The False Appearance of Influence with Social Media
Brent Leary and myself got into a great discussion about how some pretend to have influence simply because they have a few followers.
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Show Notes:
1:20 Outlook for 2010 in Business is optimistic
2:10 National Retail eCommerce numbers beat expectations
3:52 Amazon Kindle e-book sales crush it
5:20 The Apple iPad reviews
8:27 Lessons from Conan O’Brian from Tonight Show
12:00 The Appearance of influence with social media
15:03 The @Wiseman23 Twitter threat
17:23 Tit-for-Tatter-Twitterers
18:00 Measuring Influence
18:00 Brian Clark (Copybloger.com)
18:39 Guy Kawasaki on Twitter
18:50 Oprah Winfrey on Twitter
19:07 Bill Gates on Twitter
19:30 Chris Brogan/Liz Strauss/Gary Vaynerchuk
23:30 Man vs. Wild
25:10 Levar Burton
Brent recently blogged on this topic with a post called Please Stop Automatically Equating Number of Twitter Followers With Real Influence
So can Twitter make you appear to look influential in a short amount of time? Apparently so, because people will give you the time of day if you have thousands of followers. Can you automate the process of appearing influential on Twitter? Absolutely – I’ve seen people’s followership rise quickly.. people I’ve never heard of before (regular non celeb types), even when they weren’t tweeting all that much…mostly through using some kind of service.
— Brent Leary
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Excellent post. I'm amazed at how many gimmicky programs are out there for rapid follower building. People do want the quick-fix, to fake the appearance of being an influential person, as you mentioned. The size of a Twitter following definitely is not anything that can guarantee a person's influence or true leadership. The mark of a real leader is one who invokes change in the lives of others. This is something that is accomplished through giving, interacting, relating, participating, and collaborating… nothing that you can get from buying a few thousand Twitter followers in bulk!
Excellent post. I'm amazed at how many gimmicky programs are out there for rapid follower building. People do want the quick-fix, to fake the appearance of being an influential person, as you mentioned. The size of a Twitter following definitely is not anything that can guarantee a person's influence or true leadership. The mark of a real leader is one who invokes change in the lives of others. This is something that is accomplished through giving, interacting, relating, participating, and collaborating… nothing that you can get from buying a few thousand Twitter followers in bulk!