Twitter Follow Fridays (group back rubs)

A social meme activity has grown in the Twitterverse known as Follow Friday (or #FF for those of you who speak #hashtag). It is simply a mechanism to let other people who are interested in you, know who you are interested in.

As I wrote that, I realize how sophomoric that sounds, but that's what it is. Twitter, as a social network, does require relationships to be reciprocity. You can follow Bill, but Bill may not follow you. And that works well, maybe because you find what bill says interesting, but Bill might not feel the same about what you say. Wow, that sounds more shallow and self absorbed than it is. Bill might be very interesting and have thousands of people interested in what he is saying and it is reasonable that he would not follow everyone who follows him, regardless of how interesting he might find them. But, I digress.

Follow Friday is the popular method of saying to everyone following you: "I find these people interesting. You might also." The way it works if pretty simple and informal. On Fridays, Twitter users (or Tweeps) send a message (a tweet) with the names of people they are giving a shout out about, and then include the short hashtag (codeword) #FF. That's it! Pretty simple and not complicated.

Sometimes, peer pressure kicks in and people feel the need to reciprocate. Someone gives a shout out to there followers about me, and I might feel that I should return the favor and include them in my #FF message. I try to resist that knee jerk reaction. Although it always makes me feel good when I find that someone feels what I have to say is interesting, I feel that if you only have 140 characters to say something, you should be truthful about it. If my followers though I was just tossing out #FF names because they did it to me, it would dilute my recommendation that I find them interesting.

Sometimes, Follow Fridays seem to become huge virtual group back rubs. Everyone doing a little for everyone else, but no one really getting someones full attention.

Now, let me digress a bit into how I have begun doing Follow Fridays:

Twitter has a mechanism for flagging tweets that you find interesting as being a favorite of yours. It is real simple. You read something you like, and with a single click, it is flagged as one of your favorites. I use the favorite feature all the time. I don't always have time to read twitter, but if something catches my eye, I will flag it and will read it later. If, after I read it, I thought it a keeper, I will leave it flagged.

On Friday, I can quickly go to my favorites page and see all of the messages I found interesting. One click on the Reply icon for each and it adds it to my next tweet. Click-click-click-click, toss a #FF on the end. Maybe add a short message in it like "These made me laugh this week" and off it goes.

I hope that people that include me in there #FF messages aren't offended if I don't immediately reciprocate. Don't take it personal, I don't. I have the unfortunate predicament that I have interests in multiple, unrelated things. Winemaking, Computers, Beermaking, Science, Social behavior, Music, .... What I find interesting is probably only interesting to a distinct subset of people who follow me. I try to please everyone.

Happy Follow Friday everyone!

Who made me think this week? #ff @2020science @BadAstronomer @donttrythis @sciencebase @bayareascience @rstrohmeyer @tim_harper @maureenogle

You can follow me on twitter at @tbeauchamp, but only if you find me interesting.

Social Media: Turning an Echo Chamber into an Amplifier of a PR Campaign

A common characterization of the ecosystem of social networks, whether Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any of the other on-line centers of virtual gathering, is that they become “Echo Chambers” for their participants, as opposed to engines of knowledge transfer.  Another term for this is “Group Think”.  This is when you bring people together and the critical mass of participants and ease of quick, bursts of comments becomes a fertile breeding ground for chatter, giving each other “props”, and reveling in the shared experience of discussion, rather than moving the discussion forward towards a useful end. 

Topics usually pop up around a central idea or event and then everyone participates and shares thoughts that circle and expand the idea.  But something interesting happens in the aggregate to the ideas.  The group’s social dynamic kicks in and reshapes the discussion.  “Shaping” probably isn’t the right term here.  It is more like filtering some aspects of the of idea and reinforcing others.

A similar effect happens in the physical world too, but with sound or light.  Sound generated in in a room will bounce off the walls and items in the room.  The dynamics of the room and all of it’s contents will dampen some sounds while allowing others to resonate.  Soon the sounds at the resonant frequency dominate the acoustics and the dissident sounds die out.  It doesn’t matter what white noise you start with, you end up with a spectrum of sound that comes out the same each time.  Nothing new, nothing original.  That is what can happens in a social network discussions also.  A topic is introduced and it quickly is molded into a similar outcome or consensus typical for that group. 

Utilizing social media as part of your marketing strategy has to be done with this phenomena in mind, sensitive to this echo chamber mechanism.  A traditional print campaign marketer might be tempted to treat the publishing event as the culmination of the PR process, not realizing that publishing the post is really just a transition from the preparation phase to the participation phase of the campaign. 

The added attention that you now have to give to your message doesn’t lessen the need for preparation and crafting of the message in the first place.  An incomplete or ill-conceived message will hit the blogosphere, Facebook ecosystem, or tweet-stream and quickly be torn to shreds for what it is.  But, even with an “on the mark” and well crafted post, setting it free in the wild requires ongoing attention and nurturing.  Unless your campaign says exactly what the community already wants to hear, it will either just be drowned out, or worse, take on a life of its own, which probably won’t be the message it was intended to be.  If the message resonates with that crowd, it will be amplified.  If it doesn’t square with what the audience wants, or what the crowd is predisposed to, your message will be molded into what fits that community's tone better, and then that will be the message that gets amplified. 

This amplification can be used to your advantage, carrying your message farther and with greater impact that just the original words themselves and form could have.  The message can evolve to live and grow in it’s new environment until it resonates with the crowd that participated in it’s current form.  Now, the message is the product of many contributors, all with a stake in it’s success.

This now takes the old model of message crafting, publishing and calculating ROI; and changes it to crafting, publishing, stewarding through the new social media landscape, and calculating ROI.  And ROI also needs to be evaluated differently.  More resources are expended in the delivery, but there are real numbers of active participants at the target.

In conclusion, this social media has not made PR easier. It has changed the lifecycle of a message and extended its reach.  But no longer can you just put it out there. Social media messages are now  interactive and living and evolutionary.