Update: Thanks for reading the blog and commenting! Just to clarify, I sat on this post over 24 hours in the hopes that my requests on Twitter for clarification of the situation would be answered. They weren't. There was no undone homework or gun-jumping here, and I stand by the case as a classic example of what not to do. Cheers and thanks for reading!
Developing an effective Social Networking strategy requires patience. A posse won't just appear before your eyes when you snap your fingers; it takes time to meet folks, talk to them, and get them into your contact sphere. One thing is certain, though, you will develop your network as you work it.
Patience isn't a virtue for many folks, myself included, and the temptation to cut corners in any business is often strong. In social networking, the temptation is to artificially increase the size of your friends/followers list. One of the most common shortcuts in this regard is the use of the sockpuppet.
As a kid's toy, the "sock puppet" is when you draw a face on the toe end of a sock, put it on your hand, and go to it. In the on-line world, a sockpuppet user is when a person joins a forum or community under multiple names. The user then plays ping-pong with the two accounts. The user posts an announcement, position, or argument under their primary account. They'll switch to the sockpuppet account to offer support for the argument, or possibly an endorsement of an event or service. If the position is attacked by another member of the community, the author can convey the impression of outside support.
This sort of behavior is almost universally frowned upon in most online communities. It's the sort of thing that gets a user "banned" from a site. Even if the owner of a sockpuppet isn't banned from a site, the original user's credibility and integrity are brought into disrepute. For example, Lee Siegel of The New Republic was slapped with a suspension and his blog was shut down by the magazine when it was discovered he was using a sockpuppet to defend his writing in comments to the blog.
It's important to make the distinction between the use of sockpuppets and the use of an anonymous persona on the web. Anonymity is permitted in many communities, both mainstream and offbeat. Political communities often permit the use of pseudonyms to protect a user's identity. Even if the user's positions don't constitute whistleblowing, expressing political opinions that conflict with an employer could well cost that user their job. Since political blogging can't compare salary-wise with many full-time gigs, best to conceal real identities.
There are other situations where anonymity is a good idea, from back when Errol Laborde (now of New Orleans Magazine) used to do parade reviews for Gambit Weekly (@gambitweekly on twitter) as "Rex Duke," to mommy-bloggers who don't want to reveal too much about their personal lives. In Laborde's case, it was better to praise and/or criticize carnival krewes under a pseudonym to have a level of deniability in public. Mommybloggers, like many female writers online, have to be concerned with the possibility of stalkers. There are a lot of psychos out in the world, and when we start talking about intimate details of spouses, children, family, and friends, it's possible to feed the twisted minds. My friends who blog under pseudonyms don't lie about their experiences, they just don't give you their names. It's easy to take away the point the author's trying to make without knowing their real name in these circumstances.
Of course, some folks are open books online. I'm a good example of that. I use the nickname "YatPundit," but all you have to do is look at the "about me" section on my blog to find out more than you want to know about me.
Either way, however, the anonymous user and the "out there" person are both just being themselves. They don't join a community with the intention to deceive.
And that's the purpose of a sockpuppet account--deception.
The case that prompted me to write this article comes from the social networking community, twitter.com. Twitter is an immature technology, drawing inspiration from chat boards, instant messaging services, and SMS/texting on phones to create a new paradigm. I'm enjoying twitter at this stage mainly because it's full of "early adopters" who are more tech-savvy than the "regular" users who will invariably follow as the site matures. Since it doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to use twitter, we're seeing a number of people style themselves as "social networking experts." When you characterize yourself as an authority on something, it's logical to want to present the appearance that you know what you're doing.
On an interactive system like twitter, the way to look like you know what you're doing is to gather a following among users. Readers of a popular blog will welcome the author's appearances in other media, such as Pam Spaulding (@pam_spaulding) or Wil Wheaton (@WilW). It's natural for someone actively involved in self-promotion to want as many followers as the man who once was Ensign Crusher on ST:TNG, but that has to happen naturally. Creating those followers yourself rarely works out.
There is another type of twitter user that deserves mention: The accounts used by established news outlets. I don't know exactly if the owner of the twitter account for the New Orleans newspaper, Gambit Weekly (@gambitweekly) has a personal twitter account. I also don't care if TV personality Tavis Smiley's twitter account (@tavissmiley) is controlled by Tavis himself or someone on his staff. There is a common understanding on such accounts that they exist to promote their paper, show, etc.; there is no intent to deceive.
Which brings me back to my latest sockpuppet encounter. I found a mommyblogger who was promoting a product-sales website that's a family operation, mother and two daughters. The lead daughter is a good writer, and their mother isn't that much older than I am, so what the heck, I followed mom and daughter. Two days ago, I discovered that the daughter was posting on twitter not only under her account, but also as her mother.
Sockpuppet!
When confronted with this, the original user made light of the situation. While that could be dismissed as a rookie mistake, this woman claims credentials as a Social Media coordinator for not only her family business but another mommyblogging site.
In other words, she should know better.
It's a shame, too, because I don't think this young woman is dishonest or unethical by nature. Still, I can't help but look at messages from her that now come through twitter and wonder, do her sister and mother even participate on the website, or does she do it all? Her almost-amoral dismissal of my concern that she was running a sockpuppet could be attributed to the arrogance of a twentysomething, but there's that little something that nags the back of my mind, making me ask, is she just a liar?
The immature nature of a site like twitter makes it unlikely that the site admins can be called upon to police sockpuppets. Given that most of the current twitter community consists of computer professionals at one level or another, it makes sense that users by and large aren't interested in interactions with dishonest people. It's hard to re-build a reputation that's been tarnished in such a way. Bloggers who take controversial positions leave themselves open to challenge and mockery by their detractors. Operators of e-commerce businesses have a tough enough time distinguishing themselves from the phishers and scammers online.
Develop your social network slowly. Expand it naturally. If it doesn't take off as fast as you like, be patient. Work your contacts, meet folks in their networks, participate in their discussions. Karma comes back as we give it out.
And don't cut corners!
Recently in Social Networking Category
Using a narrow definition of "spam" is merely an exercise in semantics. One of the current goofy threads in many twitter conversations these days is whether or not "twitter spam" should be called "twitspam," "tweetspam," or "twam." It's not surprising that such a staid and respected authority on defining the Internet as wikipedia hasn't caught up with these goofy names.
Let's look at what spam is and consider if the behavior of a spammer can be applied to twitter users, however. This is a better way to determine whether or not applying the term "spammer" to tweepeople is appropriate.
At best spammer sends unsolicited, mass-market messages to people to entice them to visit one or more websites that the recipient would otherwise not have gone to. At worst, the spammer is malicious, trying to send the reader to sites which will force-download viruses and other nasties to their computer. Let's leave malicious out of this for the moment.
When someone goes on twitter and begins to follow thousands of people, it's legitimate to question their motives. It's impossible to maintain social networking relationships with so many users, just as it's impossible to maintain personal relationships with a similar number of LinkedIn connections. So, why follow thousands? One can examine the user's twitter stream and draw some conclusions. If 80%+ of the twitter stream is pointers back to that user's website (be it a site that sells a product/service or a blog), there is little difference between that person's twitter behavior and the guy who wants me to click through to the Canadian pharmacy to buy Cialis.
In short, if the user's purpose in following people is an attempt at mass-market promotion of you, your serivices, and/or your blog, you're a spammer. What makes it worse is that the user who engages in "twam" is mass-marketing to early adopters. That's a very unproductive approach to getting those folks in your camp as promoters of yourself and/or your business. I wrote on nurturing early adopters last week:
http://www.keyboardnetworking.biz/archives/2008/05/early-adopters.html
Now, that brings us to the "Twitter Blacklist." Since this is not a part of Twitter.com, one has to evaluate its impact in how people use Twitter. There are two ways a twitter user will see who is on this blacklist is to go twitterblacklist.com and scan through it. The other is to install a script that runs with the "Greasemonkey" add-on for the Firefox browser that will compare a user's ID to the black list and pop up a red alert bar on their twitter user page if they're on the list.
I submit that the overhwelming majority of twitter users are blissfully unaware of the add-on site and never will be. Most folks are certainly, even if they have Greasmonkey installed, aren't going to be bothered with adding a script for this function, and IE users don't even have the option. It's much ado about nothing.
...but they may refer/recommend you.
One of the biggest challenges that self-employed/self-starting workers face is self-promotion/self-marketing. Many F2F networking groups work hard to educate their members on how to identify those people in their business network that are potential customers as opposed to those who will be partners. When it comes to new Social Networking media online, many self-styled "Social Networking experts" appear to have difficulty understanding the difference between these two groups. They treat Early Adopters as potential customers rather than potential referral partners.
What is an Early Adopter?
Simply put, an early adopter is a user who buys into technology ahead of the curve. Early adopters are the folks who put Firefox on the map as a browser alternative to Internet Explorer. They bought Macs in the mid-1980s. They switched from WordPerfect to MS Word in 1990. In terms of Social Networking, they're incorporating technology like Twitter and Pownce into their use of sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
Early adopters are technology hackers, experimenters, self-educators. They wear being on the "bleeding edge" as a badge of honor. They don't need someone to teach them how to use new tech, they figure it out on their own. These are often just as much "experts" in the technology as those who market themselves as such.
In short, they're not going to hire an "expert," but they are very likely to recommend an expert to someone else.
Early adopters may enjoy a technology, and may even develop an addiction to its use. Most of these folks have jobs that don't directly involve the new technology, though. The legal secretary who switched from WordPerfect to Word in 1990 didn't have time to sell others on the wonders of MS Word; she still had to get the work done. Still, she was likely to talk on CompuServe with other Word users. In short order, she was an expert and didn't know it! For all her expertise, however, the odds were against her capitalizing on that expertise by going into business for herself.
Fast-forward to the Social Networking sphere of today. One of the newest angles in this sphere is the concept of "micro-blogging," using systems such as Twitter and Pownce. It's logical that the people to take up micro-blogging first would be those who have already bought into blogging and other maturing aspects of Social Networking. They've climbed one mountain and are ready for the next expedition.
And they're not going to hire you.
Still, the "experts" promote themselves and their skills, causing many of us to doubt their expertise as they continually promote their blogs, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and announce how much they love helping people learn technology that all those in earshot (and monitor-shot) already know how to work. It's all preaching to the choir.
So, what's a choir member to do? Talk! Socialize! And ask for referrals. F2F networking groups encourage their members to get to know their fellow networkers, developing a level of trust that will enable them to recommend and refer each other. I'm not going to get the guy who owns the local comic book store (follow "bsicomics" on Twitter) to hire me to help him develop a Twitter strategy for his business-he's already there. I will, however, get him to refer others to me, because, even though he knows as much about Twitter as I do, he has a business to run. Same goes for the computer programmer who is at university, finishing her degree.
To get to these early adopters, one must establish a relationship with them. Since you're not going to tell them anything they don't already know about the specific technology, one must reach out to them on other levels. I've already written on how it's not a bad idea to be social when doing Social Networking - that's a good start. Finding common ground with fellow early adopters is both fun and profitable. Get to know your colleagues and they'll turn you on to the people they know who would benefit from your skills.
Case study in developing early adopter relationships: Greta Perry is the "Princess of Positive" She's a New Orleans blogger who writes for both her own site, Kiss My Gumbo, as well as writing and doing video projects for Nola.com. I may be a computer trainer and consultant, but there wasn't much about Twitter I could teach a blogger who was using the system as much as I was. That doesn't mean she was a "lost cause" in terms of business, though. By talking to her about our home town and sharing ideas on other subjects, I learned she was starting her own radio show on a local AM radio station, WIST-690. Next think you know, she's inviting me to be a guest on her show for a 10-minute segment. We're going to talk about streetcars tomorrow afternoon, allowing me to promote my book and the New Orleans Street Railway Association.
If all I ever did would be to try to sell Greta (follow "kissmygumbo" on Twitter) on my skills as a Social Networker, I'm sure she would have dropped me from her Twitter stream in no time flat. Working at the relationship requires more than just saying "Hello, I'm here to solve all your problems!"
The bottom line: Treat early adopters as colleagues, not students. Show them respect. Get to know them, both socially and on a business level. Develop trust and turn them into your sales force!
Feel free to comment on this post here, or follow YatPundit on twitter and talk to me there!
BE SOCIAL!!!
One of the toughest parts of any Keyboard Networker's marketing strategy is to discern the line between social contacts and doing business. Some will argue that you're always doing business, even when you're with your friends. They usually continue that line until either a) they have no more friends, or b) their friends stage an intervention that usually involves beating them over the head with a nerf bat.
Sometimes a person who is in that downward spiral of all-business-all-the-time enters a new social environment, finding that environment disappointing. They've spent so much time in all-business mode that they've forgotten how to just talk to people.
The biggest thing to remember about Social Networking sites and technologies is that they're there to facilitate being social, not you making money. The creators of the sites want "normal" users, people who come online not to constantly hawk a product, but just to connect with friends. The sites are set up so they can make money. If you do, that's fine, but it's certainly not their mission.
So, what's a dedicated Keyboard Networker to do when faced with a bunch of people not doing business?
BE SOCIAL!!!
Approach the social medium as a networking mixer, or better yet, happy hour at the local tavern. Folks aren't going to want to hear your "elevator speech" when you first arrive. People who have worked at a 9-5 job all day (as well as those goofing off while at those jobs) don't want to hear more work-related stuff when they're done. They want to talk about their kids, their hobbies, or just about anything other than work.
Your task as a Keyboard Networker at this point is to decide whether or not engaging these folks is a good use of your time. If you enjoy their company on a social level, even if talking to them doesn't open doors that expand your client base or business revenue, it's still good for your sanity. If you can't justify that, then move on.
Whatever you do, don't become the person nobody wants to talk to because they always bring things back around to business.
BE SOCIAL!!!
