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Tag: Mark Schaefer

  • Tao Of Twitter Author Talks Follower Count, Retweeting And Lists

    We recently interviewed Mark Schaefer, author of The Tao of Twitter. We discussed a variety of topics, like Twitter’s lack of a TweetDeck-like interface, real-time search, the Twitter directory and embeddable timelines widget, and Klout score.

    He had some other points to make that we didn’t use in any other articles, but were still worth sharing, so here you go.

    In The Tao of Twitter, Schaefer suggests that those who think quality matters more than quantity (in terms of followers) are naive or liars. We asked him how important follower count is, and if this mentality is unique to Twitter, or does the same philosophy apply across Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and others.

    “Again this depends on your strategy,” he tells us. “We are free to make Twitter whatever we want it to be.”

    “I believe that to use the platform effectively for business, you need both quality AND quantity,” says Schaefer. “For example, If you’re in sales, you need a lot of contacts before they become sales leads. And you need a lot of leads before they convert to sales calls and you need a lot of sales calls before you make a sale. So, it’s a numbers game.”

    “To some extent, the same is true of Twitter if you’re using it for business,” he adds. “You’re more likely to create business benefits if you have a larger pool of quality, relevant people following you.”

    Schaefer also shared some thoughts about curation and Twitter lists.

    When asked about how much tweeting of other people’s content is too much, Schaefer says, “I’m not sure that there is any strong rule of thumb on this. Most research shows that tweets are more likely to be read if they are spread apart by at least 30 minutes. Tweeting the content of others can be a great networking strategy. Nothing says I love you like a re-tweet now and then. Over a period of time, you’re likely to get on somebody’s radar screen if you are making an authentic attempt to connect with them and share their great content.”

    “If more than 90 percent of your tweets are nothing but links and RT’s, you’re going to get dinged by some third party applications aimed at helping people discover relevant new users,” he adds. “If all you are doing is constantly re-sending links in a mindless way, you’re really just a bot at that point and who wants to connect to a bot? In my mind that is simply a mis-use of Twitter.”

    We asked Schaefer if a large percentage of Twitter users are using Lists, or if it is more of a power user tool.

    “That’s a great question, ” he replied. “I’ve never seen any research to even give me a clue as to what that percentage might be. I would say though that once you follow 200 or more people, lists are simply a way to survive on Twitter! You need something to help you cut through the noise. I would guess that almost anybody with 1,000 or more users has discovered lists by now!”

  • How Much Does Klout Score Matter?

    How Much Does Klout Score Matter?

    “While you may abhor the idea of a company like Klout judging or grading you on a daily basis, it’s already happening and companies are paying attention, so we shouldn’t just ignore this trend.”

    That’s a quote from the book The Tao Of Twitter, by Mark Schaefer. It comes from a chapter about influence on Twitter, something that many businesses and individuals continue to strive for. Sure, there are no doubt plenty of influential people who could care less about their Klout scores, and certainly plenty that feel they are above this kind of judgement, as Schaefer says, but you have to admit, he has a point.

    Do you pay attention to Klout score? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments.

    How much does Klout score matter? How much is it being paid attention to by others? We reached out to Schaefer for more thoughts on the subject. After all, he did also write a book about Klout score.

    “I think the most succinct answer is that if you cut through the emotion of being publicly ranked, Klout’s PR missteps, and the silliness of being an influencer on a topic like lamps or teddy bears, then yes – they are on to something,” he tells us.

    “A Klout score simply shows whether you are somebody who can move content over social media channels that creates reactions,” he adds. “And if you think of how many jobs depend on that ability these days, this can be a very useful number to consider. I hear of more and more companies using Klout scores as a topic in job interviews. Controversial, but it’s happening.”

    Indeed, there have been quite a few articles to come out this year about this. Consider this one from Wired, which begins:

    Last spring Sam Fiorella was recruited for a VP position at a large Toronto marketing agency. With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.

    The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

    More recently, Forbes reported:

    …Klout is on its way to becoming an integral part of the job search and recruiting process for many individuals and companies.

    “We look at this as similar to an SAT,” says Klout spokeswoman Lynn Fox. “It is one of many factors that is considered when a person applies to a university. Likewise, the Klout Score can be used as one of many indicators of someone’s skill set.”

    Here’s Klout CEO Joe Fernandez talking to TechCrunch about the trend in hiring managers taking Klout scores into account:

    “The whole process seems kind of silly, but for whatever reason, once you put a number on things, people take it seriously, no matter how bogus the number might be,” TechDirt’s Mike Masnick said of Klout Score this week. “Lots of companies now use Klout scores to determine who they should give special perks to, leading to plenty of people just trying to game their scores.”

    His article went on to talk about journalism professors who are actually using Klout Score to grade students. Some are indeed taking it seriously. The article, by the way, was filed in “the bad metrics” department on the site. Still, even Masnick had something of a changed view on subject by the end of the piece.

    “The idea of basing grades on a silly system like Klout certainly feels very, very wrong,” he writes. “However, the explanations and defenses from both professors have me rethinking that stance somewhat. Is it really all that different from ‘teaching to the test’, as some teachers do for standardized testing? An SAT score may not really tell us much of anything, but it is important for many colleges, so is it a surprise that teachers help their students optimize for it? While we can quite reasonably worry that focusing on Klout has students optimizing less useful skills, from an experimental standpoint, perhaps it’s not such a crazy idea.”

    If students are entering a workforce where Klout Score is becoming an increasingly important metric among employers (and influence certainly caters to journalism), perhaps it’s a necessary preparation.

    “On the other side of the aisle, companies like Nike, Disney and American Express are using these social scoring platforms like Klout and Appinions to connect to powerful word of mouth influencers,” Schaefer tells us. “When companies like that are involved, it kind of gets your attention. And of course Microsoft just invested in Klout as a partner. Yes, you need to pay attention to this.”

    Yes, Microsoft just invested in Klout, and Klout has been integrated with Bing (which just came to Xbox in web search form, not to mention Windows 8).

    Klout also recently started taking Facebook Pages into account, which could actually serve to make the score a more significant factor, given the fact that Facebook has 1.01 billion monthly active users.

    What do you think? Is Klout Score an important measure of influence? Important enough to base business decisions on? Share your thoughts.

  • Here’s What The Guy Who Wrote The Book On Twitter Thinks About Its Directory And Embeddable Timelines Widget

    Twitter has recently launched a user profile directory and an embeddable timelines widget. The two features are fairly unrelated, but since we had the opportunity to converse with Mark Schaefer, author of The Tao Of Twitter, we thought we’d pick his brain about them.

    The Twitter Profile Directory

    “It has been frustratingly difficult finding users on Twitter unless you know their precise handle — so any improvement will be welcomed!” Schaefer tells WebProNews. “I’ve tried this new directory and still find it buggy but presumably it will be a great help to discovering Twitter users.”

    “I think there is also a built-in benefit here to search engines,” he adds. “Twitter has made a number of search-friendly moves in the last few months and this is an example of this strategy. Of course, many Twitter profile pages have been indexed by the search engines for some time now, so it’s too early to say if the new directory is helping them find any unindexed profiles but my hunch is that is going to provide much more visibility to Twitter profiles on search.”

    In the book, he had some good things to say about Twellow, which is certainly a more user-friendly way to discover Twitter users based on category and/or location (disclosure: Twellow is owned by WPN parent company iEntry).

    The Embeddable Timelines Widget

    “I have a very strong opinion about that,” says Schaefer. “I think in most cases, it’s really ineffective to embed a Twitter stream on a website for two reasons. First, if you’re using Twitter correctly, you’re having a conversation right? Why would you post one side of a conversation on your website? What good is that? At that point it seems like a gimmick just to show you’re cool or something.”

    Embeddable Twitter Timeline

    “The second reason is the potential risk,” he adds. “I was on a friend’s site and he had his Twitter widget front and center on his company’s landing page. Well, his latest tweet was a joking comment about the foremost users of Twitter that simply said ‘PORNOGRAPHY!’ Is that really what he wanted on the front page of his website? The tweets are completely out of context.”

    “There could be some interesting applications to allow people to see tweets from a conference or something but again, a conference of any size is going to attract spammers to a popular hashtag,” he notes. “You run the risk of posting tweets that are inappropriate or even damaging.”

    For more of our conversation with Schaefer, see:

    Why Hasn’t Twitter Launched A TweetDeck-like Interface?

    Without Realtime Search, Google Risks Pushing News Seekers Away To Twitter

  • Without Realtime Search, Google Risks Pushing News Seekers Away To Twitter

    Will Google ever restore its realtime search feature? Will Google and Twitter ever reach another agreement giving Google the access to Twitter’s firehose it needs to make the feature useful? Would the feature ever work without Twitter?

    These are questions we’ve asked repeatedly since the deal expired last year, and the realtime search feature went way. Given that Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, with search being the flagship product, it seems that this is an area that Google should have nailed down. Unfortunately, that’s far from the case.

    Now, the best place to search if you want to find up to the second news and commentary about something that is happening “right now,” is undeniably Twitter. That might have still been the case even when Google had the feature, but Google had/has the luxury of being the starting point for search for most people.

    We recently had a conversation with Mark Schaefer, author of The Tao Of Twitter, and wanted to see what he thinks about this. We asked:

    How badly does Google need to get Twitter’s firehose back for realtime search? Do you think that Google is missing an important function without it? At the same time, is Twitter benefiting from people not going to Google for these kinds of searches?

    “Twitter is trying to reign things in as a way to create more opportunities for monetization,” Schaefer tells WebProNews. “To the extent they can do that, then yes, Twitter will benefit. The real-time results from Twitter are an irreplaceable, unique and highly valuable asset, especially when it comes to providing ‘warm’ search results based on timely comments from friends.”

    “It’s quite ironic that Google+ has been so conservative with providing access to their API,” he adds. “At SXSW last year, Google’s Vic Gundrota said before they made it available, they wanted to make sure it was the right thing to do so people would not be disappointed down the road. In hindsight, his comments seem prescient!”

    Since Google got rid of the feature, Twitter has done things to improve its own realtime search. If Google is not careful, this thing could snowball in Twitter’s favor. Twitter is already a major source of news on the web, and publishers are increasingly distancing themselves from Google News.

    “New data from The Social Habit project reveals that Twitter is benefiting from a youth movement,” Schaefer tells us. “People between 12-17 appear to be piling on to Twitter now. Are they using it for straight news? Probably not!”

    “By comparison, I have surrounded myself on Twitter with the brightest marketing experts I can find,” he adds. “To a large extent, on this topic, Twitter is my trusted RSS feed and it is a very effective one. Today, the news breaks on Twitter. So, yes, Twitter can be an excellent news feed if that is what you want it to be.”

    Could Twitter replace Google News for more and more people? Twitter cares about news. They even recently put out a set of best practices for journalists.

    “News breaks on Twitter, whether local or global, of narrow or broad interest,” Twitter analytics research scientist Jimmy Lin recently said. “When news breaks, Twitter users flock to the service to find out what’s happening. Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them; the speed at which our content (and the relevance signals stemming from it) evolves make this more technically challenging, and we are hard at work continuously refining our relevance algorithms to address this.”

    “Just to give one example: search, boiled down to its basics, is about computing term statistics such as term frequency and inverse document frequency,” he added. “Most algorithms assume some static notion of underlying distributions — which surely isn’t the case here!”

    “During major events, the frequency of queries spike dramatically,” Lin noted. ”For example, on October 5 [2011], immediately following news of the death of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, the query ‘steve jobs’ spiked from a negligible fraction of query volume to 15% of the query stream — almost one in six of all queries issued!”

    It’s interesting that even Google is acknowledging Twitter’s growing role in news seekers’ content consumption habits. One of Google’s official twitter accounts tweeted this out today:

    That links to a Brand Republic piece, which says:

    The research, seen exclusively by Media Week, from Ipsos Media shows that 20% of top European businessmen, including chief executives and finance directors, are spending more time on Twitter in an average month, than on global business websites such as Reuters, Bloomberg, and the Economist.

    The data also reveals that the business elite have dropped off in their daily consumption of the Financial Times and The Economist.

    Beyond just news, there is also the social element of Twitter, and Google is increasingly looking to personalize search based on social connections. Twitter (not to mention Facebook) could play a significant role here too, even in real-time terms, when relevant, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon.

    By the way, Twitter (like other Google competitors) is poaching Googlers. They reportedly just got Google business development director, Matthew Derrella.

  • Why Hasn’t Twitter Launched A TweetDeck-like Interface?

    Last week, Twitter launched a redesign for TweetDeck. The biggest change was the color. It switched to a lighter one. They also added a new way to switch themes and the ability to change your font.

    Twitter bought TweetDeck last year, leading many to assume that Twitter was about to get a TweetDeck-like interface, or some features from the product, at least. So far, however, Twitter has shown no indication that this will happen. That doesn’t mean it won’t, but Twitter hasn’t stopped the product itself from getting updated from time to time, while making other completely unrelated tweaks to Twitter’s own desktop client and apps.

    We recently had a conversation with Mark Schaefer, author of the book The Tao Of Twitter. When asked what he thought the most significant feature Twitter has launched this year has been, he said he feels the most significant thing is the lack of TweetDeck integration.

    “This is going to be a weird answer but I think the most significant story is what they HAVEN’T launched – a TweetDeck-like interface,” said Schaefer. “Take it from somebody who spends a lot of time coaching people on Twitter … the current interface is difficult and non-intuitive. How do you even find your direct messages unless you really hunt?”

    “Twitter purchased TweetDeck but have not yet integrated it into the core platform and every day I wonder why,” he adds. “Twitter’s adoption levels are suppressed by the strange language of the platform and the difficult interface. The company is limiting itself by not leveraging this acquisition and the huge opportunities it presents. Puzzling!”

    That’s an interesting point, considering that the whole strategy of the company once co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to day-to-day operations seemed to be to make users better understand how to use Twitter (though Dorsey has now assumed a reduced role at the company).

    Why hasn’t Twitter integrated TweetDeck into the regular Twitter experience? Would you want it to?

    TweetDeck said when the acquisition was announced, “The mainstream Twitter user-base is well catered for by twitter.com and the official mobile clients. And by becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs ‘more power’.

    So is that the end of it?