Nov
02
Social Media and Social Proof: On Twitter Lists, Metrics, Mammals and Marketing
by Naomi Dunford
First, I’ll give you some background before I get into my screaming, raging rant. Cool? (Oh, and please do not take this explanation as endorsement, OK? Some people have never heard of Twitter and I want them to be able to experience the full force of my rancor just as much as you can.)
Twitter is a social media site. The people who choose to be alerted to your updates (tweets) are called followers. For a long time, your worth as a human being was calculated by subtracting the amount of people you follow from the number of people who follow you.
This little junior high clique-stravaganza was ruined when some enterprising people discovered that, with most Twitter users, if you follow them, they’ll follow you back. So I could wreck the whole hierarchy by following 10,000 people, getting followed back by 7,000, drop all my original 10,000 except for 16, and look like a celebrity. (7,000 people deem me worth listening to, but I only return the favor to a very special 16. Aren’t I elite?)
All this bullshit made Twitter look lame, and it resulted in people following WAY more people than they could ever reasonably connect with. How can you track 10,000 people? You can’t.
Now, in the last several days, Twitter has rolled out a new function called lists. Lists allow you to… make lists.
You could have lists of fellow Etsy sellers or tech geeks or comedians or Torontonians. You could also have lists called A Listers, My Heroes, or Rockstars.
This is about where everybody’s shit got tragically lost. Most people voiced their opinions in the 140 characters Twitter allows for their updates, but a few people have written some interesting blog posts.
Chris Brogan doesn’t dig lists because they’re inherently exclusionary. He’s right. He’s a celebrity in his niche and including Dude A but excluding Dude B puts him in the position of making a statement he doesn’t want to make. If he participates at all, he’s going to hurt some feelings and he’s a nice guy who doesn’t want to do that.
Robert Scoble thinks Chris Brogan is being Mr. Namby Pamby Pants. He says lists are functional sorting tools and if people want to sit in the corner and pout because they didn’t make a Big Shot list, well, man the fuck up. He is also right, except for the Mr. Namby Pamby Pants Thing. (Have you met Chris Brogan? I have, and the man is built like a brick shit house.)
Dave Troy says that lists have permanently changed the economics of Twitter, and has questions about how Twitter is going to deal with derogatory lists (Top 50 Douchebags In Social Media or Worst Fucking Posers In The NHL) and the effect this might have on what people are willing to do to “get listed”.
Ryan Rancatore thinks lists are the bomb because they allow us to follow everyone who follows us. Cause you don’t have to read the tweets, see? You just put everybody you WANT to hear from on a list (public or private) and then you can safely ignore the noise from everybody else. Everybody gets to feel good because you followed them. There’s some merit here, although following everybody who follows you gets you more spam than an Okinawa mess hall.
Here’s what you need to know and it has nothing to do with Twitter
If you sell anything, you are a marketer. And marketers are very, very concerned with social proof.
As human beings, we operate on two levels, the ape level and the Homo sapiens level. The ape lives in a group and has a difficult time functioning outside the alpha beta hierarchy. The Homo sapiens learns how to count before he’s three. Given those two factors, is it any wonder we really dig things like lists?
We need a framework. We need to know where we stand. We need to know where we fit in relation to everybody else. Numbers are a handy way to do that.
More importantly, YOUR CUSTOMERS need a framework. YOUR CUSTOMERS need to know where you stand. YOUR CUSTOMERS need to know where you fit in relation to everybody else. Numbers are a handy way to do that.
When Shoemoney first showed a photograph of himself with his $132,994.97 Adsense check, people went nutso. Much more nutso than they would have had he said, “I support myself and my family quite comfortably with Google Adsense ads.” When Darren Rowse calls himself a problogger, you believe him when you see he has 129,000 RSS subscribers. And when I put that big shiny number in the top right of your screen, I got 4,000 new readers in a month. I guess I get to be taken seriously now that the writing’s on the proverbial wall.
People really like social proof. The social media consultant with 112 Twitter followers and 9 Facebook fans dies broke. Doesn’t matter that she’s actually just above this petty cliquishness. Doesn’t matter that she really knows her shit. The public cares about her numbers and if she wants to eat, she has to care too.
Should we act this way? Should we judge people like this? Should we assign such a high value to arbitrary numbers?
It doesn’t fucking matter what we SHOULD do. As a marketer, ALL you care about is what we DO.
SHOULD we decide not to date a guy because he lives with his mother? SHOULD we reject a job applicant because they smell like dog food? SHOULD we balk when our daughter’s new boyfriend shows up with hair down to his ass and a face full of tattoos?
Irrelevant. We do. And that’s all that matters.
Am I in favor of lists? It doesn’t matter. They’re here, and people are going to use them as another measure of your (and my) success. If we didn’t use lists as a metric, we’d find something else.
People like numbers. Get used to it.
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List as the new social proof currency
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