Social Wisdom: Digital Strategy Musings

Hip Hop Star Murdered Just Two Hours After His First Tweets

Okay – so sorry to post and tweet about something so dark and stupid.  With no disrespect intended to Dolla, we have a bit of a twitter craze going on – as evidenced by the many comments trying hard to see the connection between death and twittering just before it.

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Twitter Surges Past Digg, LinkedIn, And NYTimes.com With 32 Million Global Visitors  [article by Tech Crunch - note the very interesting end notes with the funding per venture]

This is a very interesting graph showing twitters global visitor count just exploding past digg and linkedin.    The article linked above acknowledges that the visitors count includes only twitter.com and does not capture tweets from other apps and devices.

I’m wondering where this will settle.  I like twitter and I really hope there is a bit more consolidation in the twitter universe.  There are tons of twitter tools – none of which are integrated (from a marketing perspective) into twitter.com.   Perhaps I speak too soon but it has been a bit of self discovery to find the various tools.

When Shake n’Bake’s Perfect Potatoes were launched, sales took a very similar hockey stick look.  Many who tried Shake n’ Bake picked up a box of Perfect Potatoes.  With the sales going thru the roof, production was ramped up, sales to grocers increased and store displays built.  The problem was, however, that many people who tried PP didn’t buy a second box.  When I joined the brand team, I had a *huge* inventory problem.   [in the end, taste wasn't the issue.  The issue was it took 45 minutes to cook cut potatoes in the oven when consumers only had 30 minutes to make dinner...].   In the same respect, I wonder what will happen six months from now.  Will twitter traffic crash to a much lower level once the drama is gone?

I’m not being pessimistic.  I’m also very aware that in social media consumer adoption leads corporate adoption.  There is still a vast amount of corporate adoption to come for twitter.  So.. the future may also be bright.  I’ll be watching either way.

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Okay – so I admit it – I was blogger before twitter and so until recently, didn’t use twitter. I found it somewhat futile with my handy blackberry stripped away from me having gone on mat leave in 2008 [i hate losing technology] and so being on the grid was difficult. Now that I’m back in the industry, twitter has its place – I see great value and I am enjoying following both former colleagues, respected savants (often one & same) and the international folks. I love the information flow.

I consumed happily and easily with my 26 follows and followers. I took pride in my near equal ratio – consuming and populating thoughts in a personally selected sphere of influence. Suddenly yesterday, I went from 26 followers to over 100. Okay so I got a nice and appreciated #followfriday (thanks Andrew Blair) and I added my twitter address to a discussion post in popular facebook fan page. But beyond that – I can’t account for the explosion.

And who are these people? I can’t quite understand it. Are they sincere in their follow attempts? Am I just a number to make their stats look big? I get that people with near equal rations are targetted so that twitterers can increase their follower numbers. What kind of value are people placing on how many people they follow and are followed by? I’m not talking about celebrity brands like Oprah whose fans presumable feel more brand loyalty thru twitter feeds but for the everyday joe – how do they know outside of a tag (or#followfriday) that I’m the one they should follow?  It doesn’t feel very scientific to get a stranger twitter follow.

I want to answer each one of my new followers personally and evaluate if I should return follow but now I feel a little sick looking at my exponentially growing list [minus the chick with her mouth full who is blocked for her wierd image].  I don’t think I can manage an expanded follower list without a better tweetdeck.

I attended a Trend City event last week where Norah Jones and Mark Evans and others were presenting their top social media trends. At one point Mark admitted to not being able to follow more than 200 people and that there would be a need to prioritize and filter the information. [to which I got excited and stated that we would see reverse segmentation in the future - whereby consumers would demand and use tools to better segment their friends and communities for organizations. And then the room went silent.. I *hate* that!]

I do want better segmentation on my twitter. When some starts following – I want their profile to auto filter them into segments that I’ve predefined.  Okay so tweetdeck does this on a very limited scale – I can assign a group for a bunch of followers.   And yet, I want to be able to identify my close friends from acquaintances – when I add start following.   Sort of identify a profile per twitter follow and then filter based on those profiles.  e.g. separate my just for laughs tweets from thought leadership tweets. Tweetdeck doesn’t really do much for me in this regard.

Tweetdeck is annoying me with the clear issues.  I can’t seem to get a saved clear status.  When I enter twitter from another computer, twitter does not remember what I’ve seen.  Must investigate.

Anyhow – I felt a need to rant.

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