Do as I Say, Not as I Do?

Miami criminal defense lawyer Brian Tannebaum has some questions for self-proclaimed social media expert Adrian Dayton. Brian latches on to some inconsistencies between the things that Adrian says about himself on his website and the record elsewhere on the internet, as well as inconsistencies between the things that Adrian says about himself on his website and what Brian sees as reality:

How can a member of the Bar, with a straight face describe themselves as a rainmaker and an “experienced corporate attorney” with 8 months experience, 2 of which there was no work? And in those first 8 months was he an integral part of one $450 million dollar merger, or was it several $450 million dollar mergers? Which bio is true? Exactly what role did he play and what relevance does it have to teaching lawyers to use twitter? Was he using twitter before the merger? Did twitter get him the merger client? Someone, anyone?

I describe Adrian as a self-proclaimed social media expert, but is there any other sort? Michigan law student Justinian Lane suggests applying the Daubert test to social-media “experts”:

If people are going to not only sell themselves as experts, but try and sell themselves as experts to lawyers, isn’t it fair to expect them to undergo the same scrutiny you’d subject an expert to in a lawsuit?  I know that many of you are probably a little intimidated about social media and technology in general.  So I’ll tell you what: If you’ve got a question or two about social media, shoot me an email.  I am not an expert!  But I’ve been blogging since 2003 and I probably know enough to prevent you from wasting money on someone who hopes to exploit your ignorance.

Justinian lists eight generally-accepted principles of social media (“If any expert disagrees with these principles, he not only would fail Daubert, but fails at the Internet”). The inconsistencies Brian finds in Adrian’s online persona suggest that Adrian doesn’t subscribe to the first of those principles:

Be honest about yourself and your experience.

If someone selling social-media marketing can’t tell his own story truthfully and coherently, why would you pay him to tell yours?

The Twitter Interesting Index

Twitter Interesting Index Calculator v1. “More followers = better” is a delusion. In truth, more interesting = better.

Look for v2, coming soon.

What Part of “Social” is Unclear?

Are you the kind of guy who hands out business cards in church? Who, dining out at a restaurant, goes from table to table selling bowling balls? Who, when meeting friends for drinks, tries to get them to join your MLM scheme?

If so, then social media marketing is for you!

If not, however—if, that is to say, you are not a huge asshat with boundary issues and an underdeveloped sense of self, or at least don’t want to seem to be such—then please resist trying to use Twitter, Facebook, and blog comments to hawk your wares.

Now, I know that you’ll get lots of Twitter “followers” and Facebook “friends” even if you’re in perpetual sales mode. Getting followers is not hard; I know of at least one Twitter account with no updates and more than 1500 followers. But guess what? Those followers will be in perpetual sales mode too.

You’re all yammering at each other, and nobody is listening.

Many of us like to use social media socially, to meet other people for pleasure, to form educational and entertaining connections with other human beings.

Trying to sell to us using social media is like trying to teach a warthog to sing (just like a pig, but uglier and with long dangerous tusks).

A Sort of Denial from Glenn Beck . . . Sorta

Glenn Beck’s lawyer has at last officially denied that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, but the denial is buried in paragraph 35 of a complaint filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization Arbitration and Mediation Center, linked to at the Legal Satyricon.

This is all well and good, but it raises the question: why won’t Glenn Beck personally deny allegations that he raped and murdered a girl in 1990? Why is he hiding behind his lawyers?

Twitter Curmudgeon Tools

Find two twitterers’ common followers.

Eliminate your followers who haven’t twitted in n days (or who have never twitted, or whose twits are protected).

Eliminate your followers who care so little about content that they follow a selected spamoron or spambot.

The Twitter Follower Delusion

On Twitter, followers are like money you can’t spend. They are like money because they have zero intrinsic value, and are only worth something because some people agree they are worth something. But of course you can’t trade your Twitter followers to someone else who agrees with you that they have value.

“No intrinsic value”??? But every person that sees my content is valuable!

First of all, no. If you’re writing in Hindi, or on a college level, and the person that sees your content reads no Hindi, and on a fifth-grade reading level, the fact that your content passes beneath his gaze means nothing.

Second, you’re assuming that “followers” on Twitter actually see anything you write.

Guy Kawasaki is “following” 163,812 people. If he spent one second per twit and each of his followeds twitted once per day, it would take him 45 hours to review a day’s twits. I think we can safely say that Kawasaki doesn’t read 99% of his “friends’” twits; as a follower, Kawasaki has no intrinsic value.

Maybe, but Kawasaki is an aberration. Most people don’t follow that many.

Do you suppose that anyone “following” a thousand people is actually reading his “friends’” twits? I suspect not.

I recently built an application that allowed me to select a twitterer, and automatically force all of that twitterer’s followers to unfollow me. I selected a few twitterers of the “picture of Britney giving a blowjob” variety, and ran the application on them.

I promptly lost a third of my paltry 700 followers. That means that 200 people following me were also following spammers who contributed nothing.

That they were following the spammers revealed to me that they didn’t care about what their “friends” (Twitterspeak for those they are “following”) were saying.

So why were they following me? Probably in hopes that I would boost their follower number by following them back. And there’s the heart of the matter: many on Twitter don’t decide whom to follow based on the interestingness of their content, but only in hopes of boosting their own follower numbers; these are followers without value.  Or, as @KevinOKeefe says, “just because someone has a lot of followers on Twitter does not mean they are offering anything of value“.

Guy Kawasaki apparently can’t conceive of more followers as anything but better:

I check on my TwitterCounter stats so many times a day that it scares me. I don’t think it’s just me that does this because there are only two kinds of Twitter users: those that want more followers and those that are lying.

It’s a game; I get that. But Twitter followers—like World of Warcraft gold or Monopoly money or U.S. greenbacks—aren’t worth anything to people who aren’t playing the game. The Twitter Delusion is that they are.

I love games, and sometimes wish I could afford to play them more. But playing games has costs, whether direct costs or opportunity costs. If the game depended on merit, so that the price of more Twitter followers were to produce more interesting relevant conduct, I might give it a shot—producing interesting relevant conduct requires thought and creativity, two faculties that I could afford to exercise more.

But if the cost of having another follower is to give my imprimatur to someone whom I am not interested in following, I’m not going to play.

Why care? If you have 700 followers, and 250 of them are never going to pay attention to a word you write, why does it matter? You should just be grateful for those who will pay attention and not try to change things.

It probably doesn’t, and I probably should.

But imagine a Twitter (or a subTwittersphere) in which people only follow each other if they might be interested in what they had to say. The spammers go away (or spend all of their time twitting each other), and the rest of us can more easily find a community of shared interest without having to weedwhack our way through the “Trump Network” and “TweetAddder” spambots and spamorons.

Ah, the potential!