Misconceptions in 140 Characters or Less

I have been a fan of twitter since I begun using the service two years ago. Twitter is a a mini blogging tool that asks one question: What are you doing? Posts are short; up to 140 characters to be exact, and can be sent or received through the web, standalone programs like TweetDeck, and text message. Twitter has been used in a number of manners including posting articles, documenting trips, planning events, and letting your friends in the area know where you are. Twitter allows you to become a fan of the service’s users and allow those users to follow you in return. When the service was primarily populated by internet technophiles and web geeks, users typically followed each other to help build the community.

But as twitter has gained momentum and become populated by celebrities, musicians, and business leaders, these power users are unable to follow their hundreds of thousands of fans. This has turned the service from a two-way communication medium into one where power users broadcast messages and get real time feedback from their many fans. This has sparked what is commonly called the attention economy, where opinions have become the currency of social networks like twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and etcetera. The thought is that comments from everyday internet users provide more insight into the quality of a company’s product or the integrity of an individual than bulk spending on public relations. Tara Hunt, who has recently written a book on how to use social networks to build your business called The Whuffie Factor, recently blogged about the importance of the attention economy in promoting her new book.

However, of those that answered my tweet and asked for a book are actually looking forward to the book. This group is busy, too. Career and lives get in the way, so I probably will see about half of them able to actually get to reading the book in the near future. And, as blog posts fall off from reading, Maybe 5 of them will actually get around to posting something. Say, their collective readers are somewhere around 500 - and that number is really conservative, since most blog posts will see long term hits, even those with a low readership (I will also do my best to drive people to those posts). Adding this column up, I see a sum total of possible ‘eyeballs’ reading about the book being 500.

And from the test earlier, 500 is greater than 0. Therefore, I’m sending books to people who want them and are more likely to read them. Not to mention that the people who are just starting out on their blogging/tweeting/online community adventure today very possibly could be the ‘influencers’ of tomorrow. I started as a nobody. Kathy started from zero. Cory and Shel both came from being unknown to being well-known. I totally remember when Michael (TechCrunch) was just starting to write about startups - it was about 5 years ago. He went from 0 to over 1 million in less than 2 years. Like I said, today EVERYONE is an influencer.
Whuffie Math

I personally use twitter in a bubble, taking advantage of the service’s continuous flow of posts. To me, twitter offers an information buffet where I can pick and choose snippets that are important to both my career in banking and personal interests outside of work. Most recently, I have learned about XBRL; a financial markup language that promises to make financial reporting more transparent, short term investment strategies in the stockmarket through the users of StockTwits, and what promises to be an excellent Philadelphia meetup hosted by Mashable. In addition, I use the service to meet new friends in the same way I used IRC, BBS systems, IRC, mailing lists, and web forums while growing up.

But thursday morning, I had a very different experience on twitter. I was responding to Colin Ong an Economist out of Singapore who posed a question on leveraging your twitter fanbase to improve ROI.

Colin, who uses cost-benefit analysis to determine effective use of his time, limits how much of that time is spent building his twitter fan base. Based on coversations that we have had, Colin believes that time is expensive based on the formal training that he has and limited (to 168 hours per week). Colin has 2,340 followers which is substantially fewer than internet self-promoters iJustine (436,584), Gary Vaynerchuk (231,828), Robert Scoble (81,410), and Jason Calacanis (65,685). These are users who primarily do business on the internet, and do not have mainstream celebrity status such as Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, or Jimmy Fallon. However, iJustine and Gary Vaynerchuk benefit from being featured users by twitter itself.

Intrigued by Colin’s tweet, I brought the case of Gary Vaynerchuk to his attention.

Gary is an iconoclastic wine retailer and entrepreneur motivator who has leveraged his strong twitter fan base into a seven-figure, ten-book deal. Per TechCrunch:

The wine retailer-turned-video-blogger is cashing in his Internet fame for a seven-figure, 10-book deal with HarperStudio. That comes to at least $100,000 per book, which is decent for first-time an unproven author, but he is going to have to hustle to keep up the interest for ten books. His first one comes out in September, and is called: Crush It! Turn Your Passion into Profits in a Digital World.

One thing Vay•ner•chuck has going for him is a built-in audience he cultivated one e-mail at a time, starting with his his popular video wine blog, Wine Library TV. Then he started branching out beyond wine into marketing, motivational speaking, other Web video shows, wine-review site Corkd, and even T-shirt search (because everyone is always looking for a good T-shirt).

What sets Gary apart from other internet business people who receive book deals (including Tara Hunt who was earlier cited), is that he does not maintain a traditional blog. He maintains a video blog with brief synopsises of each video’s content and has over 5,000 twitter updates. Both take inordinate amounts of time and work to maintain, but neither highlight Gary’s ability to pen a series of books. Which is what made his deal a positive outlier in my mind.

However, I didn’t proofread the tweet and said Gary didn’t “read books” instead of Gary didn’t “write books”. If this were any other day, I likely wouldn’t have noticed and the internet would have continued to churn along with no ill effects. But soon my BlackBerry began vibrating to no end. Gary had posted a part-defensive, part-sarcastic response to his followers.

And their responses reminded me that despite the age of the internet, users are quick to flame — or send messages filled with fervor.

I have been using the internet long enough, that electronic barrages such as the one demonstrated above roll off my back with ease. Especially when they are mild and stem from a minor misunderstanding. But with the internet becoming mainstream and users posting under their real names instead of pseudonyms, what happens when someone takes their threats to the next level? If I had engaged in a heated discussion with Gary’s fans, the situation could have escallated into a real-world disaster. In this hypothetical example, a disgruntled fan could attempt to track me down via phone or in person and make physical threats against me. This would generate a huge personal relations disaster for Gary if blogs and mainstream media outlets caught wind of what happened. And because information is readily available on the internet it would be when, and not if, the story was picked up. And I am certain this would have a negative impact on Gary’s self-proclaimed $60 million business.