The pillars of social media

Many companies are interested in getting onto social media, like in the dot com boom, having a webpage. But like before, building a webpage is not enough, getting traffic is the key to a successful webpage.

Even when these marketers successfully mastered optimizing their webpage to reach people, the Internet today is a slightly different place. The audience is creating and people have so much information on their fingertips. They are more unlikely to trust a corporate page's information, and they would believe a fellow blogger.

With Web 2.0, the trick now is not only to have presence and have a blog and webpage, the goal now is to grow your influence.

Pillars of Social Media

View more presentations from Robin Low.

This presentation give you a good idea on getting more follower and growing your influence -- a must have today if you want to have a successful social media campaign.

-- Robin Low

Unleash your Brand

In today's digital age, it would be naive to think that it would be enough by just "getting by", doing your job, working for a company. With the financial turmoil, there is no such thing as a stable job, and the old saying of "studying hard and finding a career with a big company" does not hold water anymore.

With tons of mergers and acquisitions, companies going bust, it is no longer true that you can just work for a company for the rest of your life. Even though there are no world statistics on the accumulated number of jobs of the population, there is some information on the US and UK: the book “The Economics of Earnings”, by Solomon W. Polachek and W. Stanley Siebert, presents a study in which the UK population aged between 60 and 64 years had accumulated an average of 6.9 jobs; in the US, this number for the same population equals 10.5. An average between these two figures corresponds to 8.7 jobs in a lifetime. It is safe to say that getting known and branding yourself is becoming more important than ever.

The Brand -- YOU

People have been long searching for a way to one-up the competition. With the world going into the digital age, the process of applying for jobs also have became digital.

HR departments, headhunters, VCs and other stakeholders are using the Internet and their personal networks to find opportunities. Whether it is looking for a job, starting your own business or selling your products and services, the Internet plays a big part in many industries.

Personal branding is not a new thing, for several years now, many people have been sharing good value in the Internet on their blogs. Through other social media channels or search engines, their thoughts and deeds are made known, giving them opportunities to network and even better -- find a job or business opportunity.

I have personally know many individuals who have found jobs by just networking online. How do they do it? By simply making themselves more valuable to the marketplace by showing their skills and competence.

Digital Footprint

Your digital footprint plays a very big role. In job hunting or starting a business, many people do use search engines to find out more information about you. When is the last time you search for yourself online? Is the outcome positive?

Well it is not too late. Personal branding takes time and effort. Building relationship online is the same too. It is never too late to start. Whenever you post good information on forums or blogs, or if you contribute any articles online, remember to use your real name. You will never know the things you write would be picked up somewhere and your brand would be BIG someday.

-- Robin Low

10 Reasons to be on Social Media

After giving several talks and lectures on social media in Singapore and the region, I realize that social media seemed to be still very new in Singapore, especially amongst the Gen-X and baby boomers.

In Singapore, there are more than 1 million Facebook users, and there is a growing importance bloggers and other social media influencers play in our daily lives.

With twitter gaining popularity, the number of users greatly increased after celebrities start to use this social media platform. Micro-blogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user.

With the gaining popularity of mobile social media applications and devices in Singapore, users who were previously using sms-es are starting to get on social media in a big way, participating in Foursquare, updating their Facebook and Twitter Statuses, or viewing videos on YouTube.

Many people want to know why are there so many people getting on social media, and here are some reasons that I can think of.

1) Networking - You can find all sorts of people on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Web 2.0 allows you to build up a strong network of people that share similar interests which you can find in groups. You can sometimes rely on the expertise of these people and as they come from varied backgrounds, having these people in your network is definitely great if you need to seek advice on a topic you do not understand.

2) Updated news - I could not believe how fast some of these news show up on twitter. Being on twitter, the news show up real time and unlike certain newspapers of news source, the current events you get from twitter is varied and may give you a very balanced or skewed new on a certain topic. I found out the winner of the recent F1 race even before the race ends on my live TV - talk about real time report!

3) Friendship - Updating your status or what you are doing can allow you to stay connected with your friends and family. Reading about your friend's tweets and status updates about their newborn lets you stay in touch with them, even when you cannot be there. You can also make new friends, and people with similar interests.

4) Information - You definitely get a lot of information about your industry or interests. You can find almost everything on the web, thanks to search engines, and search engines today are even trying to keep up with the real time content of social media networks. What's even better, you can post a question to your followers and sometimes they will reply you with a link of what you need!

5) Entertainment - There are tons of quotes, jokes and funny picture or video links. Endless entertainment on Facebook and Twitter. You can also follow celebrities and know what they are doing or are planning to do. Its fun!

6) Events and meet ups - Tweetups are getting more and more common, and it is quite funny that many people who are usually not social butterflies, fell more comfortable to come to a "TweetUp" or a twitter event to meet their fellow friends whom they have never met in real life on these events. It is a great way to go out and meet new people. Local events are also getting common on Facebook, and you can search for open events in your area to participate to gt to know more people.

7) Job Search - In this financial crisis, any new source where you can find a job would be a bonus isn't it? Just do a #Jobs or #Job search with #location for more specific jobs on Twitter. There are a few groups on LinkedIn just dedicated for job searches and job openings as well. It is a great place to meet others and possibly, land a new job.

8) Find someone to chat - It is easy to go to a trending topic of interest, find who is talking about it and start a chat. You can always find a friend online on your Facebook page and start a chat if you are bored or just need someone to talk to.

9) Develop Weak Ties - Weak ties can be powerful, but challenging to build across cultures, languages, and preferred sites. Weak ties are powerful because they can give you what close friends and community often cannot (e.g., different ideas, connections, resources, models, etc)

10) Personal Branding - As the information on social media is searchable and for public consumption, your ideas and your values can be shared and you can become a thought leader in your field if you share your thoughts and opinion professionally. Giving your opinion on current topics, sharing your knowledge about your industry can provide good information for people searching for it. Being open to discuss these topics can allow people to discover your passion and brand yourself as an expert, as well as create more awareness for your company and its services.

-- Robin Low

Social Media Observations in Asia.

As you may know Social Media is gaining popularity around the world.



Is Kung Fu Panda running off to update his Facebook Status?

Everyone seems to be getting into the action, including Asia.

The Statistics

Rank	Country	Number of Facebook users	12 month growth %	6 month growth %
1	USA	101,303,240	140.80%	46.00%
2	UK	22,625,300	51.50%	20.90%
3	Turkey	16,943,780	113.60%	36.80%
4	Indonesia	14,681,580	1536.70%	126%
5	France	14,290,700	117%	32.60%
6	Canada	14,228,460	31%	19%
7	Italy	13,272,760	137.60%	30%
8	Philippines	8,387,560	2046.80%	208.40%
9	Spain	7,701,200	196.70%	33.40%
10	Australia	7,611,920	75.80%	25.70%
11	Argentina	7,387,120	227.50%	50.60%
12	Colombia	7,243,520	99.40%	25.80%
13	Mexico	6,505,040	351.50%	78.50%
14	Chile	5,808,020	39.90%	20.20%
15	Germany	5,799,520	361.90%	84.90%
16	Taiwan	5,490,300	4763%	701%
17	India	5,397,480	403.80%	66.80%
18	Venezuela	4,952,340	164.20%	38.40%
19	Malaysia	3,975,640	367.50%	99.30%
20	Sweden	3,066,180	80.70%	34.10%
21	Belgium	2,872,160	73.50%	21.10%
22	Hong Kong	2,727,980	87.00%	30.70%
23	South Africa	2,434,500	164.60%	41.50%
24	Brazil	2,413,900	1052.40%	137.70%
25	Egypt	2,341,880	184.70%	44.70%
26	Denmark	2,262,260	27.40%	15.30%
27	Norway	2,256,080	54.90%	21.70%
28	Greece	2,222,860	122.40%	35.60%
29	Israel	2,149,500	149.50%	49.90%
30	Thailand	1,963,560	1063.80%	181.60%

http://life-in-boston.blogspot.com/2010/03/facebook-fan-page-get-one-of-your-own.html

As the number of users are on the rise, Asia starts to take notice of this phenomena, there more and more user online starts to get on social media. Today, there is an explosive growth on social media in Asia, and there is still a growing trend in Europe and North America.

The presentation below are some of my observations of social media in Asia.

Social media observations in Asia

View more presentations from Robin Low.

-- Robin Low

Facebook vs. Twitter comparison

Some statistics:

Facebook US and Global traffic ranking: 2
7 day Average daily time on Site by Users: 32.2 minutes
# of users 400 million

Twitter US and Global traffic ranking: 12
7 day Average daily time on Site by Users: 7.8 minutes
# of users 75 million

It is hard to say which is better as the uses of these 2 social networking sites are different.

Facebook Strengths:
Organize events
Sheer number of active users
Include photos, videos and other information in feed.
Direct communication (instant messaging)


Twitter Strengths:
Market research
Viral messages (RT function)
Great Internet reach. (Can follow others without them reciprocating)
Real Time information. (trending topics)


There is not really a question when it comes to which one to use for a corporation. The best practices from successful companies show that as the number of channels increase, overall engagement increases at a faster rate. So why not use both?

There are many tools that allow you to have your accounts linked, but I would recommend just "cut and paste" relevant status updates for the other platform as not all information are relevant, especially RTs.

-- Robin Low

8 tips to build more followers on Twitter

Many people have asked me: How do I get more followers for my Twitter account.

I basically ask the following question:

1) What do you generally use twitter for?
2) Why do you want/need more followers?

To use twitter as a tool to keep in contact with online friends, and follow the latest news and get industry information, you do not need a lot of followers. I really depends on who do you want to read and respond to messages you post on Twitter.

For most of the time, conversational tweets are not helpful to others, and updates on your life may not be relevant to people unless you are a noteworthy public figure.



However, if you own a company and would like to talk about your products and engage your customers, getting people to follow you and spreading awareness is important to you. If you want to brand yourself as an expert in the industry and you would like to share knowledge and information in your industry, then getting more followers is great for that.

For Twitter, I feel that a few things work for me to get to more than 10,000 followers on @robin_low. To get followers, firstly think of your target audience, who do you think will be reading your tweets? I have tested with a few different accounts on Twitter, and for @robin_low, it is my personal twitter account. I use it to tweet the happenings that I experience around me. I tweet the most updated blogs I have, and news about the industry and my company. The followers I have are friends, Entrepreneurs and people I meet at Social Media meetups.

I feel that if you have a niche you want to target, a very focused account would be good. @dmediaacademy is my other twitter account that I use to have discussions on Social Media. I re-tweet (RT) other interesting Social Media tweets and interesting articles and I post my blog updates on this twitter account. From time to time, I will discuss with people about their blog posts or respond to comments when they ask me a question on my twitter account. It works, and I have a targeted followers who I could say are interested in Social Media.


Basically to get followers, you have to do the following:

Ask yourself this question: Why would I follow someone on Twitter?
Why do people want to follow me on Twitter?


1) Tweet value:

Most of the time, the answer is: "I would follow people who provide good information" I follow people who tweet things that interest me. If I am interested in the Red Sox, I would search Red Sox on Twitter and find the relevant people who tweet about it and see who is tweeting the right information I want to read about. Of course, a lot of them would be conversational, I just have to find the ones who tweet things I would like to know about and I may follow them.

The reason why @mashable and @guykawasaki are so popular is because they have a lot of good information on Social Media to share.

Constantly sharing good consistent information (of an industry) is a good way to get focused followers of that industry.


2) Re-Tweet (RT)

Dan Zarrella, an award-winning social, search, and viral marketing scientist and author of “The Social Media Marketing Book“ and "The Science of Retweets" has a lot of great information on how to get followers and how to get RT by your followers.

As one of the main purpose of having a lot of followers and getting your message virally spread amongst the Twitter community is the main goal, you probably also need to RT. If you have come across some interesting Tweets on the people you follow, feel free to RT if you think it is relevant to your followers. The author would definitely appreciate your RT, and if you also tweet value, the author may also follow you.

Since it is very time consuming to write blogs all day and tweet about them, the easier way to provide value is by filtering good tweets and RT them to your followers. This is a great mechanism in Twitter that makes Twitter so powerful.

To help in RT, it would be optimal for your message to be "@yourusername_" shorter than 140 characters so your message does not get truncated during the RT.


3) Stop Tweeting about your life.

Most of the people use Twitter to update their friends about their life, however, when you want to get more followers, get more RT, reduce the number of "self-relevant" tweets. If it is a tweet that is only relevant to yourself or your friends, you may want to post it on your Facebook Update. For most of twitter, (I call them nodes) users tend to simply update their personal status, which is fine for connecting with friends, but not relevant to the followers who follow you for industry news and information.


4) Tweet constantly but not excessively

If you want people to follow you, you must have something to say. There is no hard and fast number on the optimum number of tweets you should tweet a day, but I usually find I can get followers after my tweets. (I think some followers find me through Twitter Search on certain keywords) So if you want to gain more followers, you need to tweet more often. I usually have about 5 - 20 tweets a day. Do not tweet out in a blast of tweets. It is fine to respond to messages in short bursts as Twitter uses a filter and when your messages begin with an "@" symbol, only the user you are messaging to and those who follow both of you will get the tweet. Sending too many tweets in a short burst may make you feel like a "spammer"


5) Plan before you tweet

Like an email, when you send a tweet, it goes off instantly. Although there is a delete function, a wrong tweet will often stay in the system for some time, and may show up in someone's new feed until the next refresh. Make sure your message does not exceed 140 characters. you can use bit.ly and other URL shorteners to shorten URLs, and if you have a lot to say, write it in your blog and tweet about it.


6) Follow relevant people in your industry

To get more tweets to RT, it is a good idea to follow the relevant people on Twitter. I use wefollow.com (and other twitter directories) to search for people in the different industry to see what they tweet about. Simply type in the relevant keywords that describe your industry and you can follow the right people. You can also add yourself in the Twitter directory.

A note on following: When you follow, there is also a chance of people following back. So it is always a good idea to follow people, and your followers as long as they are not spammers or bots, but you need to know more about your following to follower ratio. See following article:
Twitter : Followers and Following


7) Participate in #Followfriday

#followfriday or #ff is an international event that happens every Friday to promote people you follow to your followers. The idea is to think of interesting people you already follow and recommend them to others.

On the first FollowFriday, there were almost two #followfriday tweets per second at its peak.

It is common for people to reciprocate. When you recommend someone on #Followfriday, there is a high chance the user will do so, otherwise you will get their attention and they may follow you.

FollowFriday is successful because of three main factors:

1. It’s easy. It takes little effort to send a tweet, something people do dozens of times a day.

2. It’s participatory. You don’t need to be part of the “Twitterati” to participate. You can suggest one person or 100 people. You can get endorsements from one person or a hundred people.

3. It’s karmic and it feels good. It’s a great feeling to simply say, “I think this person is great. You should follow them.”


How to do a #Followfriday.

There are 2 ways.

1) A very common way is to list a list of interesting Tweeps to follow and add #Followfriday or #FF hashtag

E.g. #FollowFriday Follow these interesting tweeps @greenyarnllc @sgbrands @sgtweetup @8gen @reviewsguru @robin_low @dmediaacademy

2) You can do a personal #Followfriday, and it adds more impact and you will get attention from the user you recommend.

E.g. #Followfriday @oliverschmid - He is a great user, full of humorous tweets and information on Social Media.


8) Use of #Hashtags

A #Hashtag is a word with a preceding "#" Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. It can be used to display locality, e.g. #Boston or #NewYork or it can be used for an event, e.g. #TCon2010

#Hashtags can also be used as part of the sentence for context. e.g. The #RedSox must win the last 2 games to become the ALCS Champions again!

As #Hashtags are searchable tag that is used in Twitter to search on a topic. Any tweet with the #hashtag will be returned when the #hashtag is clicked on.

E.g. A #bumfondle is a mark of love, respect, friendship and brotherhood. Give one today!

When you click on the tag #Bumfondle, all other tweets with the #hashtag is displayed.

So when you tweet with a #hashtag, you may also gain visibility as people may come across your tweet through the #hashtag used.

-- Robin Low


Related Blog: Twitter Tips (Use of CAPS)

Networking Fundamentals & Network Modeling

Hub and Connectors

Connectors are an extremely important component of our social network. They create trends and fashions, make important deals, spread fads, or help launch a new business. Connectors are nodes with an anomalously large number of links.

The Internet is the Ultimate freedom of speech. When your views are published, it will be available instantaneously available to anyone around the world with an Internet connection. With the billions of webpages on the web, the question is -- will anybody notice it?

In order to be read, you have to be visible. On the web, the measure of visibility is the number of links. The more incoming links pointing to your webpage, the more visible it is. The average Webpage only has about five to seven links, each pointing to one of the billion pages out there. The likelihood that a typical document is linked to your Webpage is practically zero.

Just as in Society a few connections know an unusually large number of people, and the Internet is dominated by a few highly connected nodes, or hubs. These hubs, such as Yahoo! and Google are extremely visible. In a collective manner, we somehow create hubs, Websites to which everyone links. Compared to these hubs, everyone is invisible. Some pages linked to one or two documents do not exist and even search engines are biased against them, ignoring them as they crawl the web looking for the hottest new sites.

Hubs dominate the structure of all networks which they are present, making them look like small worlds. With unusually large number of links to large number of nodes, hubs create short paths between any two nodes in the system. From the perspective of the hub, the world is tiny. (For Google, reaching webpages are often two to three clicks away)

The 80/20 Rule

Pareto's Law or principle, known also as the 80/20 rule, has been turned into the Murphy's Law of management: 80 percent of profits are produced by 20 percent of the employees, 80 percent of the problems are produced by 20 percent of the consumers, 80 percent of the decisions are made during 20 percent of the meeting time, and so on. Similarly, we can use it to describe the phenomenon that 80 percent of the links connect to 20 percent of the Webpages.

The Rich get Richer

The initial network model start on two simple and often disregarded assumptions; the number of nodes is fixed and remain unchanged throughout the network's life, all nodes are equivalent. With the discovery of hubs, and the power laws that describe them, we need to abandon these assumptions.

On the World Wide Web, even for searches on Google with the keyword "news", there are 100,000,000 hits. How do we pick one? The random network models tell us to select randomly, however no one ever does this. Without giving much thought we may pick BBC.com or CNN.com and unconsciously, we prefer to link hubs. The better known they are, the links point to them. The more links they attract, the easier it is to find them on the Web as we are more familiar with them. We all have this unconscious bias, linking with higher probability to the nodes we know, which are inevitably the more connected nodes of the Web. We prefer hubs.

Preferential attachment rules in many different networks. In Hollywood, the producer whose job is to make the movie profitable know that stars sell movies. Thus casting is determined by two competing factors: the match between the actor and the role, and the actor's popularity. The more movie the actor has made, the higher the probability he gets casted by the producer.

Winner Takes All

Nodes compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world. In most cases, this competition is overt, as when companies compete for consumers, actors strive for opportunities to perform, people vie for social links. In a winner takes all scenario, competition leads to a scale free topology. Most real networks belong to this category, and the winner shares the spotlight with continuous hierarchy of hubs. Networks are competitive systems that fight fiercely for links. Like it or not, we are all part of a complex competitive game.

.... To be Continued

-- Robin Low

Personal branding on Facebook

You need to remember, your profile can be search on the Internet and whatever you say will not really be private information. This can be a bane and a boon at the same time. With Facebook now, you may be seen as a thought leader as you share your views.

Joining different groups, sharing ideas and networking on Facebook also brings a lot of opportunities, but your Facebook profile need to be kept “professional” if you are interested to do professional networking or you have professional contacts on your Facebook profile.


Do you need a separate Facebook account for work?

I know of many people with 2 separate Facebook accounts, one for work, and another for private use. I personally feel it rather redundant, however, for some people, it may seem necessary when you feel a strong need to connect to some friends.

However, if you manage your settings correctly, you do not need to have 2 separate accounts.

1) Privacy Settings

Follow the below tips and protect your profile.

a) Personal Info. – it is important to fill up your personal information so that your old friends can connect with you and know it the “real you”
i. Avoid inputting your home address to avoid unnecessary dangers like stalking.
ii. If you don’t want to be called by everyone, make sure you set the privacy settings under “Only friends”, so only people on your friend list can view your phone number.
iii. Set “Photos and Videos of Me” to “Only Me” as you can never tell what photos your friends will tag you in. (Your friends can still see your photo albums.)

2) Add only friends you know.

Though you may play Facebook games and meet a lot of new friends, some of these “Friends” may be spammers, and if you need to add them, add these friends to the “Limited Profile” list on your friend list.

i. Create a “Limited Profile” List. (Under Friends -> Create List)
ii. Add people you don’t know personally into the “Limited Profile” List
iii. Set privacy settings on your Facebook Profile to exclude people you don’t know that well, and hide some information from these people.
(Settings – Privacy Settings – Edit to “Hide this from” -> Limited Profile)
i.e. You can allow friends to comment on your posts, and prevent people from “Limited profile” List to do so.

3) If you play Facebook games, prevent these games from posting on your profile.

You do not want people to see that you are playing games during office hours and you do not have any other Facebook activities besides playing games. (If you want to use it for personal branding)

4) Think before you post.

This may be harder that it seems, as it is common for people to post what they think. However if your manager or professional contacts are your “friends” on Facebook, and think before you post, lest you may regret what you post later.

-- Robin Low