Why The Connection Itself Matters Most in Social Media: 30 minute talk about the things we don’t like to admit as human beings and why they are so important.

Mentioned:

JibberJobber.com
score.org’s 2009 Score Awards
@shashib on Twitter

(wrote the post from my iPod so hyperlinks will have to come later.)

27,000 visitors from StumbleUpon in one week is my personal high score for generating social media traffic. 40k is my overall best in one day.

But if you ever look at my SU profile, by all outward appearances, I’m a pretty average user.

I don’t have 1000 subscribers, like Andy Beard, who can rock my server with one stumble.

And my both my Stumbling record and number of reviews certainly pale in comparison to someone like Zaibatsu.

And yet. Whether you’re talking social media or online news site, online reputation management or offline social networks, I seem to have a knack for knowing where all the pressure points are, and where to apply – or relax – force, to get the coverage that I want, and to pass that on to my customers and clients.

You can’t buy social media traffic, with the exception of Stumble Ads and Facebook Ads, which really aren’t the same as what I’d call social media traffic – even under those circumstances, it’s just not the same.

It’s the same way you can’t buy good vibes. Either you can get them, or you can’t. You can’t pay someone to genuinely feel good about your products, services, and customer support. Though I’m sure in this economy, lots of people would fake it really well if you offered them the right price.

As I get closer to retiring, I’ve wondered- and studied, what it is that I’m doing differently , more and more frequently. What  am I dong in half an hour on StumbleUpon that has the same effect as what some others do in 40 hours?

As it began to dawn on me, I started to take notes. This excerpt is from a PDF guide I wrote about what I have logically concluded, and repeatedly tested, to be the Secret to my Success in drawing social media traffic and generating massive traffic in general. [download it | pdf].

For the next 24 hours, I’m not going to ask for your email address or anything else in order for you to read it. After the opening day sale is over, there’s no more free peeks – you’ll have to give somethin to get somethin. wink wink.

Have a Happy Weekend. If you’re in the DC metro area, remember to stop by Faith Gifts and Stationery in Laurel Mall across from the Macy’s to visit me between 11 am and 2 pm. You can corner me and ask me questions about your web site.

I hardly ever watch TV live, and today was no exception. But Mashable has a portion of today’s Twitter appearance featuring @Oprah and @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher), who reached 1 million Twitter followers, beating @CNN, so I ended up seeing the Twitter-relevant part of the show in a fairly timely fashion after all.

Here’s the video:

After the Twitter on Oprah post, Mashable posed some critical questions:

Do you think Oprah’s audience will flock to Twitter? Moreover, what will the impact of Twitter becoming so mainstream?

My comment was getting way too long, so I made a new post out of it.

Because of the way it was presented in the first of the videos from the show, I think yes, some of Oprah’s followers will flock to Twitter.

Not in a mass migration of millions, but certainly the type of thing we saw with people who joined Twitter to follow the election, and in particular, @BarackObama. What Ashton said about the ability for one person to go up against the news is appealing to a lot of people from business, personal and activist perspectives.

(And yes, only 6% of CNN’s audience uses Twitter, but that’s still about 2 million people. Four years ago, how else would any celebrity talk directly to an audience that size in their own voice, at a cost of near zero?)

Will they all expect to get a million followers? No, and they don’t need to, but the opportunity to have your voice heard, to be able to influence decision-making in an area you care about, or thought leadership on a topic you’re interested in, is a powerful thing.

The second question was even more interesting to me. What’s the impact of Twitter becoming mainstream? Of course dollar signs danced in my head. I’m a Capitalist little piggy, what do you want from me?

Seriously speaking, once Twitter and other Social Web properties go mainstream, we lose things and we gain things, as always.

And yes, one of those things is a larger audience to indirectly (!) peddle our wares to, for the business person. It means more people to get to join our causes to the activist. It means more of our friends from the non-virtual world may be reached via Twitter, which is really powerful since we can take Twitter with us on our cell phones.

We may lose the intimacy of the Twitter community, but we’ve been losing that bit by bit since Twitter began, and people started using it for different things and in different ways than some of us were used to, particularly this last year. It’s logical – the more people there are surrounding any given thing, the less intimate it becomes. It’s possible to feel and experience intimacy as part of a crowd when you’re one of many thousands or millions, but it’s more plausible the fewer those numbers are.

The thing to remember about Twitter though, is that you’re in control of the volume of the signal and the ratio of signal to noise.

You decide who to follow.
You decide who to return-follow.
You decide how long you’re on Twitter and to what end.

Sure, you can’t force people not to follow you but you can block them. And since the people who care if and why you follow know they have to keep you interested to retain you as a subscriber, they work harder to give you what you want. In the end, that’s good for everyone, I think.

People who we believe don’t “get it” will ultimately fail at capturing our attention. We’ll be inconvenienced by their attempt to overwhelm with noise but not for long.

Besides, as long as they leave Favrd alone, we’ll all know who the cool people to follow are, right?

OMG DO THEY KNOW ABOUT FAVRD????

(Just kidding.) What do you think is going to happen? Respond below or click the retweet button, and I’ll follow the discussion back to Twitter.

It seems to me that if you can learn how to be the life of the party, you can learn how to work the social media scene. Let’s think of it as a party then, and do a run down of how it would work out.

Stage One: You Go to the Party

If you’re smart, you’ll be invited, or better yet, throw the party. The party of course, meaning the place where you socially interact in the social media arena.

On a social news site, the party might get started when you submit a link, or a party in progress might be a story you vote on that’s rising in popularity.

Stage Two: You Find the People Who Like
What You Like

As Rob Gordon says in High Fidelity, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” So find the people who have the same tastes as you, follow what they’re voting for, or saving, or where they’re hanging out.

One safe basis of friendship is commonalities.

Stage Three: You Mirror and Create Rapport

You know how you meet someone knew and start picking up their expressions, etc. When you’re meeting people online, we also tend to try on aspects of other people’s behavior. You’ll suggest things to each other, or catch yourself imitating one of the Alpha Populars.

There’s actually a scientific background to this. In Unlimited Power, Anthony Robbins talks about how to use rapport to build connections to other people.

Stage Four: You Make a Gesture

Eventually, you’ll start to drill down to your favorite folks, and in natural course, do something for them. It’s partially the paying of an imagined social debt – when people enrich our lives by sharing information we enjoy, we often feel like reciprocating.

That’s one of the reasons the free ebook still works so well to get newsletter sign-ups. (It’s email that’s failed, not the email marketing techniques. But I digress.)

Stage Five: The Gesture is Appreciated,
or Even Reciprocated

When you get feedback from shared links, when you are thanked for your gesture, or the person you hooked up does you some kind of solid back, you’ve definitely got the basis for a relationship.

It’s a two-way street.

Stage Six: You Are Friends

At least in the online sense of the phrase. This is the time when you can send a link out of the blue even if you haven’t spoken in a few days.

But remember the most important part of a relationship is maintaining it. Don’t take this new connection for granted, and keep doing the thing that made you become familiar to each other in the first place.