For ordinary businesses it’s quite difficult to gain a following without a strong personality. You have to have a very strong brand for it to work.

If I choose to follow someone or some company it is because I have an interest in what that person or that company has to say.  For me personally, so far there are very few companies I actually follow.  A few I follow because I do have an interest in their products or philosophy.  As long as that company keeps my interest, then I am happy to keep following them.  However, if I no longer have a use or interest, then I will no longer follow.  It’s pretty simple.

In most cases, I choose to follow a particular person or individual.  I like what they say, the message they communicate, or they share a common set of interests with myself.  Who they work for, is not why I follow them, it just happens they work there and that is where a majority of their tweets come from.  If for whatever reasons they move on, I will still follow them, but unless the company has created a brand I am interested in, I won’t continue to follow the company.

It is hard to pinpoint a financial value to Twitter followers as it is unclear why they follow a particular account.

The key to this statement is why they follow.  Who I choose to follow is my choice as the follower, not the owner of the account I am following.  What makes person or company feel they in any way own or can make claim to a set of followers is beyond me.  The entire follow or not follow process is not owned by them.  If you want me to follow you, then create a personal brand that makes me want to follow you. This is one of the great things about social media compared to previous technologies such as email or phone.  Once a company obtained your phone number or email address they could contact you anytime they wanted as often as they wanted and there was little you could do about it.  The company felt in control, and to a large degree they were.  You could change email addresses or phone numbers, but the cost and work involved to do that is very high for you and not high for the company.  With social media such as Twitter, Facebook and others, it is easy.  Just a mouse click and you are gone.  It levels the playing field and forces companies and individuals to compete on their brand, quality of products, treatment of their customers, and other factors.

I hope that this does not settle.  I think it would benefit everyone to have a legal precedent set.  Data and meta-data ownership is going to become very interesting from a legal point of view over the next few years, and I am looking forward to watching it unfold.

Update (Jan 3, 2012): @LeeBerlik a lawyer in Virginia wrote a post about this which you can find here.

Up until now, the main reason I used LinkedIn and Facebook was to keep abreast of what is happening in my contacts lives.  Typically LinkedIn are people that I have worked with, and Facebook is more social friends.  This is a really useful feature to myself for a couple of reasons:

Are people leaving a company? If there is a increased rate of people leaving a particular company and you are considering working for that company, you might want to re-consider. Or you might see it as an opportunity.  Regardless of your decision, it gives you valuable insight.  Insight that was not as easily available before social networking.

Transparency. It forces transparency for companies as they do not have any control over LinkedIn.  I love this.  If suddenly there is an increased rate of people leaving a company, public announcement or not, something is up.  Good information to have, especially if you are considering them as a potential candidate for employment or contract work.   The reverse (where a company is suddenly hiring) is also true.

One can suggest that it is not ‘official’ information, but in reality that doesn’t matter.  Forgoing statistics and math,  ask any investigator or law enforcement detective.  If you get enough information from enough people, eventually you will get to the truth.  Sure each piece of information is biased, leaves something out, or has added  titbits for colour, but if you get as much information as you can (sample size), you will start to see what most likely is the situation. At the very least where to focus your efforts to answer the question.  The same applies to information from LinkedIn.   It may not be official, and sure maybe one or two people are potentially mis-representing their position or title, but if there is a sudden change in a company’s employees, there is usually a common set of reasons for the change.

A few months ago when I was looking at changing careers, I was actively on LinkedIn.  Even without the follow feature, it became obvious to me over the weeks that one company I was interested in, was letting people go.  Looking at the profiles of individuals that were leaving,  they had been at the company for a long period of time, and were typically in senior management positions.   The company was not officially downsizing.  Curious, I contacted a few of individuals at the company.  My assessment based on LinkedIn was correct.  They were quietly removing higher paid employees for lower paid ones.  Correlating this information with their hiring positions published, you could see this was clearly the case.

What fundamentally worries me is that companies start to see this as a problem and attempt to ‘fix’ it.  They could do this in several ways.  Dis-courage employees from posting to LinkedIn, offering LinkedIn money to change the perception of their company, or LinkedIn could see it as a business opportunity and offer perception control as a ‘service’ to companies.  I hope this will never be the case, but money talks.  I recently saw a tweet about Facebook, but the concept applies to LinkedIn as well:

RT @ruv: “The most important thing to understand abt Facebook is that you are not fb’s cust, you are its inventory” via @davehyndman

The risk of social networking in this case is we have to trust LinkedIn.  LinkedIn is the control point of this information and we have to trust them to do the ‘right’ thing.  While this might seem okay, one only needs to look at the recent happenings at Facebook to understand what can happen when a company gains a clear majority of followers and controls the information.

I do like this stuff though!  Isn’t behavioural analysis awesome?

My goal with social media is to connect and meet other interesting people.  As a general rule, I believe that when someone decides to follow you they are indicating they value your opinion and/or want to start some sort of on-line relationship with you. At least for a majority of people, I believe this to be true. Specifically in my areas of interest (security and networking), Twitter has been very valuable for me in building relationships, getting feedback, and keeping abreast of what is happening.  I also feel that the point of Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other social media sites is to connect with others, build relationships and trust.  Accomplishing that requires both parties to give, just like a relationship between two friends.  If it is one sided, what is the point?

That being said, there are those that will use social media for ‘bad’. Bad by my definition in this context, is to attempt to tweet me to death with useless information, send marketing links about products constantly, or use it as an automated tweeting tool where no real person is on the other side.

When someone follows me I typically do the following:

Check their twitter profile

Are others following them?  What is the ratio they have of followers to following?  If not many are following them, then I check how long they have been tweeting.  Maybe they are new.  The ratio of followers to following is a indication to me of how active they are and how interested they are in others.  A low follow rate may indicate they like to say things, but don’t like to hear opinions of others.  Not 100%, but an indicator.

Scan their tweets

I scan their previous tweets.  Are they informative and original or are they all just re-tweets.  Do they appear to be all just trying to sell products? Do they appear to be auto-generated?

Internet presence

Do they have an Internet presence such as a website, blog,  Facebook account,  Linkedin account?  If they have a website does it look legitimate?  Does the website or blog have information that is useful?  Are their opinions?  Is their an ‘about me’ area where they tell the reader about them.  This is extremely important to me.  I like to know who I am building a relationship with.  I don’t need big secrets about them, but a general concept of who you are, what you do, likes dislikes is helpful.  If I am going to read your posts, references to articles, I’d like to know that you are real and have some background and/or experience with the information you post.

General Internet search

I will search Google.  Do they post elsewhere?  Do they have comments and opinions?

Based on the information I find and feedback, I make a decision to follow or not.  This evaluation process is similar for blogs I add to my blog reader.  Again, this is not cast in stone.   There are a few that I follow that do not follow me back and that is fine.  However, for me that is the exception as opposed to the rule.

Do you have a criteria for who you follow on Twitter or what blogs you subscribe to?

While I think they will have a tough fight on their hands and I doubt their plan will be acceptable today, the analysis provided in the confidential memo is interesting. Specifically, I like the analysis of how the news of Michael Jackson’s death propagated and how Wikipedia, Google, and Twitter where the main benefactors of the traffic.

Michael Jackson died suddenly on June 25, and within 30 minutes,
the news absorbed 25 percent of all web traffic. Online news
sites logged an astounding 4.2 million visitors a minute,
according to the delivery network Akamai.

Two of the biggest beneficiaries of that traffic bonanza were
Twitter and Wikipedia, a couple of digital natives that would
have been viewed as very unlikely news competitors even a few
months ago. Indeed, a new pattern of consumption was validated
in the confusing minutes that followed the first reports of
Jacko's death: Users shared; they searched and they clicked
on Wikipedia.

In the course of only a few hours on the first day of the story,
the Michael Jackson page on Wikipedia received 1.8 million
visits.  By Friday, the total reached 5 million visits.

For those with long Internet memories, the new routine of
Twitter-to-Google-to-Wikipedia contrasts sharply with the
behavior of users in August of 1997, when millions loaded
and reloaded bookmarked news sites to get updates on the
death of Princess Diana, another celebrity icon of similar
magnitude.

I have to agree with their behavioural analysis of consumers of news.  I myself saw a tweet on my PDA about the death of Michael Jackson.  Next, I searched Twitter and clicked on the links that made sense to click on.  Twitter is my main source of news.  From Twitter, I can decide what news tweets if any I am interested in.  If I am interested, I can investigate further via other tweets, links and/or Google.

The memo goes on to explain their 3 step approach to regaining control of the news from consumers.  AP did a press release on their “News Registry” to help “protect content” which is one of the steps in the memo.  However, the confidential memo is much more revealing and ‘colourful’ if you are interested.

A quick entry I have been meaning to do for a while now.  It is late and I need to get to bed.  I signed up for Facebook a couple of years ago when it was all the rage.  My wife actually singed up first and then convinced me.  It was really cool at first.  I started hooking up with friends and family.  Soon I was finding people that I hadn’t seen in a long time, friends from University, high school and to my surprise even elementary school.

Lately I find that I am rarely on Facebook.  The only reason I keep my account is that I have people I am friends with that are distant and do not yet appreciate the advantages of Twitter yet, so it is my only constant connection to them.  I started using Twitter more and more.  Rather than update my Facebook status by logging onto Facebook, I just tell Twitter to update it for me with tweets.  One problem with this approach is friends that comment on my wall or comment on my status I often miss as I am not on Facebook and email updates are annoying.  I don’t really use  any applications in Facebook.  I used to use notes but I now just use this blog for that function.  This website is easier for anyone to get to since a Facebook account is not required.  I’ve recently starting just putting links in Facebook to this website in the about me, quotations and other fields.  If you want to know about me, it makes more sense to come here.  I dislike the Facebook user interface.  All in all I am disappointed with Facebook.

I think Facebook would do much better to open up and use Twitter for status, wall updates, and reply to comments.  Facebook took an interesting step this month, allowing you to link your Gmail or OpenId account and use that for login credintials instead of requiring their own authentication.  Maybe integration with Twitter is not far off.

Up until the other day, viewing the full note, included a link at the top entitled “view original post.” Selecting this link would bring users off Facebook to where the original post was located. This has suddenly disappeared as an option. Given the recent discussions around Facebook, Google, and others, I hope this isn’t part of a grand plan to “Keep what is their’s” ….. theirs being “your data” and attempt to stop external linking and access. I am of course not naive enough to believe it is not.

There is a general problem that companies and start-ups love the Internet and the openness it brings when they are beginning and it works for them. But as they grow, become more dominate, and business and money become part of the equation the openness of the Internet changes from a benefit to a threat. There arises the need to “protect what is ours.” You can see this in most internet businesses.

I have sent a note to Facebook customer support asking them what has happened to the “view original post”. I am hoping it is just a change in code and the functionality got missed — I’m not holding my breath mind you.