The resilient meme re John Locke's now-infamous purchased Amazon reviews has stirred a big pot of author resentment. But is there another way?
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Friday, October 5, 2012
Friday, September 21, 2012
New Patriots of Mars Synopsis Page Online
I recently set up this Patriots of Mars About.Me page, featuring what an old-school marketer would call a 'hero shot' of the book, along with a plot synopsis.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Sticky Situation
What's America's 'stickiest' social network, and (more important) why should you care?
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
#Twitter 104: Building a Following, Early Stages
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Serendipity
While you work hard to get the word out when you publish a book, what puts it over the top (if that's meant to happen) is serendipity. Serendipity is a funny concept, and apparently difficult to explain to some cultures.
Harry Potter? Two major counts of serendipity. The first was a publisher who had no great interest in the book being nagged by his young daughter, to whom he had given the manuscript. To appease her, he printed 250 copies and shipped them off to libraries. With no faith in the book's prospects, no marketing effort was made. The second count was that the librarians liked and recommended the book often enough that it began to gain traction, and get reviews. After that - well, you know.
The best things are usually not what you're trying to accomplish. Two months ago serendipity sent the charming and intuitive Linda Stone my way. Then a few weeks ago a serendipitous book review came to me.
Yesterday a friend sent me a very charming and creative music video which seemed to be inexplicably gathering dust on a YouTube shelf. I decided it deserved a better fate, and began spreading the word around.
One of my Facebook friends who got the link, Walt Gilbert, loved the video and wound up giving me and The Patriots of Mars a kind and unexpected boost. (Thanks again, Walt!)
If the book does well, I expect the many hours I spend promoting it will mean much less than all the factors I can't control. Mood-swings (favorable or otherwise) of the reading public, emerging news, and the financial fortunes of Amazon are out of my hands. Serendipity is difficult to explain, impossible to manufacture, and completely critical to success. There's nothing to be done but accept it.
The book's not actually out yet, by the way. But the opening prologue is online. My Facebook friends will all get a free copy, so if you like what you see stop by my page and 'friend' me.
Meanwhile - here's that video. You won't recognize it, but that's one of ABBA's most famous songs - and their final recording ever.
Friday, April 6, 2012
#Twitter 102: The Zen of Social Media
This series is 'The Zen of Twitter'. It's not 'The Zen of Facebook' (or LinkedIn or Pinterest or Reddit, etc.), because the essence of those services at least seems straightforward to the average user. But Twitter's stark simplicity makes its purpose elusive, and its governing rules aren't self-evident.
In approaching these social platforms, I ask the same basic question you probably do: How can this help me achieve my goal?
I'm an author. The average author defines his (or her) goal as selling books. Therefore, the purpose of Twitter, to someone like me, is to sell books. Therefore, Twitter is for sending Tweet after Tweet about one's books.
Yet we can sense right away that this approach is, at best, limited. At worst, it's repellant. I've been in chat rooms full of authors who complain how sick they are of seeing endless sales Tweets, then turn around and crank out their daily quota. And when sales flag, they're likely to Tweet even harder.
Selling books - selling anything, really - is like making a butterfly land on your finger. Which is to say: You can't. You can only create an optimal situation for the butterfly to choose to land on your finger.
An artist should intuitively understand that concept, since creating worthwhile art is pretty much the same elusive process. The fact that so many fail to grasp this suggests that their work lacks this same ephemeral but vital quality.
But what is that end for an author, if not to sell books? If we accept the premise that tweeting won't make that butterfly land on your finger, what is an achievable social-media goal? And if it's not earning income, why bother?
Speaking for myself: My goal is to elicit a core 'social behavior' from the social platforms I use. Achieving this goes beyond the usual rules, tricks, metrics, wiseguy-workarounds, 'helper' apps and other ephemera that are the red meat of most 'how-to' posts you'll find. To me, this is the Zen of Social Media.
Like a garden, social media must be cultivated. There is no better (i.e., faster) approach to what I, at least, consider its successful and proper implementation. In the next installment, I'll describe recent happy instances of the 'social behavior' that I've seen in my own little tended garden.
In approaching these social platforms, I ask the same basic question you probably do: How can this help me achieve my goal?
I'm an author. The average author defines his (or her) goal as selling books. Therefore, the purpose of Twitter, to someone like me, is to sell books. Therefore, Twitter is for sending Tweet after Tweet about one's books.Yet we can sense right away that this approach is, at best, limited. At worst, it's repellant. I've been in chat rooms full of authors who complain how sick they are of seeing endless sales Tweets, then turn around and crank out their daily quota. And when sales flag, they're likely to Tweet even harder.
Selling books - selling anything, really - is like making a butterfly land on your finger. Which is to say: You can't. You can only create an optimal situation for the butterfly to choose to land on your finger.
An artist should intuitively understand that concept, since creating worthwhile art is pretty much the same elusive process. The fact that so many fail to grasp this suggests that their work lacks this same ephemeral but vital quality.
For many users, social-media tools become a trap. The numbers these things measure can easily become the goal of using these platforms. Which, obviously, they should not be. In fact, so compelling does this stuff become that these tool providers encourage their users to broadcast these numbers, despite the fact that they are, in themselves, relatively meaningless noise. (Which many readers could merely wind up resenting.)
We've all encountered the SEO hucksters offering to 'sweeten' our Facebook 'likes', or our blog traffic, Twitter followers, etc., for a few bucks. That's very tempting to those of us who aren't celebrities (i.e., most of us) and subsist at the low end of the social totem pole.
Here's where this path leads, though. Recently I encountered a young, media-savvy author (I won't name him, no point calling him out) whose indie YA sci-fi book was selling well. He had a respectable number of Amazon reviews, plenty of 'likes' on his book's Facebook page, and tens of thousands of Twitter followers. It certainly looked as if his book was ripe to spill onto the laps of a much larger audience.
But when I checked his blog, I noticed very few comments on the posts. When I checked his Tweets, I saw that he was offering his followers rote cut-and-paste rote responses. (It was certainly not a newsfeed I'd sign up for, and the guy was no celebrity, so what was the appeal?) Also, he had no personal FB page, only a page for his book. Digging further into his website, I saw the remnants of SEO gaming (if you're savvy enough, you can spot at least some of them).
In theater parlance, this guy had 'papered the house'.
It's understandable to want to attract a crowd to one's business. But it's all-too-common to mistake a large number of 'followers' for a meaningful achievement. Twitter's not an end - it's a means to an end.
But what is that end for an author, if not to sell books? If we accept the premise that tweeting won't make that butterfly land on your finger, what is an achievable social-media goal? And if it's not earning income, why bother?
Speaking for myself: My goal is to elicit a core 'social behavior' from the social platforms I use. Achieving this goes beyond the usual rules, tricks, metrics, wiseguy-workarounds, 'helper' apps and other ephemera that are the red meat of most 'how-to' posts you'll find. To me, this is the Zen of Social Media.
Like a garden, social media must be cultivated. There is no better (i.e., faster) approach to what I, at least, consider its successful and proper implementation. In the next installment, I'll describe recent happy instances of the 'social behavior' that I've seen in my own little tended garden.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
#Twitter 101: Desperately Seeking Zen
Let's start off by saying I'm no Twitter Expert. If you want advice from a Twitter Expert, there are tons of them out there. I can't vouch for their expertise one way or another, but they're out there.
Maybe you knew that before you came here, and came anyway. Maybe you just found out, and are now looking (understandably) for the exits. Maybe I'd better give you a reason to stick around!
Try this on for size: While I don't know much about Twitter, I do know something about Zen. And it is the essence of Zen to realize that one never completely knows the answer one seeks.
Yet Twitter Experts promise to completely unravel its mystery - some in just 24 hours!
So while my Twitter expertise falls well short of 'expert', on the Zen side of things I think I can hold my own. In fact, let's test that theory. Here's a search for the words 'Twitter' and 'Zen'. How many results pursue the true nature (Zen) of Twitter? Not many. Let's look at them.
Mashable offers Four Tips for Productive Tweeting: (1) Approach With a Beginner’s Mind, (2) Give What You Want to Receive, (3) Only Add Useful Content, and (4) See Differently. Good advice in general, and certainly a healthy (IMO) approach to what you send out there in that little box. But it does not try to parse the essence of Twitter.
Next: Ten Steps To Twitter Zen. Six more steps than the last post: (1) Be Yourself, Be Nice, (2) You Must Give In Order to Receive, (3) Follower Count Isn’t Everything, (4) Conversation Is Not One-Way, (5) Mix It Up A Little, (6) Know The Proper Way To DM (direct message), (7) A Non-Follow-Back Is Not Cause For Concern, (8) If You Want to Increase The Likelihood of a Follow Back… (9) You Can Always Unfollow, (10) Give Thanks. This comes a little closer to what we're after, but most of his advice is, again: 'Be courteous, interact, be generous'.
Let's lay our cards on the table: If you're an ass in real life, you'll be an ass on Twitter. And if you make a nuisance of yourself on Twitter, no advice of mine can possibly help you, aside from this: Get someone with the necessary social skills, creativity and wit to do your tweeting for you.
Back to the Ten Steps. Items (3) and (7-9) suggest what we're after, which is the nature of Twitter itself in terms of its design intent and function. We must also account, as Twitter must, for the behavior of the folks using it. As someone who once constructed messages for marketing and political campaigns, this is an area where I can claim some insight.
Next up: Free Course: A Zen Peacekeeper Guide to Twitter. This seems to be on the right track - and the price is right. In fact, it's too on-the-nose. We're immediately shown images of Buddha and a woman meditating. Not to mention links to yoga - and what's up with peacekeeping? Maybe it's just me, but I'm starting to feel a little squishy here.
Pressing on into the seldom-seen second page of Google's results, there's something called Achieving Twitter Zen. It's a list of possibly-useful software enhancements for using Twitter. Again, not what we're after.
Another post called Twitter Zen tells us: The social media microblogging site Twitter has a Zen quality. The premise of Twitter? Answer the question “what are you doing”? Each post, called a tweet is like a haiku – a fluid expression of a moment in time... unburdened by verbosity (there is a 140 character limit on Twitter posts) as our human travails and observations are expressed. Little life moments. Experienced and shared. Happening.
Another Twitter Zen post, this one by Stephen Foskett, offers a no-nonsense series of four concise lessons designed to cover the basics for the newbie. At a glance, it looks pretty thorough in that regard. Here it lays out what Twitter is, and isn't:
The most important concept to grasp is the fundamental nature of Twitter: It is an ongoing, global, democratic conversation. It is not a blog, USENET, Facebook or MySpace, or an instant message platform, though it does have certain elements of all of those.
That helps, though if you're a Twitter newbie you might also not know what a blog, USENET, Facebook or MySpace are, either. But it's a start, and this writer goes on to offer some good observations. It's worth reading.
Ask yourself: Is becoming a 'Twitter expert' your goal? Or is Twitter only a means to an end? I'm in the latter camp, and I suspect you are too. (Otherwise, you'd have left by now!)
With that in mind, I'll stick with the basic practices and tools in the posts ahead. I'll review what I'm doing and why, and what I believe the Zen of the thing is. The first practical lesson has already begun: The headline of this piece starts with a hash tag (#), which in the Twitterverse is shorthand for a searchable topic. This post appears not only on this blog, but as a Tweet that opens with a popular search term. I'll show how that works in a future installment.
Meanwhile, Mr. Foskett's piece looks like a solid Twitter primer, with some good 'Zen' points to expand on later.
Maybe you knew that before you came here, and came anyway. Maybe you just found out, and are now looking (understandably) for the exits. Maybe I'd better give you a reason to stick around!
Try this on for size: While I don't know much about Twitter, I do know something about Zen. And it is the essence of Zen to realize that one never completely knows the answer one seeks.
Yet Twitter Experts promise to completely unravel its mystery - some in just 24 hours!
So while my Twitter expertise falls well short of 'expert', on the Zen side of things I think I can hold my own. In fact, let's test that theory. Here's a search for the words 'Twitter' and 'Zen'. How many results pursue the true nature (Zen) of Twitter? Not many. Let's look at them.
Mashable offers Four Tips for Productive Tweeting: (1) Approach With a Beginner’s Mind, (2) Give What You Want to Receive, (3) Only Add Useful Content, and (4) See Differently. Good advice in general, and certainly a healthy (IMO) approach to what you send out there in that little box. But it does not try to parse the essence of Twitter.Next: Ten Steps To Twitter Zen. Six more steps than the last post: (1) Be Yourself, Be Nice, (2) You Must Give In Order to Receive, (3) Follower Count Isn’t Everything, (4) Conversation Is Not One-Way, (5) Mix It Up A Little, (6) Know The Proper Way To DM (direct message), (7) A Non-Follow-Back Is Not Cause For Concern, (8) If You Want to Increase The Likelihood of a Follow Back… (9) You Can Always Unfollow, (10) Give Thanks. This comes a little closer to what we're after, but most of his advice is, again: 'Be courteous, interact, be generous'.
Let's lay our cards on the table: If you're an ass in real life, you'll be an ass on Twitter. And if you make a nuisance of yourself on Twitter, no advice of mine can possibly help you, aside from this: Get someone with the necessary social skills, creativity and wit to do your tweeting for you.
Back to the Ten Steps. Items (3) and (7-9) suggest what we're after, which is the nature of Twitter itself in terms of its design intent and function. We must also account, as Twitter must, for the behavior of the folks using it. As someone who once constructed messages for marketing and political campaigns, this is an area where I can claim some insight.
Next up: Free Course: A Zen Peacekeeper Guide to Twitter. This seems to be on the right track - and the price is right. In fact, it's too on-the-nose. We're immediately shown images of Buddha and a woman meditating. Not to mention links to yoga - and what's up with peacekeeping? Maybe it's just me, but I'm starting to feel a little squishy here.
Pressing on into the seldom-seen second page of Google's results, there's something called Achieving Twitter Zen. It's a list of possibly-useful software enhancements for using Twitter. Again, not what we're after.
Another post called Twitter Zen tells us: The social media microblogging site Twitter has a Zen quality. The premise of Twitter? Answer the question “what are you doing”? Each post, called a tweet is like a haiku – a fluid expression of a moment in time... unburdened by verbosity (there is a 140 character limit on Twitter posts) as our human travails and observations are expressed. Little life moments. Experienced and shared. Happening.
Another Twitter Zen post, this one by Stephen Foskett, offers a no-nonsense series of four concise lessons designed to cover the basics for the newbie. At a glance, it looks pretty thorough in that regard. Here it lays out what Twitter is, and isn't:
The most important concept to grasp is the fundamental nature of Twitter: It is an ongoing, global, democratic conversation. It is not a blog, USENET, Facebook or MySpace, or an instant message platform, though it does have certain elements of all of those.
That helps, though if you're a Twitter newbie you might also not know what a blog, USENET, Facebook or MySpace are, either. But it's a start, and this writer goes on to offer some good observations. It's worth reading.
Ask yourself: Is becoming a 'Twitter expert' your goal? Or is Twitter only a means to an end? I'm in the latter camp, and I suspect you are too. (Otherwise, you'd have left by now!)
With that in mind, I'll stick with the basic practices and tools in the posts ahead. I'll review what I'm doing and why, and what I believe the Zen of the thing is. The first practical lesson has already begun: The headline of this piece starts with a hash tag (#), which in the Twitterverse is shorthand for a searchable topic. This post appears not only on this blog, but as a Tweet that opens with a popular search term. I'll show how that works in a future installment.
Meanwhile, Mr. Foskett's piece looks like a solid Twitter primer, with some good 'Zen' points to expand on later.
Friday, March 16, 2012
What's working (and what's not) on Pinterest
It's still growing like a weed. The quality of the images found on the top pinners' sites is only improving, and expanding nicely in its variety. But Pinterest does not do nearly enough to ensure that the original posters (both those who bring the images inside Pinterest as well as the original 'outside' posters) are properly linked and credited. There is technology that could improve this, but Pinterest is not employing it, at least not yet.
More thoughts here.
More thoughts here.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Google+'s inherent - and inherited - problem
Recently, Virginia Postrel threatened to take her business elsewhere if Facebook forced Timeline on her. Though her friends voiced support, the fact is that folks resist uprooting and re-establishing themselves on another social network without 'sufficient' cause, and Timeline is almost certainly an insufficient reason.
Google+ has been attempting to establish itself as FB's main rival. This is not an incidental effort on Google's part, but critical to its future growth. Yet despite Google's institutional muscle, the effort is a relative failure.
Various explanations have been offered for this, but I have found none of them satisfactory - until today. This piece from Nick Bilton's 'Bits' column for the NY Times, IMHO, nails it.
What do Bilton's conclusions mean for the future of Google+? Can they 'fix it'? Not really - the problem is inherent within the nature of the institution that is Google. Can 'the institution' be fixed, then? Our own history insists that broken or obsolete institutions periodically need to be 'altered or abolished'. Ask Linda Stone, sometime, about her efforts to change Microsoft's culture from the inside out.
If Google can't do it, can ANYone overtake the Facebook juggernaut? History tells us that it's not only possible, but eminently likely. It was not so long ago that AOL ruled the 'social media' scene, and thereafter it was MySpace. Both have long since fallen on hard times.
Could Google simply acquire the strongest FB competitor and win the social media wars that way? Again, the historical record speaks to us. This time it tells us that the answer is yes... and no. 'Yes', Google could certainly acquire an up-and-comer, and Yahoo once did with Flickr. Yes, start-ups need sugar daddies. But no, this strategy does not win the day for Google. Yahoo's wet-blanket corporate culture killed the spirit of innovation at Flickr, which could have evolved offshoots like, for instance, Instagram. The writing was on the wall when Flickr's founders walked away in frustration.
The real solution here lies in recalling just what it is Google really needs from Google+, which is: User information. Facebook won't give it up to Google, so Google attempted to build its own social network. And it failed - at least, it failed in terms of the scale it needs to achieve going forward. But that's not to say another emerging social network might not be able to reach an innovative accommodation with Google that gives the search giant much of what it needs without surrendering to a corporate kiss of death.
This is not just a 'possible' outcome, but a 'likely' one, and as such it's well worth keeping an eye out for.
Google+ has been attempting to establish itself as FB's main rival. This is not an incidental effort on Google's part, but critical to its future growth. Yet despite Google's institutional muscle, the effort is a relative failure.
Various explanations have been offered for this, but I have found none of them satisfactory - until today. This piece from Nick Bilton's 'Bits' column for the NY Times, IMHO, nails it.
What do Bilton's conclusions mean for the future of Google+? Can they 'fix it'? Not really - the problem is inherent within the nature of the institution that is Google. Can 'the institution' be fixed, then? Our own history insists that broken or obsolete institutions periodically need to be 'altered or abolished'. Ask Linda Stone, sometime, about her efforts to change Microsoft's culture from the inside out.
If Google can't do it, can ANYone overtake the Facebook juggernaut? History tells us that it's not only possible, but eminently likely. It was not so long ago that AOL ruled the 'social media' scene, and thereafter it was MySpace. Both have long since fallen on hard times.
Could Google simply acquire the strongest FB competitor and win the social media wars that way? Again, the historical record speaks to us. This time it tells us that the answer is yes... and no. 'Yes', Google could certainly acquire an up-and-comer, and Yahoo once did with Flickr. Yes, start-ups need sugar daddies. But no, this strategy does not win the day for Google. Yahoo's wet-blanket corporate culture killed the spirit of innovation at Flickr, which could have evolved offshoots like, for instance, Instagram. The writing was on the wall when Flickr's founders walked away in frustration.
The real solution here lies in recalling just what it is Google really needs from Google+, which is: User information. Facebook won't give it up to Google, so Google attempted to build its own social network. And it failed - at least, it failed in terms of the scale it needs to achieve going forward. But that's not to say another emerging social network might not be able to reach an innovative accommodation with Google that gives the search giant much of what it needs without surrendering to a corporate kiss of death.
This is not just a 'possible' outcome, but a 'likely' one, and as such it's well worth keeping an eye out for.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Imminent changes to design of Pinterest pages
News re changes to the layout of Pinterest's pages and some insight into the company's (brief) history, here. Worthwhile for anyone interested in this burgeoning social platform.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Free Irish ditties for St. Patrick's Day (just get Spotify)
Here, I've loaded up more Irish music than you can shake a Shillelagh at. You just need to install Spotify and click the link. (Or punch in "Irish" in the upper-left search box of the Spotify app for a tsunami of more tunes.)
I've been experimenting with Spotify, which for anyone unaware of it is a relatively new music service. Here's what I've found so far:
(1) You can tell it's a new service - 2/3 of my [80,000+] songs they don't have licenses for, and therefore I can't post them.
(2) Many of the songs they DID post for me now (one day later) 'cannot be found', and the service is asking me to 'try again'. Thanks a lot, boyos.
(3) There's a world of 'net piracy trying to swoop down on these guys, and that is partly why many artists are hesitant to participate. (For example, The Beatles won't sign up.)
(4) The main reason artists won't sign, though, is that they misunderstand the mindset of most fans. The thinking is, "Why would they buy our music if they can get it on Spotify for free?" Of course, that was once the 'music industry's' argument against radio. (Not to mention the handwringing and all-out war over recorded music in theaters! Which spelled the end of economic viability in the musical arts, exactly as forecast by music industry execs of an earlier era. Yessir.)
What listeners today really want - and the late, great Steve Jobs got this - is to 'own' and control their music. Mainly, they want to build their own playlists, and Spotify (wisely) stops just short of allowing that.
Despite the still-considerable issues the service has, 'social' music should take off. Whether Spotify will continue to lead the charge is unknown (remember, MySpace was once the king of social media, as was AOL before it. Today's leader is tomorrow's also-ran.). But the concept has now been demonstrated to be viable and vital.
The great advantage of 'social music' for music lovers is the casual and immediate discoverability Spotify offers. It presents an opportunity to discover music through the ears and experience of people whose musical tastes you respect. Now - odds are, there are few people you think of that way, but with Spotify you'll find 'em, and fast.
This is what Apple wanted their 'Ping' to become, but the sticking point for them was dealing with Facebook, which is where the majority of listeners they want to reach hang out. Steve Jobs found Facebook's terms of engagement 'onerous'. Even after Ping's launch, things got even more fractious between the two companies -- Ping started out with the option to add friends using Facebook Connect, but Facebook blocked access when it discovered that Apple wasn't playing by the rules. FC is actually an open service - unless Facebook decides that it isn't - and apparently it decided Apple's Ping network was an unwelcome guest. Apple removed the service from Ping, but you'll still see some notes around suggesting you can bring in friends from Facebook.
Facebook claimed the problem was that Apple would have simply sent them too much traffic, which seems suspicious. Some observers believe Facebook (i.e., Zuckerberg) was simply lying.
At the same time, since 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend', one can only wonder why Apple didn't turn immediately to MySpace. On the surface it would seem the two would have seen the mutual opportunities - and Apple already had a strong relationship with MySpace's owner at-the-time, Rupert Murdoch, who had recently launched a newspaper specifically for the iPad. (Murdoch, in fact, has lately admitted that on his watch 'they screwed up MySpace', and the new ownership says a vast remodeling is underway. So Apple may yet cut a deal that could torpedo the fledgling Spotify.)
Anyway, Spotify was leaner and hungrier than Apple. (Almost any company on the planet is leaner than Apple.) They agreed to whatever 'onerous' terms Zuckerberg dished out. The downside for users is that Spotify lacks Apple's clout in the music biz, and so the rollout of this service is likely to remain painfully slow.
Despite the drawbacks and occasionally spotty service, I've downloaded about as much of my library onto the service as it will allow. Prior to this, I relied largely on the vast wealth of mostly-Blogspot blogs out there to discover new and/or forgotten music (especially 50's-era jazz). Now the opportunity looms for a broad and more-immediate wealth of experimentation. Or at least it does if Spotify gets its act together. They have a LOT of work still do do, and have barely scratched the surface of their true potential. Here's hoping. But if Apple/MySpace manage to come together and build a more compelling service, I'm there. The concept works - in theory. Now it's a question of who will MAKE the concept work, and from there become a dominant force in the music industry. My bet is it'll be the company who's there in the thick of things already, and holding more ready cash than the entire US government.
Three guesses.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Inside Pinterest's numbers
Despite the company's reluctance to release numbers, studies of Pinterest's external and internal behavior are coming to light.
The most revealing stat was something I had anticipated, and so was gratified to see confirmed: Over 80% of all pins (images collected by users) are re-pins (images found from within Pinterest, rather than from outside sites). This means that new content is brought into the 'Pinterest Community' by only 20% of its users. The remaining 80%, in effect, 'vote' on how popular and viral that content will become.
A small minority, then, controls what the majority sees. But the majority does decide what of that content will rise to the surface. (See related: Pinclout)
It is also being demonstrated that the Big Kahunas of the Pinterest Community are its early adopters. Newer members are not showing the same commitment. There will be exceptions to this, of course. Despite this, Pinterest users in the aggregate show a level of continued involvement well above that of the average user of other social tools (Twitter, etc.).
Another stat that stands out is the tremendous breadth of linkage that comes out of Pinterest. Esty gets the lion's share of links, and this is understandable. Many artisans and small businesses who use Esty to sell their wares are setting up shop on Pinterest. After that comes Google Image Search, which is again understandable. Google is the prime means of finding images today, though eventually I expect Pinterest to reach a point where it supplants it. After that come Flickr and Tumblr, both geared to the aggregation of visual content.
Yet none of these major, well-known sites has more than 3% of all Pinterest's links. This is truly a long-tail phenomenon that reaches deep into the web.
Source: RJ Metrics
The most revealing stat was something I had anticipated, and so was gratified to see confirmed: Over 80% of all pins (images collected by users) are re-pins (images found from within Pinterest, rather than from outside sites). This means that new content is brought into the 'Pinterest Community' by only 20% of its users. The remaining 80%, in effect, 'vote' on how popular and viral that content will become.
A small minority, then, controls what the majority sees. But the majority does decide what of that content will rise to the surface. (See related: Pinclout)
It is also being demonstrated that the Big Kahunas of the Pinterest Community are its early adopters. Newer members are not showing the same commitment. There will be exceptions to this, of course. Despite this, Pinterest users in the aggregate show a level of continued involvement well above that of the average user of other social tools (Twitter, etc.).
Another stat that stands out is the tremendous breadth of linkage that comes out of Pinterest. Esty gets the lion's share of links, and this is understandable. Many artisans and small businesses who use Esty to sell their wares are setting up shop on Pinterest. After that comes Google Image Search, which is again understandable. Google is the prime means of finding images today, though eventually I expect Pinterest to reach a point where it supplants it. After that come Flickr and Tumblr, both geared to the aggregation of visual content.
Yet none of these major, well-known sites has more than 3% of all Pinterest's links. This is truly a long-tail phenomenon that reaches deep into the web.
Source: RJ Metrics
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Google+ a 'virtual ghost town'
Recently, Virginia Postrel warned her followers that, if Facebook was going to force its 'Timeline' on her, she'd take her ball and play in Google+'s playground. Well, Facebook is behind it's planned schedule to port everyone to Timeline, but it has not changed its corporate mind. But if you plan to hoof it to the Dark Side (what IS the opposite of the Dark Side in Star Wars, anyway?), these headlines tell you what you have to look forward to:
• Google's Social Network Is a Virtual Ghost Town
• The only people I know that use Google+ regularly are people who work at Google (and Robert Scoble)
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