The top ten posts of 2009 from These Digital Times

Here are the top ten posts of 2009 from These Digital Times. Twitter and social media dominate – not at all surprising for a blog in this area.

• Six types of Tweets if you Twitter every day
• The ten questions I ask myself before I publish any blog post
• Five people to follow on Twitter in 2009
• A list of social media habits I am stopping immediately
• What should a well designed website look like: part 1
• About John Welsh
• Tennis player Andy Murray’s Twitter goes dead!
• Guest post: top ten tips on how to manage a Linkedin group
• A list of companies using social media to market themselves in the UK – take two
• A list of ten Google Reader Shared Items to which you can subscribe saving you time

So what does the traffic tell us?

1. The two blog posts about Twitter in the top ten make up just under 10 per cent of the entire year’s traffic.
2. The top five posts represent just over 25 per cent of the entire year’s traffic while
3. the top ten posts represent 40 per cent of the entire year’s traffic.
4. All but ten of the 238 posts on this blog were looked at during 2009 although
5. the least popular 20 posts only managed 30 views in all, the bottom nine posts only one view each.
6. Three of the posts (if you include “About John Welsh”) date back to 2008, hammering home the point that people’s use of the web is blind to date but keen on relevance.
7. Only two of the posts predate the moment when These Digital Times found its voice providing lists for those acquiring skills in social media, and even one of those (“What should a well design website look like”) can be seen as a list.
8. Only one post (Tennis player Andy Murray’s Twitter goes dead!”) dates back to a time when I just used this blog to comment on what else was around. Little surprise that it is a famous tennis player’s name that keeps this post there.
9. Look how high up “About John Welsh” is in the list. It reminds you not to neglect an often overlooked element of a blog.

So the traffic follows the classic Pareto Distribution, a phrase used in economics to describe the typical distribution of wealth. This suggests that the wealthiest person in any town or country is likely to be twice as wealthy as the second most wealthy person who, in turn, is likely to be twice as wealthy as the third most wealthy person and so on. Such distribution, plotted on a graph, is a steep curve away from the vertical axis then continuing almost parallel to the horizontal.

It is a distribution often seen in social media and digital. The activity of the most active member of any community, for example, is likely to be twice as much as the next most active and so on. And think also about something like Amazon where the most popular book is twice as popular as the second and so on.

I’m rather chuffed that These Digital Times follows this pattern.

The etiquette of permission networking

You’ve heard of permission marketing, right?  As defined by Seth Godin, it is the transformation wrought by social media encouraging people to opt-in to rather than opt-out of marketing.

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

What about permission networking? How does that work and what is the etiquette? 

I’m off to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco at the end of this month (disclosure: the conference is produced by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb, a sister company of mine in the US).

Last time I was in San Francisco, I had been writing this blog for barely two months. And I had scarcely got going on Twitter. I still had the habits of a traditional broadcast editor in me, thinking nothing of emailing directly a leading and high profile social media expert.

But it takes a lot more than an email to convert a social media relationship into a telephone conversation. This social media guru very politely suggested we could speak on Skype a month later. 

Now I’m surprised he even bothered to reply.

Seven months later, nine months into this blog, five months into my Twitter profile, four months into my Google Reader and ten months into social media, I know better.

Just as social media has transformed push into pull marketing so it has transformed assertive into permission networking.

As I head to San Francisco this time round, I’m not going to be sending emails. I’m not even going to be picking up the phone. 

What I am going to do is

• Tweet out my preparations for the trip.
• Follow the Expo’s hashtag #w2e on Twitter Search to check on who is going.
• I will begin following people I am interested in and see if they follow me.
• Suggest a Tweetup each day.
• Update my status on LinkedIn and TripIt to alert my existing networks of my plans.
• Read Chris Brogan’s 27 things to do before a conference.

But other that those few things I will wait. I wait until people come to me.

And if they don’t, I will know that I need to spend even longer investing in my community before I try to convert social media acquaintances into face-to-face meetings. I will need to contribute even more to people’s conversations on Twitter. And I will have to comment even harder and way more intelligently on their blogs.

I’ve got a dinner booked already and a meeting, both through permission networking.

I’ll let you know how the rest goes.

Photo credit: theogeo

A list of 10 social media habits that I am stopping immediately

1. I am no longer looking to subscribe to individual blogs via RSS.

If I admire a blogger, such as Mike Fruchter, I look whether he has a Google Shared Items page to which he bookmarks his top posts by other bloggers. I then subscribe to his Google Shared Items RSS feed, relying on his editing to have done the work of screening for me. 

 

2. I am no longer ignoring people after accepting them as “friends” on Facebook.

As soon as I accept a “friend request”, I write a comment on their wall.  Why did I imagine that accepting a “friend request”, and not saying hello, was anything but rude? 

 

3. I am no longer forgetting to tag my pictures on Flickr.

Flickr’s Creative Commons allows you to search a word and provides several tagged pictures for reproduction in your blog. The web is all about reciprocity – the more you tag, the more choices you will get back in the future.

 

4. I am no longer using del.icio.us for bookmarking. 

My own Google Shared Items has replaced del.icio.us. Some bloggers are beginning to use Google Shared Items for their reading and del.icio.us as a bookmark for coverage of themselves.

 

5. I am no longer failing to monitor my name on Twitter Search.

How can you tell whether you are are really involved in the conversation unless you monitor your Tweets. Use Twitter Search to assess your interactivity – see @paulbradshaw‘s feed for example. 

 

6. I am no longer sending pictures from my phone using Twitpic unless absolutely necessary.

It is difficult to gauge 140 characters when you send a picture on Twitpic. If you can wait, return to your computer, upload>post only>share this photo>Twitter update bar. You can write your Twitter in relative comfort. 

 

7. I am no longer making recommendations on LinkedIn.

One person for whom I wrote a recommendation did not use it. I had got in to the habit of responding to any “LinkedIn request” with a recommendation. Bad etiquette. I am still so embarrassed. New rule, only recommend when asked.

 

8. I am no longer writing this blog all by myself.

Ask other people to guest post. I’ve had Julius Solaris, Endaf Kerfoot and Ruth Galpine - different voices. And remember reciprocity. You will only be invited to guest post or feature on another blog if you do the same, as George Hopkin has done with me.

 

9.  I am no longer running my FriendFeed as my status through my Facebook profile.

My community on Facebook are family and friends who are certainly not interested in my Tweets or pictures about social media (doh!). Remember different content for different communities.

 

10. I am no longer going to ignore my FriendFeed.

But I am going to give up on any further pretence that I have a life offline. 

 

Do you have any social media habits that you are giving up? 

 

If you think your followers/community on Twitter would be interested in this post, show them your value by reTweeting it to them!

  

Picture credit: walknboston

Five more online skills you must master BEFORE you start a blog

Earlier this week, I launched the first of my two part campaign to encourage people to master five online skills before they start a blog. I promised five more online skills. So here they are.

Once again, I make suggestions for both journalists who already write for websites but also for people who do not have access to a website.

Research

In the previous post, I encouraged you to identify a community.

You still need to find out all you can about that it through research.

You might find that your chosen community is overwhelmed with good blogs. What it actually wants is a closed group on a social network where it can discuss business issues. Without research, you might overlook the social network your community is already in. Why set up a LinkedIn group, for example, if your community is obsessed with Facebook.

If you are a journalist, a few questions on your website is one way to collect information.

If you do not have a website, why not use a social network? Join LinkedIn and write up your profile. Then join a group in a sector closest to your potential blogging community. Participate in the discussion areas. Why not ask a few questions yourself?

You don’t need a blog to do research.

Categories

One of the key questions in the research of your community for your blog might be “what information do you need?”.

Once you have the results, you could write a list of subjects in which your community is interested.

Whooa! Don’t let it become too long. Just as your blog will attract more users the more closely it focuses on your community, so those users will be more likely to return if you can keep the content within a narrow range.

Why not try to keep it within ten core subject areas?

Whether you are a journalist of not, visit some blogs and notice how the best blogs use few categories.

You don’t need a blog to work out the core subject areas for your community.

RSS feeds

Bloggers are, by the nature of the media they use, more likely to be web-savvy. Many of them sign up for RSS rather than email subscriptions. Whether you understand RSS feeds or not, find out before you start your blog.

Sign up to Google Reader. Sign up to some RSS subscriptions. Learn to manage you daily reading through RSS feeds.

You don’t need a blog to make yourself familiar with RSS feeds.

Optimise

Have you noticed how certain parts of this post have links, in bold,  to other posts on this blog ? If you click through, do you notice how the same words appear in the original post’s headline? You need to do the same.

If you are a journalist, you have started to put links between stories, one of the five online skills to master before you start a blog that I mentioned in part one of this campaign. Try to use the same words as the previous post’s headline. It’s awkward at first – perhaps you need to rewrite the previous post’s headline – but you will get used to it. Over time, you will begin to notice how you write headlines ready for use as links in future posts.

If you do not write for a website, sign up to Twitter as soon as possible. The discipline of writing meaningful messages in 140 characters will improve the brevity and directness of your writing – all good practice for your future blog.

You don’t need a blog to learn how to write so that your content is more easily found.

Analyse

You’re going to be so proud of your blog when it takes off. But you are only going to be able to assess the success if you have learnt to understand the quantity and quality of your traffic. One way to do this is to get to know Alexa. It shows the traffic and ranking of any site.

If you are a journalist writing for a website, why not input your own site. Then input your competitors!

If you do not have a website you can access, why not log in your favourite site and see how it compares to others that you view.

You don’t need a blog to learn how to analyse traffic.

Are there an other online skills that you think are essential to acquire before starting a blog?

If you think your followers/community on Twitter would be interested in this post, show them your value by reTweeting it to them!

Photo credit: Leonard Low

Guest post: eight tips to convert a social media relationship into a telephone conversation

 My second guest post is by Endaf Kerfoot, leader of LinkedIn’s Future of Social Media group (disclosure: and a colleague). 

Endaf is sales manager of an exhibition called Internet World and also contributes to the Internet World blog. He has expanded his professional network through this LinkedIn group, building up his social capital by encouraging quality discussions and posting useful links.

A high profile social media expert has just joined the group. Endaf wanted to contact the guy.  But, what is the etiquette? I suggested that the expert’s membership of the group explicitly acknowledged that first contact could be made through LinkedIn . Endaf did so.

I therefore asked him to give us some tips on how to develop a relationship on LinkedIn and then to convert it into a telephone conversation. 

The LinkedIn Future of Social Media group now has over 600 members from around the world. The success is a challenge, putting pressure on me to ensure that new discussions are worthy of the members, adding and linking to good quality news stories and encouraging leading social media commentators to get involved (here’s some tips on how to manage a LinkedIn group yourself).

What would happen if I were to try to contact one of the members, a leading social media guru? I took the plunge and emailed the guy. The end result was a perfectly business-like conversation where he gave me several contacts that will be useful for the group.

What are my tips?

1. Whenever anyone signs up to your group or accepts your contact request, follow up with a welcome to the group. Here’s a great guide to LinkedIn etiquette.
2. Make sure that there is a constant flow of high quality white papers or other relevant content posted.
3. Encourage discussions and commenting. Do it yourself if necessary.
4. Once you are ready to email directly, do not be overawed by someone’s reputation.
5. Explain in an email why you are interested in connecting with them, who you are and what you have to offer.
6. Be concise but make it clear why you want to talk. You need to be ready to do that “Elevator Pitch” (how would you tell someone what you do and how great you are - in the time it takes for a lift to travel between floors).
7. Set up a call. So much of the initial groundwork has been done through social media that you don’t need an introduction.
8. I invited the four contact suggested by the social media expert to my group, the process of expanding and improving my group then repeating itself ad infinitum.

Social media has to prove its ROI(return on investment). Proving that running a group can expand a business network is a key indication of success. Endaf might well have been doing this within a social media environment today. But, all businesses will be expanding their networks through social media as it expands beyond early adopters into business generally - what social media expert Peter Kim calls social business.

If you thought this post was useful, reTweet it to your community!

Photo: existentist

Guest post: top ten tips on how to manage a Linkedin group

Guest post by Julius Solaris, a community manager and social media expert.

Julius blogs at Event Manager Blog and manages the Linkedin Event Planning and Management group, which boasts more than 5300 event professionals from around the world. I have always been impressed by his entreprise, by his ability to run his own buisness and his obvious commitment to creating, enlarging and cultivating his community. Here he guest posts for These Digital Times.

 

When Linkedin opened up groups a few months ago, I was quick enough to create one for event people (28th February 2008). Ten months later, the group now numbers over five thousand people. Here are few things I learnt in the process.

1. What is the group for?

I made that clear in the Group information page. The group info page helps in keeping naggers away and attract only motivated members. I made the joining criteria even more specific, when one month ago the group felt a stronger need to emphasise quality – more of that later. Try to be clear with what you want and what you don’t want.

2. Bulk approve, but ban misuses

Having a lot of members helps. If I told you at the beginning of this post that I managed a group of 20 people, that probably would have not captured your attention. Therefore, bulk approving is a must.

On the other hand, having great numbers brings a lot of spam and lowers the quality of the network.

Make sure you state repeatedly the objectives of the group with a featured post.

Delete discussion violating rules and warn the abuser.

If you still get annoyances, ban users who perpetrated misuses. You can definitely do without these trouble-makers. Don’t be afraid of losing members, it’s for the win.

3. Follow the input of the community

The group has been like a craiglist for event professionals for a while.

One shiny day, somebody protested about the format and complained about blatant self-promotion.

Apparently this was the feeling of several other members. I respected that and engaged in more severe management, pruning spam and applying more severe rules.

I also made that clear with sticky ‘featured’ posts as well as in the info’ page.

4. Delegate responsibility

In introducing the aforementioned shift towards more quality, I made clear that the community should have been active in reporting spam or abuses.

Since earning a living from a Linkedin Group is quite tough, the majority of us do this as a hobby. If this is your case, I strongly suggest you reinforce the concept that mere complaints are not acceptable in a community.

You complain when you pay for a service, you complain when you are giving something in exchange.

Members have to understand that they can only complain with themselves in a Linkedin Group. Managers are not held accountable if the community acts like customers instead of users.

I got a great response from one member in particular who gave me incredible support and helped me through the “cleaning” process.

5. Praise those who respond positively

Anne was the person who helped me along the way.

What I have just done with you now (telling you the name of a dedicated user), I did repeatedly in the group.

Rewarding positive behaviour is as important as banning negative uses.

6. Advertise your group wherever you are active in the web

A major differentiator of the LI Event Planning and Management Group is that it already had big numbers compared to other groups, way before Linkedin introduced Group search.

This was possible because I was actively promoting the group wherever possible.

I got 10 people registering everyday from my blog alone. I posted about it on twitter and talked about it in all the events I attended.

If you are not convinced about your group, close it right now and dedicate your effort to a new, better project.

If you feel your group is really worth joining, then make the world aware of that!

7. Monetize it

For a while I monetised my group. I worked together with an online event registration/ticketing service.

I made a newsletter to make the group aware of the sponsor and invited the members to have a look at the profile of the company.

The company sponsoring the group had immediate benefits from event planners registering to events using their registration platform.

 Usually groups work more to generate brand awareness rather than converting clicks and you should be aware of that when pitching to companies.

8. Empower members to meet offline

 During the aforementioned period, I got the sponsor to support group events across the world. We had more than 7 meetups and it was great fun.

I created a dedicated umbrella for all the events called http://www.spicynetworking.com

I also started a regular London Meetup for that.

9. Know where to address your efforts

While Linkedin had no discussion or news section facility, I created another group on Ning, another social networking provider, for members to interact. I manually invited thousands of people and got 500 members together.

When Linkedin allowed a bit of interaction, I had to let go and move on. I shut down the platform as of 1st of Jan 2009 and am very happy to focus my effort in one place.

10. Linkedin is not on your side so be creative

The platform as it is does not give you management tools such as newsletters, broadcasts, sticky posts in home page or whatever necessary for basic admin.

That is why you really need to be creative, I wrote my own newsletter, learned how to use external broadcasting services, customized a Ning, created a Meetup.

A lot of effort is required and results are not always immediate, so try to shake things up if it’s not working until you find your way.

What’s your experience?

by Julius Solaris

It’s a myth that social media suffers from a lack of accountability or ROI

Most social mediators have finished the year fearful, often justified, that social media suffers from a lack of accountability or ROI (return on investment). 

Their concerns are matched by more traditional players, companies and individuals who have come late to social media.

They see the fun. But where’s the process?  Where’s the strategy? Where’s the money?

Warning! Warning! Warning!

We are all in danger of putting people off before we have really got started.

I think everyone should just calm down. They are missing a point.

Early-adopter social mediators and the difficult-to-persuade are misreading the excitement of the active late-comers.

Yes, the latter are thrilled to set up a Twitter account or kick off a blog without so much as a who-is-it-for or a why-are-we-doing-this. 

The resultant half-born profiles and scatter-gun postings lie shivering and neglected all around us. But at least they got going.

Give them a break.

Let them set up this and neglect that. And then let them begin to work out who they really want to follow and by whom they really want to be followed. They are only going to understand such words once they have got got involved.

The solution to the problem

The irony is that these excited, active, latecomers to social media are the solution to all our problems.

They are not in this social media buzz because of the kit or technology.

They are there because they have always been good at media. Social media is just the next thing. So

• (Once) Traditional marketers will come up with the best strategies for embracing social media.
• (Once) Traditional journalists who wrote for specific communities will write the best blogs. 
• (Once) Traditional editors with great networking skills will set up and garden great social networks.
• (Once) Traditional PRs will monitor the conversation better than anyone else.
• (Once) Traditional sales people will spot the opportunities for revenue.
• (Once) Traditional event organisers will work out how to sell tickets with it.

I am not naive. I know it is harder than that.

But, don’t  imagine that the long-honed skills of process, procedural driven people are suddenly going to be lost in the excitement of social media – that marketers no longer market, or sales no longer sell, or journalists no longer write. That just makes out social media to be more than it is.  

Photo credit: Oddsock

Make sure none of your brand’s future social media profiles can be stolen

Do you remember when you were about to launch a new website for a magazine/exhibition/product?

You found it easy to name because you just took the existing brand and dotcommed it. Then you discovered that the name had already been pinched by a “company”. Your only resort was to add some meaningless phrase to the brand so as to avoid the expense or time to get your name back. You’re still annoyed five years later as all your brand-centred SEO is so awkward. 

That was then, what about now?

Now you are planning your brand’s social media strategy. You decide to launch a LinkedIn group, after research of your users, winning over your colleagues and organising resources. You go to set up the group and, goddammit, find that the name you wanted is already in use.  Worse still, you find that some of the key thought-leaders in your sector have already signed up to the group thinking it was you.

You don’t have much recourse. You cannot complain to LinkedIn unless it is your exact brand which has been replicated. Even then, have you actually tried to contact some of the social media providers? And, were you to be successful, are you really going to contact those covetted members and say they joined the wrong group?

Just one resolution

If you are going to make one New Year resolution, you might make it this – sign up your brand now to as many potential social media sites as possible (and make a record of the passwords!). You might never use the vast majority of them. But make sure none of your brand’s future social media profiles can be stolen.

Photo credit: Richt

Are early adopters in social media ready for competition from a new wave of competitors?

They will compete with us to dominate social media. And they will do so because their chosen subject is more focused than us. Who are they and are we ready for them?

They are, of course, people in non-digital jobs turning to social media for the first time in their lives. Not early adopters like you and me, using Twitter, FriendFeed, Vimeo or whatever, in a constantly analytical, experimental way. No, these lot could not care less how it  operates or what it is called. They just want it to work for them.    

I’ve already asked whether bloggers are ready for competiton from the arrival of so many former, print journalists who, having lost their jobs or their prejudices, will turn to blogging and better many long-term bloggers. And so with this new wave of people using social media to network.

Take my brother, head of media and campaigns in a government department. He’s already reactivated his Facebook profile, set up a Twitter account and launched a LinkedIn group, all in two weeks. His years of media, many on the UK’s national papers, translates seamlessly to our new world. But he has one further bonus when it comes to community – his focus. So when he sets up his LinkedIn group he does not just want any communications experts, only those in local government. 

He’s already having debates about whether Facebook has a role in a company’s internal communication.

How many of we early adopters can beat that?

Five reasons to be interested in Facebook once more

It comes in waves. One day I am obsessed with Twitter. Another day it is back to FriendFeed. But, at the moment, it’s Facebook. I’ll try and tell you why.

Only a few months ago, I was asking on this blog what is the point of Facebook. I even asked a colleague to come and show me what turned her on. But to no avail. The interface was too busy. The pages did not make sense. Who were all these “friends”, anyway? And then…

And then, I began to get it. Here are my reasons.

1. If you are new to social media, Facebook is a good way to get up to speed. Imagine yourself a social media virgin, once more, and forced to kick off with FriendFeed. I don’t think so! 
2. Are you fearful of the divide between your professional and private life?  There is no quicker way to learn this division than through Facebook – just take a look at your “friends’” profiles and work out what you wouldn’t put up.
3. If you don’t join Facebook, you cannot compare it to LinkedIn. Some might be really LinkedIn. Some might be rather more Facebook. Do you know which one is suitable? If you cannot compare the two, you are not going to learn which network is right for your community.
4. Sign up to and play one of the games. No, it is not puerile. If you have never experienced a viral game this is your chance to do what spotty teenagers in Arizona are brought up on.
5. Can you encourage your ”friends” to join a group to which you can sensitively market them something? Many of my “friends” work in the travel industry - I used to be editor of a weekly newspaper for the travel industry. You might well be in a similar situation where your group is dominated by one type of worker. Is there a way to create a more professional group activity – I call this the “Trojan Horse”.

Are you still enjoying Facebook? Or are you really turned on by another social media activity?