Twitter, Guy Kawasaki, Obama, and your mother

What's the difference between Guy Kawasaki, Obama, and your mother? Hint: 2 of them have big ____s.

• Guy Kawasaki: 55,000 something followers on twitter
  
• Obama: 100,000 something followers on twitter
  
• Your Mother: 3 followers on twitter
  

If you were thinking something else from the hint... pull your mind out of that gutter! Even if that was the case, the old "It's not the size of the ship that counts, it's the motion in the ocean" addage would come into play. The real answer is "follower counts" :) Now, the question is, does that really matter?

Over at the blog A Big Victory. There is a serious divide on people who are using twitter. The divide is so strong that I've been literally torn between my original goals of marketing my product on the system and just using it for "fun time" which I have not too much of online at the moment. For me, it seems to be this... You seem to have gotten a LOT of hits to your blog through twitter, but you are not a marketer and you don't have anything to sell. This is simply because you had something worthwhile to say and it seems that you spent the time to actually write this article from your heart. That being said. I'm currently analyzing new trends like this. I'm trying to find some common thread or some path/go-between for marketing and conversation. Here's what I've observed so far:

1. Twitter can be used for traditional marketing techniques, but often that gets you banned, or you only get followers who are also marketers. (in my case this is good since I have a product to give marketers too :))


2. Most marketers do not get this fact, and most of them continue to see it as a numbers game


3. This numbers game is something of a dinosaur when it comes to twitter because there is serious conversation for the more tight-knit groups of actual friends who also have followings of tight-knit friends


4. People tend to follow me more when I'm just being myself and I'm conversing with them.


5. This has been really hard to explain to most marketers and businesspeople who are so trained for numbers as the bottom line that they do not really get it at first


6. Whenever I had something really interesting for people to post in my different blogs, I got more people following my blog, but less hits

So it seems like Twitter is not just a social marketing tool, and maybe people who have been using it for the numbers game can gain influence, and maybe faster, but are they really gaining relationships and real fans of their work?

As far as Guy Kawasaki goes, he had written books before he was on Twitter. I don't think his twitter fame came from the marketing techniques he's using now, but the fame that he already had before he was on twitter... like Obama. He didn't even need to do anything, just have the name Obama, and blam... tens of thousands of followers. However, if your mother joined twitter (assuming your mother is not famous), then she would start out with 0 followers and it probably would grow at a normal pace depending on how much she used it... but let's say without the help of bots, etc. she would maybe have some friends on there for a total of about 50 - 60 followers.

How many of Guy Kawasaki's followers will actually re-tweet his posts and links? I'm sure a lot of them, but they are qualified followers for a different reason, because they were already fans of his book.

People who are just starting out on twitter like myself, are mainly confused at first as to why it's such a good site... but given time and conversation, they usually tell me... wow! I get it now!

One other demographic that I'm looking at for you numbers people is how to really guage your real reach on twitter / blogspot / whatever social media tickles your fancy. The equation should be something like:

for blogger
how many new people follow you or subscribe / number of visits

for twitter
how many people retweet or reply / number of friends you tweeted to

The outcome of this equation will change based off of what you say. If you use this ratio that's created to measure your reach, you can see the real difference between the things that you say and how your following or viewership responds to it. For instance, If I had 735 followers and I tweeted "(some url) please retweet" and maybe two people retweeted it... the reach ratio is somewhere around 0.2%. If I tweeted some joke like "Obama was found tripping on LSD today. Upon questioning he replied 'I beat up James Brown!'", and I got 5 replies and 3 retweets... the reach ratio of that message is 0.95% which is much better.

If your reach ratio is low like mine, then maybe you have too many followers, and a lot of them are not paying any real attention to you. For example: if you had only 55 followers, and you said these things and got responses about the same, your reach ratio would be somewhere around 4% and 12.7% meaning that you have had to do less work yielding better results.

That being said, your reach ratio is just a part of the whole reach equation, because on Retweets, you have to take into account the people who retweeted you, for second-level retweets, etc. The whole algorithm itself is somewhat mind-boggling because of the simplicity of the system in which it is generated.

In the end, I think that twitter can be used for marketing and fun... both at the same time. What we need is a new way to look at indirect social marketing and how that can be measured, controlled, and utilized to give both sides of the twitter divide a better experience.

P.S: I followed your mother because she was hot.

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NewsBubbles and the power of Context-Time Exploration

The Bubble Time Machine!

It's not absolutely complete yet... but I've been playing with it in pre-release mode and want you guys to see the power of it before It's released.

I've been studying the relationship between the words "crisis" and "stimulus" using NewsBubbles.org, my news exploration tool. The system basically works through extracting all of the "subject clauses" or bubbles from the articles of majorly syndicated news networks, and then builds a relationship matrix, showing you what other words are most mentioned in the news along with the phrase you put in.

The Buble Time Machine is powerful, because since you're browsing through the context of things, you can now see what the context was yesterday, or a year ago for your bubbles... for instance... look at these two different dates for obama. One when he was just a candidate, one when it was just him and mccain, one when he was elected, and one now that he's president-elect.

January of this Year - Notice the second thing on his list is Clinton : there were 100 articles syndicated about him every 8 days or so.

The end of September - Up against McCain, they had the debates... some of the issues they talk about are listed there too : 100 articles in 6 days related to obama

Election Day - Notice election is about the 5th most related word to obama behind mccain, ofcourse

Day after Election - VICTORY! lol... victory for obama, second bubble on the list... behind his full name... they seem to mention his full name almost every time in their articles. : 100 articles in one day

November 25th - 20 days after his victory, and he's now offering the stimulus package for the economic crisis... etc. etc.. : Notice he's gotten much more coverage now.. over 100 articles in 1 day about obama

This is just an example of what you can compare... I've been looking at the word "crisis" and found some interesting things, looking back. You'll see the options for the date slider coming soon in the user interface for NewsBubbles

When you look at the bubbles through time and how they change, they tend to tell the story without you having to actually read much besides the words that actually matter. Keep in mind that the sources I'm using are top news media organizations... wether you trust them or not, this is not telling their story, this is just telling you what they say mostly, in relation to whatever you want.

Stay tuned for more NewsBubbles Updates