I’ve spoken before about whuffie deposits and withdrawals before. I’d like to think I deposit a lot into my whuffie account. I help people out with their campaigns, vote for them when they ask and generally follow links, photos and blog posts I see and RT, comment and pass along when necessary. I also spend a good amount of time helping friends out with advice, time and encouragement as well as spending a good amount of time on giving stuff out in general for free (posting links from my research, writing blog posts like this one, working for a large percentage of time on movements that help the general community like Coworking, etc.). So, all in all, I deposit quite a bit into my whuffie account.
On the withdrawal side of things, I ask for very little. I have only asked for RT’s and passing things along when it has to do with a charity or a movement that benefits others. I rarely, if ever, pass along links to my blogposts and ask people to read (although I do post them to twitter now since they are infrequent). I love to highlight others work more than mine and have a problem in general asking for withdrawals.
So, when the voting for Cogaoke came up, I decided that I could ‘spend’ some of that saved up social capital/whuffie and get myself enough votes to be near the top of the performing list.
How it works: last year the fine folks at Happy Cog created Cogaoke, a once a year karaoke contest taking place at SXSW Interactive. Contest hopefuls created a profile and got people to vote for them to compete. Only the top 20 voted would get to compete for the coveted title of Cogaoke Champion. I was #21, which meant I missed out on competing and went and cheered on my friends who got to compete in the top 20. This year, Cogaoke is only allowing the top 15 voted up in advance to compete and changed the rules of voting (you can only vote once per day – last year, you could refresh your browser and game the system). Being utterly disappointed that I didn’t get to compete last year, I was prepared this year. I had to treat this seriously if I was going to get in the top 15 and be allowed to compete.
So everyday for the past ten days, I’ve been barraging my followers on Twitter and my friends on Facebook to vote for me, trying everything from enticing them with the fact we will wear lingerie to perform Lady Marmalade to explaining that the vote itself takes less than 20 seconds to complete (no sign up required). I even posted a screenshot on Flickr giving instructions that show how easy it is.
Taking into account that there are four of us in our group doing the same thing daily and cumulatively having the largest following on Twitter and Facebook, the results have been quite shocking and a little disheartening. Calculating the number of votes we get per day, it’s just over 100. Divided between four of us, that is 25 each. And seeing that I’m voting 5x for myself (one on each browser and one on my phone browser) each day, that’s 20 per day! Seeing that I have 31,815 followers on Twitter alone, that’s 0.06% of my followers that are actually voting (and that’s taking into account that people are voting only once!). Not to mention that I also got the infamous Gary Vaynerchuk to ask his 878,000+ followers to vote and my SEO friend, Dean B to sprinkle it through is network…which got us probably a couple dozen votes in total.
I’ve said this before but haven’t had great proof of it: NUMBERS OF FOLLOWERS DO NOT MATTER. I did a quick survey of the top 15 as of 3:00 pm today, comparing their ‘reach’ (twitter followers/facebook friends) and their votes and as you read down the list you will see that there is absolutely no correlation as to how many votes people have compared to their ‘reach’:
| Contestant | Twitter followers | Facebook Friends | Votes on Cogaoke | Percentage of Votes (to twitter numbers) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michael McDonald & The Morning After | unknown | unknown | 1,860 | unknown |
| Roger Niner | 131 | 246 | 1,803 | 1,376% |
| Tamashii | 165 | 129 | 1,425 | 863% |
| 3rdMartini | 682 | 324 | 1,406 | 206% |
| Naylor Swift (Glenda B) | 4,314 | 1,392 | 1,392 | 32% |
| Haveboard | 1,296 | 733 | 1,361 | 105% |
| JCroft | 7,001 | 679 | 1,343 | 19% |
| Scott & Jonny | Scott: 285 Jon: 208 |
Scott: 475 Jon: ? (unlisted) |
1,295 | 262% |
| PJ Maximus | 3,105 | 2,212 | 1,259 | 40% |
| Dot Jenna | 1,806 | 4,129 | 1,073 | 59% |
| Soul Sisters (my group) | Karen: 5,178 Corvida: 5,999 Amanda: 3,275 Tara (me): 31,815 |
Karen: 2,085 Corvida: 345 Amanda: 1,708 Tara (me): 3,848 |
1,072 | 2% |
| LaLa Fierce | 2,062 | 324 | 1,061 | 51% |
| Scriggi-Tay | David: 1,045 Scott: 1,934 |
David: 171 Scott: 1,028 |
976 | 33% |
| Woo | 72 | 248 | 913 | 1268% |
| Tony B. Goode | 1,966 | 620 | 818 | 42% |
Now…I won’t make any leaps into why it is that four attractive women who are real people, give a good amount to their community, have loads of followers, and offered lingerie donning have such a low percentage of votes to Twitter followers. I’m sure there are loads of factors involved, but I will say this:
- your number of followers has little to do with your ability to influence
- the larger the number, it seems, the lower the engagement per follower generally
- numbers do not equal action in the real world – which should be the true measure of influence
Certainly, voting for a karaoke contest is not an action of higher purpose, I get that, but the ‘spend’ of 10-20 seconds should correlate at some level. I’ve seen similar discrepancies when trying to engage at a low time/energy spend high purpose level (asking to retweet and/or vote for a good cause).
I pretty much know for a fact that numbers don’t matter, so some follow up questions to this are:
- have networks grown so big and saturated with content that few people pay attention anymore?
- did RickRolls, spam and phishing get us to the point where we don’t trust clicking on links anymore?
- does everyone just hate karaoke? Or me? Or me singing karaoke?
- since the promise of social networks and influence is obviously bunked, is there truly a path of influence that is decidedly old skool? (for instance, RogerNiner, who is a Karaoke Artist in his real life actually has a great list of people who support and follow him for his gigs via email) Or is it impossible to *really* figure it out because there are so many mediums and everyone has a different depth of engagement?
At the end of the day, I’m glad this happened. I’ve been looking for a good example to show in my presentations that demonstrates how little the numbers of followers/friends on social networks means when it comes to real world action. Unfortunately, the example may cost me the ability to compete for the second year in a row in Cogaoke…
Oh yeah…and of course VOTE here if you haven’t already! Today is the final day! (no sign up required btw)
March 1st, 2010 at 1:01 pm
I have nearly 20,000 Twitter followers and find Twitter to be largely useless for promoting anything.
Most of the people who follow me also follow at least 1,000 others, meaning my Tweets are quickly buried. Facebook has slightly higher engagement, in general, but mostly for personal stuff.
My largest asset is my email list. With ~4,000 people on it, it outperforms EVERY other method by thousands of times. Second is my blog’s RSS readership–though they don’t buy as much, they tend to engage.
But I can blast out an email to my list and get hundreds of click-throughs and replies in a matter of minutes. Don’t know what it is about email, but it really is effective, and at this point I think any online business without a list is doing itself a disservice.
-Erica
March 1st, 2010 at 1:21 pm
I don’t have as many followers in twitter, but I find it impossible to be up to date with what the 400 people I follow update, so I guess many people don’t see your tweets at all. In my case I create columns on Tweedeck with people I’ll like to follow closely or not miss out. Then I guess this shows.
And then it’s people that read the tweets and are afraid to click a link. There’s also some followers that since they don’t see any value for themselves they don’t click (let’s hope this is a minimum).
It helps to clear some points about withdrawals. First of all they don’t feel like a withdrawal (in the sense that you’ve used something and hence your whuffie has decreased with me….that hasn’t happened), and second that the good thing is that if the balance is correct when you withdraw something it will leave you in the same position as before.
And finally I agree with Erica in that Email lists or blogs are more effective, this is simple because a higher percentage of the people in there actually know your work and the quality of it and that’s very important.
It will be nice if you could count how many of the people that voted for you read your blog regularly, maybe there’s some hidden insights there.
March 1st, 2010 at 1:22 pm
For me, it’s a partial attention thing. I follow 400-ish people on Twitter and am not watching it all of the time so some ‘call to action’ tweet has to whiz by when I happen to be looking at it and I’ve been away from Twitter more than I’ve been on lately.
March 1st, 2010 at 1:30 pm
I think your first point, about networks being saturated is part of the issue. Another is “quality” of followers: are they simply information gatherers, who love to read but aren’t interested in engagement? Or are they social creatures and social media really IS an extension of their active self? I also think it has something to do with how your own followers are each others friends, as opposed to disparate strangers. I know a great deal of my followers are actually from Edmonton, so they KNOW each other. A RT from one of them has higher weight than a random stranger even if they have influence (ala Gary V).
I disagree with Erica that promoting things on Twitter is largely useless. Recently we had a RANDOM local #yegSings (karaoke) meetup, COMPLETELY based off of Twitter, mostly Tweetup n00bs, and only had teeny Facebook b/c some people who didn’t have Twitter wanted to know more about it, and +40 people showed up (write-up on the Tweetup here:) http://mythoughtsexactly.typepad.com/blog/2010/02/take-a-bow.html
And in my own little tweeting experiments, I’ve managed to get 30~ people to come to an ExpressionEngine meetup at 9 in the morning on a SATURDAY. One person drove 3 hours from Calgary to Edmonton to give a FREE talk for us (which means she got up before 6 in the morning to show up for free), too.
The only “strategy” I had for getting votes was to seem as desperate as possible.
Haha! I specifically engaged all my “real life” friends to vote (a lot of them are from my old high school musical theatre days and are more than happy to encourage any musical outlet). A great boon is that several of them work in offices too, and somehow, on my behalf, managed to convince their co-workers to vote for me too or were allowed to use several computers to vote for me. My husband votes for me and got a few people from his team to do so several times as well. They don’t know me. I’ve never met their co-workers, but they trust MY friends. 
Another thing I did was used my OWN personal URL shortener, which is http://lealea.net/x/3
Also, maybe because I also have less followers and I normally do not plug anything about myself like crazy, I’ve been a lot more shameless / gratuitous in plugging the voting process. My twitter is also hooked to my Facebook, so again, those who don’t have Twitter have a chance to see my pleas.
Maybe part of the issue was that BECAUSE you have so many followers, a few of them thought, “Eh, she’ll be all right. I don’t need to vote for them b/c someone else will.”
March 1st, 2010 at 1:30 pm
I think your ability to influence depends on a ton of factors. Raw number of followers is a measurement of what we can call “influence capacity”, but the intersection of what you’re talking about and why people are following you shows your “influence capability”, whether you can inspire people to act on the stuff you’re talking about.
Influence capacity scales perfectly – if you’ve got the followers, you can tweet to 8, 800, or 8 million. Influence capability, on the other hand, is much much harder to scale. Gary, for example, has all those followers, but is a single one of them looking to him for info on karaoke? It’s unlikely. If you give people a call to action on the things they’re following you for, they’re far more likely to act, but if it’s on something else, that likelihood plummets.
A corollary to this might be that we look at top twitter users as dispensaries of relevant tweets rather than as people.
Of the people on that list, I’ve voted for 3 different contestants (each day I usually go for whoever has the least votes), one because I know Rannie’s a karaoke God having seen him perform (even though I’ve beat him in competition), and for Jeff or Scott because they’re building BarStar, which I use, and when I’ve reached out to them with feedback/suggestions, they’ve responded. In all three cases there’s a personal connection of some kind. Those don’t scale.
Given all this, the impression I would get is that while you’ve got the followers, they’re probably not looking to you for karaoke tips and tricks, which limits your influence on karaoke matters, but not all the other things you do.
I do hope you make it into the competition, though!
March 1st, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Tara –
I hope my feedback will help a bit on this, as it is quite pertinent to your situation. Permit me to let you in on my Monday — it’s just one gal’s account but it might represent some of us “out there”:
These were my Monday events leading up to this reply to your post:
8:00am: Arrive at work, grimace at the pile of papers that I was supposed to come in and review over the weekend but didn’t
9:00am: Meet quickly with my most awesome Intern Corrie — one of the top items on my agenda was having her review the use of the new Seesmic, CoTweet and others to see what makes the most sense for all of us to use for organizing our personal and company Twitter activity — NO LIE, this has been a major “to do”, organizing my contacts in Twitter so that I can stop missing things (see the pertinence!!!)
9:30am: Internal business development meeting
10:00-11:00: Get some things rolling before 11:00 meeting
11:00: Prospecting call with what could be totally awesome client
12:00: Eat and hang with crew
1:00: Client work
2:00-3:30: Internal meeting for milestones of totally awesome client
3:30-4:00: Catch up with Fathom folks on ongoing projects
4:05: Sit down to peruse HootSuite to catch up on Tweets and – BAM! – there is your post in the main stream which I click on randomly because I like reading your stuff, whether you’ve enticed me to read it or not. Some folks I read if they’ve used the right words to catch my attention — you are one of about 20 people that I tweetstalk because your stuff is interesting. YET — I only heard about your call for votes from seeing that Tweet at the top of my stream (vs. looking at the column of social media folks that I have running) and then reading this post. I’ve been so immersed in my work lately that I dropped out of sight for a while and have been really out of the loop on things. I hear the same thing from a lot of people — so much happening now that 2009 is dead (which is great!) but so little time to keep up.
So, this is totally just one person’s bird’s eye view of how it lead me to actually read your plea but this time it was: TOTALLY random. Now that my activity has ramped up big time online, I haven’t done a good job of putting a better system in place to organize the Twitter conversations so that I can keep on top of things.
In other words, in my assessment I see your question #1 as the biggest hurdle. There is so much noise and so little time to find ways to hear it all, even the people you like hearing from on a consistent basis.
March 1st, 2010 at 1:44 pm
I appreciate what you’re saying, but still ask people to vote for me. I’m not well known and have had to beg, borrow and steal to get the votes.
http://go.cogaoke.com/contestant/scott
Ok, the begging part is done.
I think in our case (Scott & Jonny), it’s a serious case of just working it as hard as possible.
Keep in mind that, in my case, I went outside of just these online networks to get votes.
1. I work in a marketing department of +40 people and announced my intentions in a meeting and in subsequent message to the whole team, on a daily basis. They are all excited about it as well (and it turns out we have an entire department filled with karaoke fiends!)
2. Facebook, for me, is a very personal network of close friends and family. With few exceptions are there many people in my network that I don’t feel are close to me on more than a casual basis. I’ve been asking regularly, a lot of times sending direct mails to people with ‘clever’ images asking for daily votes. I think the more personal appeals have been helpful.
3. Family has been very helpful as well. Email with a link directly to the page and asking them to send the emails to five of their friends or co-workers may have been a boost.
4. I also live in a very social and tech oriented building. I have a sign in the elevator to vote for me on the ride up or down. And do nothing but talk to people in our social gatherings about helping me get into this contest.
5. I’ve tried to use the underdog status to my advantage. (see message abouve)
6. I joined the contest the moment it went online.
So I think we both have some fanatical people out there voting their butts off trying to get us into the competition.
Does quantity matter? I guess not. Not always. Maybe if you were raising money for Chile it would be different?
March 1st, 2010 at 2:07 pm
I wouldn’t put too much faith in the flaws of this voting system, Tara. As you’ve mentioned you were able to vote for yourself 5x from every browser, as opposed to Cogaoke saying you can only vote once. And I’m putting this out there. I worry that someone set up some sort of automatic voting system on me behalf without me knowing about it. I never asked anyone to do that for me. I just wanted them to vote by the normal loopholes that were found
I think it really has to do with who gets your tweet when, who gets your message when. All I did was ask everyone on my Twitter lists and Facebook friend lists to vote, as well as at every show, which has been 8. But it that someone got fanatical in seeing me in first place, which doesn’t even do anything! So do not lose heart. I don’t think this is a good litmus test to judge of tweets matter.
March 1st, 2010 at 2:13 pm
All of this is good feedback and speaks to the complexity of influence.
As for @brian – Rannie (photojunkie) IS a karaoke god as are Scott and Jeff – but none of them quit their job and karaoke’d across America, did they?
http://www.whuffaoke.com (two of us in the Soul Sisters were on that trip and the other three members of the whuffaoke team are far down on the voted list!). So I pretty much think that a large number of my followers (especially the real people) DO know me as a karaoke enthusiast!
T
March 1st, 2010 at 2:18 pm
After reading the above comments: perhaps the interesting statistic to examine is the average (or median) number of followed twitters per follower (that is: take all your followers, add up the number of feeds they follow, divide by the number of your followers). This translates into a measure of their attention per tweet, assuming the time spent examining their twitter feed is a constant — or at least, reaches a maximum, which it certainly does.
March 1st, 2010 at 2:28 pm
I only really use Twitter as a way to link to my Facebook account. I have been asking friends and family to pass to word around as much as I can, and people I don’t even really know were coming to me at my shows saying they voted for me. So all my main votes, or the voting surge, were coming from people I know IRL.
March 1st, 2010 at 2:50 pm
I’ve been interested/frustrated/fascinated by the whole follower->action debate. It’s comforting to hear that someone with your reach isn’t getting a lot of action (pardon the pun) either – but I think the reality is that content is still king.
Perhaps your followers aren’t as aware of Happy Cog and/or SXSW and so don’t care (not likely?) or like you said, Karaoke isn’t enough motivation to actually click and vote.
We’ve seen similar results to the first commenter, albeit on a smaller scale, that email response is greater than Twitter/Facebook response:
http://blog.yastech.ca/2010/03/do-number-of-followers-matter/
March 1st, 2010 at 3:14 pm
Scott’s comments about how he engaged a full-on offensive strategy is interesting and reinforces the need to not just rely on one channel.
I disagree too on Twitter being useless. We recently held an event that we only pulled together in 3 weeks — it was to raise $ to bring 700 CT National Guard troops home for the holidays before being shipped to Afghanistan in January. At the one day event, after rounding up donations and raffle prizes, etc. we raised $12,000+!
Honestly, it would not have been possible without Twitter. I would literally put a Tweet out that said, “Help! I need someone to drive to Stamford, pick up raffle prizes and bring them back to Middletown. Anyone?” And in 20 minutes someone was in their car and helping us out. It was crazy. I had people thanking me for giving them the opportunity to help! I’ve never seen anything like it.
So, again, it’s not the numbers. It’s how connected you are to the people behind the numbers.
March 1st, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Tara, I think you have many good points here. What I would add is that many of the contestants share followers. For example, I follow you, Jeff Croft, Scott, Jonny and Woo. I’m also Facebook friends with all of the guys. The Cog’aoke community is probably overlapped with many people just like me. People that are torn on whom to vote for each day. I like the underdog, myself, so I vote for the lowest of the people I know.
Not to mention, voting every day for a week or more can get to be annoying. Add to that the people that cheat, and folks start giving up on traditional voting.
I hope you and your Soul Sistas get to perform, along with the Seattle karaoke guys, and I’ll cheer you all on from NxNW!
March 1st, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Great post. Interesting stuff.
My first thought goes something like this: “CHEATERS. F’ING CHEATERS.”
There’s no doubt it’s very easy to “cheat” at this little contest, and my inkling is that many of the people near the top have, or have had people doing it on their behalf. I don’t blame them for this one bit, though — if Happy Cog didn’t want it to be so easy to get more than one vote per day, they would have built the system differently. I don’t blame anyone for bending the rules as far as the technology will allow them to — but I sort of blame Happy Cog for not making the system a bit more secure. But, I suspect they just don’t care, and that’s fine, too. No big deal. I’m not upset about it at all, but if we’re going to analyze why people who have a smaller audience can get a ton of votes, the fact that it’s easy for one person to vote hundreds upon hundreds of times per day can’t be ignored. I’ve seen people get hundreds of votes in a matter of minutes, so there’s no doubt it’s happening — at least to some degree. It’s be fascinating to see how many of the votes came from a very small percentage of the total votes. I bet it’s a high number.
That’s not what’s interesting, though. What’s interesting is trying to analyze what gets your audience to take action and what doesn’t. Although it’s hard to say where exactly all my votes have come from, I, like Scott, suspect the vast majority have come from more personal connections (family, close friends, etc.) and not from my “audience” of Twitter followers. Those people who are personally connected to us are the ones more likely to sit at their computer for 30 minutes “cheating” at the contest. A Twitter follower who has no real personal connection to me may be willing to vote for me once, but probably isn’t going to go to town on my behalf, or even vote again the next day.
I think there’s also a bit of a counterintuitive disadvantage for those of us who have larger audiences, as well (Lea mentioned this already) — it’s been seen on bigger stages like American Idol, too. Often times the “shoe-ins” don’t actually get the votes because people would rather vote for an underdog and/or feel like the “shoe-in” is, well, a shoe-in and therefore doesn’t need their vote. I’ve heard this countless times over the past few weeks. “Sorry, @jcroft, but I voted for _____ because you don’t need the votes and they do.”
This is all very interesting, and it’s too bad we don’t have the analytics to figure out the real answers, here. It’s very intriguing stuff!
March 1st, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Another thing I’ve thought of, but forgot to mention (thanks to my homegirl Morgan Holzer for reminding me) is the “splitting votes factor” (also seen repeatedly on American Idol). Some of us who have a large audience have a great deal of followers who are also following other contestants. For example, I’m quite certain my Twitter following overlaps a great deal with Jina Bolton’s. And Keith Robinson’s. And Rob Weychert’s. And Mark Trammel’s. And probably yours, to a lesser degree, Tara. So these followers have to choose which one of us to vote for. The result of that, I think, is that they vote for a different person each day, or just choose not to vote at all, which means they never amount to much in terms of voting numbers.
This shows, again, that the really personal connections are the ones that are going to get you the greatest results.
March 1st, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Annnnd Karianne beat me to it. Whoops.
March 1st, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Good points, Jeff. May I add that this morning I was ‘called out’ by someone who seemed hell bent on knocking me from the top spot. Again, I never asked anyone to rig things on my behalf. All the information I discovered about multiple computer and browser use came from those voting for me, and those in the contest. PLUS, I actually e-mailed the Cogaoke people to disable my account if there was something phishy going on. But i do know that a majority of my initial votes came from people mobilizing outward from my shows, and family and friends spreading the word around. I don’t think any of them came from Twitter. So, Tara, fret not. You are looking square in the eyes of “Karaoke Drama” and should not taint your view on the motivating power of social networks.
March 1st, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Keith-
You don’t gotta defend yourself, bro. I don’t think anyone did anything wrong! I just think if you’re going to analyze this, you can’t do so with the everyone-only-voted-once-per-day blinders on.
March 1st, 2010 at 8:45 pm
My kneejerk reaction to this post was to agree that the number of followers you have doesn’t matter, it’s how connected you are to them.
But I think the effort you make to CONNECT with your network is what counts. I am constantly sharing links on Twitter, and I absolutely obsess over how my network shares the content I am sharing. Mainly because I want to make sure that the content I am sharing is valuable to them.
And I also closely track what happens after certain people RT a post I have shared. For example, I know if Shannon Paul or Beth Harte RT a link I have shared, that their networks are going to immediately start RTing that link. That’s because their networks absolutely love both of them. And both of them are constantly sharing content, commenting on other blogs, commenting on their own. They invest time in their networks, and it’s obvious they both care about the people that follow them and WANT to connect with them.
And I think how invested you are in your community greatly determines how invested they are in you.
March 2nd, 2010 at 1:46 am
Yeah, I gave my first few votes to Croft, because he was further down than I thought he should be, but then I realized you were so far behind him.
I only just realized, after reading this, that I can vote with every browser. I’ve loaded up all my other four on my 3G modem, and now I’ll be doing the same on my netbook. Ten votes!
Actually, I’ve noticed that the ‘Percentage of Votes’ seems to drop as you go down the list (with some fluctuations). I wonder if people with less Twitter and Facebook followers know more people in real-life, or if having thousands of Twitter followers affects what you say. Most likely, people perceive you (and their worth in relation to you) differently in light of your hundreds of thousands.
You seem to have more votes, now, which I think proves my theory that blogs are a lot more powerful that tweets. These posts land in my reader, and they’re here until I read them; the tweets, meanwhile, I’ll skim over every half-hour.
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:59 am
OK, your article worked and I did vote 4 you!
March 2nd, 2010 at 6:31 am
Just one woman’s honest feedback:
-If I read the word “karaoke” my mind immediately thinks “unimportant” and it is hard to take in the rest of the request.
-twitter is not a significant and organized mode of communication in my mind. It is usually promo or info.
-I read what you have to say via email or via your web site. I really value your work and thoughts and consider you a top expert in your field. I appreciate your honesty. But I don’t see you as the person that I _can_ help. The image of that person for me is a colleague in my field, former workmate, a local to Wisconsin, a good buddy from college… Meaning I have laughed and eaten a meal with that person.
-If you had turned the vote for you into a fundraiser – for every vote you got you’d donate a sum to Chile, for example, I think you would have had greater engagement.
Thank you for sharing the vote etc. Very interesting.
March 2nd, 2010 at 6:39 am
Tara,
I follow you and had I seen your tweet I would have voted for you. I hardly ever see your tweets and perhaps I almost always use the web to log into Twitter. As one Canadian to another, I will vote for you now. When does the voting close?
Avil Beckford @avilbeckford
March 2nd, 2010 at 7:41 am
I got here via wonky formatted email. Two wonky formatted emails.
So, for those playing the home game:
Wonky Email > Twitter
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:28 am
Amazing analysis. I was thinking very similar stuff throughout the competition.
I used http://bit.ly/cogaoke to promote myself all over, including in-person, Twitter, ustream, Facebook, email, and more. A look at the statistics shows an interesting breakdown:
http://bit.ly/info/9MZRvf
Nonstop tweeting to my ~1,963 followers got me no more than 200 clicks for the entire run. Compare that to the direct/email stat of 1,589, and it’s clear where the traffic came from.
Personal appeals, via email or in person, were by far the most effective. When I personally got all of NWC to vote for me, or when one of my friends got their whole Yoga class or another group, that’s when you could see the votes really rolling in.
It’s an interesting and sobering perspective on just how effective (or ineffective) your social media networks can be, and just how little it matters what the number is.
Thanks Tara for taking the time to take a look at this, this is a really useful and important case study!
March 4th, 2010 at 3:14 am
Apart from the fact that people may not be able to filter the tweets they follow, your post reminded me of an interesting phenomenon I read about in a book this week.
The book (Influence by Robert. B. Cialdini) tells about an interesting phenomenon called Pluralistic ignorance. This was demonstrated in an experiment by Darley en Latané, in which students faked an epileptic seizure. They received help 85 percent of the time when there was a single bystander present but only 31 percent of the time with five bystanders present.
This is what might be going on with your tweet about cogaoke. I’m not that saying nobody is concerned about your appeal. I’m saying that due to the fact that you have so many followers, a collective state of mind that says “ah well someone else will vote” arises. This might also explain why Tony reported that personal appeal via email of in person were by far the most effective.
March 4th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Very much in agreement with @carol. I didn’t pay attention because of the word Karaoke. Telling myself that I would read that later on. And when I did come back it was too late. I feel bad about not having been there for the support as I am also a big admirer of your work. I think you are a breath of fresh air by bringing the human element to social media at the forefront.
I am not a big user of Twitter, but funnily enough I met with a small business owner recently who has been relying heavily on social media to market his products and create a community around it. He has been quite successful. Twitter played a great role when he launched his company about 2 years ago. I will be writing about this soon.
Thanks for a great post.
March 4th, 2010 at 10:15 am
I was going to add my perspective, but after reading all the other comments, I just want to say, I am so happy you made it this time around! (i did vote 3 times)