I write a lot about Twitter because it’s one of my main networking tools for both Abel Communications and my side project – Tchochkes. As you probably know by now Twitter has a List Feature in Beta. The List feature is interesting for 2 main points:
- You can see how people view you by what lists you are included in.
- You can find the connectors in other networks to see who you should follow.
The first one is fairly obvious and has given me many a giggle.
However, it’s the second that has me excited. To use Twitter strategically it’s not just about engaging in conversation – it’s about finding the Paul Reveres out there who people listen to and engage with as well. Having a list that many follow show that you are a Paul Revere and not a William Dawes.
And to those of you who don’t know Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
- what I’m referring to is the snippet below:
Paul Revere’s ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic. A piece of extraordinary news traveled a long distance in a very short time, mobilizing an entire region to arms …
At the same time that Revere began his ride north and west of Boston, a fellow revolutionary — a tanner by the name of William Dawes — set out on the same urgent errand, working his way to Lexington via the towns west of Boston. He was carrying the identical message, through just as many towns over just as many miles as Paul Revere. But Dawes’s ride didn’t set the countryside afire. The local militia leaders weren’t altered. In fact, so few men from one of the main towns he rode through — Waltham — fought the following day that some subsequent historians concluded that it must have been a strongly pro-British community. It wasn’t. The people of Waltham just didn’t find out the British were coming until it was too late. If it were only the news itself that mattered in a word-of-mouth epidemic, Dawes would now be as famous as Paul Revere. He isn’t. So why did Revere succeed where Dawes failed?
The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. Revere’s news tipped and Dawes’s didn’t because of the differences between the two men.
[Revere] was gregarious and intensely social. He was a fisherman and a hunter, a cardplayer and a theatre-lover, a frequenter of pubs and a successful businessman. He was active in the local Masonic Lodge and was a member of several select social clubs. He was also a doer, a man blessed — as David Hackett Fischer recounts in his brilliant book Paul Revere’s Ride — with “an uncanny genius for being at the center of events.”
It is not surprising, then, that when the British army began its secret campaign in 1774 to root out and destroy the stores of arms and ammunition held by the fledgling revolutionary movement, Revere became a kind of unofficial clearing house for the anti-British forces. He knew everybody. He was the logical one to go to if you were a stable boy on the afternoon of April 18th, 1775, and overheard two British officers talking about how there would be hell to pay on the following afternoon. Nor is it surprising that when Revere set out for Lexington that night, he would have known just how to spread the news as far and wide as possible. When he saw people on the roads, he was so naturally and irrepressibly social he would have stopped and told them. When he came upon a town, he would have known exactly whose door to knock on, who the local militia leader was, who the key players in town were. He had met most of them before. And they knew and respected him as well.
But William Dawes? Fischer finds it inconceivable that Dawes could have ridden all seventeen miles to Lexington and not spoken to anyone along the way. But he clearly had none of the social gifts of Revere, because there is almost no record of anyone who remembers him that night. “Along Paul Revere’s northern route, the town leaders and company captains instantly triggered the alarm,” Fischer writes. “On the southerly circuit of William Dawes, this did not happen until later. In at least one town it did not happen at all. Dawes did not awaken the town fathers or militia commanders in the towns of Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown or Waltham.”
Why? Because Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown and Waltham were not Boston. And Dawes was in all likelihood a man with a normal social circle, which means that — like most of us — once he left his hometown he probably wouldn’t have known whose door to knock on. Only one small community along Dawes’s ride appeared to get the message, a few farmers in a neighborhood called Waltham Farms. But alerting just those few houses wasn’t enough to “tip” the alarm.
Word-of-mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors. William Dawes was just an ordinary man.
Businesses and business people need to find the connectors in their area of interest. It makes communication easier, spread faster and raises your companies reputation to have the connectors on your side. And it’s relatively simple to find the connectors on Twitter. Start by looking at a list that you’re interested in – an example for @Tchochkes could be my friend @HomeWorkShop’s list. We’re in a similar industry, but she has been Tweeting under this monicre longer than I have been tweeting under Tchochkes so she has a lot more followers. Fair enough. My goal is to grow my list as smoothly and quickly as possible – so I check out her list and follow all of the Tweeters who have many followers to their lists. Does that make sense? In other words:
- Go to the list of someone else in your industry who has done well and has many followers
- Check out what lists they are on
- Find an appropriate (meaning if you are all about design and the list says “Hockey” it’s probably not for you) list with a lot of followers (anything over 10 is good – over 30 is great) and click on that list
- Then click on the owner of the list to get to their page
- Follow them
Now you have to work on building the relationship with these Tweeters. The first bit is simple, the second not so much. Twitter is about transparency and conversation – and if you’re fake you’ll very likely be flamed and you certainly won’t be followed. My interest in these Tweeters is the same as theirs – we are all interested in design.
I can’t follow everyone due to time restraints, etc. so it’s important that I focus on the right people who have interests the same as my own.
Keep in mind – I will still follow someone who has followed me who I find value in, regardless of who follows them. My point is that if you have limited time it makes sense to go after the connectors first. And Twitter Lists is the best way to find them.
Back in the day I was the Director of Customer Relations for a group of internet casinos. I managed the Customer Service team and basically anything that went in front of a customer. All marketing was approved by me as I wrote all of the Terms and Conditions and was intimately aware of what happened if we wrote those conditions wrong (it would cost us loads of money – never a good thing.)
(and yes, these are affiliate links) and listening to cds of 
, which explain the differences in the techniques needed for high cost versus low cost items and as such realizing the difference sales tools needed (which is what marketing is) for selling different priced items.
