I found the group of twitter users with the most followers from several types of accounts. I used Twitter Grader to evaluate the relative influence of these users, and compared it to the relative number of followers they had.

Twitter Celebrities Have Most Followers; News Accounts Have Most Influence

Within all the twitter accounts I analyzed, Celebrities and TV personalities had a greater than average number of followers. However, they had less than average influence. On the other hand, news, social media and tech had below average following and above average influence. Interestingly, entrepreneurs failed to gain both followers and influence, and fell below average in both factors.

Twitter is about Engaging, Not Sheep Herding

Your twitter power is not just about how many followers you have. It also matters how influential they are, and how engaged you are with them.

Celebrities tend to tweet about themselves. While this may be interesting to their fans, talking about yourself (whether personally or in business) does not invite interaction.

Even though celebrities have the most followers on twitter, if you want to influence people they are not the ones you should emulate. Instead, engage as much as you can with those that already follow you. Remember that collectively, they can spread your word a lot better than you can.

Interaction Is Either Public or Private

Chris Brogan: A Public Communicator

Brogan is all about public interaction. A quick look at his twitter stream, and it’s obvious. Through his blog posts and his twitter, he frequently asks questions, inviting interaction. He openly invites everyone to connect with him on LinkedIn, and doesn’t really decline invitations to connect.

However, if you want to contact him in private, all you’ve got is this contact form on his website. To me, this form seems uninviting, because I don’t normally have conversations through forms. If you look closely, he doesn’t even guarantee that you will get a response, or that the response will be from him.

Seth Godin: A Private Communicator

Godin, on the other hand does not use twitter. He uses his blog to make statements and has comments disabled on his blog. The questions he poses in his blog tend to be rhetorical, and they tend to have the same answer – ‘I’m right’. (Don’t worry though, he is!)

Instead of inviting public interaction, Godin communicates extensively through email. He brands himself as a guy who answers every single email. He’s also incredibly prompt about it, which is something I can confirm from personal experience.

Selling a Service vs. Selling an Idea

It seems like both Godin and Brogan are suggesting that you should interact with them in a certain way – either publicly (Brogan), or privately (Godin). But what’s the idea behind each style of interaction? Could the difference have something to do with what they’re selling?

Brogan is the main brain behind New Marketing Labs, an online marketing consulting company. While he is a master of sharing useful information, his blog is not his job. His blog is a way for him to share his thoughts that educate potential clients, and establish himself as an authority in his field.

Godin, however, is a blogger and author, first and foremost. He is not offering you his services, only his ideas and his wisdom. He is not so much interested in the naysayers as he is in learning from us or hearing our experiences. Frankly speaking, I feel he also puts more of an emphasis on being ‘right’ and framing ideas in a unique way.

What Everyone Needs: A Symphony of Public and Private Interaction

I see Seth Godin and Chris Brogan as two endpoints in how we can create successful interaction. In reality, most of us use a combination of public and private venues of communication. Not only social media or business development people, but all of us. If you have a Facebook account in addition to an email address, that’s what you’re doing.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a good example of reinforcing public interaction through private channels and visa versa. He’s one of the most interactive guys around, no doubt. Yes, he does tweet a lot, answer emails and comments, and invites interaction. But at the same time, he knows when to take the conversation into a private venue. One great thing he does is use Direct Messages (DMs) extensively on Twitter. This allows him to keep communication in the same venue, while switching from public to one-to-one conversation.

What’s Your Mix?

It seems to me that public and private interactions are good for different things.

Benefits of public interaction:

• Connecting with lot of people
• Getting found
• Promoting others, instilling a feeling of reciprocity in them

Benefits of private interaction:

• Connecting intimately with a few key people
• Converting what you learn from these people into a quality brand
• Making the sale

Where do you stand on public vs. private interaction? I’m interested in hearing from both online marketing professionals and regular folks with a Facebook and an email account. Your opinions are all personal, and therefore equally valid. I just want you to think about why you go public sometimes and private other times.

This isn’t the first time the show has joked about the transformative effects of the internet. In ‘The Snuke‘, Cartman uses the internet to get information on a terrorist attack he suspects by the class’s new Muslim student. In ‘Over Logging‘, the town of South Park migrates out west in search of more internet, since they “ran out” of internet themselves. I believe their latest episode was their most direct satire on social media. As a long-time South Park fan, I knew I had to write about it.

South Park is known for integrating witty messages into its playful mockery. Exaggeration is a form of humor that the show exercises. At the same time, it uses exaggeration as a way to expose truth. While demonstrated through exaggerations, I believe the episode makes the following points.

The Value of Your Social Media Presence Can Be Quantified

In the episode, a ‘stock’ metaphor is used to measure the value of Kyle’s facebook profile. When he facebook friends a boy from school with 0 friends out of pity, the value of his own stock plummets. Everyone else unfriends Kyle and he is left with only one facebook friend himself. While this course of events seems unrealistic, quantifying the value of your online profile is not ridiculous at all! An example of a tool that does this is Twitter Grader. Furthermore, the integration of social media results into SEO has made it all the more important to give weight to opinions expressed in this medium. Social media connections can indeed be a liability. Be open, but choose your connections wisely.

Artificial Engagement Brings Short-Term Value

In an effort to regain facebook friends, Kyle uses methods that result in artificial engagement. He ends up losing the only friend he gains. Just like in social media, you can’t create friends, you need to make friends. Don’t forget that social media has changed the methods of engagement, but many of the principles are the same.

Your Social Media Presence May Have a Life of Its Own

When Stan decides to delete his facebook account, his profile takes up a life of its own (literally) in cyberspace. Does your facebook profile have a life of its own? I would say no, but at the same time it selectively represents you. People have their personal side, their family side, their professional side, and maybe even other sides. It might be awkward for me to see the private lives of my professors, because I am used to their professional side. Likewise, the children of my professors would find it funny watching their mom or dad teach. However, both sides make up who they are. In this sense, your social media identity is not equivalent to your own. It does have its own life in that it represents a person like you, but not exactly you.

Represent Yourself, Don’t Seek Social Validation

Social media can be a great forum for us to show our uniqueness. Instead, many see it as a source of social validation. The cast of South Park does it – whether it’s Kyle begging Stan to help him maintain his online farm, or Stan’s dads desperate attempt to interact with his son on facebook.

Use Social Media to Create Value, Not Avoid Work

The lesson of South Park this time: Be careful how you use social media. It can be another excuse to avoid work, or it can be a way to enhance your work. I recommend doing cool things that you like as if social media did not exist. Then publish them on the social media platforms you feel best suited for you. For photographers, Flickr can be the perfect platform for you to share your photos share tips with people with similar interests. If you’ve always felt like a talk show host at heart, make sure you check out Ustream. Quit stalking people, quit playing FarmVille, and don’t worry about how cool you look. The promise of social media is that you can share content you are passionate about and be cool with the right people.

I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of South Park’s insights – I’d love to hear what you think about the episode or the points it makes. Add a comment below and I hope we can have a good discussion.

To tweet about this event, use #TEDxCMU. You can see the twitter steam in this post.

If you didn’t catch it earlier, make sure you check out my interview with the TEDxCMU founders.

I’m very happy and grateful I was selected to attend this event. During the event, I will be taking notes on things I find particularly interesting.

Summary Notes

• All fears and obstacles to achieving your goals are petty in the face of death.
• 3 big fears are FAILURE – JUDGEMENT – SUCCESS
• Doing nothing does not help you avoid failure – life applies friction.
• There are no rules for being innovative. Innovation is about breaking the rules.
• Being forced to be innovative is scary – people don’t want to break the rules! They feel like they’re cheating.
• People tend to follow the crowd. Being yourself is the ultimate fearlessness.
• Goals are achieved when you turn your ‘shoulds’ into ‘musts’.
• Think like an amateur – only then can you focus on innovation and not limit yourself according to norms or tools.
• Technology should be a last resort in solving problems.
• The terrain for innovation is outside the office.
• ‘Playing it safe’ is like bargaining with fear. But fear doesn’t know about this ‘deal’.
• Fearlessness is playing the believer, not the cynic. Step onto the stage.
• Leaders get too caught up in their own voices and forget to listen. Listening ignites movements.
• Maybe leaders can only create change once they surrender their power.
• Sharing ideas is often met with resistance. However, it can be for the greater good. So let’s set our ideas free and see what happens.

Live Notes

tedx “at” ted.com – feel free to write them if you have comments on the show

Why FEARLESS? Not because the speakers are not afraid of anything. It’s because they’re calm in the face of what they fear.

Jonathan Fields
Author, Blogger, Entrepreneur

Starts with question: What is the Number 4 fear in the world?
Answer: Death
Number 1 fear is public speaking.

Number 1.1 fear – saying hello to a stranger. Tells everyone in the audience to do this.

What did he do that was fearless?
Signed a 6 year lease to start a yoga center in New York City. He had no yoga background, and a family to support.
Date he signed the lease – September 10th, 2001. One day before 9.11.

Was it appropriate to launch a business during this atmosphere?

Remembering that you’re going to die is motivation to follow your dreams. All obstacles are small in the face of death. If you really want to pursue something, and if you accept the reality of death, you realize you must be FEARLESS.

Decided he had to launch his business. His yoga center became one of the most successful in the city.
In Dec. 2009 he sold the company.

What let’s fear blossom?
The things we don’t see. The questions we don’t ask.

What are the 3 big failures.
Failure
Judgment
Success

We tend to ramp up our fear, especially of failure.
We also spin things. Repetition breeds belief.

What about the ‘hidden questions’ -
What is I miss the opportunity?
What if I do nothing?

When thinking about ‘what if I fail’, be realistic! Also ask yourself the second important question: ‘how will I recover?’

Why should you do nothing? Because life applies friction.
Life doesn’t move sideways – doing nothing amplifies your current situation.
If you’re unhappy now, doing nothing will make you more and more unhappy.
This can be a far more terrifying outcome than failing!

What if I succeed?
Are you doing things only because you’re sure you won’t fail?

What you should do:
Take something you’ve been putting off.
Ask the 3 questions:
What if I fail? (how do I recover)
What if I do nothing?
What if I succeed?

MK Haley
Faculty at the Entertainment Technology Center

What is innovation?
It’s everywhere! In some companies, everyone is responsible for being innovative. This can be scary!

IBM: ‘Think’
Apple: ‘Think Different’
They told us ‘do it’… But we had no idea how.

Is innovation “cheating”?
If cheating is breaking the rules, then how can we do this if we don’t know the rules? What are the rules of innovation?
People put artificial rules in their head. Norms are not rules!

Mazlow’s heirarchy of needs: Need to be accepted, and part of the group.
But innovation is inherently risky and characterized by deviation from the norm.

What can we do to add incentive innovation?
Just shut up! Don’t feed your ego by judging.
Besides not judging, you can also reward deviations from the norm. Many time success is the result of multiple failures!

Also use success to create opportunities.
When you come up with a hit product, take another look at its uses. See if it can keep squeezing innovation out of that.

What you should do:
Thank your model.
Be a role model.
Congratulate success.
Never eat lunch alone.
Collaborate.
Napping.

Jackson Chu
Beautiful musical solo performance on erhu, an ethnic Chinese instrument.

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Video: Wildly popular TED2010 talk from Blaise Aguera y Arcas on augmented reality maps
—

Raghava KK
Multi-disciplinary Artist

Being yourself can be fearless. People tend to mold themselves to the crowd.

Tried to study how people get money and fame.
Discovered that these are just means to an end.
How do you want to make money? Why do you want to be famous?

When you are famous, what do you do with the exaggerated exposure? What do you do with all these followers?

Moved to NYC with family from Bangalore.
“In NYC you live and die several deaths per year” – an excellent place to lose control. People fear the loss of control.

How did he learn to paint? Needed to get rid of painting materials. Just painted with no critics.

Now he does ‘investigative art’. The art changes and evolves based on the audience. Sometimes you need to produce to learn and get to success, not to succeed. Don’t always need to be didactic.

You must understand your fears.
Talking/creating art can help you articulate your fears.
In the end, you should invite fear! It makes it easier to deal with.

—
Speakers are given gifts of artwork from TEDxCMU attendees.
—

-INTERMISSION-
I’ll try to have a word with the speakers over lunch until 1:30. I’ll be back for more notes then!

RF Culbertson
Entrepreneur and Professor at Tepper School of Business

Investing is simple. You can do this.
Imagine you’re playing golf. Your partner says “let’s play for a dime a hole”. For the second hole he says “let’s double it”. A similar trend continues. By the 18th hole you’re doing a second mortgage on your house. Compounding is powerful!

Example of Ted – UPS worker.
Died with $ 70 million in the bank. How?
Worked for UPS, not on too high a salary. He took 10% of his salary and invested it.

So why isn’t everyone wealthy?
The meaning of wealth changes. But set a goal – it’s much harder to hit a moving target.
Turn your ‘should’ into a ‘must’. It’s not a goal until it is a must!

Never stop asking why or why not. You need to be content with watching paint dry sometimes.
The secret to wealth is gratitude – help people who have helped you.

Who is most fearless person he knows? Here’s a story.
He was judging a beauty contest. As part of her act, a contestant threw up a baton. It was supposed to come down for her to catch it – but it got stuck on the ceiling!
What did she do? She kept going with an imaginary baton.
Lesson: Don’t blame failures ‘out of your control’. If you have a goal, keep going. No excuses.

Ends with a ‘fearless rap’. The audience gave a beat. Amazing!!!

Nathan Martin
CEO, Deeplocal

Background as a fine artists, and metal band musician.

Think of how to solve problems without thinking whether about whether the tool exists.

The problem with expertise is that it limits your scope of vision.
Looking at things the way the are will lead you produce things that have already been done.
Look at something and ignore what you’ve been taught.
The Lesson: Think like an amateur

Dissolve the roles that you’re traditionally ‘supposed to be good at’.
The only way to be good is to be passionate.

Wants to make DeepLocal more like his band. Wants to learn from artists.
He has a ‘Corporate Artists Residency’ project.
Helps artists have access they wouldn’t have access to. Deep Local helps artists who come to them with an idea. A requirement is that neither the artists or Deep Local know how to create.

Think like a deviant
Run controversial projects and don’t get discouraged by criticism and threats.

Solve projects without technology if possible – always remember this.
Put the problem itself at the focus.
Being given too many tools to help solve your problems can make you overlook the simpler solutions.

Why Gutter Tech? Why should businesses learn from artists?
All the innovation comes from the outside world – outside of the office. The problems still exists there, and often so do the solutions.

—
Video: Eric Mead, Magician
—

Chris Guillebeau
World Traveler and Writer

Talks about crocodile farm experience. When he went, the crocodile didn’t act tame, as the leader said it usually does.
Similar incident with Killer Whale killing its trainer at SeaWorld.

Fear is like a crocodile or a killer whale. We don’t know how to engage with it, so we try to bargain with it – “I won’t take any risks or do anything out of the ordinary. In return, fear let’s you live your little life.”
But fear does not understand your bargain – just like the crocodile or the killer whale.

Going down the road of change, you don’t know where you’ll end up.
With a sociology degree, he worked carrying boxes in Sierra Leone. What was great about his job was that he always saw who he helped. However, this job did not require actual executive decision making.
Six months into his job carrying boxes, he got a significant boost in his position within the heirarchy of the company.

Lessons learned:
(1) Being an executive is not as easy as it looks. It’s hard to make non execs understand this.
(2) If you want to face your fears, you have to step forward onto the stage. You need to become the believer, not the cynic.

‘Permission’ is not given, it is taken. Its is not bestowed, it is acted upon.
You can’t ‘write the permission slip’ for someone, but you can help them see the life beyond that which is restrained by the slip

Hafiz – A Small Man Builds Cages for Everyone

—
INTERMISSION 2-
—

DS Company

Dance performance by Carnegie Mellon’s Dancer’s Symposium

And may I say, it was truly a FEARLESS performance.

—
Video: Michael Pritchard makes filthy water drinkable
—

Stacey Monk
Founder, Epic Change

Greatest fear: Not rising to the top and not being a leader.

Experiencing trauma can help you clarify your real desires – death of her brother led her to travel.

Went to Tanzania – met Mama Lucy Kamptoni. Mama Lucy helped many local children in Tanzania and created a school.
In Tanzania, Stacey was asked by Mama Lucy if she would join her in her mission.
Stacey came back to the U.S. After trying to go back to work, she couldn’t leave Mama Lucy’s offer hanging. She then founded EpicChange to help grassroots humanitarian changemakers.

Started the #tweetsgiving tag on twitter – raised money for Mama Lucy’s school.

Wanted to help the kids in Tanzania share their stories in their own voices. Helped kids use twitter and other social media tools to communicate with the world.

We are so caught up in our own voices that we sometimes forget the voices of those like Mama Lucy and the kids.
Our efforts to be leaders can make us forget to listen.
When we choose to follow, we ignite movements. When we are trying only to lead, we forget to have each others’ backs.
It’s not only the ‘leaders’ that can change the world.

What should you do?
Take your gifts and invest them in someone else.

Are leaders the ones who change the world?
Maybe not. Maybe the world can only change when we surrender our power.

Chase Jarvis
Photographer, Director and Social Artist

First film at age 6 – the Sons of Zoro
17 people came to the premiere
He knew it was good art – but he had a distribution problem. He didn’t have the mechanism. But now, we have it!

Artists used to have to get approval – whether it was from the King or the Pope, or a magazine or a gallery.
Now creativity has been democratized.

Artists are defying the old model.
In the old model, people held onto their ideas.
Now we are bombarded with ideas – to the point at which it is disruptive!

What about FEARLESS?
If you’re an artist and you’re not scared, you’re not pushing hard enough.
Had to quit lots of things.
For one thing, bailed on medical school. Also left a PhD program on the philosophy of art.
All these moves allowed him to call himself an artist.
After you ‘become an artist’, there is a second level of fear. Standing behind your ideas is not easy.

Sharing ideas can lead to resistance.
Sometimes information protects people.
But he knew that sharing was for a greater good – getting to the truth of things.
If you give ideas to the community, you are also likely to take ideas away.

You can have more ideas than you have time to implement.
However, there might be someone out there who wants your idea. And by sharing ideas you are promoting this symbiosis.

Set your ideas free. Will it work? Only time will tell.

—
Speakers and performers all invited up. Again given gifts of art.

Closing remarks. Everyone comes up and adds to the blackboard behind the speakers.
—

#TEDxCMU Tweets

Here’s a brief overview:
TEDxCMU is an independently organized TED event happening at Carnegie Mellon University on Sunday, April 4th, 2010. It will last from 10 AM to 5 PM. The theme is FEARLESS, and I believe they’re truly bringing in some speakers who have no fear!

There’s a lot of hype about the event in the CMU community. I got the founders to answer some of the questions we’ve all been asking, namely:

• What is TEDxCMU and what is its relation to TED
• How they got started organizing this event
• Why they chose FEARLESS as a theme and how they found speakers who fit the bill
• Why is the event exclusive and how they selected audience members
• How can we keep up with the event while it’s happening

All the questions are answered in the interview below… Sandwiched between some playful banter, a la NPR. It’s in two parts, but you can download it in one file here as well.

Part 1:
Part 2:

For more information, check out the TEDxCMU website, and be sure to tune into my live coverage this Sunday!

To cover this event live, we will have pictures and notes. If you would like to tweet about this event, please use the hash tag #95800.

(pictures courtesy of and © Manolis Kounelakis)

—

To us, there were a few key takeaways from the panel. Before going into the detailed notes, here are some points we found interesting:

• It is our duty as consumers of social media to be aware of the associated privacy risks of this medium
• People will tend to give away private/personal information if they have something to gain
  • ‘Good’ example – let Amazon store your purchasing history so that they can recommend
  • ‘Bad’ example – employees giving employers access to their personal email account
• Companies are relying less on “gut-feeling” decisions, and more on quantitative analysis to determine what customers want
• The platforms for performing these quantitative analyses are converging.
• Rich real time tools (e.g., Foursquare) enhance communication in one sense, but pose a threat to privacy (e.g., Please Rob Me)
• Making personal data portable from one application/platform to another could be a way to maintain some level of privacy
• Regarding privacy issues in social media, there are associated moral, legal, and business strategic questions. Unfortunately, the corresponding answers to these questions often conflict.
• Social Web has the potential to finally create bottom-up change in organizations – this is exciting to some and scary to others.
• For now, privacy is dead. But do you think the benefits outweigh the costs?

—

Below are our LIVE notes on the event (courtesy of Haris):

Gene Connors, Partner, Reed Smith
Companies should not try to control – this is a losing battle!
“If we’re not talking together, you are talking about me”
Companies should encourage social media engagement and transparency – many companies are doing this, employing some sort of policy

From a practical legal standpoint on maintaining privacy – keep educating ourselves on how we can avoid compromising our private information
e.g., facebook applications grab your information – know what you’re getting into!
Beware of hidden and unhidden cookies on websites

Companies intentionally looking for your information – studying when a person is most likely to give away compromising information
Usually giving away private information happens when people feel they have something to gain from it

In the end, whose responsibilities is it? Individual, legal, etc…
Would love to have a law that warns users before giving away private information

If so many sites should depends on trustworthiness – what is our duty? Spread the story! Social media can be a powerful force to do this.

There is no constitutionally recognized right to privacy in most states.

Even if we had a way of preventing privacy infringements, you won’t stop the scam artists – which was the same before the digital age.

Horror stories are what create laws – banking and other corporate abuses have added more regulation.
Same could happen with privacy.
Expecting on the regulatory side you’ll see a lot more big brother.
We should police ourselves, because otherwise others will police us.

On the topic of whether social web shift will happen top-down or bottum-up…
Maybe the bottom need to convince the top of the benefits and necessity.

Sean Ammirati, COO, ReadWriteWeb
Interested in real time nature of social web
Twitter was interesting 2 years ago, but now we’re even getting richer real time experiences (e.g., Foursquare)
Google buying Aardvark is testimony to this -> ask a question, route the question to the right person
Privacy implications – PleaseRobMe.com

Shocking rate of growth of blippy.com – broadcasts purchasing decisions. No trick, totally transparent!
What can we draw from this? People have different sensitivities to information privacy.

You should know what you want to keep private and what you don’t.
Hard to believe that the law will beat the scam artists – the community should do this.

The online battle for identity – google, facebook
Facebook connect has better authentication than openID
This battle is not getting enough attention – but one big player will most likely win
One thing that could help – make personal data portable

Mike Smith, Assoc. Professor IT and Marketing, CMU
How will organizations adapt to social media?
What will differentiate companies is not whether they will go into social media, but how they will leverage this medium to learn more about their customers
Companies don’t make “gut feel decisions” – they use quantitative tools to predict what you’ll buy and suggest it to you

As far as privacy issues, who owns this information is an interesting question. On one hand, most people would be comfortable giving some information to amazon to get better recommendations. However, some information like bank account information is something users would not like to shared.

In online privacy, there are three kinds of questions: Moral, legal, and business strategic.
Often the answers to these questions are not the same!

People are bad at evaluating low-probability, high-risk situations – giving away private information is such a case.

Rob Howard, Founder and CTO, Telligent
Personal identifiable information -> scary how much information can be mined!
For companies, put a human face on itself and foster community engagement.
Proctor & Gamble example – communicate better to consumers, but also improve internal company communication.
Challenge is not digitizing information, but finding relevant information – Amazon has done an excellent job in this!
Integration of different information systems is a trend – can collect different forms of information (analytics, engagement, etc) under one platform.

A resume is nothing these days – always searches people you’ll meet, and find their online face.

Measuring effectiveness of online campaigns:
1) Listen
Get feedback, measure engagement
2) User Type Analysis
Break down users into categories – who comments, creates content, consumes content, etc.
These types can shift – ‘askers’ can become ‘influencers’
3) Engagement
Social Media can give even more fine grained information on enagement
Can find out more demographic information and preferences

The tools for measurement are converging.

Some organizations base their culture around keeping information in – hard to create a top down cultural shift in the age of social media. Will this change happen bottom up?

Tim Stanton, Sr. Acct. Exec. LinkedIn
Key question – how to use social media
Organizations will continue to wrestle with social media
Still believes we are in early phases of social media

Q: Broadening or deepening scope of social media influence?
Both – important to spread out, but don’t spread too thin.

At LinkedIn, the community drives the content – that is how they deliver relevant information, which makes the community willing to provide them with information. LinkedIn has built their brand on this.

It’s hard to maintain privacy, even without online life. Sounds like privacy is hard to achieve today.
For professional reasons, getting found is very important!

—

Many thanks to Heinz College for hosting this panel, and especially to my professor Ari Lightman for organizing this event. Please check twitter hashtag #95800 for tweets related to this panel, and for general discussions within our social media class.

On December 21st, 2009, I took the photo below at Times Square, New York City . In it, we see the two giants side by side, promoting themselves on large TV screens in one of the most action-packed spots in the world.

© Haris Krijestorac

Google and Yahoo are lucrative largely because of the need to be prominent on the Internet. While their advertising themselves on Times doesn’t quite refute this premise, it does lead one to ask what is better: Being number 1 on Google or Yahoo, or being on Times Square?

Although facilitated by technology, the concept of advertising on Times Square shares many qualities of traditional one-way advertising and lacks those of interactive marketing. Interestingly, this photo suggests that the more traditional physical medium is better in this case. It shows us that even the giants of the Internet can not avoid marketing in the physical world.

This question is relevant not only to the giants of the Internet, but to all Internet marketers. What will happen to digital and physical marketing venues in the future remains to be seen. But in an age in which both venues are still thriving, companies are asking themselves how to partition their marketing efforts between these two venues.

This is a complex issue with many twists and turns… So now, perhaps more than ever, we’d love to hear some opinions and relevant experiences from readers!

• When is it better to sell your brand or idea in the digital arena, and when should your marketing remain in the physical world?
• In general, how should the physical and digital media interact?
• How will the answers to these questions change in the future?

• The Media May Change, but the Fundamentals Remain the Same by Ed Barr
• The Role of Peer Influence in Marketing on Online Social Networks by Rajiv Garg, Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang

We would like to send out special thanks to Janna White and Stacey Thornberry from IABC for being our editorial advisors and for supporting us along the way.

Apart from this newsletter, IABC offers an incredible variety of articles, resources, contacts, and other services in the field of business communication. Apart from the Student Connection e-Newsletter, there are other opportunities for students to be editors of a publication or even publish their own work.

To learn more about the IABC, you can check their membership benefits!

Within the three days during which the poll was open, we got a total of 131 respondents. It is noteworthy that since we got these largely through our own connections, there is some bias in the sample of this poll (as with all polls). Most respondents were most likely Generation Y students, pursuing either an undergraduate or graduate degree. Most were probably Internet and technology literate. They are all or nearly all facebook users, as facebook was the main vehicle through which we obtained respondents. However, most were probably not regular users of other social networking tools such as twitter.

We asked the following five questions and obtained the following results, which we will comment upon later:

Question 1 – Single choice

Question 2 – Single choice

Question 3 – Single choice

Question 4 – Single choice

Question 5 – Multiple choice

One of the trademarks of social media is the increased ability for customers and companies to directly communicate. About half of our respondents found it ‘somewhat important’ to communicate with companies whose products they liked. Only 16% found it ‘very important’, while 26% saw it as outright ‘unimportant’. There are several ways of interacting with companies through social media. Communication with companies, especially when it’s a two-way conversation, can lead to beneficial interactions in which both customers and companies learn about the needs, desires, and abilities of each other.

The fact that more people did not find it even more important to communicate could be an indication either of concerns about interactive communication, or of doubt over the effectiveness of such methods. This is reflected by the fact that the majority of respondents were concerned about privacy issues and the effectiveness of interactive communicative methods, as per question 5. One key factor that is harder to measure is the fact that even our educated and Internet savvy sector of the population is still not used to this form of communication! They are still using more primitive methods, although newer and more effective ones are available to them.

One promising result in terms of the benefits of social media is that most people at least saw a company’s openness towards customer communication as positive. Social media is a crucial vehicle for companies to come out in the open and communicate openly. Whether through facebook groups and pages, twitter, or blogs, the number of companies communicating in an interactive arena has increased. If people are seeing this as a good thing, then it will put pressure on companies to enter this arena.

A classic paradigm in the field of psychology dictates that people will be more willing to express feedback if it is negative. We wanted to test this paradigm on public interactive venues. While our results from questions 3 and 4 do show that the old paradigm remains true, the results are give more insight than just this. Although about half of respondents would update their facebook status to express positive feedback on a product or service, more than half of these people would prefer that this update be visible only to their friends. In other words, for some reason, people did not want their feedback getting out to the company or its potential customers. This could be attributed to the aforementioned privacy concerns with this kind of exposure, as well as with the fact that in our culture people are not yet accustomed this this kind of open interactive communication.

In line with the old paradigm, 64% of respondants said they would prefer to express their negative feedback in an open interactive venue, rather than in a private venue such as an email or a phone call. This indicates that customers recognize the benefits of public communication at some level. They realize that saying some things out in the open can lead to positive interactions between them and other customers or the company, or at least spread the word of their complaint more effectively. Companies should take this is a cue not only to listen to customers who communicate through this venue, but to interact with them and react to their concerns.

It is interesting that while our respondents saw openness to customer communication as a positive trait in a company, not many of them found it ‘very important’ to communicate with them. If we were to conduct this same survey several years from, the main change would probably be an increase in this statistic.

The fact that the use of interactive communicative methods and tools has exploded over the past several years has not only been a result of clever uses in technology. The means to create interactive communicative platforms existed years before the rise of these tools. Their use, however, resulted from a need for people to make increasingly complex choices. We are bombarded with information every day, but we need a way to filter out the useful stuff from everything else. With all the products out there, we want a way to find out which one is just right for us.

Like all significant changes, it will takes our culture time to adapt to all this. We think it’s worth the wait.

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P.S. If you want to give us more data, feel free to take our survey =).

The exponential web team will be covering this event with our live notes and streaming photos, which can both be found below.

Live Notes

Courtesy of Haris Krijestorac

Panelists -
Live
Cara Weiser Keithley, MAM 2004, Marketing and Communications Strategist and Gov 2.0 Practitioner, carakeithley.com
Stacey Monk, MAM 2000, CEO and Co-Founder, Epic Change
Darren Tome, MISM 2005, Technical Product Manager, Local Integrated Media, NBC Universal

Online
Nathaniel McNamara, SocialFeet
Glenn Pasewicz, MSPPM 1993, Public Policy Analyst, Pennsylvania House of Representatives

Darren Tome

NBC):
Target 24-44 year olds who don’t just ‘live’ in a city, but go out and experience it!
e.g., nbcnewyork.com
New social features:
So My City – Sound Off: Like a twitter for a city.
Mood of the City: Crowd-source emotion of a city. How does a story/gallery/video make you feel? There are some issues – some issues will have views that are polarized. Sometimes NBC needs to shut it down.
Overall, these social features have significantly increased the attention towards

Stacey Monk

(Founder, Epic Change)
Their goal is to amplify visibility and impact of people who are creating change in their own communities.
Company started with no money! Took part in America’s Giving Challenge by the Case Foundation. Had to work hard, reach out to every social media for change venue possible.

#tweetsgiving – share what you are thankful for. Number 1 trending topic around thanksgiving! Great example of how a small company can make a big impact through the power of the Internet. Getting ready for Tweetsgiving 2009!

Challenge of cross-culture online collaboration. It’s hard to run a democratically organized online social media event, because there are different levels of internet access around the world. Tanzanian school boy @gideon_gidori was helped find his voice through twitter!

Glenn Pasewicz

(Pennsylvania House of Representatives)
Most of his work has been in the public health sphere. Does ‘systems projects’.
House and senate have facebook pages and twitter accounts, but in the day-to-day work they are not part of what they do.
Has set up wikis for collaboration, but it is not catching on.
Why is social media not used? One thing is the generational gap. Furthermore, legislature is not a fast, real-time thing. Instead, it is more of a process. Therefore the means of communications related to it mirror this process, and communication is done largely internally and through emails and face-to-face.

Cara Keithley

(Social Media Evangelist, works for State government, professor at Franklin University)
Will discuss how to harness social media to internally foster change in higher education and government.
Both government and higher education needs leaders and innovators to help them adapt to changes of social media.
If you want to change an organization, you don’t need “permission” – you need to do your research and share your opinion intelligently. Focus on the organization’s strategic goals.
Social Media allows people to be more ‘discriminate shoppers’ when it comes to looking for a University or school. Therefore schools should join the conversation, engage potential students, answer their questions.
She claims she has identified many opportunities and fostered relationships through social media.
Tools are transient – don’t focus on them! Instead, focus on the innovations that need to take place.
(Note: all slides are on SlideShare)

Nathanial McNamara

(SocialFeet)
Social Media traffic going up 20% per month for the top 25 sites in the U.S.
It won’t just be facebook and twitter, but the overall landscape will change.
Spoke about ‘activity screen’ interfaces.

Comments from panelists on measurement of social media results:
At NBC, users are tracked throughout the entire sessions. Not just click through and page views, but resulting actions.
Measurements for a social media movement can be different than for a website. See how many mentions, who mentions you. How the people you’re working for/with respond will surely be noticed.
“Measurements can tell you whatever you want, and you can make them say whatever you want” – You’ll know if it’s working!

Live Photos

Courtesy of Manolis Kounelakis