5 Things Basketball and March Madness Teach About Social Media

In offices all across America TVs are going to be on during the work day this week and next as the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament cranks up. If you need an “excuse” to keep watching March Madness games when you should be working tell the boss that basketball and the tournament can give everyone a few simple pointers on social media. For example:

1. Anyone can, and sometimes will, win: At the start of the tournament or the start of a game everyone is a potential winner. The same is true in social media where customers and the people trying to earn their business have never been on more equal terms. The same goes for businesses competing with other businesses in social media. Fail to recognize this new dynamic and, for business at least, the game will soon be over.

2. At the start it’s a toss-up: Who wins the jump ball at the start of the play can set the tone for the rest of that game. Does your business have a strategy to both grab that ball and then quickly score before the other guys know what hit them? Will your business seize early opportunities and turn them into points on the board?

3. Individual effort is great; team play wins games: If everyone understands the game plan and sticks to it the chances of your business winning its own version of Social Media March Madness are much greater. Too much solo hot-dogging or a lack of team effort will lead to lost games or a blown tournament.

4. Creative plays are game winners: Of course you must play by the rules if they’re there. But to win a game you often need to come up with a play or two no one has seen before. A creative move that takes your opponents by surprise gives you the competitive advantage.

5. Winning is 90 percent hard work, 10 percent luck: Even the best coach can’t control that last 10 percent, but a great social media strategist can help monitor the other 90 percent to ensure that the hard work is sustained and that despite any setbacks it is maintained.

Remember the start of a basketball game is always a toss-up, but he result of the game and your social media efforts don't have to be.

What other parallels are there between basketball in general and March Madness in particular and social media? Please let me know if I missed some.

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10 Ideas to Help Business Navigate Social Media

Almost a year ago I wrote a post called 5 Reasons Social Media is Like Sailing that was well-perceived. It’s time to update that post.

Since then I’ve come up with more reasons sailors might just have the right approach to social media for business. Even if you aren’t into sailing you might try these approaches to see if they don’t make your time in social media more positive and more productive.

Here then are 10 Ideas to Keep Biz Sailing Smoothly in Social Media:

1. Pick your boat carefully: Not every craft is right for every sailor just as in social media not every platform is right for every individual. Pick a platform that suits you. Work with one at a time and see what works.

2. Start slowly: Nobody goes from pond sailing to open-ocean sailing in a day, weeks or even years. Learn your own capabilities, learn from others and be willing to get dunked a few times along the way.

3. Find an old-salt/mentor: Every top sailor was at some point helped along by an experience hand. So it should be in social media: Find someone who literally knows the ropes and can help you navigate your early days. They’ll also be there to stop you from drowning when you inevitably get wet a few times.

4. Learn to be ease in the environment: Just as being on the water can be a somewhat unnatural state for many beginning sailors, so can a newbie feel that their first days, weeks and months in social media can be slightly uncomfortable. Relax. Once you realize that the very worst that can happen is you may get a little wet once in a while then you’ll soon be loving every moment in social media.

5. The quickest route is NOT always a straight line: Like sailing, businesses in the social media space must navigate all kinds of challenges to get to their goals. Along the way there are likely to be winds (customer feedback) and currents (the business climate) that challenge a business trying to get to its port (goals). The best-laid social media plans include contingencies to deal with these. Although the course may be less than perfectly straight, the well-planned business will reach its goals ahead of its competitors.

6. You can’t control the wind: But you can control the trim of your sails and heading of your boat. The winds at the intersection of social media and business can be unpredictable and are constantly swirling. As a business you need to monitor the breezes of public opinion so that if they should suddenly turn into a squall of bad publicity you can react appropriately.

7. When bad weather hits: You, your vessel and your crew had better be prepared. Having a well-trained crew/staff and a solid social media plan will help a business react in its best interests. The plan allows the captain/boss to sleep well at night knowing that his boat is ready for anything.

8. An efficient sailboat is the sum of its working parts: A combination of hull shape, sails, masts and rigging keep a sailboat moving forward. A business operating in social media is also about the right combination of components to keep it moving forward. A social media plan will assess existing strengths, competitive threats and business goals to come up with the correct combination to keep you moving forward.

9. You WILL find yourself becalmed: It’s not something to fear. A thorough social media plan includes a list of “To Do” items that are not pressing, but certainly help make the enterprise if not stronger at least better able to make the most of the next breeze (opportunity). Remember that the “calm usually comes right before the storm.” Using it to get your business ready is just smart sailing!

10. Sail away from the safe harbor: You should take a few chances. This great quote from Mark Twain (sent to me by the helpful and smart Marita Roebkes) says it best: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

So, are you and your business ready to sail off and explore social media? I hope so. What other tips would you recommend for social media sailors?

Image is of The Man at the Wheel – the Gloucester Fishermen's Memorial Cenotaph, a tribute to local fishermen who have died at sea, in Gloucester, Mass. From FreePhoto

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10 Newbie Twitter Mistakes Made by Businesses

Businesses jumping into social media often see Twitter as a “simple” part of the plan: set up an account and start tweeting. Sadly some even get stuck right after the set up part. Here are 10 mistakes business newbies on Twitter should avoid:

1. Doing Little or Nothing
With an estimated 25 to 30 percent of Twitter accounts either empty or “one tweet and done” is it surprising that these accounts generate little interest from others on Twitter? Your inactive or virtually inactive account sends a clear message that you’ve given up on Twitter.

2. Desperately Following
If you’re following hundreds of people and only a few dozen are following back doesn’t that send a message that you desperately want followers but aren’t getting them? Why not be patient and never let your Following count get more than 10 percent higher than your Followers account?

3. Tweeting Too Much
If you’re guilty of this you will annoy your followers and water down your message… which likely means you’ll lose followers faster than you get them. How much is too much? Start slowly and only tweet useful stuff two or three times a day. As you slowly increase this over several months pay attention to what, if anything, gets a response (it's retweeted or commented on) … and when this happens. Let this be your guide.

4. Mostly Self-Promotional
Too much “me, me, me” talk will mark you as boring … or worse. Add value for others on Twitter and more followers will come. Mention your business or services only when you’ve been asked or in direct response to a stated need. If you consistently give, you’re followers will do the same and your good behavior will be well rewarded.

5. Failure to Connect
It can be tempting for businesses to give a Twitter monologue instead of engaging in a dialogue. If you get to know your followers by asking and answering questions, for example, you’ll show that you’re interested in them. They in turn will learn about you. This also means responding to any “@” messages promptly (within a day at most).

6. Not Helping Others
Acting as a connector or problem-solver will earn you loyal followers. Sometimes the simple act of retweeting a piece of great content will be seen as being helpful. Twitter truly is a place of getting more than you give, but you have to give first.

7. Mixing Business and Pleasure
Sending a mix of business and personal tweets can work when you’re well-established, but a better practice for a business new to Twitter is to keep it all professional. Otherwise you’re sending the message: We don’t know enough to keep our personal lives out of our business.

8. Impersonal avatars
Yes your business name or logo is important, but Twitter (and all social media) is about people. Use an avatar image that reflects your people not your brand name.

9. Wasting background space
Twitter gives you a lot of real estate around your Twitter-stream … don’t waste it. Use it to let people know what you do and why you do it. Put your people and the business personality on display. It’s also OK here to list a few other contact points such as email address, phone numbers and other social media URLs.

10. Not Checking In Regularly
Maintaining a Twitter account needs to become part of your routine. Once a day or twice a day or more, but it does need to become a regular thing to have any chance of helping your business.

So what am I missing? I’d love to hear other things businesses who are new on Twitter should do to improve their chances of social media success.

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Twitter Influence Graders: Behind the Green Curtain

Does influence on Twitter matter? And, if it does, what is the best way to measure it?

On the first question it seems reasonable to say influence only matters if all or part of the reason you are on Twitter is for business … then “influence” matters.

So if it matters to you, how do you measure influence?

In Twitter 1.0 most believed: Followers = Influence. Clearly the world of Twitter has moved on.

Today there are many tools that claim to measure an individual’s influence using up to 140 characters.

I decided to look at the three Twitter influence graders I use and ask questions of the people behind the tools. Here’s what I found:

Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader is just one of the many free analytics tools from the always helpful folks at Hubspot. I heard back from Dharmesh Shah, the founder at HubSpot himself (and @dharmesh on Twitter).

Twitter Grader ranks Tweeps on a scale up to 100 and allows comparisons to others by city and state, as well as analysis of followers and those you are following.

Dharmesh says Twitter Grader looks at a number of factors but one of the most important is the degree of "engagement" for a user.

“So, if a given user seems to be getting more retweets and responses to their tweets, they would get a higher grade.

“This makes sense, because this ‘engagement’ score acts as a decent proxy for influence,” he says. “We also look at the number of followers – with some adjustments for when an account has a lot of low-quality followers.”

Dharmesh went on to say that what people should know is that Twitter Grader measures on a curve (i.e. a relative scale). “So, as the Twitter user-base evolves, the scores adjust automatically. So, when a user gets a grade of 80, it means that based on the factors we look at, that user scored higher than 80 percent of the other users that have been graded.”

He concluded by acknowledging that calculating authority on Twitter is not a perfect science, but that Hubspot, who has been doing this for a while, has evolves its algorithm as it learns more about how Twitter is being used.

Twitalyzer

On behalf of Twitalyzer I heard back from its creator, Eric T. Peterson, Chief Executive Officer and Principal Consultant at Web Analytics Demystified, Inc (and @erictpeterson on Twitter).

Eric says Twitalyzer, which can spit out analytics in dozens of categories, decided that humans know that influence is “something we see and experience every day in our lives” and “that being complex for complexity's sake was a bad idea. So we fixed that.”

With the Twitalyzer 2.0 release his company made changes to the old "influence" calculation and started calling it "impact."

“At the same time we dramatically simplified the influence calculation to look at the two measures we believe best reflected the pure definition of influence (‘causing something without any direct or apparent effort’): retweets and references,” Eric said.

That way anyone tracking their influence in real time will find “the more you invest in Twitter as a communication medium, the more influential you will become,” he said.

And while he personally does not see influence on Twitter as some kind of contest “if you're a business person paid to Twitter and you can’t move your Impact score up, something is wrong.”

“This is why we provide recommendations in Twitalyzer Dashboard ... to help our business users understand how they can improve their impact in Twitter,” Eric said.

TweetLevel

On behalf of TweetLevel I heard back from its creator, Jonny Bentwood, Head of Analyst Relations and Strategy at Edelman in London (and @jonnybentwood on Twitter).

TweetLevel tallies up scores in popularity, engagement and trust to reach an influence score. It does this with a transparent calculation it reveals on its About page that includes data from such places as Twitalyzer and Twinfluence.

Jonny told me that the key aspect when measuring influence with Tweetlevel is context. Within context the tool examines the “location of the conversation” and the type of influencer (including those that create, amplify, adapt or comment).

TweetLevel doesn’t “confuse popularity with importance,” but instead focuses on “micro topics” and understanding who are the key people in those areas. Jonny added: “TweetLevel is a dynamic tool that will alter someone’s score depending upon that user’s current usage.”

“The tool will continually evolve as Twitter adapts its API and functionality (such as the recent introduction of lists and change in the way retweets work). TweetLevel will take this new data and include it in the algorithm,” he said.

In terms of what TweetLevel’s scores mean (on a scale of 1 to 100) Jonny said his tool’s score is the equivalent of someone’s Google PageRank x 10. A score above 80 is truly exceptional and below 25 is not too good. For the everyday user that means a score over 40 is good, over 50 is great and over 60 is amazing

So what did I learn? It seems that of the three tools I use (for myself and clients) all have their value.

I think anyone relying too heavily on one influence measuring tool is likely getting a skewed picture of influence. Maybe there is a place for an “influence aggregator” that scores each user across multiple influence tools.

What do you think? Does Social Media , and Twitter specifically, need this?

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Twitter’s ‘Tweet Lifters’ Take Credit Where Credit Isn’t Due

Twitter’s ephemeral nature means content comes and goes in most Twitter feeds at the speed of light. As it flashes by you see the good, the bad and, if you are unlucky or accidentally follow an idiot, the ugly.

So taking a tweet and reposting it without crediting the source is no big deal, right?

It’s only Twitter. There’s so much stuff flying around who will notice, right?

Wrong!

People do notice and you will be caught. Your “tweet lifting” (a term my friend @markfrisk coined) will be noted.

You may be called on it publicly (the best case scenario as it may make you stop the lifting or whatever you want to call it). Or you may simply suffer a silent, but deadly decline in your reputation.

Take the case of someone I follow, someone I know personally and someone I once would have trusted completely as both an authoritative voice in social media and a “good person.” We’ll call this individual Person A.

Person A is a believer in Twitter and its power to connect people and build collective knowledge. Person A has taught classes on the topic of Twitter. In the past month I have noticed that Person A reposts items that I and others have posted – usually within minutes, but sometimes hours later.

Person A does this without crediting the original source and sometimes with minimal or no changes to the original tweet.

How do I know this? Obviously I can’t be 100 percent sure, but the evidence has me at 99.9 percent. For example, a tweet this past weekend on a somewhat obscure topic was reposted six minutes later. A Google search found four stories on the exact topic, two of which ranked higher in the Google search than the one I chose.

I had chosen the story to link to because I liked the way it was written. Could it be mere coincidence that Person A reposted a link to that exact story just minutes later. It could. But this has been a pattern for several weeks.

In another example the bit.ly shortened URL I had in a tweet was repeated in a Person A tweet about an hour later, although some of the tweet’s language had been changed.

In yet another example the entire tweet, word-for-word and with the exact same bit.ly shortened URL showed up, uncredited, five hours later.

I think I know enough about URL shorteners to understand that an identical shortened URL would not be created by bit.ly.

In his blog postSharing Content (Anatomy of A Tweet And A Retweet) Francisco Rosales spells out just how important attribution is. And I agree with him when he says it is a “critical piece of the tweet”.

The bottom line is this: Your reputation as a “good person” on Twitter is on the line: Don’t be a “tweet lifter” on Twitter.

Examples:

Posted at 11:30 a.m. Friday, Feb. 19, 2010

Reposted without credit at about 4:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 19, 2010

To read more from Francisco Rosales go to his blog at socialmouths. To follow him on Twitter go to @socialmouths

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