Social Media Talk at NUS

I gave a Social Media talk at NUS Today on Social Media: Digital Footprints and how to manage them. And the folks at the School of Computing were very helpful to help me host this event.

I would like to thank Ho Kok Wei Daniel, President of NUS Students' Computing Club and the Management Committee for organizing this.

Digital Footprint

View more presentations from Robin Low.

Basically, I shared this slide and informed the students that it is important to maintain a "Professional" digital image, just like a professional image when you go for an interview.

I also talked a little about Personal Branding and Networking and I invited Sarah Chong from Penn-Olson to come give a guest speech on her experience as a student running a very successful and informative blog Penn-Olson





I had a great time, and if the students have any questions and need any help on Social Media, feel free to ask here!

-- Robin Low

Managing your Digital Footprint.

Getting a job is like sales, you are selling yourself.

Picture this:

You are the CEO of the company that is YOU.
Your product is YOU.
YOU provide your services.
You need branding and to create a desirable image for people who want to get and use YOU.
You need to create awareness, market and eventually sell the company YOU.


Branding yourself is very important, when you find a job, when you are in a job but want to show your passion and possibly move to another position which you would fit best or even if you own your own company.

Creating a professional image online is important and even when there is nothing bad than can be found online associated with your name, would it be better if there are great things associated to your name?

Social Media has made this a lot easier as your thoughts can be shared in your blog, and your conversations on Twitter can attract a lot of attention as well.

Your activities on Facebook and the discussions you have on your LinkedIn account can also bring you visibility.

Just think of a deck of cards, if you shuffle it and get a prize every time you draw a joker, wouldn't it be nice to add more jokers in the deck if possible?

Managing your digital footprint takes time and effort, but it is very important and essential in today's connected world.

--Robin Low

Digital Footprint

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Link -> Digital Footprints <-

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)

The Internet

About 50 years ago, the US was developing a communication system that would survive a nuclear attack. A centralized command system would be vulnerable as a nuclear attack would handicap all equipment within the range of detonation. Destroying the central node would destroy all forms of communication. A decentralize system would offer the early system of a scale-free network, and the ideal system would be a mesh like network, redundant enough that if some nodes go down, alternative paths would maintain the connections.

Who would have thought that this network described would be like the Internet.



Understanding the topology of the Internet is a prerequisite for designing tools and services that offer a fast and reliable communication infrastructure. Though human made, the Internet is not centrally designed. Structurally, the Internet is closer to an ecosystem than a machine. Understanding the Internet hence would not just be mathematical or an engineering problem; a tangled tale of convergence of a massive scale gave birth to this jumbled information mass for historians and computer scientists to unravel.

It is important to know the Internet topology to design better tools and services. The current Internet protocols were developed with a small network and 1970s technology. As the network grow and new applications emerged, these protocols often fall short of our desires. Today, the Internet is almost exclusively used for the World Wide Web and e-mail. Had the original creators foreseen this, they would have designed a very different infrastructure, resulting in a much smoother experience. Instead we are locked in a technology that adapts only with great difficulty to the booming diversity and demand imposed by the increasingly creative use of the Internet.

Even as biologists unravel the science and codes behind our DNA, neither computer scientists nor sociologists know how this large-scale structure emerged and change until we put the pieces together in this fast evolving system.

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The Web.

In the early days of the Internet, there were many webpages, and they were only often linked by a webring. But to find things effectively, you would need to find a very connected hub and search for information you need. Then robots started crawling and visiting Webpages, reading and indexing millions of Webpages. This was the beginning of piecing together a fragmented Web, the beginning of the search engine.

The topology of the Web limits our ability to see everything out there. The World Wide Web is a scale-free network, dominated by hubs and nodes with a large number of links, but also coexists with numerous small-scale structures that severely limit how much we can explore simply by clicking our way along the links.

Even with the world's best search engine, there are still many webpages that will not show up due to the Internet's topology. The Web can be best described as fragmented continents with occasional tubes and connections to other continents and islands. There are places you can go on a continent and sometimes going down that path does not lead you back.

The Internet grows faster than ever. Everyday, new pages are created, pictures, videos and other files uploaded. Our life is increasingly dominated by the Web with the explosion of Social Media, and it has pretty much changed our views on privacy and sharing our slice of life with others. It is a revolution in information access, a new way of life that previous generation have not enjoyed. As it continues to evolve, the question is, what do we have to lose in the meantime?

--Robin Low

Transmission of ideas, fads and diseases

As we learn from the previous posts, real networks are scale-free networks, and there is much similarities between different scale free networks, however, by studying some of them, we could model the others.

Before adopting any innovation, we normally ask ourselves several questions: Should I spend time evaluating the new product? Should I spend money on it? How would I know it would work for me as promised? As there were little guarantee that the extra benefits would be worth it, the first adopters still took the risks, and this group are called the innovators.

All of us know some innovators. They are the first ones who buy the Android Phones, and drive the new hybrid cars. They are the teens who pick up on new trends before they become mainstream, the artists and intellectuals who nurture ideas well before they reach the rest of us through books, movies and magazines. If the hubs resist a product, they form such an impedance that even the best innovations fail, however if the hubs accept it, they influence a large number of people. These hubs or -- opinion leaders are nearly changing everything we know regarding the spread of ideas, innovations, and virtues.

Threshold model

To explain the disappearance of some fads and virtues, and the spread of others, the threshold model is developed. The speed at which the likelihood that it will be adopted by a person introduced to it is not the only factor that determine whether or not people will adopt it. There is a threshold -- a critical number of people that is required to adopt it before the innovation spreads, and the number of people adopting it will increase exponentially until everybody who could use it does.

Understanding this phenomena is an important conceptual advance in understanding spreading and diffusions. Epidemiologists work with it when they model the probability that a new infection will run into an epidemic, as the AIDS virus did. Marketing textbooks talk about it when estimating the likelihood a product will make it in the marketplace or understand why some never do. Sociologists use it to explain the spread of birth control practices among women.

This simple paradigm dominated our treatment of diffusion problem. If we wanted to estimate the probability that an innovation would spread, we needed only to know its spreading rate and the critical threshold it faced. Nobody questioned this paradigm, but we have learnt that some viruses and innovations are oblivious to it.

Of the hundred of social links each of us have, only a few are intimate enough to transmit a sexual disease. Therefore AIDS advances on a very sparse subnet of our highly interlinked social web. With the relatively low contagiousness, you should find the epidemic should have died out by now. Despite the odds, however, AIDS has already infected 50 million people, and the numbers continue to rise. To understand the spread of the disease better, one would need a map of the sex web, but this is simply impossible. Hardly anyone would give out the names of everybody with whom they had sex with in the past.

Despite the fact that there are several effective treatments for AIDS, there are still lots of people infected worldwide. The crisis faced by Africa is most severe. The problem is not only that most African countries cannot pay for the drug. Even if they drug prices were to drop, these nations lack the infrastructure to distribute and administer the treatment.

The early spread of AIDS were attributed by mainly homosexual sex, today heterosexual sex is the leading means of transmission. As we've learnt that hubs play a key role in spreading AIDS, as long as resource is finite, we should treat the hubs, before the others, but the problem is often not as simple as many other factors play a role. Doubtless, many hubs will go undiscovered and a few nonhubs will make the list. Furthermore, any selective process will raise an ethical question: "Are we rewarding the promiscuous?" Are we ready to offer drugs to the more connected poor prostitute than to the wealthier but sexually less connected middle class?

Currently, the world spends US$350 million on AIDS vaccine research and more than US$3 billion on AIDS drugs in America and Europe.

Though networks can be modeled after well documented spread of diseases, there are still many unpredictable differences and factors which are hard to model in the real world. The concept is similar and it can help us understand the diffusions through hubs, and know is half the battle won.

-- Robin Low

The Topology, Robustness and Vulnerability of Networks.

Breaking down of Networks

Node failure can easily break a network into isolated, non-communicating fragments. The 1996 blackout in the US highlighted the underlying vulnerabilities of the interconnectivity of the electrical network, and how a single disturbance can be detected thousands of miles away. There is a question asked, how many routers must we remove from the Internet to break it into isolated computers that cannot connect and communicate with each other?

As the Internet, the World Wide Web, the cell and social networks are known to be scale-free, it could be said that a significant number of nodes can be randomly removed from it without its breaking apart.

So what is the source of the topological robustness? The few highly connected nodes -- the hubs that keep these networks together is one of the main causes of this robustness. If failure of nodes have equal chances, small nodes are far more likely to be dismantled as there are so many more of them.

The accidental removal of a hub will not be fatal either, since the large hubs will maintain the network's integrity. Topological robustness is thus rooted in the structural unevenness of scale free networks: Failures disproportionately affects small nodes.

It is possible to take down networks, hackers can target and attack the hubs, taking large hubs down can cause networks to be slow as traffic now needs to flow to other hubs, and may eventually make the network fail.

The removal of the most connected nodes may however disintegrate these seemingly robust networks. In understanding the complex system, simulations have shown that one can remove many nodes from a key cellular network without the risk of killing the organism. If however, a drug or an illness shuts down the genes encoding the most connected proteins, the cell will not survive. If the highly connected keystone species are removed, the ecosystem dramatically collapses.

As seen in Social Media, Rockstars of Social Media are hubs. When they start to get on MySpace, they can bring a lot of following and crowd to join MySpace. They are opinion leaders, and when they think it is unsafe and they leave MySpace, there is also a large Exodus of members.

The price of topological robustness, however, is extreme exposure to attacks. Taking out hierarchy of highly connected nodes will break any system. It is bad news for our economic establishment as the failure of the financial giant, Freddie Mac and Fannie May would ripple and cause a widespread recession worldwide. On the Internet, this exploit allows hackers to design strategies that will take down the whole infrastructure.

Research has shown that topology, robustness and vulnerability cannot be totally separated from each other.

-- Robin Low

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