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Eric Elkins › Comments
@PragueBob Your claim to be an expert in social media is based solely on your 64k followers on a single social media platform. Am I correct
Nope. But I will add that the handful of companies I've done social media consulting for have all called me an expert and clamored for more! I didn't pin that label on myself, but hey! If the shoe fits, wear it. At least I have the numbers (both on Twitter and here on FriendFeed, for instance) to back it up and those numbers were not obtained by using any tricks ("gaming the system" as...
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- Robert Morrison
Bob, we've had more than a handful of clients - both smaller boutique brands and global corporations who look to us for help with social media. It has nothing to do with luck. I don't need a large number of followers, personally, as long as we're able to help our clients leverage social media platforms (in addition to Twitter) to reach their target audiences. 64,000 followers is...
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- Eric Elkins
This is great stuff - inspiring me to write another Examiner piece on all this. Our clients would much rather I spend time building awareness about their products and services than building a following for myself or my company.
- Eric Elkins
You keep missing the point of the discussion. You criticized people for calling themselves experts. There is nothing wrong with it, as long as it's true. One way of judging this is by the numbers. My point was (and is) that if people call themselves social media experts look at their numbers (this doesn't have to be just the number of followers on a social network, but it is indeed a...
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- Robert Morrison
OH: "I had to go the entire time, but not a single drop of pee escaped my blatter." Thanks, Simone.
"Bladder," damn it.
- Eric Elkins
I will discuss what I've learned by spamming Twitter here:
Alexandros Georgiadis, Peter Mosier, Enrique Gutierrez and 40 other people liked this
1. People are perfectly happy spamming each other with "follow me" statements, but if I start having a heated conversation that's over the line.
- Robert Scoble
All ears. Go ahead Sir.
- Hardeep Singh Dang
more to come shortly.
- Robert Scoble
2. You are allowed to retweet things, but only once in a while. Say once every two hours or so like @timoreilly does. Do it more, and you'll get marked as a spammer.
- Robert Scoble
Wonder why they complained about heated conversation. Just a matter of setting notices in Twitter right.
- Hans-Joerg Stangor
3. People who say "I'm unfollowing you for spamming" or who complain about your spamming stuff are among the worst offenders. Case in point @bayliss and @karikari -- they provide the usual Twitter crap that spams ME. But then they complain about it when I do it.
- Robert Scoble
4. Twitter has -- for a lot of people -- become a game of collecting both followers and following names. They don't actually want to see these people, they just want cool people on their "following" list. Hint: if I don't tweet at all my follower count goes up by 300 a day.
- Robert Scoble
agreed re: retweeting. I think sometimes people don't put a retweet through the "is it of value" filter and RT in lieu of posting something original.
- PaulJohnson
There are a lot of funny people on Twitter! I would love to see a Twitter Ego app that measured people's perceived importance of themselves :-) Um, there's a challenge for some semantic genius...
- Steve Nimmons
People have different criteria for what's spam and what's not. It's pretty transparent to me who is spamming and who isn't. You are not spamming. You are just a well connected guy hearing about and seeing tremendous things every day. Spammers will die through Darwin's method...if spammer, unfollow. Case Closed.
- Troy Malone
Seen that quite a bit.
- Stephen Lecheler
5. I follow most people who says they are unfollowing me. Their output is almost ALWAYS 1/1000 what Jay Rosen or Dave Winer put out to their followers. I have not found an exception to this rule yet.
- Robert Scoble
6. The same behavior that will get you called "spammer" on Twitter will get you more followers on friendfeed.
- Robert Scoble
I think for the most part if you just "help people out" in social media, after a while slipping in something of self interest is ok
- prunch
7. I watch thousands of Tweets per day and 99.99999% of them are crap. Utter crap. So are mine.
- Robert Scoble
People seem to have lost the ability to filter things for themselves. If a comment on Twitter isn't interesting to you, just skip over it. If a program on TV is not to your liking, change channels. If a billboard ad annoys you, don't look at it. Society seems to be tending towards the impossibility of having to please everyone, all the time.
- John
frank: Twitter has turned into largely ONLY self interest and pushing of stuff.
- Robert Scoble
Robert, I can see you are upset, how can I help. :-) (I learned that from couples therapy)
- Shawn Thompson
All human discussion is crap most of the time. This crap helps us to get in tune. And once it is there the valuable part of the discussion starts.
- Hans-Joerg Stangor
@robert well maybe for you but my twitter community is very communicative with lots of 2 way conversations. But I am not a celebrity like you. People have different reasons for following/tweeting me than you.
- Chris
Shawn: I'm not upset. I'm tired of people being two-faced and telling me not to spam the system when they are a worse offender.
- Robert Scoble
@Scobleizer I get the same thing. Whenever I'm not on, people add me. As soon as I have a conversation, they unfollow :D Three profiles at play: the adaptive, the imitating, the cooperative - depending on the personal stress and that of the system. Overall, people notice what they think about (your point #3).
- Valeria Maltoni
Seconded. I'm in a rather tight knit World of Warcraft Community that we all are cross responding to each other and having a all around good time.
- Stephen Lecheler
If there's one thing that I'm upset about is that I'm not allowed to attack jerks like @karikari back. They are allowed to make me feel bad but I'm not allowed to make them feel bad back.
- Robert Scoble
I love GOOD spamming. Like the kind the Scobleizer does. I get good information from his tweets. I now use Tweetdeck thanks to him!
- Torrence Davis
They need to understand that when they follow a celeberty there is the distinct possibility they could get flodded with content they don't like
- Stephen Lecheler
Robert, I've been following you for a while and while I sometimes find that the retweets get to be a little much, I don't see the point of complaining to you about it. Even if there's 50 retweets I'm not interested in, there's always going to be at least something that I will be interested in and that's why I follow you. You get a lot of leeway because you have a lot of great content/opinions that are of interest to a broad amount of people whereas I do not. Ignore 'em and keep doing what you're doing.
- Jason Carter
Scoble finally admits he spams twitter! LOL :D just kidding! funny I enjoy the noise...bring it!
- Susan Beebe
Thirded. :-) I'm in several communities in twitter that are actual communities with actual discussion taking place.
- Joanmarie
Same with me.
- Donald Townsend
I do agree on the volume of re-tweets. Occasionally useful, but they become an echo chamber if you follow people in the same area/circles/what-have-you.
- Jason J. Thomas
Valeria, I think in general people get irritated by what they most hate about themselves.
- Nicola Quinn
Having used FF and Twitter for almost the same amount of time, I find it virtually impossible to "converse" on Twitter. If there is a conversation on Twitter and the first Tweet doesn't grab my interest I ignore the rest of the conversation. While I think Twitter should only be used for the odd small conversation, that rule shouldn't apply to anyone else but me.
- Kenton
Newly minted user of FF, but used Twitter for nearly a year now. The one thing that I had difficulty with on Twitter is backtracking a post to what it was originally about. I like being able to see the full context of a conversation
- Stephen Lecheler
Good conversation doesn't mean we all have to agree. There's nothing more boring than "Yeah, me too" replies. Heat it up, Robert!
- Dave Cadoff
Great stuff in this thread, AND FriendFeed really needs to get comment threading like yesterday... Robert, I have thought a lot about how social media can ultimately work for marketers (and let's face it, everybody is marketing something at all times, even if it's just themselves for approval/acceptance/asf.), and the big sticking point is that people react to almost ANY blurring of social and business contexts as a violation of social trust, i.e. violently. Good stuff in Ariely's "Predictably Irrational"..
- Alex Schleber
.. on that, Chapter 4, The Cost of Social Norms. In my view, you can just about never offer anything directly to your first level followers/friends/etc., you can at best count on the network effects, i.e. FoFs being interested.
- Alex Schleber
Robert: "frank: Twitter has turned into largely ONLY self interest and pushing of stuff. - Robert Scoble" True to a large extent but I'm reading your links/posts because the good outweighs the bad
- prunch
Hi Robert. Re your point "Twitter has turned into largely ONLY self interest and pushing of stuff" - I keep my follower number to about 300 - friends, people I have met and look up to, and a small number of news feeds. This helps make Twitter a conversation and makes it useful in the opposite way to much of what I'm reading above here. It's really interesting to see you push Twitter's limits, but most of how I see it used in the UK is like a mix between IM and Facebook. Small enough to be useful
- Drew B
Even in the most horacious of spam, some people still find value in it. Some of it is actually REAL marketing disguised as spam. The concept of spam is completely relative to the person receiving it. I find at least Robert spams stuff that interests me for the most part. It's not like he's pitching male enhancement products ;)
- Devlin Dunsmore
from twhirl
Twitter numbers for me largely reside on being balanced. Having roughly the same followers and followings is nice. Admittedly though, I'm more of a lurker. I have yet to put myself in the mindset that anything that goes on in my life is interesting and as such, I just intake content and do not put out much of my own (in twitter and FF amongst other sites). One resolution for me is to contribute more, even if it is "crap." ;)
- Arlan Koizumi
8. I tell clients to tweet what they want, and that @replies and RTs are even more important for engaging in conversation. I'm going to tweet personal and professional crap because I'm sticking to a single Twitter account/persona (personal philosophical decision). If people unfollow me because I tweeted about my dinner or daughter or dirty martinis too many times, screw 'em.
- Eric Elkins
I figured out long ago that I can't please everyone. If people unfollow, then they unfollow and that's that.
- Morton Fox
Robert - I'm beginning to see some of what you're talking about re: conversations being better on FriendFeed... my assessment for now is that Twitter is being used primarily as a networking tool - people want to know just enough to know what it is you are doing / working / thinking about, so that they can see if there are commonalities to connect / collaborate over... FriendFeed is more of a conversation space, but I don't see, for better or worse, the same emphasis on networking
- Michael Broukhim
I think it points to a larger issue, as hinted at the beginning of this (Name "Flair" following versus following based on interest in your content). I believe it lends itself to a lot of people following still without doing any research into your style/frequency of updates. While it affects mistakenly tagging authentic/timely information as spam, it also increasingly affects how the Twitterverse pressures somewhat fragile "rules" on posting methods.
- Brandon
I love point #6 Ironic! The whole thing about not tweeting adds more followers is so true. I was sick for two weeks recently, and I barely tweeted at all. My account grew by 15 percent during that time. Thanks for sharing those pearls of twitter wisdom. One last thing, it seems like @timoreilly retweets more than every two hours. He's the king of retweets in my book, but a fascinating guy.
- Michael Fidler
Brazil Pioneers Sustainable Swimwear - http://www.aninconvenientblog.org/2008...
Smaller thongs? Only if it's sustainable.
- Eric Elkins
Gold's Gym (1)/5) - http://www.yelp.com/biz...
"I was staying in a hotel in Redwood City for a single night, spending a couple days on either side doing the Sand Hill Road VC pitching thing with a client. I chose the hotel (America's Best Inn)…"
- Eric Elkins
Garbanzo Mediterranean Grill (4/5) - http://www.yelp.com/biz...
"I love Chipotle, but I've grown weary of ordering roughly the same ingredients mixed and remixed into the roughly the same meal. And I love Mediterranean food like falafel and shwarma, but I'm over…"
- Eric Elkins
Triage (5/5) - http://www.yelp.com/biz...
"If you want to be among the best dressed in Denver, then do yourself a favor and pay a visit to David Scott at Triage. Every item in the store (which caters to men and women) is a reflection of his…"
- Eric Elkins
Cafe Ink (4/5) - http://www.yelp.com/biz...
"I probably shouldn't spend so much time "working" here, consider the steady number of distractions when I'm trying to write-- the intensely funny conversations between pro athletes and their female…"
- Eric Elkins
Lola (4/5) - http://www.yelp.com/biz...
"There are four reasons to hit LoLa: 1. Sunday afternoon happy hour-- cheap drinks, two dollar tacos, live music, best view in the city (until the lofts go up across the street) 2. Fresh guac and…"
- Eric Elkins
The Lure Lounge (5/5) - http://www.yelp.com/biz...
"Although the name of the place isn't easy to say via cellphone ("Allure? Demure? Huh?"), The Lure is my favorite loungy restaurant/bar in the city right now. All low lights and dim alcoves, with an…"
- Eric Elkins
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