From the category archives:

Social Media

Social Media Revolution

Essential Education: Social Media Revolution:

It’s a interesting video, although the numbers may not be accurate. According to Burbeck, a commenter on YouTube (Yea, I know):

The concept is right. The numbers are wildly exaggerated, though. And it’s not just because they’re growing so fast. It’s because many of those numbers are unavailable in any accurate way. There is, indeed, a revoution taking place. You just hope it’s led by people who are more honest with their numbers.

As compelling as the video may be, I think that it misses the point. The big change is not that 96% of all Generation Y are members of some kind of social network. What’s much more exciting is that 100% of all people currently inhabiting the planet, have access to the tools necessary to create and distribute creative work. You don’t need a printing press to publish a book or a broadcasting antenna to air a television short.

It is less important that a college stopped giving out email addresses and more important that 10-year-olds can create quality digital media and publish it using the same channels as professionals. An eighth grade class can design an online newspaper just as polished as the Huffington Post, if they choose too.

I like social media as much as the next guy, but I think it’s a distraction from the much bigger and much more important sea change that is happening.

100 million people updating their Facebook status with what their cat ate for breakfast doesn’t interest me. 100 million people creating quality content is what excites me.

(Via Education Innovation.)

My Secret Recipe for Getting More Followers on Twitter

Last November, Guy Kawasaki posted an article on how to get more followers on Twitter. Guy’s article is better written than most, but there are hundreds out there. Most of the articles out there provide similar advice: Suck up to the influentials (even if they don’t respond), auto-follow everyone, sign up for a service that auto-spams everyone with direct messages should they choose to follow you, post lots of links, and pick a pretty picture.

I’m sure I missed a few in that list, but I think I made my point. To an extent, these articles are right. If you follow their advice, you will get more followers. I’m not going to argue that it doesn’t work—instead, I suggest that it’s hard to keep up this strategy over the long term for a number of reasons.

First, it’s not a particularly honest endeavor. If you’re going to engage in this kind of behavior, don’t kid yourself—you’re doing it solely to watch that count of your current followers on the upper-right of your Twitter page go up.

Secondly, the return is not nearly high enough for the effort you need to put in mindlessly posting links you ripped from Digg. You need to make a decision: When it comes to followers, are you interested in quality or quantity. If you’re just posting anything and everything that pops up, then you’re probably not concerned with who these people are or if they’re interested in what you’re doing; you just want some warm bodies in the room. You’re running a college frat party.

To quote Bill Cosby: “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

Here’s my secret recipe for amassing an obscene number of qualified followers on Twitter: Be interesting or do something exciting.

Oprah didn’t need to auto-follow everyone who came within twenty feet of her. For that matter, Guy Kawasaki didn’t either—the man has sold countless books and is no small part of the reason half the people working in the coffee shop down the street are sitting in front of Macs. John Roderick, singer for the Long Winters, is another great example. John shot up to about 1,000 followers within the first week of having a Twitter account and—as of this writing—is sitting pretty at over 4,300 followers. Merlin Mann discovered more people followed him when he took breaks from Twitter.

Here’s my advice: It’s beautiful day out. Instead of mindlessly posting other people’s work or retweeting posts about other people’s work, go outside and figure out what you can add to the picture. Resolve to create something awesome or become the guru of some niche passion of yours. Start building, start a blog, take whatever that first step you need to take to make something exciting and make sure you take it today.

(Image via moleitau)