Twitter: Broadcast, Engage, or Both?

Twitter seems to work best when used as an amplifier for messages, set to 'broadcast only' if you will. However, to get messages out and move people to action (or at least thought), one must have followers who will re-broadcast and propagate those messages. If not, one is shouting inside an empty room.

This would suggest that if one is not already famous (Peter Gabriel, Salman Rushdie, et al), one will have to build up credible connections (follows and followbacks) with people who have an interest in the ideas and topics about which one will post. This should be done with genuine engagement, however, not merely to accumulate a herd of meaningless, random connections.

However, having meaningful engagement through a froth of posts from those whom one follows is a challenge. I only follow 167 persons/organizations currently, and keeping up with the Twitter feed is like drinking from a fire hose. I cannot fathom what it would be like to have thousands of followers. Letting my imagination free, it makes sense to me that if I were mega-famous (Angelina Jolie), I could only pick an occasional tweet to respond to personally and any other responses would be performed by staff assistants. I served on a thought leader's Twitter chat once and a team of 12 people handled incoming questions with the leader answering only a select handful, some of those with messages I and others craft. This is a common practice for busy, important people who still try to have some level of engagement.

That is the nut of Twitter's paradox: accumulate enough followers to get your messages out, and you cannot effectively engage with your audience, at least not on your own. Limit your followers and follows to a focused group, and your message may not escape the cadre. It is possible that *if* you have the right follows/followers, they will be influential enough to perpetuate your messages.

For now, I have chosen to follow only two kinds of persons:

• People whose ideas/thinking interest me regardless of whether we share belief systems (keeps me intellectually honest and challenges me)
• People who have chosen to follow/support/engage with me despite a lack of common interests (this broadens my knowledge and expands my areas of interest)

I will drink from the firehouse until I figure out how to regulate it.

False: Social Networking and Mobile Have Obliterated Work-Life Balance




Saw this from @Armano on Twitter: "Social networking and mobile have obliterated the work-life balance." This is a false construct, a proposition built on an erroneous perception of what work-life balance is.


First: Though many of us are wired at work and at home for social media (literally and figuratively) as part of both our work and social life, the great majority of people are not. We are are woven tightly into the fabric of the social networks in both work and personal worlds and are something of a rarified cadre.


Secondly, I don't see an issue of work/life balance with social media. The work/personal overlap allows me the flexibility to be in contact with my family and friends during work hours, but also affords me the opportunity to work or hone my skills during off time if needed. Each of those overlaps, however, is my choice and I get to choose how much and when I do it. 


To me, work life balance means that I am getting enough of each in proportion. There does not have to have a bright line separation with one completely divorced from the other for me to have balance. 

Yet another Cassandra is crying "Facebook is dying!"

I remain skeptical about such jeremiads because I find the reasoning to be faulty. Frankly speaking, Facebook is unprecedented, so it's probably wrong to use standard metrics to define whether it is failing. Consider these points:

• Social media is still evolving. We don't yet know what normal looks like.
• Facebook is a behemoth in terms of users, so something astonishing will have to happen to cause a significant migration away from it.
• Given the stock structuring, Facebook is Zuckerberg's show just as he intended.

Bullet 1: Clearly, social media is migrating to mobile with the explosive development of very smart phones and tablets. Whether Facebook can develop or buy the right mobile platform will determine whether it is able to migrate along with its users.

Bullet 2: Slowing membership growth for Facebook is inevitable due to the finite number of people who live on the planet with sufficient access to the internet to make use of it. That does not worry me. The question that should haunt Facebook's leadership and development team is: what is the thing that will cause us to lose members or cause them to spend less time on the site? The absence of a user-friendly mobile GUI for Facebook only hurts if someone creates one that is simple, attractive, and intuitive and does everything that Facebook does so much better than people are willing to try to drag their entire social media world (friends, apps, documetns, images, etc.) to another platfrom and start fresh. That has not yet happened. And unless that alternate choice allows easy importation of all of those things, it is unlikely that large, overlapping social networks are going to up and leave for an unknown.

Bullet 3: Zuckerberg has never put profitability ahead of his beliefs. I am firmly convinced that he has no interest in generating significantly more revenue than is needed to sustain/perpetuate Facebook. Those who saw Facebook as a quick-profit buy or expect fountains of future revenue to gush out through dividends will likely be thoroughly disappointed. It's not as if he hasn't made that clear from the first day on the Harvard campus, so others' dreams have nothing to do with his. His behavior suggests he does not see huge profits as necessary to achieve what he wants: connectedness of the human graph and radical transparency. He is not stupid, he knows that he will need capital to buy things that Facebook needs, but the company is already large and profitable enough to do that.

So, that all said, Facebook is still large, profitable, and seems determined to remain relevant. IPO failings (not of Facebook's making) aside, there is nothing happening below the daily stock market froth to make one believe that Facebook will not remain the social media leader for years to come, especially given its increasingly close relationship to Apple.

As Facebook prompts us on our home pages: "What's on your mind?"