I Stumbled Upon This Flying Dog

There are more social media sites I am able to shake a stick at.  If you knew how incredibly proficient I am at stick shaking, you would know that is a bunch. Yesterday I wanted to look at the benefits of a fun little place called StumbledUpon.

It is a clever name, to be sure. This is the concept. Every day there are literally well over 13 - 14 new pages of content on the internet. Well Over! So what do you do if you don't have time to find the new stuff? You leave it up to the wisdom of the herd.

Much like herd of cattle, who are naturally predisposed to move towards pictures of cats with light sabers, the internet herds behave in a similar fashion. StumbleUpon allows one to create an account, then simply hit a button and they will go out and get a coral a page of fun from the world wide web and deliver it straight to you computer, free of charge, no tip required.

So imagine that tomorrow you wake up feeling absolutely sure there are all sorts of new bits of internet goodness, flying dogs, dancing marsupials, and lists of the mundane. You are thinking you might really enjoy a flying dog picture or a cup of mundane and so you sign on to StumbleUpon and hit the button. There it is! Fun...or not so fun.

Sometimes, one person's flying dog, is another person's bag of wet cheese, and so, depending upon your view, you may choose to 'Like' it or give it the old thumbs down. This is where the herd comes in. If the flying dog picture is well liked, then there is a greater likelihood that it will get delivered when someone hits the 'Stumble' button. If people don't care for it, then it is put out to pasture with the poorly cropped picture of something which is definitely NOT a Yeti.

When one signs up they are able to indicate preferences for which type of internet tom foolery they wish to be bombarded with, even going so far as to allow one to get serious news and political mumbo jumbo.  I seriously advise against getting serious news.

The question on your mind, aside from, 'Why am I reading this again?' is, 'How does this help me promote my brand,blog or pet snack bakery?' This was the question on my mind as well, 'How do I get my stuff into the mix and will it matter?'

I wondered over to my account, ExtremelyAverage and found the 'Add a site' button. Next I choose an old post from my blog at http://extremelyaverage.com and entered it into the system. It then asked me to add some tags, which is how it decides where to fling the post. There are 9.8 million people who use StumbleUpon, so I assumed that there might be a few who would find me.

My previous best day was 137 visits.  I had posted it at 3:30 pm and over the next 3 hours, 83 new people came to my silly blog.  The best part is that they choose to hang out a bit.  The bounce rate was 4.82%, and they viewed 9.89 pages per visit.  My final tally for the day was a new record at 232 visitors.  This is just shy of my friend who has had 270 visitors.  So I feel that I may be able to use StumbleUpon to pass him.  Of course, I have already showed him how to use it, so his old record may not be the mark to beat for much longer.  I digress.

The point is that it did drive some traffic to the site.  Is one test a statistically significant event?  No. But that is where you folks come in.  If you have arrived here via the link I put out in emails or on Twitter, please use the 'Like' at the top.  If you didn't like it, you are free to thumbs down me too, though that would be mean and cruel and likely lead to global warming, but it is really up to you.

I will then write a follow up post with the results.  Assuming that getting 'likes' helps, then we will see if the traffic to this site has changed.  Since this isn't my real blog, and I rarely get more than about 10 people per day, it should be a good test.  Until the next time, thanks for stumbling on over to my blog and if you should choose to join StumbledUpon, feel free to look me up, I will be the ExtremelyAverage cow in the herd, next to the blurry Yeti [not pictured]

Beware the Follosauras

If one spends any time on the internet super highway they may spot the follosauras roaming free. It is a strange beast to say the least. Their heads are often enormous. They will have big mouths and tiny ears; they may or may not have eyes. They are most comfortable hiding in the bushes waiting to see someone wonder past, when they do, they jump out of the bushes and say ‘Hey, follow me and I will follow you back!”

The unsuspecting traveler will see no harm, as the follosauras can be adorable, in the right light. So they will follow and presto they will have a new follower. The problem with the follosauras is that they don’t care what you have to say, they won’t read your tweets, retweet your messages or connect with you in any way.

The point of social media is to build relationships. The follosauras thinks that if they have 50,000 followers, they will have something of value, because all those people will be clicking on their links, passing along their wisdoms, and after a while, the money will start to roll in. What they will actually have is 50,000 other follosauri (the plural of follosauras), who also don’t care what the people they follow say, and are under the same delusions. It becomes a giant herd of people tweeting, ‘Hey, look at me.’ Sadly, none of the follosaurasi ever achieves much, because they aren’t listening to each other.

One might ask, what is the harm in allowing the follosauras to roam around with your legitimate followers? At present there isn’t much harm, other than cluttering up your data. Let me explain. I track my progress at relationship building by charting the number of followers each week. If I let the spammers and follosauri continue to follow me, it gives me a false sense of the number of real people I am connecting with. I certainly never follow these people, but I usually take it one step further. I block them. I don’t want them following me.

Let me explain why. When I see a tweet from someone that looks interesting, I will check out their twitter page. I want to know if this person is offering interesting links, if they have a blog that is worth reading, and if they might be someone I would like to get to know. It has become apparent that the number of followers alone isn’t a good measure of the quality of this person. The metric I use to judge a person, is their Followers to Listed ratio. Lists are a relatively new feature and have yet to be ‘gamed’. A list is a way to manage the people one follows. If you show up on a person’s list, then you are putting content onto twitter which they find to be valuable.

If a person has 10,000 followers, I would look at how many times they are listed. In general, someone who is listed by 500 (5%) of their followers is probably a good person. If someone has 50,000 followers and is listed 83 times, then it is a safe bet that nobody likes their tweets. They are only promoting themselves, they are a follosauras, and they have devoted their time to building up a really impressive number of ‘fake’ followers. They haven’t built up any friendships. They don’t care what you have to say, so why bother trying to connect with them?

The other benefit of ‘blocking’ the follosauras is that it is really fun. Ha!, you didn’t trick me into following you and clicking your tweets for your new get rich quick scheme. I win.

There is nothing wrong with following some people you don’t know each week. I do this too. Every week I try to find some new people, that I want to watch and read. I have found lots and lots of wonderful people this way. They are my friends now. I read their blogs, and some of them read mine. But if you only follow someone, to get your follower number to grow, then you just don’t get it. You are destined to spend a lot of time, tweeting to a huge room of follosauri.

Time For An Opinion

He sat watching tv as she came out of his bedroom. She was almost ready to go out for the evening and just wanted his opinion. She stepped infront of the 5th inning of the Cubs game and asked, "Does this blouse make me look fat?"

He looked at her, cocked his head to one side, gave it some thought and replied, "No, not at all. The skirt makes you look bloated though and your hair is a bit of dissapointment."

She left his home shortly there after and he was able to enjoy the rest of the game.

I am sure that most readers will spot the error here. It is obvious that he should have scheduled their date to begin after the game finished. This would have given him time to consider what she was really asking. She didn't want an honest appraisal, she wanted a good review.

Today I was asked, via a tweet, to review a website. I did, and found it to be ok. The color scheme was fair, the content was nice, but not terribly inspiring. There was a video, which didn't work. So I responded "That it was ok, but I was dissappointed that the video didn't work."

He thanked me and fixed the problem. So I returned and gave the video a look. It was almost 22 minutes long. The gentleman who asked me to 'check out his site and let him know what I thought' was the speaker. I have done competitive speaking in Toastmasters and when someone asks me what I think, I tend to try to give a fair appraisal. It is difficult to tell the tone of the request in a tweet. I truely believe that he wanted an honest critique. Of course, I may be wrong.

The gentleman speaks with confidence, had a better than average slide show presentation, and was able to get several laughs from the audience. There was but one aspect that prevented him from getting an A on his report card. In the twenty-two minutes of his presentation he said, 'uh' 'you know' or 'um' 79 times. This is common when an athelete is speaking, but should not be heard in a business presentation.

The video itself could have used a bit of editing too. The content was good, but a savvy editor could have easily paired it down to a more bite sized version. The length is quite a commitment in this day and age. I have watched many videos of that length on Ted, but those speakers are a bit more polished. It is my sense that the gentleman takes these speaking engagements very seriously and were he to work on this one aspect, could be a world class presenter.

So I give his site a C+ and his video a B+. But without the context of what I might consider an 'A' blog, this is a bit meaningless. There is another gentleman, named SteveBoese, who is a brilliant writer. I also discovered his blog today. I have actually followed him on Twitter for some time and never seen him promote it. In fact, it was someone else who sent out the link. http://steveboese.squarespace.com/journal/2010/4/17/unidentifed-nuts-possibly-filberts.html

This is the definition of great company blog, in my opinion.  The site is clean.  It is easy to figure out how to follow someone.  The writing has nothing to do with the company!  It makes me think that they really have it figured out.  It makes Steve look good, it makes his company look good.  It is, in short, quality.

So when someone asks for your opinion, take some time, maybe a sip of your coffee, and determine if they are asking for a compliment or an assessment.  If you do that, you may find that you are not spending as many nights home alone on the couch.  You will be out celebrating you success.

[Note:  This blog is mostly just a repository for thoughts and ideas I have.  It isn't very well designed.  Not terribly nice to look at, and I don't market it at all.  My real blog is treated with much more care.]

She Looked Great

She looked great. Her hair, jet black, long and straight, it went down to the small of her back. She was tall and lean, with a body that had been sculpted over hours and hours at the gym. When she walked into a room, all eyes found their way to her. She could talk at length about shoes and celebrity gossip, but sadly, that was all. She wouldn’t get a literary reference to save her life, she didn’t care about science, or politics, or news.

Have you ever had a chance to date someone that was so spectacularly attractive, that the mere act of looking at them, could burn out your retina, but they were also were too stupid to talk to?

If I had a nickel for every time this has happened to me, well I would have, let’s see…carry the one…hmm…absolutely zero cents. Ok, but I am sure it has happened to people. I know people that have been able to get the beautiful girl and stupid girl, mostly they ended the relationships, on occasion they married them, sometimes they did both.

I had a similar dilemma today, if I am permitted to use a very liberal interpretation of the term ‘similar’. I was followed by someone who offered tweets and a blog about blogging. I am interested in blogging. I love it. I don’t know much about it, as is obvious by this post, but I hope to learn more. Here is the problem. I have a general set of rules about who I will follow.

I want to follow people, which I can have a meaningful relationship with, the type of relationship where we learn from each other and help one another along the road of social media. If I see a Tweeterer who only tweets about their interests, I lose mine. If their follower vs. following ration is out of balance, the scale tips towards ‘no’. If they never tweet, it is ‘no soup for them’.

This person’s transgression was, admittedly not a cardinal sin, but it did bother me. Every tweet on their page had ‘Please RT’ as the start. The dilemma was that they were tweeting tips that were helpful. I saw two that seemed especially interesting.

Now I generally will either ‘follow’ or ‘block’ 90% of the people that follow me. There are very few people I find, when I check out my new follower, that have information that I don’t care about, but that they seem nice enough that ‘blocking’ would be mean. They may really want to follow my silly tweets, and since they seem decent, that is fine. Again, most people who seem like good people, are also interesting enough that I want to follow them.  The ones who are spammers, self centered, or just ‘don’t get it’, I don’t want to be among my followers and they get blocked.

 So what to do about Mr. ‘Please RT’? Do I follow or block? It is a tough call, and I can’t say I have decided, so I guess I will mull it over for a while. I would be interested to get anyone’s opinion on whether their sin is worthy of a block or not?

It is quite possible that I am being ridiculous in my bias.

After The Break

When recess was over we did a little bit of playing around with Twitter.  I explained how one is able to analyze other twitter users to find the ones who are actually interested in forming relationships.  Twitter, much like the internet, has thousands of people who think that every get rich quick scheme will work.  To some degree, the claims of thousands of followers is not a lie.

There are spammers who have programs that troll the twitterverse and all they do is follow people.  The point is that if they follow 1000 people, 100 people will likely follow them back.  The goal is to get thousands of followers and then use that to make money.  The problem is that if you have 10,000 followers who were found using this method, not a single one of them will care what you tweet about.  To build a brand you need to have people who are interested in what you have to say.

There isn't any way to fake it.  You have to genuinely care what  the people you are following are doing.  You have to want to see them succeed.  You must try to help.  If you are just out to make a quick buck you will fail, get blocked, or be accused of being a spammer and the fine folks at Twitter will take your account away from you.


So how do you tell the contenders from the pretenders?  That is the question.  I told Bob that he had to check a number of areas on their page.  The avatar, is it a custom avatar or the little tweeter bird?  The tweeter bird is one sign the person isn't serious about their account.  Next we looked at the following to follower ratio.  A good rule of thumb is to be wary of those that are greater than 1.5:1.  You might also avoid someone who is following 50 people, but has 10,000 followers, unless they tweet about a subject you are interested in.  If they do, then follow them and learn from their tweets.


The next stop on the tour was to check out the last time they tweeted.  If the person only tweets every few days, then they may be interesting, but they have little value in a brand building exercise.  What do their tweets consist of?  I have seen hundreds of people who are interested in the same things I am, but all of their tweets are only about their product or service.  They don't RT (re tweet) anyone's tweet.  They don't mention what they had for lunch.  They don't have conversations with their followers.  In short, they are not going to want to build a relationship with you.  They are out for themselves.


I also explained that a person who taked the time to write a clever or funny bio, is probably a pretty good choice to follow.  These people are generally engaging.  I like to see a person with a url for their blog too.  They get one brownie point for that.  The reason will become cleal later, but I didn't want to overload Bob with too much info.  The last area I check is how many times they are listed.  More is better.


When we were done I gave Bob some homework.  He was to follow 10 people, all of whom he didn't know.  He wanted to follow a bunch of his contacts from Linkedin, but I told him to hold off for a couple of days.  It is important that he sees how one can build relationships with people he has never met.  The power of Twitter is that one can develop friendships all over the world.


So tonight I popped in to see if he had done his homework.  Bob had followed 16 people.  He had 6 followers, but two of the accounts were mine.  So 4 new followers.  I gave a look at the followers and 1 of the 4 is a spammer.  He didn't tweet one time today.  So I have to give him a C + on the day.  He exceeded his following quota, did ok on followers, but didn't tweet.  That is the point of this exercise, to chat with the world.

The Bell Has Rung

When the bell rings it is time to be in your seats and facing the front of the class. At least that is how I remember the first day of school. It has been a long time though, and I wonder how my student felt.

 His name is Bob. Ok, that isn't entirely true, his name is not Bob, but we shall call him Bob from here on out. Bob is a very smart guy. He is in his late 60's, has a ton of connections within the TV and Publishing industry and now wishes to make a go of it in PR. He is understanding of what it takes to get people, to take notice of a company or product, is incredible.

His understanding of computers and social media in the 21st centuary is, well, abysmal. This is a very smart guy, who before tonight, didn't know that "control - c" was a short cut for copy.

He has been on Twitter and didn't get it. He is on Linkedin and surprisingly enough, not only gets it, but excels at networking. He has over 1000 connections. His situation is a paradox, wrapped in a riddle, covered in a glaze of uncertainty. As he told me tonight in an email, after we had finished our first session, "It has been a long time since I have been a student."

He found me on Linkedin. I had responded to his question in Answers. Apparently he liked my views and decided to send me an email. We talked a couple of times and I volunteered to bring him up to speed on all that social media has to offer. I make my living managing social media. I love to teach. And I find that when I do, I learn quite a bit myself.

So over the past weekend I formed a plan. It was only tonight that I decided to chronicle the journey here. I don't know where it will end, but I look forward to the sights along the way.

Day 1: We started by picking a Twitter handle for him. We found a good one and he signed up. He asked a good question right off the bat. "Should I use my main email?"

The answer to that one is no. Pick one, or get a new one, that can be your dedicated social media email address. Twitter was but the first stop on our journey, there would be many more tools and all of them would require an email to register.

I had taken his picture off his website and fixed it up in photoshop. It is important to have a professional looking picture on your Twitter avatar, because if you leave the tweet bird, people will assume you don't know what you are doing. Anyone serious about social media will change the avatar to their picture or something interesting immediately. It doesn't have to be a photo either, it must be destinctive and not look stupid or cheap.

This brought us to our first educational hurdle. It took me 2 minutes to get the photo ready and send it to him.  I then spent 20 minutes trying to explain how to save an attachment to his desktop. In this exercise, I ,the teacher, failed. I could not convey how to do it, in either Firefox or Chrome. We solved the problem by having me sign into his account and uploading the picture myself. Not the best solution, as he didn't learn how to do it, but he was getting frustrated and we both wanted to move on.

It was time for recess, so we took a brief brake, as I had to answer a call.