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First Impressions Are Hit or Miss

They say you shouldn’t try to please everyone. You shouldn’t try to make everyone like you. I was thinking a little bit about why. I notice this in how the people around me treat me. I casually observe, knowing I can’t make people think of me the way I want them to, hoping to figure out what their first impression of me must have been.

People make up their minds about you within seconds of meeting you, seeing you, and talking with you. Occasionally, a person’s first impression can be swayed, if they’re open to it and if it’s drastically different from how they see you after that. This may sound like common sense, but it’s impossible to be fully aware of someone’s perception of meeting you.

I have two opposite examples.

Let’s start with the negative. I was at PodCampAZ 2 and was out to lunch with about 80 other attendees. I had just sat down at the end of a very long table of noisy social media people. Someone walked up to me, said, “Hi, I’m Bridget.” and reached out to shake my hand. I immediately shook her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Brian.” As far as I remember, that was about it. I was a little perplexed when the person who had walked up to shake my hand immediately walked away. Little did I know at the time, I had been connected with her and her husband on Twitter for a few months. What — to me — was a random and strange event during a hectic lunch was also — to someone else — a terrible first impression. I found out later she told other people who had never met me I act like I’m full of myself. One bad first impression resulted in a few bad zeroth impressions!

Here’s one that’s positive. I helped organize Startup Weekend Phoenix. During the event, we encouraged bloggers, podcasters, and photographers to attend for free to make some media for the event. I was bouncing around the teams to make sure everything was going alright and I saw someone walk in with a camera. “Great!” I thought. I rushed over to him to get him situated with what was going on so he could take some photos. Turns out, the camera was an excuse to poke around and see what was going on. This was his first peek into the Phoenix tech community, and he had someone enthusiastically showing him around and getting him up to speed. It seems like the enthusiasm got through, because he went to all of the tech events in the following weeks. In a matter of weeks, he went from not knowing much about the Phoenix tech community to being a regular, and I was there to welcome him in. Also, at each of the events, I was either helping organize or I was speaking. If that isn’t an ideal first impression, I don’t know what is.

It seems like most people fall in between. No matter how “good” of a person you may think you are, first impressions can go bad and you usually won’t even know about it.

Watch your first impressions and examine what about people gave you a good impression of them.

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Sofa Jumping

SofaJumper.com

I traveled every month of 2008, sometimes multiple times a month. To cut costs and to make more travel possible, I’ve started crashing on friends’ couches. My employer BitGravity will cover a couple nights at a hotel when I visit the Burlingame headquarters, but I can save them money and stay longer (1-2 weeks) if I stay with friends.

The best part about it, though, is the fact that all of the people I stay with are really awesome individuals. There is always so much happening and so much to catch up on.

On a recent trip to New York, I found myself staying with a different friend every night, because most of my friends were traveling, hosting other visitors, or otherwise unavailable. In a conversation about this exciting couch-hopping trip (9 nights, 8 different places) with Mike Germano, he suggested that I tell the stories of these incredible hosts as I hop around.

And so, SofaJumper.com was born!

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Community: Quality > Quantity

I hate being asked how to increase a number of followers, readers, etc. Whether it’s a marketer asking me how they can get more followers on Twitter or Tim Ferriss asking me how to get 50,000 new RSS subscribers overnight, it’s a request I simply don’t want to accommodate.

You need to engage and embrace the community you have and let it grow organically. Getting thousands of people to give you a sliver of their attention and none of their support does you little to no good.

You need to focus on blowing people away, turning casual observers into rabid supporters.

That is how you build a valuable community.

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Calculating Your Value on Twitter

There are several ways you can calculate your value on Twitter. The method with the most merit does not include the number of people you’re following OR the number of people who are following you. The latter seems to be the obvious way to gauge someone’s value. If people subscribe to your updates, then you must be worth listening to. Unfortunately, I think the best proof to the contrary is my own Twitter account. According to some lists, I am currently the 13th most-followed user on Twitter, where there are over 14 million registered accounts (but probably only about 1 million active users.. Wait, did I say “only”?).

Choose an adjective: funny, interesting, thoughtful, intriguing, fascinating, entertaining, etc. No matter which adjective you choose, I guarantee I am not in the top 0.000001 percentile of people. I think it is fair to say that this is reasonable evidence that the number of people following someone does not correlate to the value of the information they provide.

Robert Scoble recently wrote about the value of the number of people you follow, and how he thinks it is more important of a metric than the number of people who follow you. I definitely do not disagree with the importance of listening to many sources (I even wrote about and agree with Sean Tierney’s thoughts on people who subscribe to many RSS feeds). However, the number itself is not a metric of the value of one’s content. Anyone, especially uninteresting people, can follow thousands of users on Twitter.

The Real Metric

These numbers obviously mean very little when it comes to measuring the content of a Twitter user. There is, however, a way that I believe you can. The value of a Twitter user is in the amount, depth, and breadth of interaction with other Twitter users. Users who start global conversations and provoke discussion from others seem to have the most value. For people who need a concrete method of tallying this can start by performing searches on a given user’s Twitter name using tools like Tweet Scan.

Still, it is not as simple as counting the number of replies. For example, social media princess “iJustine” could post on Twitter that she is eating ice cream and receive dozens of replies. The replies that matter are ones that include thoughtful commentary, progression on the topic, or even redistributing the thought to one’s own followers. It is also important to see the user in question engaging in conversation with the people who are replying. When Twitter is treated like a distribution mechanism for a user to push messages to fans, the user loses value.

While quantity of interaction will definitely be on the side of the highly-followed users, it is easy for users closer to the average to carry on meaningful discussions with a diverse group of users. I personally think there are many, many users with between 100 and 1,000 followers that have much more value in their thoughts and conversations than the majority of the top 100 most-followed users.

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Social Networking Strategy: The AcmeAdd

Let’s say there is someone you want to communicate with online. In some situations, an email might not work because it might slip through the cracks or come off as too much of a sales pitch. Maybe you do not have anything in particular to say, but need a way to catch their attention.

You might consider connecting with them on a social network. You are interested in what they are up to, so you should probably ‘follow’ them on Twitter anyway. Unfortunately, following someone on a social network does not mean that they are following you. They might receive a notification email after you connect with them, but if the person you want to connect with is similarly targeted by others, that notification email is likely to go ignored.

There is, however, a way to stand out without being too intrusive. By doing a small amount of research, you should be able to find other instances of the individual’s web presence (other social network profiles, blogs, etc).

By adding an individual as a friend on multiple networks at the same time, or AcmeAdding, the potential contact will receive a few notification emails saying “John Smith is your newest contact on __.” Generally, the reaction begins with confusion and results in intrigue, leading to investigation. They will ask “Who is this?” and try to find out who you are and why you’re adding them. If who you are or what you do is relevant to them, then they are likely to connect and/or open the door for conversation.

The term “AcmeAdd” was coined after an observation of social networking expert and Phoenix photographer Adam Nollmeyer of Acme Photography. He usually uses the name “AcmePhoto” on social web sites.

Personally, I am not extremely “popular” but I do receive 15-20 notification emails per day regarding new contacts on various social networks. They do not get opened and I have them filtered so they do not distract from more important email. However, I do see them. Whether or not I take notice of who connected with me, skimming over the names makes them more familiar the next time I see them (in another notification email, in a comment on my blog, or anywhere else).