Here are my twitter influence results on Jan 29, 2009 for the past week of Tweeting:

Click image above to enlarge results.

Relative authority

• NON EXISTENT
• I have tweeted nothing valuable this week that someone would want to re-tweet into their own stream for their followers.
• based on 0 retweets of @x10′s updates by others

Relative visibility

• SLOWLY EMERGING
• A few people reply to me. Not bad, but it shows that I need to engage others more in conversation.
• based on 9 references to @x10

Relative generosity

• SLOWLY EMERGING
• I don’t take the time to retweet other people’s content. Sheesh, how can I expect to be re-tweeted if I don’t do it myself.
• based on @x10 retweeting 1 times on behalf of others

Relative reach

• DEVELOPING
• My reach has been growing steadily since Guy Kawasaki convinced me to follow all my followers on Twitter.  This has been helpful in adding 8 to 10 new followers a day.
• based on @x10′s 417 followers:

Relative velocity

• SLOWLY EMERGING
• I think 14 updates in 7 days kinda sucks personally, that works out to only two posts a day. I update Facebook more than that.
• based on 14 updates from @x10

Relative clout

• NON EXISTENT
• None of the Top 100 Influential Tweeters tweet to me.  Makes sense.
• based on 0 influential Twitter users referencing @x10

Relative value of contribution

• DEVELOPING
• This score is basically how much needless crap I post, divided by the amount of useful information I post (references, links, hashtags, retweets).  Definitely can improve here.
• based on a signal to noise ratio of 35.7%:

How not to suck.

• Have some real conversations and try to move into the 4th or 5th stage of Twitter Acceptance. (See graphic below)
• Retweet great content when you see it.
• Tweet valuable material.
• Make friends with Twitter royalty? :)

Want to help me stop sucking? Feel free to tweet me by copying this into your twitter client:

RT @x10: How to suck on Twitter. http://bit.ly/J9qM

The reason you want more followers is the law of big numbers: the more followers, the more people talking about what you do, the more you can reach the tipping point. If you think you “know” exactly who can and will help you, you are deluding yourself. [Read his post How to use Twitter]

I don’t have a large following on my feed, maybe one or two new followers every two days or so, but I definitely haven’t been in the habit of following back.

When I think about it in this way, I am missing out on conversation. All of those people who subscribe to my twitter feed can’t get back to me.  (Direct messages and @replies don’t show up in your feed when you aren’t following).  I’ve been treating Twitter more like my Facebook friending or LinkedIn professional connections, focusing on quality of relationship rather than a conduit for discussion.

Soooo… i’ve taken Kawasaki’s advice on following everyone. I signed up for socialtoo.com which is a service that will send a thank you message to anyone who follows me and lets me automatically follow those who follow me. Hopefully Tweetdeck whill help me sift through relevant tweets.

If you follow me on Twitter prepare to get followed!

Face-to-face service can make all the difference in how your brand is perceived by your customer. You might have the greatest offering in the world, but one bad experience with a cranking customer service rep can change that customer’s opinion in a heartbeat. In this age of new media, one bad experience can be a big deal for your brand. Information spreads like wildfire on the web.

Service industries (restaurants, photographers, doctors etc) check Yelp.com and see what people are saying for you. If you are in a smaller city, without Yelp, then monitor local forums for ratings on your service.

A poor rating on Yelp isn’t the end of the world. Use it as valuable incite as to what you can improve. I’ve seen tons of companies on Yelp respond to a customer who gave them a bad review to apologize and ask what they could do to fix it.  Nine times out of ten, the unhappy reviewer returns to update their rating and explain how awesome it was that they were heard and what was done to make it better.

Companies and techies make sure that you are on Satisfaction – People Powered Customer Service.  Make sure you are listening to what your customers want from your product. Encourage feedback and open dialogue and encourage your employees to interact with the people who use your product.  If your users are techies and bloggers they can have a huge impact on how you are perceived by the blogoshpere and the technophile masses.

2. Monitor how users tag and keyword you outside of your own site.

One of the beauties of tagging and social media is how easy it is to see the tags and categories that your customers give your content.  I recently read a post by Jeremiah Owyang called Use Delicious to uncover your brand (and improve your SEO). He explains how to use delicious to see how people have saved your posts and pages.  He shows how sometimes we, as bloggers or content authors, categorize our post in the way that we feel is appropriate for the user… or maybe, in some cases, the way we want to “spin it”.  But using delicious, the truth and appropriateness of our own tags can easily be compared with how your users actually tag it.

This can also be extremely valuable keyword research for SEO and figuring out a more organized user friendly information architecture for your own website.

3. Monitor all of the web’s channels.

Monitoring your brand on the “web” is no longer a simple as maintaining your corporate website. In fact it’s more important to manage your brand on OTHER people’s websites.

There are so many different channels that make an impact on your overall online presence. This graphic called People Streams from Elliance SEO Services is a great illustration of the many ways people can find you online and thus can influence by your brand’s rep.

The technologies in this graphic will constantly evolve (for example, the channel of Microblogging like Twitter isn’t on this graphic).  However, the principle is still the same: Go where the people are talking.

(Read the book Groundswell for more info on how to keep up with the technology curve.

Do this for each channel:

• Investigate if your brand is already being talked about in the channel by
  • Searching comments and tags for your brand name and your URL
  • Monitor referring links in your web stats
• Determine if it’s a viable channel for you to be involved in regularly by researching the demographic most involved in that channel. PS. If people are already on there talking about you, posting about you and commenting about you, then that’s a pretty big hint that you should be there too.
• Come up with a plan for measuring each channel on a regular basis. Try to increase communication through a particular channel and monitor the results.

Today I signed up for Plurk.  It’s kind of like a graphical Twitter, which I have trouble updating anyways (!), but I saw the Plurk timeline and I was intrigued.  I like how it promps you with words for your status.

“Christen likes…”, “Christen hates…”, “Christen was…” really helps you come up with something to write if you’re a little shakey with the whole status game – hmmm maybe Facebook could give that a try too?

Anyways, on to Social Capital…

It caught my attention that Plurk uses Karma points to keep track of your participation in the community.

Certain features (changing your Profile title), that are only available to you once you “give back” to the Plurk community.

A week ago I listened to an awesome interview on social capital.  So seeing  my Karma score on Plurk immediately got me thinking about my own Social Capital.  And perhaps if my whuffie (the currency you accumulate based on your reputation and your interactions with others) could be affected by how I used this tool.

It’s true that certain web apps like Yahoo Answers are trying to someone track and display social capital by giving points for the number of questions you answer.  You then accumulate a credibility “rating” within the Yahoo Answers system.   The problem with it is that people realize that all they have to do is respond to a million questions and their score will go up.  It doesn’t mean they have to write something worth while.

I think Plurk may be getting a lot closer to a measure social capital but still it’s still far off.  They avoid some of Yahoo’s pitfalls by deeming the quality of actions as increasing or decreasing Karma.  The basics are:

Get karma by:

• Updating your profile (picture, location, birth day etc.) will gain your more karma
• Quality plurking each day
• Responses from other plurkers will gain you karma.
• Inviting your real friends will boost your karma

Lower your karma:

• Karma will be lowered if you request friendship and get rejected
• Getting unfollowed by friends will lower your karma
• Spamming other users will lower your karma
• Inactivity for a long period will decrease your karma

But can you really track it?

The feeling of losing Karma really sucks. I just logged in and it said I’m at zero.  That kind makes me feel embarrassed in this little plurk community.  “Hey be my friend, I have zero Karma”.

I also feel like Social Capital may be really difficult to track cause as soon as you put rules on it, people figure out a way to capitalize on it. Whether it’s building an app to post for you or adding Plurk accounts for all your clients etc.

It also makes me wonder if I should stop signing up for every little app under the sun if I have poopy scores of zero sitting there for the world to find.  Quality over quantity, Christen!  Perhaps weigh Twitter vs Plurk and commit already! :)

Tara Hunt, author of the The Whuffie Factor (and the intervee above) explains that Whuffie can’t really be tracked by normal stats tracking like we do for page hits etc.  Your social capital is extremely valuable simply because of that… because you can’t “buy” it like ad words or quick fix it like other SEO.

If you’re interested in listening to the whole interview with Tara it’s here.

If you have a few moments I really suggest you read the whole article, it’s worth the time.

It made me wonder what non-web companies like GM and Baskin Robbins might find to say to their customers.  Reading through, it seems that GM Blogs’ tweets seem to revolve around fans test driving new cars or asking each other if they’ve seen new articles or blogs on cars.  Baskin Robbins is really asking for customer feedback and telling their followers about events and promotions.

As I’m writing this, I’ve been looking at tweets from people I respect like Scobeleizer.  I see from his last tweet (4 minutes ago), that he is watching a Barack Obama speech live on CNN.  He says “twitterers are going crazy” as Barack Obama gives a live video rebuttal to John McCain’s attack on his Cuban policy…. I think I’ll wrap this up and tune in. :)