A question cropped up at Gist a few weeks ago (disclaimer: Gist is a client) about whether it would be useful to import 20,000 Twitter followers into Gist. Would importing that many people be useful, or just noise? The larger question is: when is it okay to dilute your social graph? I think the answer is when you start to approach your professional career as a mini-marketer of your personal brand. In other words, when you look at social networks as a source of customers and friends. This is something a lot of people are starting to do. What I don’t know is if it will become a necessity for getting ahead (due to the competition).

Social networks have been around since the late 90s, but the term “social graph” became much more pervasive with the launch of the Facebook platform. A “social graph” is basically a model of a network of relationships. Facebook tries to model your real-life relationships. LinkedIn attempts to model your professional relationships. Twitter is known for lightweight asymmetrical (follower and following) relationships.

Each of these services’ attempts to represent your social graph are inaccurate. Your Facebook friends aren’t necessarily your real friends. Your LinkedIn connections aren’t always your real-world business connections. Your Twitter followers (and friends) often have little or no relationship to you in the off-line world.

With each service, there is an oversimplification of the weight (or strength) of the relationship (high school friends aren’t really friends). Also, since it is so easy to add connections, the important connections can be hard to find. However, each service does have its own unique ways to “weight the edges” of the social graph. Facebook seems the most personal. If two people are in a photo together the relationship can be inferred to be stronger. LinkedIn has references to companies where you may have worked together. Twitter has at-replies, re-tweets, and lists.

I’m also fascinated by the ability to game these services. For example on Facebook you could target specific interest groups, participate in discussion and become friends with the members of the group. LinkedIn has “Open Networking” groups that exist solely to “connect” with members of the group. Twitter is the easiest to game, because it is a well known that about 40% of the people you follow will follow you back. There is even software to exploit the follow-back phenomenon.

Why is this dangerous? This is dangerous because perception is everything. A colleague was astonished by someone who had 25,000 twitter followers. In fact, this was a person who was also following 25,000 people. In this case thousands of followers doesn’t indicate authority, it indicates a person gaming the system.

Similarly, having thousands of LinkedIn connections doesn’t mean you are a fabulous famous person. More likely it means you have spent hours cultivating your list. Social networks will always make it easy for users to invite their friends and create more connections. Therefore, they will always be game-able.

To be honest I empathize with the gamers a lot. Some of us just prefer to spend hours online finding new friends rather than doing it in real life. I think it is fun and useful to be aware of these techniques, and use them to when appropriate to boost your standing. Real world networking – speaking at a conference, shaking hands and having conversations – always trumps digital networking, but it takes much more effort. To achieve equal footing with digital connections, you need more of them.

When you start seeing your friends, connections, and followers as customers and friends, it follows logically that you should have as many as possible. At that point you will appreciate the social networks from a new perspective, and start optimizing for numbers rather than depth. Large numbers of followers means every link you drop will get more clicks. On LinkedIn, every search performed by others is more likely to reveal you as the expert. Having more connections (even weak connections) does have a unique value.

I’ve written previously about how to promote yourself with social media. This post is intended to revisit and update that, but sadly, I haven’t come up with a system I’m completely satisfied with. I’ve been inspired by Ed Dale’s approach to the creative process, leverage, and market leadership (See video #124 of this podcast). Stephen Fairley’s social media blueprint for law firm marketing, and also Perry Belcher’s Social Media Matrix.

Requirements for a better system for sharing stuff online:

* Predictability: I need greater confidence in what will be the text of the tweet. For example if you relay an RSS feed to Twitter, you never know where it will be truncated.

* Inbound speed: Robert Scoble has given up Google reader for Twitter as his primary source of news, claiming Google Reader is “too slow”. I believe he meant the speed of the actual user interface not the delay fundamental to the polling nature of RSS. I think this is a bit premature due to the length restriction on tweets and the amount of great content that is still only accessible via RSS that is not automatically syndicated to twitter.

* Channels: I also have to consider different audiences by audience on twitter is a very tech heavy crowd, where is my audience on Facebook is more family and friends which have slightly more general interests are so interested in establishing myself as an alternate geek on Facebook but I don’t want to alienate my friends with excessively technical links. Another problem is that not everything a bookmark do I necessarily want to share.

* Leverage. I want to be able to share things from my phone while I’m standing at the bus stop.

* Recoverability: And ideally I’d like to archive everything in somewhere that I can search it and get it back later.

* Auto-scheduling (queueing): Ideally I would be able queue my links and blog posts so that nothing was tweeted more than once an hour.

* Feedback loop: It would be great to be able to track metrics on who clicks what.

* More outbound services: the more services I can post to the better, (Ping.fm leads Posterous but doesn’t allow for automated input).

Some people would probably also want all of their comments to be collected, that is a noble (but even more difficult) goal.

With all that in mind I put together what I think is the state-of-the-art (pathetic as it may be) in publishing to social media. It is probably already obsolete, but here goes. The goal is to make sure your content is distributed efficiently with as little work for you as possible. The purpose of this process is to establish yourself as a market leader – meaning an expert in a particular topic area.

In the first section I cover some of the basics which most people will have already have figured out and have hooked up. For example, most people will have a blog, and will have it connected to a Facebook page or their personal Facebook stream. Another common pattern is to connect your blog’s RSS feed to your LinkedIn group, where your blog posts appear as news items. The goal is to reach your audience wherever they prefer to consume your content. By replicating your blog posts to social networks, you will encourage discussion around topics of interest and get “back links” when others share your posts. The goal is to automate this so that you don’t have to think about sharing your posts after you write them, it just happens automatically.

I mentioned Facebook and LinkedIn as to places where it’s immediately obvious that you should replicate your posts. Another is Twitter. You can use FriendFeed to relay your blog’s RSS feed to twitter. You can also use other services like TwitterFeed or RSS2twitter. None of this is rocket science and you’re probably doing it already. However, I do want a mention before we move on that it is important to bookmark your own content. It is important for the same reasons that you would want your stuff published to a social network (discussion, and further sharing by others). At the moment I don’t happen to know how to completely automate this process but hopefully someone watching this will chime in with some tips.

The less obvious way in which you can establish market leadership is by just sharing content. The key is to begin using some type of content hub. Up until recently FriendFeed would have been my top pick but lately Posterous is becoming the hub of choice. Many people like Posterous because it’s easy to post via e-mail. I have never had the desire to post to the web from e-mail, however you can share via e-mail from almost anywhere, and it is also a very predictable format which I’ll get into in a minute.

By market leadership I mean that when you blog either as yourself or is your company, your real goal should be to establish your expertise in a particular niche knowledge area. You can do that either by sharing things or creating original content. If you just sharing stuff, it is best to do it quickly, share quality content, and predictably share things that your readers would want to see. You don’t want to surprise your readers with anything shocking or potentially offensive. Of course, the best thing you can do is participate in the comments and discussion that goes on around the topic area that you’re publishing in. It is by establishing this leadership that you become a trusted voice. It is easy to turn that trust into sales of your products, increased followers etc.

It is critical to decide upon a hub and posting strategy to maximize your efficiency. You don’t want to waste your time posting on this site and linking on that site. I wouldn’t lose sleep about getting this perfect, but if you at least decide on a strategy, and I recommend one here, you will get leverage through automation. The goal is that while you’re standing at the bus stop flicking through today’s articles you can – with the click of a few buttons on your phone – share to multiple networks. Ideally you’ll give the appearance that you’re always online researching things.

So let’s get back to Posterous for a minute. Posterous is a blogging service allowing you to post anything by simply sending an e-mail. However, Posterous is more than just a blog, it also relays your content to Facebook and Twitter and a few other networks. Posterous is not my dream publishing service or the ultimate solution to the social publishing problem. I also continue to pay attention to FriendFeed, PingFM, and others hoping a more publisher centric service will arise.

The most common scenario in which I’m looking to share something is when I’m cruising along in my web browser. Posterous – as with other bookmarking sites and social networks – has what’s called a browser bookmarklet. This is a bookmark you create in your browser that allows you to share whatever page you’re looking at. Again, the only reason why I’m recommending Posterous is because of its ability to take whatever content you put into it and publish it out to multiple networks (Posterous calls this auto posting).

The subject of the post becomes the text of your tweets when it is relayed to Twitter. Unlike some of the RSS relay services where you can’t always predict what the text of the tweet will look like (or where it will be truncated).
Another very common scenario is to share something from Google Reader. Google Reader is an excellent blog aggregator. You can share to posters from there. I haven’t found a good way to share from Google reader using the share from my iPhone, this is where sharing by e-mail comes in handy.

One thing I wish Posterous would do is queue your items so that you can share all bunch of them at once without overwhelming your twitter followers. Posterous also has advanced features for routing certain items to twitter as opposed to Facebook. This is useful if you have different audiences (friends versus followers) on each service. One thing that I do appreciate about Posterous its ability to store a copy of whatever I’m sharing.

You can probably tell I’m not thrilled to have Posterous as the hub of my sharing system. Hopefully it won’t be too long until another service comes along to address some of my requirements above to put the publisher back at the center of the process.

Some people explain the lack of growth by saying that only 20% of twitters users actually visit twitter.com. The other 80% of users, some claim, actually access Twitter from mobile phones and desktop clients. While it may be the case that 80% of the people use Twitter without visiting the website intentionally, I find it hard to believe that those people don’t touch the website at least once a month. Whether you are using TweetDeck or Tweetie, undoubtedly you will click a link at some point which leads you to the website. Therefore even the 80% of people “don’t use twitter.com” must have visited the website at some point during the month.

So, I do believe that Twitter’s growth is genuinely falling off. The fascinating thing about this is that usually with social sites, once critical mass is achieved, growth it inevitable. Regardless of what features are added to the website. Yet I’ve also been hearing it said that the Twitter team hopes to increase user engagement (keep new users coming back) with new features. The new features that the twitter team are adding are excellently prioritized, but I think there’s a danger in hoping that those features will bring more (or more frequent) users. Lists, for example, make the stream more consumable, but are hard to grasp at first sight. Geo-location features will make twitter more pervasive – by more closely associating tweets to the real world. But whether or not this will equate to new users is not a given. Certainly tweaks like the new re-tweet feature risk moving away from the very simple format that has made twitter popular to date.

Another question is whether Twitter will ever be considered “mainstream” or not. Even though twitter is referenced on mainstream media sites like Entertainment Tonight, it is hard for me to imagine absolutely everyone participating in Twitter. As a whole, micro messaging seems more of a phenomenon like blogging (in a smaller format) – not like social networking. Facebook became a mainstream phenomenon because of the peer pressure and social ties that force everyone to join. But I don’t believe people will join twitter just to follow Entertainment Tonight on their phone. The ultimate destination for twitter (checking local coupons on the way to the bus stop) seems unlikely. But, I also didn’t think Twitter would gain as much popularity as it has.

Twitter’s growth is of interest to me because the success of Twibes Twitter Groups relies upon twitter’s continued growth in popularity. I would bet that Twitter’s growth will catch up to its trajectory from earlier this year and follow the trajectory of blogging which still demonstrates continuous growth.

This last graph is not an accurate comparison because it represents the number of blogs in existence (not the visitors to those blogs). However, since twitter accounts are even easier to create than blogs, it seems to me that their growth should follow the same trajectory now that Twitter has established critical mass.

One slide that particularly interested me from Sean’s presentation was one on “Matching Community Incentives to Motivation”. He indicated that there were patterns of human behavior (motivations) that you should aim to please with community features.

I have stolen a slide out of Sean’s presentation, and re-worded things very slightly to match my own experiences with HelpShare, Lookmarks, and most recently Twibes Twitter Groups. This chart indicates the type of motivation, and the type of community feature that can facilitate that motivation. I color-coded the features applicable to Twibes where we’re doing a good (green), average (yellow), or bad (red) job.

Hopefully this will help you prioritize features for your own online community. Are there other motivations we are missing?

Facebook member and fan lists are not very portable. Even within Facebook, it isn’t obvious whether a Facebook Group or Facebook Page is better for communicating with customers. Gist is an emerging as a social Swiss Army knife (and social CRM) that can help solve this problem.

One thing that has always annoyed me about Facebook Pages is that there is no way to export fans. I’ve discovered workable hacks for downloading the member list from both groups and pages.

For Facebook groups, you can use the handy Export group members to CSV application. It uses the Facebook API to export members in to a handy Comma Separated Value file, which you can in turn import into Outlook or Gist.

Using the EGMCSV app, select your group and the attributes “Facebook ID”, “Full name”, and “Picture URL”. Once you have a CSV file, edit the column names to those below.

• facebook_id
• Name
• facebook_pic_big

These are undocumented CSV columns that Gist supports. They are required to track that the contact came from Facebook. Gist will automatically download their photo.

In Gist, click the “Account” link, then “Other/CSV” under “Connect More Accounts”. Once Gist has processed your file, contacts will start to appear.

Getting fans from a Facebook page is not yet supported by the Facebook API. Luckily, the Facebook Web interface uses a simple AJAX/JSON call to supply the data when you view the page.

My strategy to set this data free was to sniff the network traffic with the Wireshark tool, then replay the HTTP calls with a ruby script. The script below will iterate over the page’s fans, save the pages as JSON in plain text files, then load the text files and convert them to CSV files in the format we used above for groups. Note that if you run this you will need to substitute the value of your cookies and the form values in the HTTP post body. This insures you are authenticated as yourself when you connect to Facebook.

Here is the text-friendly version of the Facebook Page Fan export script. I didn’t try this with pages for which I am not the administrator. I don’t see any reason why this wouldn’t work for your competitors’ fans.

The net result is a consolidated list of fans (prospects and leads) in Gist.

Gist will help de-dup contacts whether they originated from Facebook or Twitter. You could for example, use Gist to identify customers from your Web site that are on Twitter, and generate a special Twitter focused mailing to them. Gist has a ways to go to make this easier (bulk contact tagging by import), and also does not yet automate the communication side of the process (send a message to a person regardless of what network they are on).

There were many things about the Wave demonstration (which I was lucky to see in person) that made my jaw drop. I was very impressed. As an application developer, it is the image of a message with a chain of puzzle pieces (uninstalled apps) on the end that really sticks with me.

I see two paradigms of discovery at play on the Web. First, is the older “world is flat” model where everyone has access to everything (often anonymously), and Web sites are discovered primarily through search. The power of the “flat” model is demonstrated in Google search, Craigslist/Ebay, and Wikipedia.

The newer model is the social media model, where everything on the Web is discovered via your friends (AKA your social graph). Where the flat model makes everything more digital (connectivity and free replication flatten markets), the social media model is makes the Web more human like by making real world interactions more efficient. Facebook is the most successful example of using your social graph to filter the Web.

When you have a product you are trying to tell people about, the primary paths in the old world were SEO and advertising/marketing. In the new world, electronic word of mouth is the goal. Annoyingly proliferous Facebook apps and armies of Twitter marketers are the evidence of this new shift.

My two models above are actually an over-simplification. In the old world, we had email, and many people discovered Web sites and participated in social “apps” like petitions or chain letters. Google Wave amplifies this phenomena the way social networks amplified it. Whether the embedded software entails rendering a map, playing a game, or watching a video – users now will be able to “become a customer” inside the message. In the same way it makes collaboration 10x easier, Google Wave makes the delivery of software 10x easier. For applications that naturally involve collaboration, new customers will come easy. For others, it will be critical to understand this rich distribution model to keep their code and content in front of customers.

Before Twibes, the best way to communicate about a certain topic was to use hashtags. Hashtags are words prefixed with a “#” added to tweets and automatically hyper linked to a search. For example: #photography. Hashtags are great, but in many ways they are no substitute for an old-fashioned list of users.

1. Ownership

Hashtags are community owned by design. The meaning of a tag may change over time, or there may be multiple competing meanings. In contrast, a Twibe has a founder who chooses keywords for the Twibe, and sets its mission statement via the Twibe description. The founder alone is responsible for grooming the Twibe member lists, and this keeps the quality of the company and discussion high.

If you have a small business on Twitter, it is valuable to be able to contain your message and membership. It isn’t good or necessary to control your message, but hashtags were designed against this.

2. Membership and Group Identity

Joining a group has more meaning than tagging a post. All humans want to belong to a group. While hashtags can be used by anyone at anytime, a Twibe has a visible list of people. With hashtags, there is no way to look at a list of people who care about a topic (for example to follow them).

3. Disambiguation

Twibes allow for multiple keywords, which allows for richer meaning and clearer topic definition. Hashtags are easy, but can have duplicate meanings.

4. Laziness and Predictability

With Twibes, there is no need to remember a specific hashtag or leave room for it in your Tweet. This is important since – in order to retain their uniqueness – hashtags are often unmemorable collections of characters (what does #09ejc mean?). Also, with Twibes you have greater confidence that someone will read your tweet. By
visiting the Twibe page and tweeting, you know the who your prospective readers are, and know that your tweet is included in the group discussion.

5. Noise

Hashtags can easily be spammed by robots. Once a tag becomes popular, it will become a target for robots that use that tag to interrupt the tweet stream. With a Twibe, the founder provides moderation.

Tagging clearly has many benefits. Many of the cons above are pros in other contexts. Hash tags work great in conjunction with a Twibe. Where hashtags really shine is in tying together content on multiple Web sites (say flickr, delicious, and twitter) with a unique term. This “on the fly” identifier works well for conferences or spontaneous events.

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I just finished reading Seth Godin’s “Tribes”. It is a short inspirational book, with bite size chapters to help you realize leaders aren’t that special. To kick off the new year, and celebrate heretics, here are some of my favorite quotes.

The anatomy of a movement:

Senator Bill Bradley defines a movement as having three elements:

1. A narrative that tells a story about who we are and the future we’re trying to build.
2. A connection between and among the leader and the tribe.
3. Something to do – the fewer limits the better.

Too often organizations fail to do anything but the third.

On expecting (not avoiding) criticism:

If I had written a boring book, there’d be no criticism. No conversation. [Ask yourself:] How can I create something that the critics will criticize?

Leader’s aren’t all that special other than being able to chose to standing up, and stick with their cause.

Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead. This scarcity makes leadership valuable. If everyone tries to lead all the time, not much happens. It’s discomfort that creates the leverage that makes leadership worthwhile.

Leadership requires thinking outside the box, and having faith (not the religious kind). The climber described here invented a technique of releasing the wall with all limbs at the same time – literally taking leaps of faith to get out of stuck positions.

Here’s a simple way to think about it: Obe Carrion, former U.S. rock climbing champion, won a tournament in an unusual way. Obe was one of four finalists, and each had to climb a very difficult route up a steep wall. The first three finalists did the same thing. They entered the roped-off area, inspected the route, and then slowly began climbing, on hold at a time, working their way up to the top. Two made it (with a slip or two), one fell.

Obe was scheduled to go last. He came out of the isolation area, inspected the route, took twenty steps back and he *ran* up the wall. he didn’t hesitate or interpolate or hedge his bets. He just committed.

It turns out that this was the easiest way up the wall. Leaning into the problem made the problem go away.

I really like this next one. Invention often seems small and big at the same time. The most interesting enhancements are the tiny ones that end up changing the game.

The first rule the music business failed to understand is that, at least at first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin.

Yes, I know, failure is good. Stop rubbing it in:

The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.

I can’t help but read this in terms of what we call “user experience” in software design. It reminds me of how Microsoft used to argue that Internet Explorer was really faster than Firefox, it was just that users *perceived* Firefox to be faster. However, in this case Godin was referring to leadership being in the eye of the follower.

Adam Gopnik quotes Jamy Ian Swiss as saying, “Magic only happens in a spectator’s mind. Everything else is a distraction… Methods for their own sake are a distraction. You cannot cross over into the world of magic until you put everything else aside and behind you – including your own desires and needs – and focus on bringing an experience to the audience. This is magic. Nothing else.”

This is striking because it is against conventional wisdom, but makes perfect sense:

Sternin went to Vietnam to try to help starving children. Rather than importing tactics that he knew would work, or outside techniques that he was sure could make a difference, he sought out the few families who weren’t starving, the few moms who weren’t just getting by but were thriving. And then he made it easy for these mothers to share their insights with the rest of the group.

And this makes a good reminder for the new year. To those of us who are blessed, our opportunities are obligations.

I don’t think we have any choice. I think we have an obligation to change the rules, to raise the bar, to play a different game, and to play it better than anyone has any right to believe is possible.