On yesterday's post I wrote a lot about some "Twitter marketing", but searching over other authors, there seems that the universal approach is not to add marcketing strategies at all.
They don't speak of stickiness, nor lureness or anything but being you. Showing the human side of the guy behind the PC seems to be the way to success while connecting to your tweeps (followers). Of course, neing yourself and showing your social side is always good, but other than sharing your honest opinions on other's people tweets, and sharing a personal interest link one or twice, I still believe that the messages should be a hook for retweeting, no mater if the content is yours or not, but it shuld lure the click and aim to the RT.
Maybe once you have a certain number of followers (certainly more than 30) the strategy should change, so RT is not as important as delivering true and honest opinions about content. Of course both points are extremely important, the issue is how to leverage both sides of Twitter depending on your current status. Please comment, I'm really looking forward to your feed.
Like what you read? Twitt It
Wondering what's the best strategy for tweeting. Please comment http://twurl.nl/pl3zkh
Or Twitt it in Retweet mode:
RT @edavaria: Wondering what's the best strategy for tweeting. Please comment http://twurl.nl/pl3zkh
--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Adding some stickiness to your Twits.
By now it's well known that Twitter can be an awesome tool for promoting your blog, but in a more general way, it's a tool for sharing your ideas. It's also part of his essence the fact that you can only tweet 140 chars, including links, tags and other people's ID when answering or retweeting. That let you with even shorter space to actually share your idea.
[We need an adapted version of the SUCCESs checklist that make us sticky communicators at the 100 chars threshold]
That's when you need stickiness to kick in. You need too accomplish a lot of objectives with your messages, including grab your follower's attention, make them care, make them remember, make them believe, and of course, share your core message. That's a lot for 140 characters. And if add into the recipe that you need your followers to retweet you and share by word of mouth, the tweets better be sticky.
[Twitter's quintessential is the volatility of their messages, but you can use them as powerful lures to force people bite your hook and lead them to the flypaper, the one that holds your idea.]
So we need an adapted version of the SUCCESs checklist that make us sticky communicators at the 100 chars threshold. This is my approach:
Simple: The message you are trying to share will always be too big to share, so you need to grab attention to make your followers click your link. You won't actually share your idea, but something that your followers already know, making sure that you left enough gaps in the information to force them to click. Be sure to fill those gaps in the link you are sharing. Also avoid abysses instead of gaps.
Unexpected: The idea shared is somehow related to the actual content, but applied in a way that needs a little thinking to make it fit, or maybe needing some more details to make it actually fit. This is great for sharing images.
Concrete: In Tweeter people tweet about nothing and everything. This point is mainly for remembering. Concreteness is not a crucial fact in tweets, cause you don't want your tweet to be remembered, you want concreteness in you message, after you got the precious click in twitter. Anyways, when possible, try to draw a clear image in the tweet that can be imagined by your followers and foreseen, or maybe try to recall something naturally sticky like "Oscar Mayer wieners" or the some old proverb "Bird in Hand"ish, Remember that spotting is just as good as creating, if not better.
Credible: Not much to say here, you wont get a click on An alien invasion radio broadcast these days, and if you get it, you probably gonna be "crying wolf" and will be unfollowed soon. Just keep it on rational limits where some thinking can make a good relation between your tweet and the title of your link.
Emotions: Try to hang from established ideas that make people feel something. Try to spot (or create) a good concept and relate it to your idea in some way. This is what will make people care. This is one of the most important things on tweeting. If you can make your followers care, you will get that click on your link. Usually spotting a nice article in their area of interest should be fine, maybe the best thing here is to know your followers, know what they care.
Stories: You simply don't have space to tell a story, but you can, again, hang from well known stories to make people care. Fables, popular ads, proverbs, famous or recent quotes are all good candidates. Again, the power here is more in spotting than in creating.
This is how i see, the SUCCESs list apply to twitter. In short, stickiness comes to a 2nd plane, after all, you can't expect people to remember something said on Twitter as it were a spot. The quintessential of Twitter is the volatility of their messages, but you can use them as powerful lures to force people bite your hook and lead them to the flypaper, the one that holds your idea.
Unsurprisingly, the SUCCESs checklist still 100% valid, the only modification is that you need to weigh things in a little different way. In this new scheme, the list is reversed. Delivering a core message is the less important thing to do, since we don't even have to have a message at all. Being clear isn't a good deal neither, sometimes a little blurriness can force some curious guy to click your link. But grabbing the attention of the reader is a must, keeping is not a huge deal in 100 characters, but getting it is the 1st mayor step. After getting the attention, you need your subject to believe, and here is your future credibility involved also. And after that, you need them to care about your message enough to make them click and start reading. Here's when the stickiness of your real content comes to play.
You like what you've just read?? Twitt it!
Bring a little stickiness to your twitts, or should i say lureness? http://twurl.nl/tmkpg6
Or Twitt it in RT mode:
RT @edavaria: Bring a little stickiness to your twitts, or should i say lureness? http://twurl.nl/tmkpg6
--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria
[We need an adapted version of the SUCCESs checklist that make us sticky communicators at the 100 chars threshold]
That's when you need stickiness to kick in. You need too accomplish a lot of objectives with your messages, including grab your follower's attention, make them care, make them remember, make them believe, and of course, share your core message. That's a lot for 140 characters. And if add into the recipe that you need your followers to retweet you and share by word of mouth, the tweets better be sticky.
[Twitter's quintessential is the volatility of their messages, but you can use them as powerful lures to force people bite your hook and lead them to the flypaper, the one that holds your idea.]
So we need an adapted version of the SUCCESs checklist that make us sticky communicators at the 100 chars threshold. This is my approach:
Simple: The message you are trying to share will always be too big to share, so you need to grab attention to make your followers click your link. You won't actually share your idea, but something that your followers already know, making sure that you left enough gaps in the information to force them to click. Be sure to fill those gaps in the link you are sharing. Also avoid abysses instead of gaps.
Unexpected: The idea shared is somehow related to the actual content, but applied in a way that needs a little thinking to make it fit, or maybe needing some more details to make it actually fit. This is great for sharing images.
Concrete: In Tweeter people tweet about nothing and everything. This point is mainly for remembering. Concreteness is not a crucial fact in tweets, cause you don't want your tweet to be remembered, you want concreteness in you message, after you got the precious click in twitter. Anyways, when possible, try to draw a clear image in the tweet that can be imagined by your followers and foreseen, or maybe try to recall something naturally sticky like "Oscar Mayer wieners" or the some old proverb "Bird in Hand"ish, Remember that spotting is just as good as creating, if not better.
Credible: Not much to say here, you wont get a click on An alien invasion radio broadcast these days, and if you get it, you probably gonna be "crying wolf" and will be unfollowed soon. Just keep it on rational limits where some thinking can make a good relation between your tweet and the title of your link.
Emotions: Try to hang from established ideas that make people feel something. Try to spot (or create) a good concept and relate it to your idea in some way. This is what will make people care. This is one of the most important things on tweeting. If you can make your followers care, you will get that click on your link. Usually spotting a nice article in their area of interest should be fine, maybe the best thing here is to know your followers, know what they care.
Stories: You simply don't have space to tell a story, but you can, again, hang from well known stories to make people care. Fables, popular ads, proverbs, famous or recent quotes are all good candidates. Again, the power here is more in spotting than in creating.
This is how i see, the SUCCESs list apply to twitter. In short, stickiness comes to a 2nd plane, after all, you can't expect people to remember something said on Twitter as it were a spot. The quintessential of Twitter is the volatility of their messages, but you can use them as powerful lures to force people bite your hook and lead them to the flypaper, the one that holds your idea.
Unsurprisingly, the SUCCESs checklist still 100% valid, the only modification is that you need to weigh things in a little different way. In this new scheme, the list is reversed. Delivering a core message is the less important thing to do, since we don't even have to have a message at all. Being clear isn't a good deal neither, sometimes a little blurriness can force some curious guy to click your link. But grabbing the attention of the reader is a must, keeping is not a huge deal in 100 characters, but getting it is the 1st mayor step. After getting the attention, you need your subject to believe, and here is your future credibility involved also. And after that, you need them to care about your message enough to make them click and start reading. Here's when the stickiness of your real content comes to play.
You like what you've just read?? Twitt it!
Bring a little stickiness to your twitts, or should i say lureness? http://twurl.nl/tmkpg6
Or Twitt it in RT mode:
RT @edavaria: Bring a little stickiness to your twitts, or should i say lureness? http://twurl.nl/tmkpg6
--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria
Friday, March 27, 2009
The Stickiest Book Ever.
At some point the book loose it's interest, cause it need to make a lot of points, loosing simplicity, but the golden brochure makes you remember every single situation and give's you the why of every single word in the whole book.
Once you start reading it, it sounds like every other success story telling book, but it's actually the opposite. It's like revealing the magick tricks secrets. It tells you a story that you probably have heard before, or some that you would probably hear in motivation talks or productivity speechs, but exposing all the "secrets" and telling you the way to build them or to spot it when you see it in your everyday life.
This is a book that simply cannot be resumed or told. I can told you in 20 lines what the book teach you and what's the checlist for Success, but the actual value here comes from the journey of reading it more than the actual conclusions.
A quick application of the SUCCES checklist into the book would be like:
Simple: not really, has a lot of topics that needs to be communicated. Even the core idea is clear... stickyness, need to deal with the SUCCES list, the curse of knowledge, burying the lead and others. Even it's not simple as one can wish, is hard to make a book simpler.
Unespected: Yes, it breaks your patterns of learning from books. The schema used is somehow standard, but makes interesting what should be boring and definitely suprises you every know and then with strange situations and nice stories.
Concrete: The book is all about concreteness. Everything is real life case studies, things that we all have in our minds, some numbers or stories gotten from other sources like Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Credible: Everything is presented in a logic way and usually with background from important sources and names. It has also passed the "test of time" at least during his first year with a huge lot of 5 stars reviews. May not be credible at first glance, but has "experts" backing it up.
Emotional: All the stories and situations are presented in an emotional way. It make you feel like the protagonist, and always reffer to their names. The name mean nothing, but makes you feel like it can be you. Also when he reveals the misteries of the stories, make you feel that "oh" that only a few can. Pretty emotional.
Stories: This is what the book is all about. Stories are what make you remember, and in the final chapter, when you are faced to the torrent of technical information and guidelines, is nice to feel that only the reference to the story can make you remember all the situation and how you (and not the author) made yourself into this point into the "rule" that is needed for stickyness.
This is what i can say about the book. I'm a begginner in the stickyness bussiness, so don't trust my word. Get your copy (or the audiobook as i did) and take this awesome trip. You can also read the excerpt at http://www.madetostick.com/ that has the begining of the book. I certanly let some gaps into the review trying to make you feel more interested. Also I'm pretty sure I'm suffering from the Curse of Knowledge as I'm writing this, but this is what this blog is all about.
--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria
Friday, March 20, 2009
Recession impacts posting
No new content yet. I have some posts half written, waiting to be finished, but some projects emerged and they looks promising... one of them involves some social networking, so could be a nice clinic for the learnig trip i began a few months ago...
Stay tuned cause I'm posting about Malcom Gladwell's masterpiece Outliers and something about Social ROI pretty soon...
Also I'm halfway over Made to Stick, so we should see at least a commentary posted on the site in the near future... and the next title is defined... will be Wikinomics. Any suggestion or commentary is pretty welcome.
--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria
Stay tuned cause I'm posting about Malcom Gladwell's masterpiece Outliers and something about Social ROI pretty soon...
Also I'm halfway over Made to Stick, so we should see at least a commentary posted on the site in the near future... and the next title is defined... will be Wikinomics. Any suggestion or commentary is pretty welcome.
--
Eduardo Avaria
www.thesocialpartner.com
www.twitter.com/edavaria
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The world is changing it's course, it's our task to keep our foots on it.
Every now and then the world suffer big changes. Now we are on the middle of one of them, just as the world suddenly became smaller with the radio, or lives easier with personal computers. Our world is becoming social, and in a way we could never imagine. People has been writing blogs and forming communities for a while, sharing their experiences and feelings, but that didn't worth the attention of big companies since they markets were in the real world. Now, there's finally something that big companies can't ignore. The Social Web.
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin
The Social Networks are here to stay, and they are becoming an integral part of our lives in the way we communicate. There's nothing more interesting to companies that communicating his ideas to the correct people... That's when communities enter into the business. Thanks to tools like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and many others, now the communities are starting to shape the way that companies interact with people, either the products they design, the experience that the consumer gets or the marketing strategies used. That's why companies needs to evolve with people and make wise decisions to survive. This is evidently shown in the power that an unhappy customer have to let the community know about his bad experience and get a hit on the company, no matter the size of the business.
Since (at least some of ) this communities has been here for 10 years or more, can be saw as a phenomenon more or less mature, that companies can't influence, or not as much as they want, so the only choice left is to adapt themselves to the forming and growing communities instead of doing what they have been doing with conventional advertising... making campaigns that identify people and gathered people attracting their attention around a single point of interest... the idea they wanted to share. The case now is completely different, where the ideas has to be born on the communities and companies need to share this idea in a way that it get accepted, since an early reject can lead to very poor penetration... although, this can lead to a unique opportunity to get early feedback and counteract, possibly generating even better result.
"In this new world, spreading an idea is not a matter of how much money you put on it, but the triggers you create to make people spread it"
This new form of communication relies on people communicating with people, and making every node of this (social) network a potential content feeder that will share their experiences and thoughts. This unleashes the power of the ideas to spread not only directly from the source, but get into the brains and crawl back into the network into a new form, the idea is not anymore a way of promotinc certain idea, but a honest communication from a person i care of what he has to say, may be a friend, someone that i follow, some guy that I admire for his achievements, a familiar, or even a random guy... even not having involved interest is a plus to a speaker when transmitting an idea. In this new world, spreading an idea is not a matter of how much money you put on it, but the triggers you create to make people spread it, and the very best of it... it's free, just as free as it is the spread of a negative comment on your idea, so you better take care of what people is saying instead of focusing on what i'm telling to people.
This implications on don't stop on the marketing, but in every way that people inside the company communicates, even between workers, with suppliers, with competitor companies, or more dramatic, to know crucial facts about the (probably private) life of a worker to take proper actions at the workplace (like firing him). We have seen this on the news a few times, but surely can be used for good things like letting a stressed worker go early, or simply asking him about his situation to make him feel the boss' support.
"When the world changes and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who are prepared"-Malcom Gladwell
Of course the implications don't finish here, but this 3 points are the most important from my point of view, and what really will make the difference in the near future. This difference will be undoubtly user driven and the best that we can do, is to get ready to it, no mater if we are users or companies... as Malcom Gladwell wonderfuly says in his book Outliers, when the world changes and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who are prepared. Probably we don't have time to get the ten thousands hours that he says we need to make full use of this opportunity, but certainly every single bit counts towards the survival of the fittest.
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin
The Social Networks are here to stay, and they are becoming an integral part of our lives in the way we communicate. There's nothing more interesting to companies that communicating his ideas to the correct people... That's when communities enter into the business. Thanks to tools like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and many others, now the communities are starting to shape the way that companies interact with people, either the products they design, the experience that the consumer gets or the marketing strategies used. That's why companies needs to evolve with people and make wise decisions to survive. This is evidently shown in the power that an unhappy customer have to let the community know about his bad experience and get a hit on the company, no matter the size of the business.
Since (at least some of ) this communities has been here for 10 years or more, can be saw as a phenomenon more or less mature, that companies can't influence, or not as much as they want, so the only choice left is to adapt themselves to the forming and growing communities instead of doing what they have been doing with conventional advertising... making campaigns that identify people and gathered people attracting their attention around a single point of interest... the idea they wanted to share. The case now is completely different, where the ideas has to be born on the communities and companies need to share this idea in a way that it get accepted, since an early reject can lead to very poor penetration... although, this can lead to a unique opportunity to get early feedback and counteract, possibly generating even better result.
"In this new world, spreading an idea is not a matter of how much money you put on it, but the triggers you create to make people spread it"
This new form of communication relies on people communicating with people, and making every node of this (social) network a potential content feeder that will share their experiences and thoughts. This unleashes the power of the ideas to spread not only directly from the source, but get into the brains and crawl back into the network into a new form, the idea is not anymore a way of promotinc certain idea, but a honest communication from a person i care of what he has to say, may be a friend, someone that i follow, some guy that I admire for his achievements, a familiar, or even a random guy... even not having involved interest is a plus to a speaker when transmitting an idea. In this new world, spreading an idea is not a matter of how much money you put on it, but the triggers you create to make people spread it, and the very best of it... it's free, just as free as it is the spread of a negative comment on your idea, so you better take care of what people is saying instead of focusing on what i'm telling to people.
This implications on don't stop on the marketing, but in every way that people inside the company communicates, even between workers, with suppliers, with competitor companies, or more dramatic, to know crucial facts about the (probably private) life of a worker to take proper actions at the workplace (like firing him). We have seen this on the news a few times, but surely can be used for good things like letting a stressed worker go early, or simply asking him about his situation to make him feel the boss' support.
"When the world changes and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who are prepared"-Malcom Gladwell
Of course the implications don't finish here, but this 3 points are the most important from my point of view, and what really will make the difference in the near future. This difference will be undoubtly user driven and the best that we can do, is to get ready to it, no mater if we are users or companies... as Malcom Gladwell wonderfuly says in his book Outliers, when the world changes and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity for those who are prepared. Probably we don't have time to get the ten thousands hours that he says we need to make full use of this opportunity, but certainly every single bit counts towards the survival of the fittest.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Facebook failing at reading your mind.
On the past few days, we saw a “strike” from the giant facebook that was supposed to hit twitter. Adding it’s full functionality, making twitter not useful anymore if you have your facebook account. Or not?
“Nobody wants to hear twits from friends… I want to hear twits from the people that I’m following. Is a matter of roles.”
I can see where this move comes from. The question “What are you doing?” don’t lead the user to the right use of twitter. Probably developers didn’t even think of it, and the tool was intended to be other than what it is today, for sure! But the success of Twitter is based on responding the question ”What’s important to my followers?” as Jeremiah says in his Twitter FAQ. Since it would be a little sophisticated for most casual users, “What’s on your mind?” seems to be a good simple and concrete choice… but not for facebook. Facebok should ask “What’s important to my friends?”, and there lies the center of the flaw in the logic. Twitter success is not based on what it does, but in what it doesn’t. It don’t allow you to keep a friendship relationship alive… it allow you to form and keep a follower-followed relationship. Nobody wants to hear twits from friends… I want to hear twits from the people that I’m following. Is a matter of roles.
“Nobody wants to hear twits from friends… I want to hear twits from the people that I’m following. Is a matter of roles.”
I can see where this move comes from. The question “What are you doing?” don’t lead the user to the right use of twitter. Probably developers didn’t even think of it, and the tool was intended to be other than what it is today, for sure! But the success of Twitter is based on responding the question ”What’s important to my followers?” as Jeremiah says in his Twitter FAQ. Since it would be a little sophisticated for most casual users, “What’s on your mind?” seems to be a good simple and concrete choice… but not for facebook. Facebok should ask “What’s important to my friends?”, and there lies the center of the flaw in the logic. Twitter success is not based on what it does, but in what it doesn’t. It don’t allow you to keep a friendship relationship alive… it allow you to form and keep a follower-followed relationship. Nobody wants to hear twits from friends… I want to hear twits from the people that I’m following. Is a matter of roles.
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