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4 Reasons Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Are Making the World a Better Place

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This is an excellent post by Michael Hyatt. He begins:

It’s popular to complain about social media and talk about how it is destroying our culture, but what if the exact opposite is true?

I joined Twitter on April 6, 2008. A friend urged me to check it out. He was already using it and loved it. So after some initial eye-rolling, I tried it and fell in love with the medium too.

It wasn’t long at all before I discovered that Twitter is one of the most powerful communication tools ever invented. It also wasn’t long before I got an earful from critics who said social media was bad news.

He goes on to discuss some of that pushback, and then shows how the critics had it backward. He gives four reasons that, contrary to the criticisms that social media is making the world more selfish, it is actually making the world more generous and a better place.

Read the whole thing.

The Right Use of Analytics in Social Media — It's Not What You May Think

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Analytics are important and helpful, but they are a minor-league detail, not a major-league detail. The numbers can almost never tell you what is most important, and easily hide the fact that some of the most important interactions may result from smaller avenues that a bare look at the statistics would have told you to kill.

This is very, very well said by Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the best social media experts around, in his excellent book Crush It!: Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion:

I use analytics very rarely and I urge you not to rely too much on them either, especially if you’ve got good business instincts.

A lot of times the stats and percentages related to my business just don’t support what my instinct says is true, and I’ll trust my instincts over numbers every time. What if your analytics tell you that you’ve only had seven views on Break.com in two months? Are you going to stop posting to that platform? The data are telling you that you should probably drop it, but what you don’t know is that one of those seven viewers is a producer for The Today Show. There’s no reason to think that can’t happen.

The numbers can be a trap that changes your behavior. People see they’ve only gotten fifty viewers in a few weeks and decide they suck and they stop trying as hard. Or their video catches on and gets watched a thousand times and they think they’ve made it, and they stop trying as hard. Metrics can be useful, of course, but the effect of your online interactions and the excitement building toward your brand isn’t accurately reflected by the number of viewers you have.

It’s not about how many viewers you have, it’s about how passionate they are. If you must use them, analytics should be a minor-league detail. Focus the majority of your attention on your overall brand positioning.

What Killed Myspace

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The cover story for the latest issue of Businessweek is The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace.

There are a lot of reasons, obviously, for the massive decline of Myspace. But here’s something that especially stood out:

“There was lot of pressure to drive revenue. There were things that we knew would be more efficient for the user that we didn’t act on immediately because it would reduce page views, which woul dhave hurt the bottom line.” — Shawn Gold, Myspace’s former senior vice president for marketing and content

In other words, the pursuit of profit was placed ahead of the user.

Deadly. Just deadly.

There’s a lesson here, which I’ve blogged about often: You have to put your user/customer/constituents before revenue.

If your organization places higher priority on money than the people it serves, you are already on your way down.

Sometimes people say “but if we don’t put revenue first, we won’t make enough money to survive.” But this has it backwards. If you do put revenue first, you will likely undercut the very things that actually produce revenue — things like goodwill, generosity, genuine service, and remarkability. The way to ensure that you have enough revenue to survive and thrive is to not put revenue first.

Profit matters, obviously. But the best companies put something other than profit first — and, paradoxically, become more profitable as a result.

5 Reasons Companies Should Not Block Access to Social Networks

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A good, brief article in Advertising Age that argues that “collaboration can increase productivity and resistance is futile.” The five points are:

  1. Resistance is futile
  2. Don’t assume people won’t find other ways to waste time
  3. Social networks can actually make workers more productive
  4. You’ll miss great ideas
  5. Employees are much more trustworthy than companies think

Point five is absolutely critical  — employees can be trusted. And trusting employees leads to higher performance. She adds: “If you can’t trust your employees, you have one of two problems: You are hiring the wrong people or you are not properly training the people you hire.”

Also, I think that point five overcomes point two — if you hire good people, they won’t waste time. Or, perhaps better, they will only waste time when doing so will lead to greater productivity overall.

Where Social Networking is Going

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TechCrunchIT has a good Q&A on the social web with Google’s Kevin Marks. Right away, his comments on the first question are very significant:

Q: We keep hearing that “Google wants to make the web more social.” What does that mean?

Everything on the web is more interesting when it takes place with friends. Today’s social networking sites are the online contexts where you and your friends go to be social, and the time we spend on them shows the attraction.

But the model of going to a single website to interact with other people is changing. In the future, we expect everything on the web will become more social, augmenting the many things you already do on the web. Whether you’re shopping, deciding what to read, or researching a topic, knowing what your friends, or family, or the people you respect think about that product, book, or source of information is a vital part of the web.

I call this the “social cloud,” meaning that “social” will be integrated with the web so that you don’t think about it anymore. Charlene Li calls this same idea “social networks become like air.” The web itself is like this — following links seems like second nature to us because we know a URL can take us anywhere. Social isn’t there yet, but that’s the highest level goal of the OpenSocial project — to make interacting with people a natural part of how we use the web.

Read the whole thing.

Four Ways Social Networking Can Serve Your Organization

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BNET has a good article on Four Ways Social Networking Can Build Your Business. Here’s the intro:

Social networking may sound fluffy, but it can translate into real benefits for you and your company. William Baker, a professor of marketing at San Diego State University, surveyed 1,600 executives and found that firms that rely heavily on external social networks scored 24 percent higher on a measure of radical innovation than companies that don’t. Online networks can help you hire the right people, market your product — or even find a manufacturer.

The four ways social networking can serve your organization are:

  1. Finding unexpected collaborators.
  2. Building a global business from scratch.
  3. Finding talent in the trenches.
  4. Viral marketing on the cheap.

Read the whole thing.