tdog.blog

There’s a different air about this SxSW, that’s for sure. Last year, we had the Zuckerberg/Lacey disaster, where the audience was tweeting away while the oblivious panelists just kept yammering about irrelevant stuff. This year, we had panel after panel (including mine, “Your First Year in Freelancing”) using Twitter to gather instant feedback and questions from the audience. 

The Small World Labs guys did it right — Sam Eder served as e-moderator (twitterator?), keeping the panel moving along by gathering and sythesizing tweets. I had a much smaller group (a room for 20 had 40 folks in it) and had set up a few hashtags (#geektopeak and #g2p) and at some point, the questions and conversations with those hash tags got too much to follow, so I went back to the audience directly. 

Here’s another thing I noticed: everyone is talking about ROI in social media. Realism. Pragmatism. It’s quite energizing, really. We’ve had these tools for a while, now we’re trying to make sense of them. Some of us are working at places where social media is the next big scary thing, and just being with folks who are also grappling with all this stuff fills me with hope. We’re on to something important here, and now there’s just this confident air that we will get it right, eventually.

In the “Selling Social Media to the Man” panel, I loved what Peter Kim had to say: “Either be the catalyst for change with social media, or get a new job.” I think he’s started something interesting. There’s going to be a huge shift of people and talent from old, stodgy places that put their thumbs down over to more progressive firms that embrace not only these new tools, but the new outlooks and DNA that these tools represent.

One of the things I’ve said since the beginning of Triple Dog Dare Media was: Fail fast. Don’t linger and dawdle. Figure what does and doesn’t work. Throw out what doesn’t. Move, move, move. And social media is like that, which I deeply respect. However, most corporate cultures don’t allow (or reward) failure. These places are going to have to deal with all of us out here who have been imbued with these technologies and philosophies.

SxSW Interactive 2009 is only half over, and I’m already brimming with ideas, plans, and thoughts about the future. After such a crappy 2008, it sure is good to feel good.

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I was just interviewed by FreelanceSwitch, one of the premiere blogs targeting freelance writers, designers, and coders.  I was interviewed by them because they were interested in hearing about my new book From Geek to Peak, which targets freelance geeks in their first year of business.

The process was painless, but it wasn’t so much an interview as it was more like guest blogging (the interview was conducted over email, which required back and forth and more writing than talking…so it felt more like writing…if that makes any sense). The result has been rather remarkable from a traffic generation standpoint–way more effective to be mentioned on this one blog then just about any other source so far.

What kinds of results have I seen? For one thing, there was an immediate uptick in sales of my book. I also got various emails from folks who had purchased the print edition looking for an e-copy, which I funneled on to my publisher. I also saw quite a bit of traffic going to WritingMafia.com (which is mentioned in the article) — it got a 300% increase in page view and unique visitors in less than a day, and it looks like we’re getting quite a bit of folks coming back to the site today as well.

Speaking of Writing Mafia, I had posted a little story there called “Are you on Twitter?” back on February 20th. On the 23rd, I signed up for BusinessExchange (a social bookmarking site set up by BusinessWeek magazine). I posted a link to my story on Twitter there. The results? See for yourself in the graphic below.

(Click the image to get a more detailed view…)

Results of Business Exchange Listing

That article received 1457 visits in 16 days, most of it coming from the “most active” part of the site, which tells me that the topic caught fire. Incidentally, not only is this the most traffic that any article on that site has received, it’s also the most commented piece on the site. Furthermore, it’s driven a lot of traffic to my Twitter account @myerman, leading to more sign ups.

In the old days, we’d try to do all this with SEO or PPC ads. I think the shift has begun to social media (wikis, blogs, social networks of all kinds, twitter, etc) and that it will only continue to snowball.

Anyone else have any stories to tell that bolster or critique this position?

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You’ve seen these all over the place nowadays. They’re the funny little images right by a form submit button that ask you to identify the smudged up letters. Supposedly, these CAPTCHA devices prove my humanity (as opposed to my bot-ness). The goal is admirable: use a Turing test to keep evil spambots from polluting your blog comments and other database assets.

The problem is, most CAPTCHAs have been hacked in one way or another. Most CAPTCHAs are hard to use even if you have good vision, and to make them accessible to the blind, they require a voice component that is also easily hacked. What we need is some kind of Turing test that will easily tell humans and computers apart, and do so in a way that doesn’t involve math or computation (which by the way, is what computers are good at, duh!).

One of the best systems I’ve found is TextCAPTCHA.com which uses logic puzzles and other questions that confound computers but leave most humans unfazed. If you can answer the questions, you are free to submit your form. For example:

Two + 5 + one is ?

What word from “kidnapped, paws, garrulousness” begins with “k”?

The list ear, Wednesday, pink and John contains how many body parts?

What is seventy five thousand seven hundred and seventy three as a number?

What is John’s name?

So far, the site features 157 million different questions that you can access through a free Web Services API. You register for free, use the code he gives you to send in requests for questions and process responses, and there you have it: an accessible (it’s all plain text, no images) extremely hard-to-break CAPTCHA on your site. And since it’s a web service, you can use it on numerous sites if in fact you run a number of them.

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For those of you who are following such things, you know that the USAF (an organization that has kept its distance from the blogosphere in the past) has come out with a “Web Posting Response Assessment”–a stiff-lipped flowchart that nonetheless appeals to the systems analyst/information architect in me.

What do I like about this flowchart? It aims to give the man on the street (in this case, a USAF enlisted person or officer) some easy tools and processes for responding to items out there in the blogosphere. I really like the “no response” solution to trolls and ragers. It’s really easy to get baited by the mental midgets out there, which makes you an even bigger midget. (You know what I mean.)

I also like the transparency clause in the Response section. That’s another thing that’s easy to forget when you’re out there–and something that’s very hard to apologize for, because everyone will assume you were hiding your affiliation on purpose.

Lastly, I like how the process encourages a response with facts, using links to existing materials. Great way to bolster any position and build SEO at the same time. Something like this should be easily adaptable to your organization’s situation.

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Twitalyzer.com offers a very interesting service: they rank your Twitter usage and tell you how well you’re doing in various areas:

• Influence, or how many followers you have
• Signal, represented by a signal-to-noise ratio
• Generosity, or how much you reference and retweet others
• Velocity, or how much you tweet over a rolling period
• Clout, or how much others reference you

Here is a screen shot I took on Friday February 27, 2009. The service is being upgraded right now, thanks to a jump in traffic that has made their hardware melt. So be patient if you go out there. I opted to delay this post just in case they needed more time!

As you can see from my chart:

• I have  a very low influence (I need more followers, so follow me @myerman)
• My signal-to-noise ratio is astonishingly high, which means 8 times out of 10 I will be providing you with a URL or retweeting others (ie, I won’t be wasting your life with useless tweets)
• My generosity is low (so I need to work on referencing others and retweeting them)
• My velocity is low (not enough tweets during the past week, but I feel like I’m right on target, really)
• My clout is super-low (I need to get more retweets and references)

Some Thoughts on Improving Your Use of Twitter

The key metric here is influence. How many people follow you, how many times are you retweeted, and how many times are you referenced. If these numbers go up, then everything else goes up. The key to gaining influence is making sure that your tweets have value to others. Try to include one (or more) of the following in your tweets:

• A URL to a resource
• A hashtag
• An @ reference to another user
• A retweet (RT) of another user’s tweet

Putting these kinds of things in your tweets will make them more useful. Another key to success is generosity. Reference other users and retweet what they say–this will open users to other networks, most of which they can’t access easily. Eventually, those you retweet will reciprocate by referencing and retweeting you! But of course, you’d better have something interesting to say….so this all kind of loops back on and reinforces itself.

At the end of the day, Twitter isn’t much different then other communication channels:

1. Know your audience.
2. Create content targeted to that audience.
3. Start conversations that drive deeper engagement.

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