Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

I keep seeing the same mistake being made over and over: Companies keep choosing their social media department based on how many Twitter followers or Facebook friends they have.

It starts when an executive hears of social media and decides that his company needs an offering in that space. The executive soon discovers that nobody really has any experience in social media, but they’ve got to pick somebody. It’s then that you can see them frantically running around the office asking “Who’s got a Twitter account?”

In a world where we have metrics for everything it can be easy to simply look at friends or followers as a metric for determining social media prowess – and that’s where companies get into trouble.

Twitter and Facebook friend counts are nothing more than an elaborate measurement of virtual penis size. That’s really all they’re good for. I’ve talked about why friend counts are bad years ago, but nobody was even talking about social media back then. (those problems still exist by the way.)

The bigger problem with friends is engagement. As I discussed last year, the reason twitter bots are so effective is that people blindly re-follow anybody who follows them. If I want to get 1000 facebook friends I simply have to go friend request about 5000 people. It’s a safe bet that 1/5 of them will approve my request. That percentage is even higher on Twitter. In my tests I’ve seen about a 40% re-follow rate.

Engagement is what matters. How many of your followers actually reply to you? How many of them comment on your posts? What percentage click on links that you tweet? Go ahead and ask your social media person – I bet they don’t have any answers for you.

It’s not just companies that are falling into the “friend fallacy” though – individuals are even more to blame. Just look at how people describe themselves on their twitter biographies and you’ll see what I’m talking about. There’s a plethora of self proclaimed gurus out there. (personally, I prefer to call myself an expert rather than a guru.)

In fact, many of the people I consider experts (myself included) are taking an opposite approach to followers. Not only do I not follow people back unless they’re interesting, but I also block the spam bots and low-quality accounts from following me. It keeps my followers and people I’m following low, but it also keeps them highly engaged. My signal to noise ratio is great too. You won’t find many other people who do this though, as they like to point to that high friend count to re-enforce their “guru” status.

Whenever somebody professes to be a social media guru I always ask them the same questions: How much money are you making from Twitter? What’s the lift generated by your Facebook account? What metrics are you using?

Many social marketers will quickly change the subject when you start talking about actionable analytics and ROI – and for good reason too. See, the fact is that many of these Gurus have no idea how to measure their contribution to social media nor do they want to. Measuring their value may just show them how small their virtual penis actually is.

Social media, like all marketing campaigns, needs to be well thought out. You should have a clear goal, a plan in place to achieve that goal, and a method of measuring the results. Plus, it can take a long time to growing a following of real people if you don’t buy tiktok views for your TikTok posts.

Just like you wouldn’t undertake an advertising initiative without a plan, you wouldn’t hire an advertising agency based on “number of dollars they spent” or a PR person based on “number of press releases submitted,” so why on earth would you hire a social media person based on how many friends or followers they have?

It’s time we stop comparing the size of our virtual penises and start looking at metrics that matter. Besides, we all know that my e-penis is bigger than yours anyway.

Lot’s of people are busy talking about Twitter’s growth and their journey to profitability. There’s plenty of discussion about new features and lots of questions about business models, but nobody’s talking about what the future Twitter account might look like. I’ve got a few ideas, and they don’t bode well for Twitter’s business model.

If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know that I recently picked up a WiThings Scale. If you don’t, the WiThings scale is a scale with a wifi card built in. It automatically tweets out my weight every time I step on it. It even keeps shareable graphs of my weight so that everybody can see how Fat I’m getting. Since you’re all curious I’ll go ahead and share it here:

So what am I getting at? Well, my scale tweets. My foursquare account Tweets every time I check in somewhere. My Blippy account will soon Tweet every time I make a purchase. DailyBooth Tweets every time I upload a picture. Do you see where I’m going here?

A good percentage of my Tweets will soon be auto-generated by other services that I use. My Twitter account is taking “what are you doing” to the next level and not even requiring me to tell it what I’m doing. It just hooks into everything else and does the rest.

Twitter is becoming less of a social network and more of a social infrastructure. Entire new startups are popping up that use Twitter as an underlying platform. There’s a shifting trend away from using APIs and instead just hooking up services via twitter. It’s insanely easy to post to and read from Twitter, and posting publicly even builds more awareness for your application; so why not use Twitter instead of a private back end connection?

It won’t be long until a good percentage of everybody’s tweets will be auto generated from some other service. What will happen to Twitter then? Will we still monitor it the way we do now, or will we simply rely on some other application to pull in the data and filter it for us? I’m betting the latter.

It’s only a matter of time before everything in my house is Tweeting. The TV will tell you what I’m watching, iTunes will tweet what I’m listening to, Xbox will tweet my kill/death ratio in Call of Duty, and Graywolf’s oven will tweet what’s cooking and how long until it’s done.

In fact, I wonder how hard it would be to hook up a wifi card and volume displacement gauge to my Toilet…..

If you want to learn how to network as a financial advisor, then you have to start with social networking. I’ve got an account on almost every service you’ve never heard of, and even the ones you have heard of. When a new social media service launches you can bet I’ll have an invite waiting. When somebody at the office has a social media question, I’m the guy they turn to.

But I still haven’t found a social network that does what I want a social network to do.

I list my friends on Facebook. I tell the world what I’m working on at LinkedIn. I tell them what I’m doing on Twitter, where I’m doing it on FourSquare, how much I spent on Blippy, and even show them pictures on DailyBooth. ( feel free to friend me on any of these – except FaceBook – I keep that just to a close circle of friends. )

But why can’t I do all of that on one service?

Let’s take a common chore for example: Business meeting at Olive Garden. To share this event with the world I’d first go to LinkedIn and update my ‘working on.’ Then I’d head over to Twitter and post something like “never ending pasta bowl at olive garden is going to wreak havoc on my new years resolution.” When I got there, I’d check in on the FourSquare app on my iPhone. I may even use my phone to take a picture of my huge plate of pasta and upload it to DailyBooth. When I pay the bill with my American Express card, it will show up on Blippy the next day. All of the details of my trip have been recorded using various social networks, but it was a pain in the ass to track.

Then there’s the whole issue of who I went to lunch with. Everyone has a LinkedIn, but only 2 of the 4 people had a Twitter and I’m only following one of them. They’ve never heard of DailyBooth, and only one other person has a FourSquare account. In fact, he’s the Mayor of that Olive Garden. Tying them all together to the event would be a nightmare. There’s just no way to do it.

What I want is one social network that encompasses all of that. From one App on my iPhone I should be able to snap a picture, type in a description, tag all my friends, and upload it. It will use the GPS to know where I’m at. Anybody following the feed will see a thumbnail of the picture with a “lunch meeting at Olive Garden” description and a nice clickable link that takes them to a full resolution picture, names and links to profiles of attendees, a Google map of the restaurant complete with tips, how much I spent, a place to comment, a listing of all the mentions and replies to this event, and links to other recent events at this place.

It should all be in one place, nice and neat, and fully encompassing all of the details of my lunch experience. Instead, I’ve got it all spread out over various social networks that most of my friends and colleagues haven’t even heard of. Furthermore, I’ve got different login names on some of the services. Sure my Twitter, Blippy and FourSquare are all RyanJones but on LinkedIn I go by Jonesy because it already had a RyanJones. My Facebook name is something completely different. There’s no way an average person could tie them all together if I wanted them to.

So Why Don’t I Build It? While all of this data is technically public, it’s not entirely open. Not all of these services have RSS feeds, Widgets, or APIs that somebody could pull from. Furthermore, I don’t really control any of the data on these services – they do. Trying to hack together a usable service from all of the existing social networks is possible, but not practical; and it doesn’t even begin to address the fact that I’d still need to have an account on each of them.

This is a problem that somebody like Twitter, Facebook, or Google need to address in order to fix. Only they have the reach and user base to truly build an awesome social network. Adding another social network on top of the established ones doesn’t seem like it would solve this problem. Ideally somebody like Twitter needs to grab the horse by the reins and start implementing all of these features. They’ve already got the infrastructure, and all of these features have already been coded by somebody – they just haven’t been properly integrated. Once they’re integrated, then the cool stuff can begin.

Think about not only being able to easily update everything, but about all the information you can glean from updates on such a system. Who else bought what I’m buying, where did they buy it? did they get a better deal? I mentioned all of that earlier on my Blippy post, but you can take it to the next level when you incorporate more data than just pricing.

Sure, it may seem pretty lame when I talk about lunch at Olive Garden, but what about events like SES where tons of people are all thrown upon an unsuspecting downtown area for a few days? You could get some pretty cool who’s doing what with who when and where style recommendations. In a new town? No problem, show me what other people who came here also did. Oh, wow people who ate at this pizza place also caught a movie at this cinema? People who ate at this chic BBQ joint also visited this bar and later rented this movie on Netflix? I should check that out. (NetFlix doesn’t realize it yet, but they’re sitting on a huge social network potential too.) You can easily see where this is all going. Then there’s all the new possibilities involving new kinds of ad targeting. Done right this system could be a marketer’s dream AND provide useful, relevant ads that people actually want to see.

Social media right now is fun, but only when you put it all together do you unlock the true potential. I’m rather excited to see where social media goes in the next few years. One thing is for sure though: wherever it does go, I’ll be there.

So I’ve been playing with Blippy over the holiday break and while I find it to be pretty fun, I think it’s missing a few features that can make it really useful.

If you haven’t heard of Blippy yet, I’d sum it up by saying it’s Twitter for purchases. Basically, you tell Blippy your Amazon, Netflix, Blockbuster, iTunes, GoDaddy, WineLibrary, Zappos, Audible, SeamlessWeb or Credit Card information and it then automatically posts updates of what you bought and how much you spent on it.

If you already have a Blippy account, my username is RyanJones

Yes I know it’s just another way to compare e-penis size, but it’s actually pretty cool to see what people like Matt Cutts and Jason Calacanis are actually buying wasting money on.

Here’s a screenshot of some of my recent purchases. The red boxes are mine, I’ll explain why below the picture.

You can see here that Blippy pulled in data from my Netflix account (I still haven’t watched that movie yet) my GoDaddy account, and my iTunes account. If you look closely though, you’ll see two charges to GoDaddy for $64.95 That’s for one of my servers. In reality, I only paid that $64.95 once – but since I added both my GoDaddy account AND the credit card that’s tied to it to Blippy, Blippy is reporting it as two different purchases. It doesn’t know that the $64.95 charge from GoDaddy and the later $64.95 that shows up on my credit card are in fact the same purchase.

Since I use that same card on Amazon and iTunes, Blippy is also double reporting those purchases. One solution might be to simply just tell Blippy about my credit card and nothing else, but then it won’t show the details of the Amazon and GoDaddy purchases. Likewise, if I remove my credit card then you won’t be able to keep tabs on my bar tabs. Hopefully Blippy figures out a way to treat these double purchases soon.

Other Features I’d Like:
I’d like the ability to make my profile public so that even people without Blippy accounts can see it. Blippy is still invite only and doesn’t have many users. By letting people make their accounts public, they could probably build up a lot more interest.

I’d also like widgets! I want to show my purchases on my blog, but without even so much as an RSS feed I’m stuck.

It would also be cool if Blippy could cross post to Twitter and FriendFeed.

They’re probably already working on it, but I want Netflix style recommendations. If I bought something on Amazon, I want to see stuff like “3 followers also bought this” and “people who bought this also bought this thing here…” That could be extremely useful when it comes to things like video games, books, or music.

I want stats! Mint.com does a great job of tracking my spending so I don’t need too many details out of Blippy, but some basic spending stats broken down by date and website would be pretty neat.

Overall, I think Blippy could be a fun service. Right now it just needs more users and features to get it to that point. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.

By the way, if you’ve made it this far, I still have a couple of Blippy invites left that I can give out. If you want one, and I know you, feel free to leave a comment here. Make sure you put your real email (it won’t show on my blog, but I’ll use it to send the invite)