I’m feeling nostalgic these days. With my second Inbound Marketing Summit wrapped up, and experiencing my first time at Blog World in Vegas in October, I’m entering November and that means it’s my Twitterversary again. Two years. Damn.

And it’s yet another blog for me. You may notice that janetaronica.com now has a new home on WordPress.org, a new (and anticipated to be evolving) look, and compiled content from three of my blogging ventures over the past two years. Yes, three… Things don’t look perfect on this blog right now and that’s ok. Startup life has taught me that sometimes “done” is better than perfect, and you iterate your product from there. I’m happy to have my domain name and my content here, my Tweet button and Facebook like button installed so you can share it with your friends. There’s a way to subscribe to my content. I’ll add the extra stuff as I go along, but I’m no longer waiting around for myself to figure that stuff out before I blog. It’s a blog. Blogging comes first.

I haven’t done things perfectly in social media. Here’s what I’d do if I started today:

I’d start a blog on WordPress.com. I’d buy my domain name from the beginning and buy whatever amount of money they charge these days for domain re-direction. I’d use the *simplest* theme possible. I would not. I REPEAT: I would not fuss and muss over the look and feel of my blog. I would just start blogging.

A mistake I made in blogging is wasting a lot of time on the look/feel of my blogs and getting frustrated with coding stuff I didn’t understand. I wasted time I could’ve spent writing screwing around with HTML and whatchamacallit and getting no where with it. I’d get the content right before I worried about headers, colors, widgets etc.

Social Health Nut is an example of this. I fussed around so much trying to figure out how I wanted that thing to look that by the time it looked the way I wanted it to, I realized I didn’t even know what I wanted to blog about. So I didn’t blog. #fail

You have to scale. What is priority when it comes to customizing your blog? What matters most? When you are JUST starting, this matters most:

• Tweet Button and Facebook Like Button (so people can share your content)
• RSS button (so people can subscribe to your content)

After I got a good six months of blog-at-least-once-a-week content under my belt, THEN I would move my content over to WordPress.org. There are far more theme options and customizations available with plugins from what I can see so far. Paying for Bluehost and having their customer service people there to bail me out when I jack up my .php stuff is well worth it. You can’t get any help like that when paying WordPress.com for rights to customize the CSS over there.

Another option? Just do a Posterous blog. It’s a very simple blogging platform, you can just email your posts to [email protected] and they show up on your site. It’s a change to focus on the content without the distractions of all that other garbage.

Also, remember: You don’t have to do a WordPress blog.

It’s the content that matters, not the platform.

Steve Rubel uses Posterous.

Seth Godin, David Armano, Julia Roy and Greg Verdino all use TypePad.

Hipster Puppies uses Tumblr. Oh, wait…

You get my point. Just start blogging. Not sure what to write about? Talk about how you’re not sure what to write about because you’re just learning about social media. “I’m new to social media and I read this article today and this is what I thought of it.” That’s a legitimate blog post! And my God, this SMD community would find that sort of stuff refreshing coming from someone new to the space, I think. Just start blogging. Go. Go, go go.

And just start Tweeting. That’s what I did two years ago and I’d do it all again. I literally just started asking people how they got their PR jobs in Boston and Tweeted blog posts I read and commented on and found interesting. I still do that, only now I’m asking about advice when it comes to community management and Tweeting/commenting on blog posts related to that. Remember that “don’t talk to strangers” advice you got as a kid? That doesn’t apply to Twitter. Talk to strangers. Lots of them.

Getting on Twitter and blogging changed my life. It changed my career direction and introduced me to amazing friends, mentors and people. It’s been a wild two years. There are things I could have done better, yes. But there is nothing that I would do differently.

I have a confession to make that may seem odd to you: I’m an introvert.

“Heh, good luck being a community manager gig, kid,” is what some are going to think.

“May want to re-think that marketing career,” is what some are going to think.

And that’s fine. Trust me, I’ll find my way. I always do.

I never fancied myself an introvert until recently. First, I love one-on-one conversations. I love deep conversations. I’m an open book, not hesitant to freely and comfortably share what’s good and what’s not so good with me. I also like public speaking and Powerpoint presentations. I feel natural in leadership roles where I am standing in the front of a room and running a group discussion.

I would say I was a fast adopter of Twitter, a platform inherently different from Facebook and Myspace, which are based on networking with shared connections, vs. communicating with strangers. But I discount this as evidence of extrovertism, as the safety of a computer screen and my openness on Twitter possibly proves myself as an example of the opposite.
 

The oddest aspect of my supposed introvertism is that I’d describe myself as bubbly, spunky, sassy… I like making people laugh. It doesn’t take me long to feel comfortable acting that way around people.

There’s the middle space of human interaction that scares the shit out of me, between one-on-one conversations, hanging with people I know and public speaking enlies the thing I really suck at: mingling. 

I hate mingling! God, UGH! a;lwekra[0inag This is just one of those things I am terrible at.

Mingling makes me really nervous, and one would think that by 23 I would have this down, right? After college parties and weekends at bars I’d have this together, right? Well, no. I’m a chick. Usually chicks just show up at bars with their groups of girlfriends, get a vodka diet and people mingle their way over to you. 

It doesn’t work that way at conferences. You have to just hang out and meet people. I’m so bad at this. I get really nervous and self-conscious. I don’t know what to say, how to introduce myself, how to approach people… But it’s weird: if you want to specifically meet for coffee or lunch or just chat one-on-one somewhere away from the crowd – I’m down! 

I’m worried my crappy networking skills will hold me back. It’s not arrogance, just raw passion and drive that speaks when I say things like “I’m getting a hammer” and busting through the glass ceiling that still exists in PR, marketing, entrepreneurism and tech. I really want to do something with this life.

I’m a dreamer. I spend a ton of my free time – my beloved Janet time (which I thrive on, I’m serious, I’m an introvert) – thinking about stuff. I think about the intersections of the internet, law and social media, contemplating the tragic experiences of Tyler Clementi, the Catsouras family and others. I think a lot about how we can use social media to find missing children. I’m just a dreamer off in my own world, contemplating what’s next. Don’t interrupt me with a phone call, because if I’m able to find my damn phone and answer it, I’ll probably be awkward on the phone. (I had a well-meaning boss tell me that once.) 

So what do I do from here? First, I’m giving up on mingling. 

Seriously. I’m not forcing myself to do this anymore. Every time I try, I’m just awkward, nervous, and I feel worse about myself because of it. I’m worried I make a bad impression. Screw mingling. I’m networking my way.

I need to make more coffee dates. I need to plan ahead before I go to these conferences and see who’s going to be there and make a plan to meet up with people for lunch on those days. When I can’t do that and there is absolutely no way around “mingling” type situations, I need to do use my “buddy system” and bring a friend to mingle in the crowd with, to ease the pain if you will.

At the end of the day, of course I have to mingle. Sort of. I’m a community manager. Part of my job is to love the crap out of my brand in public. Fake it til you make it, so the saying goes. Fake that confidence until it becomes real I suppose. 

But really, truly, I think my networking story is going to be about quality vs. quantity. Maybe I won’t meet ten new people at Inbound Marketing Summit – I’ll have coffee with two. And that’s fine. I don’t need to make a collage of business cards on my bedroom wall of people who’s faces I can’t remember. I’m building that inner circle. Those people I IM in the middle of the day on Gchat just to Gchat. Those people I grab drinks with. Those LinkedIn contacts I’ll actually contact if I or someone I know is looking for a job or advice. But I don’t email them – I text them. The thing is, those two people know ten other people, one of whom may want to meet for coffee at the next minglefest.

Do you Retweet every Tweet that interests you? Do you @reply someone every time you have a reaction to something he or she Tweets?

Recent statistics from social media analytics firm Sysomos report that 71% of Tweets garner no reaction whatsoever. This means no Retweets and no @replies. Sysomos’ statistics are the findings after studying 1.2 billion over the course of two months. The report also reveals that of the 23% of Tweets that do produce an @reply, 85% of those only produce a single @reply.  Just 6% of Tweets get a Retweet.

Mashable jumped on the story, and one of the commenters summarized much of my reaction: No @reply or Retweet does not imply falling on deaf ears. Not all information warrents a share or a response.

I know that Sysomos is just crunching the numbers as they saw them, but I don’t think the research paints a picture of what is really going on on Twitter. A few things:

• What about direct messages?

Sometimes, I’ll get into a conversation about making specific plans to meet up with someone on Twitter. I stop @replying that person and I send a direct message.

Sometimes, I just don’t feel that whatever I have to say is educational, informative, generic, or funny enough to share with the 1,800 or so people who follow me. Those Tweets people were sending didn’t go unnoticed or unreplied to, they were just private interactions via direct message.

• @replies and Retweets aren’t the only means for impact

Did you know you can favorite Tweets? Not that many people do this, but I do know some people who use the “favoriting” option as a way to bookmark Tweets for later. They do this with Tweets of articles they want to read later, for example, and keep track of it using a tool like Favstar.fm. Paper.li allows you to read Tweets in a newspaper-like format. Ever see those Tweets like “the Janet Aronica daily is out”? That’s someone publishing the links they found from their friend’s Tweets that day. Now, they may not have directly Retweeted that individual’s specific Tweet that hour or replied to that person’s Tweet right then.

My point is that just because it’s not in the form of an @reply or a Retweet, that doesn’t mean someone didn’t find a Tweet useful, funny, informative, etc. Also, how many times a day do you see a Tweet and just think “wow” but you are too busy at the time to actually type out a reaction to it? Again, that Tweet didn’t fall on deaf ears, it just didn’t garner a public reaction out of you.

• There’s a lot of “pointless” babble out there

I wonder how much of the 1.2 billion Tweets were just garbage. There’s a lot of junk on Twitter. My company has an “OH” account that’s just Tweets of funny things we say at the office. We’re the only ones who follow it. It’s basically an inside joke to us. (I’m sorry, social media gods, it’s pointless crap but it’s funny to us. ) It’s not meant to be @replied or Retweeted, but the 50 or so Tweets we’ve sent from it could’ve been a part of that 1.2 billion Tweets. I recently saw someone Tweeting about how she had started an anonymous Twitter “diet” account so she could Tweet about everything she ate and how she felt about it to help herself keep on track.

It’s 2010 and we still have that itch we had in high school when all we wanted was to put up a really great away message on AIM. We want to rant, snark and cry. We want to be heard but we don’t want to be held accountable, and I actually think there are a lot of Twitter accounts out reflecting this, but they’re anonymous. It’s your Live Journal, served up 140 characters at a time. Is it pointless? Well, it’s not supposed to garner an @reply or a Retweet, they are just thoughts.

I suppose the argument can be made that in order for a Tweet to really have legs, in order for it to resonate it needs to be shared publicly. However, I think that if you’re a marketer and you’re looking at this stuff, don’t read it as “Twitter is a waste if almost 3/4 doesn’t produce a public reaction.” What I’m going to look at is, how do my company’s account’s followers want to interact with me and share my content other than @replies and Retweets? How are you going to apply this to your marketing?

I'm re-posting this article from TechCrunch because one of my top goals in life is to chase my crazy daydreams. Because at one point, Twitter was somebody's crazy daydream and Michael Arrington said that was stupid. At one point, somebody thought selling shoes online wouldn't work. But somebody kept pursuing that and we have Zappos. And even if it wasn't a company, maybe it was another idea. Maybe somebody thought the OldSpice social media campaign was a bad idea or that no one would buy iPads.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat wearing hipsters burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless, sat up, micro-conversing in the supernatural darkness of Wi-Fi-enabled cafes…” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Tweet

I have an embarrassing confession that I hope someone will relate to.  I’m totally happy to introduce myself to anyone randomly online through LinkedIn, Twitter, email or whatever as I always like to network and connect with like-minded marketing peeps. Then, I go to networking events, and I totally clam up.

I absolutely dread those “networking” hours interspersed between seminars. It’s weird: if someone approaches me, I’m completely friendly and at ease.  But the thought of approaching someone on my own at one of these things terrifies me. Even the thought of approaching someone I have spoken to online sometimes freaks me out.

 It’s very inconsistent with how I normally am. I was a waitress, my tips depended on my ability to schmooze…with strangers. Before I got this job, I was Little Miss Informational Interview, seeking out one-on-one conversations…with strangers. At a bar, I’m a wingman, grabbing guys and telling them to dance with my friends…grabbing strangers.

 Am I just socially awkward IRL?  Why is it that at conferences I get intimidated? Why is it that at a time when my game face should most definitely be on, I’m off?

I admitted this fear for the first time to my boss/mentor when we were discussing our networking strategy for an awards event. This bit of advice stuck: remember that everyone is there to network and talk to random people. It’s not like you’re at the mall or the gym and it’s unexpected (and possibly unwelcome) for you to go up to someone and strike up a conversation. Literally, the point of these events is to go up to people you don’t know, tell them your name, chat them up, and make a connection.

Obvious, right? But no one had laid it out like that for me before. Any lightbulbs going off out there?

Basically, this is just something I’ve noticed.  My friend’s 70-something year old grandmother is on Facebook.  She has her maiden name on there.  This is a lady who probably hasn’t used her maiden name for 50 years or so, but she’s using it again on her Facebook profile.  Same thing with my other friend’s mom, who recently added her maiden name to her Facebook profile.  I also noticed recently married peeps either not changing their Facebook names at all, or keeping their maiden names on their profiles and sticking the new hubby’s name on the end.

The maiden name debockle has long been a soul-searching situation for women, and I feel like it’s gotten more complicated over the years.  It’s gone from “what will I do with my business cards?” to “what will I do with my email?” to “what will I do with my LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounts?”  (And if you’re super nerdy like me, “What will I do with my URL?”) Yikes!

Obviously, the issues to contemplate transcend the importance of social media. “Do I want the same last name as my children?” and “Who am I if I am not a Johnson (insert your maiden name here)?” are thoughts to ponder. Some may say to keep your maiden name for business purposes and use your new name in your personal life.  But thanks to social technology, we live in an increasingly networked world in which business and personal relationships are harder to distinguish.

My thought is that women who are either adding or keeping their maiden names on Facebook  are doing so because they want old friends who don’t know their new last names to be able to find them.  I think the fact of the matter is (even for people who don’t work in marketing and may not give a rip about this so-called personal branding) that your maiden name is sort of like your brand name.  Getting involved with social media, whether or not you use it for business, means you have to establish or re-establish your identity to fit your social networking needs.

I think for ladies my age and up, the problem is easier to solve now than it will be for future brides.  I’m 22, and even the girls that have been involved with social media since their tween days were probably on Myspace.  They probably had really clever usernames like “BSB4Life” and such, so last names aren’t really an issue for us.  But for the Jonas-loving tweens of today, they are establishing first name-last name personal brands on Facebook at an early age.  10, 20 years from now when they tie the knot, how will they re-establish their brands on the internet?

Anyone have thoughts?

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter lately.  No, I’m not stalking you (well, not that much) but I’m doing some PR research.  Sifting through profiles, I noticed something and I want to know if you notice this too.

According to their 160-character bios, the vast majority of people I came across fit into these categories:

-Marketers

-Public Relations people

-Journalists

-Software/web/graphic designers, enthusiasts…people who code.

-Self-proclaimed “social media gurus,” “digital natives,” and “experts” who may or may not know what they are talking about

-Boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, and wives of avid Twitter users. Significant others introduced/suckered into micro-blogging who probably still make fun of it but are secretly addicted.

Follow me for a moment into the idea that we are at least in part defined by our occupations.  Sure, there are nurses and teachers and lawyers on Twitter.  There are tons of politicians and entertainers on Twitter, but I think we can argue to some extent that they too are using Twitter as marketers.  I’m concerned that a huge portion of Twitter isn’t so much this even playing field of Common Joes, but more of a media-infatuated, geeky, techy clique.  When we the marketing/PR types get excited about “putting the public back in public relations” and encouraging our clients to engage in conversation with consumers – who are we telling them to talk to?

Don’t get me wrong: I love me some Twitter.  I just wish it was more diverse.

I can’t begin to tell you how incredibly proud my parents must be.  They spent all that money on a big, fancy college education and the culmination of all this knowledge is a 22 page paper about Twitter.

This “twpaper” is about @CoffeeGroundz, a coffee house in Houston, TX that uses Twitter to connect with customers.  I wrote it for my senior seminar class, which is the capstone communications course at my college.  I went through the class kicking and screaming, but I’m happy to say that I learned a lot from this project and found the research to be fascinating. I would like to thank everyone who helped me with this project, especially @coffeegroundz, @keithwolf, @cwelsh, @toadstar, @mikedaniel, @lfarnsworth, @gdruckman and @jgrassman. I was touched by your generosity.

I did a case study that involved a content analysis (stalking) of the @coffeegroundz Twitter traffic and interviews (the email kind) with several customers/Twitter followers.  I originally wanted to do a paper about social media and ROI, but then I realized that #1 it’s Pandora’s box and #2 qualitative research on the topic is more within my time-frame and skill set.  The paper touches on the topic of ROI, but looks at it more in a cause-effect sense and not straight metrics or anything like that.  The first part of the paper has some more general information about how businesses use Twitter, then there’s some heady discussion about theories and previous research, and then the fun part (pg. 12) with the research findings and interviews is at the end.

So, here’s the paper.  Enjoy all 31,985 delicious characters of social media marketing goodness.

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