or... stated another way... if you have 17,000 people following you on buzz!, then you're not going to be able to engage people the same way you do if you only have 30 (or even 300.) it's just not humanly possibly for your fingers to fly that fast or for your brain to process that many independent threads of conversation.
but in that last post, i didn't really offer any suggestions for people with large social media followings. this post is my attempt to move from punditry to consultantishness by making some prescriptive recommendations. i'm picking leo laporte as a use case since everyone seems to know who he is and it just seems like he needs some good advice about using social media at this point. so until he gets some good advice, he can simply follow mine.
first, an admonishment: don't bitch about social media being an echo chamber when you're using social media as an echo chamber. leo, please, you have a bazillion followers in your social media network. you're not using buzz to share the latest youtube cat video with 10 friends or see who wants to meet up at the pub for a drink after work. you're using it to promote your tech related communication empire.
i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you use social media for commercial purposes, you'll get a slightly different engagement level than if you use it for... well... social purposes. saying that social media is a crock cause it doesn't fit your particular use case makes it look like you don't know how to use it.
a better way to handle this situation would probably have been to say, "wow, i was using the tool sub-optimally" and then go into a well reasoned discussion of ways you could use it better.
the bottom line here is that blaming the tool rarely makes you look good; and you pretty much have to be bill gates or the pope to be able to pull it off properly.
the next suggestion? monitor your network, figure out why you're not getting feedback from your peeps. okay, so i made the suggestion above that social media is all about stuff like meeting up in the pub for a game of darts or bragging about your offspring. that "social" use of social media is a big use case, but not the only one. sure, you can do professional things on buzz or twitter and maybe even facebook and myspace.
if you are taking the time to tweet about something commercial or professional, you're going to want to know you're getting value for your investment in time. you'll want to know who is and who isn't replying to your tweets (and why.)
once you know why you're not getting responses from your network, you may want to be a friggin social director; engage people who seem introverted.
for instance... when i tweet something vaguely interesting, there are a couple of people i know will retweet it or reply to it. every now and again, i go through the list of people i'm following and mention them explicitly, like "hey @soandso, what do you think of this thing i just blogged?"
this works as well for net.celebrities as it does for us regular folks. the value of a social media is in getting perspective from friends of friends. most of my twitter friends turn out to be virtual worlds people with a smattering of old friends and roommates. by engaging smart people in my network, i can kind of drive a cross pollination of ideas between people i would like to see conversing. see how this works? by being the one that picks who to engage, i get to shape the conversation; plus, i have a front row seat to the exchange of ideas.
i would really love to see a service that tells me how long it's been since someone mentioned my twitter handle in a conversation and how long it's been since i mentioned theirs. i could use such a tool to tell me who i need to pester in a tweet.
oh. one more thing. i almost forgot to mention, do not treat buzz, twitter or facebook like email. there's a social contract embedded in the email system; if i send it, you'll eventually read it (or you'll eventually ignore it.) but the point is you can defer the decision to ignore it or pay attention to it. social media tools like twitter and facebook are a little more ephemeral. you haev to internalize this.
when you tweet or buzz or post a facebook update, your communication window with them is the length of time it takes for your update to scroll off the screen. sure, some people use advanced client applications that layer an email-like interface on top of a social microblogging service, but for the most part they're the exception to the rule.
facebook and buzz are not as bad as twitter and status.net on this score, but you still have to take timing into account. if you're targeting an audience for a particular status update, maximize your chances for success by timing important status messages. if you want "business types" to read an article linked to in a tweet, time the tweet for business hours. if you're targeting people in a geographic area, don't tweet it when they're asleep.
so far i've talked about things that work for people with small networks as well as large. but people who want to have a large social network are going to eventually run into bandwidth problems. at some point you're going to start getting more updates per second than you can process.
i've been playing around with futuretweets.com as a "twitter timeshifting" tool. futuretweets isn't the most feature rich site in the world, but it does one thing and it does it well and that's worth something.
what do you do then? consider registering "topic based" personas.
other people will likely be following you for different reasons. some will be interested in your "social" self while others are interested in your professional life. consider creating two distinct personas: one for business, one for personal. net.celebrities may want to consider even more.
in an ideal world, there would be a service that lets you subscribe to individuals hash tags. sadly, that doesn't exist at the moment.
anyway, these are just a few ideas. there is no "one true way" to use twitter or buzz or facebook. but you may have specific requirements for your social media. i'm hoping these suggestions can serve as a starting point for your own suggestions.
good luck and happy tweeting!
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