speaks and shared some thoughts about Tweeting and asked for feedback about its impact upon blogging.

In the time since then I have conducted an imperfect, impartial and completely unscientific study in which it has been determined that Twitter has had a severe impact upon blogging and here is how.

Prior to Twitter many bloggers would have spent time writing posts about topics and issues that are important or of interest to them. However, the ease of being able to communicate with 140 characters has led many of them to abandon those posts. Instead of 500 words about why they like eating chocolate we are left with just a line or two.

In some cases this is a boon to the reader because it falls into the category of less is more. But in other cases it really isn't such a good thing as they are taking the fast and easy way out of producing a larger and more comprehensive post.

The owners of the Shack are going to continue to use Twitter and will continue to blog. But we are going to make an effort to try to continue to bring you the same 1,000 word posts you have come to rely upon. With any luck LeBron and Kobe will meet in the finals and you'll see a resumption of the cleveland bashing you have come to know and love.

Goodbye Ashton Kutcher

Forgive me, but I just don't feel badly about this. I am not saying that stalking isn't serious, but are you trying to tell me that you haven't already taken preventative measures.

Are you telling me, "Mr. Celebrity" that you are suddenly worried about this. Are you telling me that after you put yourself out there and sought fame that you are upset. Sorry, I just don't feel badly. Don't want you to get hurt, but try living in the real world with the rest of us.

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Ashton Kutcher -- Twitter's top tweeter -- warned he may pull the plug on his tweeting if the micro-blogging service partners on a reality TV show.

"It's all fun and games until somebody gets stalked," Kutcher wrote in a Twitter posting late Monday.

Variety magazine reported Monday that San Francisco-based Twitter.com had partnered with TV producers Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment on an unscripted show that would be "putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said there was "no official Twitter TV show" in the works, but "we have a lightweight, non-exclusive, agreement with the producers which helps them move forward more freely."

Kutcher used Twitter to post a link to a news report about the partnership along with this message: "Wow I hope this isn't true. I really don't like being sold out. May have to take a twitter hiatus."

The actor, who boasts a record 2 million Twitter followers, frequently posts updates that take fans behind the scenes of his life and his current movie production -- "Five Killers."

How To Blog, Use Facebook & Twitter

During the past two weeks quite a number of the people following me on Twitter have turned out to be experts in Social Media or SEO. For a moment I was puzzled by this and then I realized that they have done so because I am the leading expert on all matters. Jack sees all and knows all, just ask DovBear.

Anyhoo, the beauty of these various tools is that there really isn't one proper way to use them. However, it should be noted that while there may not be one right way, there are also several wrong ways to use them.

The most obvious pitfall from using these tools is being careful about what sort of information you enter into them. If you consider the viral nature of the net it is easy to imagine that anything you post in cyberspace can be viewed by millions of people and for an unknown duration of time.

It is not far fetched to suggest that the YouTube video you made at 12 could still be around when you are 50, 76 or 176.

The point being is that you need anytime you put something out there you need to consider the present and future implications of that post. Not only that but you also need to remember that you don't have complete control of what is posted.

For example friends of yours could post pictures of you in compromising positions. But for the purpose of this post let's limit the discussion to what you post. You need to assume that anything you post can be seen by current and future employers, friends, colleagues and others.

So don't post anything that you aren't prepared to discuss and or if needed defend. More to come on this in a later post.

Tweeting About Twitter- One Blogger Speaks

I signed up for Twitter in December of 2008 and have been exploring/examining its utility for myself since then. Midway through my fourth month of using it I don't have a good feel for whether it is really helped me.

There are aspects of it that I really like. It is a useful tool as a source of information as well as for disseminating it. But I suspect that it is doing more to hinder blogging than to help it.

Based upon personal experience I find that things I would have blogged about are getting swept aside and turned into a simple tweet. It appears to me that some other bloggers are experiencing the same thing.

However since I haven't conducted any sort of poll this might not be entirely accurate. I don't know.

I have also been careful not to let myself get too wrapped up in it. There is only so much time in the day and far too many things that serve as distractions or unintentional time sucking devices.

In fairness I should add that I feel a bit like I am in the middle of the dog days of blogging. I still do it and I still enjoy it, but it has lost a bit of the shine for me. We'll have to see if that is temporary state or something else.

What do you think of Twitter?

Has Twitter Helped/Hindered Your Blog?

A question for those of you on Twitter. Do you think that Twitter has had a positive or negative impact on your blog?