What Top Social Media Folks Use For Comment Systems
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 30, 2011
A few days ago I read a post by our friend Kristi Hines on a site called Income Diary titled 20 Most Influential People In Social Media. Like I did when I created my two lists of influential blacks in social media, she came up with a measurable criteria to use to compile her list.
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Kristi did a very nice job with her list. There’s even 2 black people on the list and a nice mixture of men and women. It turns out that everyone on the list is from the United States, but the numbers are the numbers. And she didn’t add some fairly obvious choices either, although in retrospect she probably should have added Darren Rowse to give it an international flavor in some fashion.
Me being me, however, I decided I had to do something different. I decided to check out the blogs of all the people on the list, and I was looking for something in particular. I was curious who had 3rd party blog commenting systems and who had the traditional WordPress system. Turns out only 3 people on the list have the traditional way that I personally like. The others had a mixture of Disqus, Livefyre, and some other options.
You might not believe this, but I didn’t find it all that surprising. It seems that the way people who get tons of comments handle things is to go to a third party system. It reduces the number of comments they might get in total, although if one is popular one will still get lots of responses, and it reduces the amount of spam as well. They can afford to do it; most of the rest of us can’t, and in my case, won’t.
I’ve sometimes referred to 3rd party systems as systems of the elite; kind of like the Republican Party (sorry; I had a moment lol). Those that are already there use it because it helps them keep things under control. Those that aren’t there but want to feel as if they’re there use it and wonder why they don’t have a lot of comments because they’re doing what the top dogs are doing.
Of course what’s interesting is that if Darren Rowse, whose blog is ranked the highest out of any of the people on Kristi’s list as far as Alexa goes, was on the list he’s one of the people who uses the same comment system most of us uses.
As Forrest Gump says, “that’s all I have to say about that.”
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Taking Twitter Unfollows Too Personally
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 12, 2011
Some of you know that I don’t often read blogs I won’t comment on because of their comment systems, most specifically things like Disqus. Still, every once in awhile I get intrigued by a topic, and like almost anyone else I just have to check it out to see what the hubbub is.
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It’s in this vein that I read a post by Chris Brogan titled The Great Twitter Unfollow Experiment of 2011. He talks about making the decision to stop following all the people on his list, which was around 131,000, and how people literally freaked when he first made the announcement, then did it. Some people thought he hated them; others thought he was mad at them. Many decided to tell him he they were dropping him because he was dropping them. Frankly, it was kind of pathetic.
Why he announced it to begin with is interesting. I don’t know that I’d have felt I had to announce that I was unfollowing everyone. Truth be told, if he had just done it without announcing it probably less than 2% of the people who he was following would have noticed immediately, as some people have notification systems that tell them when someone drops them, and others would have just thought Twitter was messing with them when he followed certain people back because it’s been known by some people that every once in a while there are random drops of people.
Also, did you see where I mentioned that he was following 131,000 people? Folks, I have problems following the around 970 people I’m connected with on that level, so what the heck was he supposed to be expected to do with 131,000 people? I mean, that’s pretty ridiculous when you think about it, and he probably did what I did for the first month I was on Twitter, just followed everyone, until he got smart. But by that time the dye was cast; wow, 131,000 people?
I unfollow people on Twitter all the time. I run both Twit Cleaner and Friend or Follow. One tells me who’s not following me, which is a short list at this juncture since I unfollow most people who aren’t following me because almost all of them reached out to me first. The other one tells me if people engage others and the types of tweets they send out. Y’all know me; if there’s no possibility that someone I’m connected to will ever talk to me I’m outta there.
See, I don’t take people unfollowing me personally. I expect some people to unfollow me for one reason or another. Unless someone announces it on their way out I could care less. That may sound cold and direct but I talk about so many different things, and I do have my own political bent, that I know some folks who follow me won’t stick with me if their positions are different than mine. I do the same thing after all.
I miss people more on my blogs than I ever would on Twitter. It’s why I was so frantic days ago when the comments wouldn’t work on my blog. I know people came and I also see how comments have slowed up; some folks may not have gotten the message that things had messed up here. Still, I’ll write for whomever decides to stop by and say hello, offer a comment, or watch a stupid video I might put up. And since I haven’t put up a stupid video in a long time, I’m wondering how many of you have heard of Keenan Cahill, this 16-year-old YouTube sensation with a disease called Maroteaux-Lamy Syndrome who not only lip syncs to the videos of famous people, but actually gets the famous people to appear in his videos as well. Don’t believe me? Check this one out with him & 50 Cent; now that’s props!
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Why I Don’t Over-Automate On Twitter
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 24, 2011
“Just thought I’d mention that if you see a post from me at 2 or 3 in the morning, I actually wrote it.” – Mitch Mitchell
I tend to stay up pretty late; yeah, I’m nuts. I get my energy around 9:30 or 10PM and then I start working really well. At a certain point I finish a project and unless I’m totally exhausted it’s a great time to go back and look at Twitter to see what has gone on either during the day or for at least a few hours.
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Some people locally have commented on my late night tweets because they wake up and see a bunch of things from me. Actually, I never knew any of them paid much attention to anything I put out so that’s illuminating. However, like most people they tend to believe that everyone else is on the same time frame they’re on, and thus think that by the time I’m writing everyone else has gone to bed.
The world’s a big place, and as I’ve talked about on this blog, the majority of people that actually comment in my blogs don’t live in my area. So if I’m posting at 3 in the morning and someone’s still awake, they’re probably on the West Coast except for my friend that lives in Nebraska and works night, or they’re in Australia where it’s actually already well into their next day, or in Europe where it’s morning and they’re just getting started on their day.
One also sees a lot of other noise, if you will, when you stay up really late. There’s a ton of automation, the same messages over and over from people you know aren’t awake, messages I’ve seen many times during the day. Frankly it starts getting irritating, and one reason I actually write some of those folks early in the morning is to see if any of them respond. Of course I know that almost no one is going to respond, but I figure maybe they’ll respond in the morning when I’ve awakened.
Nope. Truth be told most people that do a lot of automation aren’t interested in what anyone else has to say for the most part. They haven’t quite learned the lesson that social media isn’t really only about “them”, but about everyone, communications, relationships, and networking.
I only do one little bit of automation. For almost every new blog post I publish I use Twitter Tools to put the notification out that I’ve written a new blog post. I do that because I tend to write a lot of posts all at once on all my blogs (remember I have 5 of my own and many that I write for others) in advance.
Often I’m actually sitting at the computer when a blog post goes out but I’m doing something else. However, I check to see if my blog posts are showing up usually within the hour if I’m not live on Twitter. Actually, every once in awhile I’m on Twitter when a post of mine shows up; that’s pretty neat.
If you see a blog post of mine in the afternoon or evening, you can be 99.8% sure that I’m posting it live. It’s either a repost of an earlier blog post or, if something’s hit me that I just have to talk about immediately, it’s brand new. Back in November I did an experiment testing 2-a-day blog posts with the second being advertisements for some of my products, and in that case those were written in advance. I haven’t done that since.
Here are my questions for you. How much automation are you doing on Twitter? How much actual engagement are you doing around the time messages are coming your way? Are you actually engaging people on Twitter at all? And how do you feel when you see messages from people that are almost all automation, since we know it when we see it?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Spreading Influence In More Ways Than One Online
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 22, 2011
Yes, once again I’m talking about this topic of influence. It’s been an interesting last month or so and it just seems like it’s time to talk about it again because, believe it or not, it’s not all about me.
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Of course having said that I’m still going to start with something that is about me, that being an interview I did with someone who comments here often, Carl, on his blog Webmaster’s Blog. It was a long interview and a lot of fun, and I hope y’all check it out and give him some love. Just so you know, it seems you have to have a Facebook account to leave a comment. I don’t normally go this route but in this instance, since I was the guy it was about, I made an exception. However, I’m still waiting for someone to tell me how or where it shows up on Facebook.
I’ve spoken about how I wanted to spread my influence more because I equate more influence with more opportunities for a great income, as well as the ability to potentially have a say in what goes on. Well, one doesn’t go places on their own. To whit, I’ve conducted some interviews on some of my blogs in the last couple of months that I think deserve way more attention than they’ve received. I’ve also put out a lot of offers to people here and there for interview spots on some of my blogs because, as I said, it’s not only about me. I think it’s a good thing when you can bring someone who deserves it to the attention of others.
I’ve also tried to go out of my way in the last month to retweet and talk to a lot of people I’ve never communicated with before. These are people in my Twitter stream, people who for the most part haven’t really reached out to me, but I don’t blame them because I hadn’t really reached out as much either. The best thing about using the cellphone for Twitter is that I can use it anywhere, and it’s relatively easy to go way back and zip through a bunch of messages.
In the movie The Secret they talked about this concept of giving to bring positive things in your life, and how giving when you may not have all that you want is sometimes the best giving of all. Just last night I went to the store and while there in line grabbed a ticket off the counter to donate $2 to feed children. I do that often, thinking that for a lousy two bucks I can help to feed someone or allow someone to have a place to say for one night. It’s a small thing but a big thing, and for the first time ever, the checkout clerk thanked me for my donation. I thought that was pretty special, and I thanked her for saying it.
So, just for a recap, I’d love to reissue some links that I’d love you to check out that highlight others on this blog and other blogs; hey, it’s a great way to start a Monday:
29 Black Social Media Influencers
21 Black Social Media Influencers
Interview – Still Eye Rise Media
Interview – Issac Bidwell (different interview than above)
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
G+ Activity Seems To Be Dwindling
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 19, 2011
Have you lost your love or enthusiasm for Google+ yet? When I wrote my post last month titled The Fuss About Google it was really new, not even a month old yet, and I talked about some of the things there that I felt people should know about.
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Since that day Google+ has jumped in members, to the point that there’s now at least 25 million people over there. That’s just phenomenal growth, no matter how you look at it. Then again it’s Google, a very well known technology company, and it was easy to promote and hype so it should have shown tremendous growth.
However, at this juncture it seems that the initial enthusiasm is starting to wane for a lot of users. Sure, there are all these articles out there on how to get a lot of Google+ followers and how it’s going to be an important social media tool, but right now, I almost hate to say it this way, but it’s boring.
Yup, there you have it; boring. Even the people who started out posting links like gangbusters, which I found really irritating, have slowed down. There are fewer images being put up, which pleases me because of all those moving .gif files that I kept having to mute.
What’s the problem? In a weird way the problem is the same complaint people have had about Twitter and Facebook; no real engagement. I have 8 circles set up and I’m starting to see maybe 3 or 4 new posts a day on most of those circles. The circles where I only have 6 or 8 people I can understand, but one of my circles has 30 people in it; one would think more of them would have something to say.
Many do have something to share, but you don’t see any real proof that anyone’s paying attention. Yeah, here and there you see that someone has given a 1+ thumbs up, but it’s a rare thing to see someone actually commenting on something, and then it’s even more rare to see that person get a response.
Frankly, with that kind of engagement I’d rather be on Twitter, where every once in awhile when you retweet something or respond to something someone wrote or posted you might get a response back. Actually, the same goes for Facebook; you at least will get 2 or 3 people, if not more, commenting on something you put up.
Not to say we haven’t had some conversations going on, but for the most part it’s just not something you see. Well, the A-listers are seeing conversations, but they’re not all that participatory, which is a gripe some people have about them on their blogs. Hey, you can only talk to so many people and still get work done, right?
But maybe I’m not being fair, so I’ll throw it out to you. Who think Google+ is the greatest thing since chocolate cake (I know you were wondering why I had a picture of chocolate cake lol)? If not, what do you think it needs to make it better or exciting?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
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