Bacal's Thoughts On The Crowd: How do you differentiate YOUR business from your competitors? Do you do so by doing "what everyone else is doing" out of fear of being left behind? Or do you stretch your creativity and ability to innovate by not investing in what everyone else is doing, and investing in fresh, new ideas that are NOT being used by everyone else? Is this a no brainer? That's the point of taking a contrarian position on social media. Don't follow the crowd, because it's going to be just like the situation with company websites. Most are STILL a waste of space and time. However, if you just have to be on social media, then commit to it with your time, creativity and resources, so you can stand out in the crowd, even as the crowd is going the same general direction.
Recommended: Giving The Business to Social Media Research
Also, check out Crowdsourcing, Self Regulating Groups On Social Media - Great example of failure
|
Top : Bacals Social Media Commentary: Most information about social media is biased in its favor because the major sources are those that are actively promoting businesses on social media. Robert Bacal brings a contrarian view point and provides both sides of the coin on social media
Articles:Real Time Twitter Updates? Why? Bizarre to Bizarro - by Robert BacalSo, what's the business/product strategy. 1) Build a platform/product that has almost no actual functional use for most people by building in limits to what can be done. 2) Get lots of venture capital and do lots of buzz building. 3) Use a cute name, a cute logo, and simply be cute. 4) As growth slows, get MORE venture capital, announce ridiculous growth projections, build a new data center, and add MORE features in the bigger, faster arena and do it in ways that render the product even MORE useless! (Added: 6-Dec-2010 Hits: 130 ) Retweets NOT A Good Metric For Twitter Influence/Success - by Robert Bacal Oh Dear, Oh My. It's what we don't know, and don't ask about that kills us. Everyone assumes that the number of retweets is an indicator of someone's influence, or success. The more you are retweeted, the more influence you have. And the more people are "engaging" with you. Nope. Don't think so. I've been slowly watching the number of people retweeting my posts, particularly since we've been so active in building up our free social media library and resource center. We're tweeting more links, and we're getting a lot more retweets. (Added: 23-Dec-2010 Hits: 287 ) On Social Media - The Ignorant Lead The Fools - by Robert Bacal n searching for articles for inclusion in our Psychology of Social Media Library area, I had the fortune, or misfortune to look at the top 200 listings from a Google search using the terms "Psychology of Twitter". I had expected to see a number of articles from people or organizations that had identifiable qualifications in Psychology, or at minimum research methods, and I also expected to see some really interesting hypotheses and data. (Added: 23-Dec-2010 Hits: 189 ) Social Media: Has THIS Ever Happened In Human History? - by Robert Bacal I'm wondering if it has ever been the case in human history whether something that has been invented fills virtually no needs, serves very few useful functions, and solved almost no significant problems while causing many? That seems to be the case with some (not all) social media. It is indeed a phenomenon in search of functions and purpose that is driven not by solving problems, but from the BUZZ it creates by itself. (Added: 21-Aug-2010 Hits: 264 ) Giving The Business to Social Media Research eBook: Robert Bacal: Kindle Store - by Robert Bacal Amazing, short understandable explanations of why the social media research is useless, and misleading regarding making business decisions. (Added: 7-Oct-2010 Hits: 190 ) Crowdsourcing, Self Regulating Groups On Social Media - Great example of failure - by Robert Bacal The other day I came across a group of accounts sending identical messages all at the same time. Not retweets. Same messages. They would do one message, then do the next and then do the next in machine gun fashion using the hashtags #socialmedia and #entrepreneur, the result being that there were about 60 of their message to one real message. Their links went to a page/blog which, by the way was also auto generated. Clearly this is an automated process. I posted a message and the only response I got back was from some idiot who implied that there's spam in email too, so? (Added: 6-Dec-2010 Hits: 213 ) Social Media and 50 Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong - by Robert Bacal In 1927 or so the lore goes, Sophie Tucker recorded a song celebrating the differences between the USA and Paris of the time, entitled Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong (lyrics are here). Here's a few lines from it: (Added: 6-Dec-2010 Hits: 124 )
Pages Updated On:
16-Nov-2011
-
08:07:35
|