In a recent study, Duncan Watts, Dan Goldstein, and I examined the adoption patterns of several different types of products diffusing over various online platforms — including Twitter, Facebook, and the Yahoo! IM network — comprising millions of individual adopters. The figure below shows the structure and frequency of the five most commonly seen diffusion trees in each case. In all six domains the dominant diffusion event, accounting for between 70% to 95% of cascades, is the trivial one: an individual adopts the product in question and doesn’t convert any of their contacts. The next most common event, again in all six domains, is an independent adopter who attracts a single additional adopter. In fact, across domains only 1%-4% of diffusion trees extend beyond one degree.
via Messy Matters – This Post Won’t Go Viral. Perhaps the more interesting aspect is that most adoptions occur without a peer-to-peer influence or within one step of the original peer.
You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions. Lead the pack! Evolve! Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President. Hire those workers to actually work! Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better. Collect the oil and get it out of the water! Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture. Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem. Lastly, don’t keep the press and the people trying to help you away from the disaster, open it up so people can see it and help fix it. This isn’t just your disaster, this is a human tragedy. Allow us to mourn so that we can stop being angry.
Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second.
via Seth’s Blog: Your most vivid fears…. If there was one blog you should be reading to understand and try to get a handle on the new world of marketing, communication, selling and understanding in an internet, social media driven world, Seth Godin’s is the one.
Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”
To prove the popularity of these extra-curricular sections of Facebook, Johnson explained: “Applications make up a huge part of Facebook. There are over 90,000 applications on Facebook. “69 million active users are using FarmVille alone, that’s more users than Twitter.” Interestingly, Facebook noted that its demographic is getting older, with the 35+ category growing the fastest and 53 per cent of all those who log on in a month come back on a daily basis.
What does that say for Twitter (and the open web) when a single application inside of a walled garden has more users? Are end users happier in the garden, is it only due to the social and community already built in Facebook, or something else?
This question is sparked within me for two reasons, two new bloggers entered the world. One, the company that I work for has a blog that is relatively new (blog.accade.com), and my g/f is working on launching a blog.
Find a really good domain name and keep it. If you don’t have a domain name that you like and one that you can remember, spell, and write easily, there is no point in it. We may live in the Google century but you will still need to communicate your blog to other people. Both in the form of providing links to all your social networks and for other people to link to and visit your site.
Find a great theme and then customize it to how you want it to look. If you want tag pages, make it have tag pages, if you want author pages, build out author pages, same thing goes for just simple things as making the title look exactly the way you want it to look. Plus side here if you want to learn about basic web technologies, customizing a WordPress theme is a pretty easy way to learn about basic web languages (HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS) without much harm.
Sign up for Feedburner and use it to burn your feeds. Trust me on this, yes Feedburner has had some issues lately, but the ability to have Google host your feeds without worrying about what happens if you change domains or you want to edit your RSS feeds and such makes it a great resource. Also Feedburner provides you essentially a Google Analytics service for your RSS feeds including: # of people subscribed, what RSS reader they use, how many clicked through on your RSS feed. Finally Feedburner provides one service that makes it impossible to beat, the ability to subscribe to updates in a variety of formats. Want a feed delivered to your email, done, a Google Reader, Yahoo, or Mail.app customized format, done.
Create a Google Analytics account. Analytics will let you track your site’s vistors and give all kinds of information on them that you never would think you would want until you have it.
Which do you care about more simply getting a stream of conciusicous thoughts from people or a stream of tons of different aspects on that person and lots of information to put it into context. That’s the dilemma facing people signing up for social networks. Each specializes in an area that makes it useful to the end users.
Facebook excels at providing you with tons of information on your friends and letting you keep in touch with them very easily. It lets you have a social dialogue with someone who you may never see, but you can find out their favorite movies, music, where they live, challenge them to a game of Scrabble and so much more.
Facebook's News Feed
That’s a close and personal friendship taken to the online world, Twitter is much the opposite. You don’t really have a lot of information on the person, instead you get a stream of thoughts (140 characters at a time) that let you see what the person is thinking at a bunch of different times.
Twitter Stream
Facebook is uniquely useful to me at providing connections to my real life friends and family. Letting me tell them how I am doing, and find out what they are out to, passively putting information onto Facebook. I can follow people and get to know them closer and keep friendships that in the past would have just died due to the difficulty of communication.
I use Twitter for a vastly different purpose, to follow a large group of people, who most may not even know me but whose thoughts I am interested in hearing. People who express some ideas or information that I want to hear more of, or even those who just create great art. I can follow along not just them creating new ideas and art, but see when they go out to eat or what they think of a new movie. It’s a very weird world where I find out before the papers are even allowed to publish the reviews what the first people watching a movie think.
That’s what communication will look like tomorrow and I intend to be on the cutting edge and learning as much as I can.
