Q&A: Social Media Resources
In this, our first Q&A episode, we answer a question from Ryan Crowe @doctorcrowe of Twilio, who asked us about what resources we use to keep up with our social media related areas of expertise.
Randy, Scott, and Marc provide some tips, tricks, and a brief resource list.
Transcript
Dana: Hi. My name is Dana Boyd and I’m the author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives Of Network Teens. You’re listening to the Social Media Clarity Podcast.
Randy: Welcome to the podcast. I’m Randy Farmer.
Scott: I’m Scott Moore.
Marc: And I’m Marc Smith.
Randy: This week we’re going to introduce our new format, Questions and Answers … Our first question is from Ryan Crow. On Twitter, he is known as Dr. Crow. Ryan asks, “Where do you guys read about social media? Do you have different resources for different aspects, for example community management, building a proper network, contact research, etc.?”
First of all, we’d like to thank you very much, Ryan, for giving us our first questions. We’re very excited to start this new segment.
Marc: Thanks for the question.
Scott: Yeah, thanks.
Randy:I’m going to break my answer into two parts - Face to Face and Online Resources
To me, face to face time is making live connections with people who are experts in the industry. (This may be by tools like Skype or Google Plus Hangouts.)
My chief piece of advice is: Don’t try to follow everything and everyone in the industry all at once! But, instead - connect with and follow people who you can trust who are digesting it for you.
Here’s a tip on how to do that: I’m fortunate enough to live in the SF Bay area - where many large conferences come to town. For example, the massive GDC (Game Developers Conference). Now, I do not attend the GDC to any great extent, but many of the people I consider to be experts in my areas of interest *do attend* - and so this is a rare chance to meet with them while they are in town. So I make the trip to San Francisco for at least the entire day to meet with as many of them as possible. And when I see them, even if only for 5-10 minutes, I ask them three key questions:
- What have you seen at the show that is amazing?
- What do you think is missing?
- What disappointed you?
Whatever they say is amazing, requires my immediate attention - especially if I hadn’t heard of it before. This is probably the only thing (other than a meeting with an expert or client) that would drag me onto the show floor!
But the things that are missing and the things that are disappointing are longer-term bookmarks for me to look into. We may spend more time discussing these items than the others. I see mismatches in expectations as opportunities to learn something new about my industry.
I also like to attend small face-to-face conferences and gatherings. Specifically associated with my areas of expertise, such as the IIW (Internet Identity Workshop) and several online community manager conferences, including the CMX Summit and OCTribe Unconference (which I helped organize in 2013.)
But, there are even smaller events - Salons and Meetups. You can learn a lot of information by socially “rubbing elbows” with other local people in your industry.
Randy:Part 2
The Online Resources I count on are also inherently social.
I use LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter - and as with face-to-face, again I choose to follow the influencers who are doing the most synthesis - the people who are paying attention to the issues that matter - but have limited time, and so share carefully what they are interested in. They give you the biggest bang for your buck.
I use Feedly as an RSS reader - In years passed I used to subscribe to large tech sites like Engaget and TechCrunch. I don’t anymore - those became fire hoses of unfiltered information (or worse, press releases.) I do follow a few influencer blogs, though those people tend to send out notices on Twitter or LinkedIn if they have anything particularly insightful to share.
Probably the most important thing in my RSS reader is Google keyword search. If I’m interested in a particular author or issue I use Google’s ability to create a search as an RSS feed to keep up to date on the topic.
There is another online resource (feed) that I’ve found useful: Newsle. It grabs internet news items about people in your LinkedIn Network and emails them to you each day. This allows me to keep up with what they are doing and often provides me with an excuse to contact them. :-)
In short, I use my social network as my primary resource to get information in a timely and filtered manner.
Scott:For me, I have far too many RSS feeds and follow too many people on various social media channels, but I am pretty ruthless about scanning and picking out what I need.
In terms of RSS feeds that I read on a regular basis, we’ve been blessed by having a growing number of community manager specific blogs with RSS feeds. The ones that I like to read are thecommunitymanager, managingcommunities, and mycommunitymanager. Also, there are a couple of subscription-based groups such as The Community Round Table and Community Geek.
Beyond the community management specific sites I then look to a broad range of topic areas. The blog called The Psychology of Video Games is not limited to games and gives insights to many kinds of online behavior and influences. mobileYouth is very good at providing practical, down to earth insight on how teens are using social and mobile tech. Kissmetrics is the place to go understand web analytics and specifically how to get the most from Google Analytics. I also pay attention to Slashdot.org. That’s my firehose for checking out legal issues. They tend to be the canary in the coal mine whenever any kind of legal issues comes up, such as proposed legislation, or court decisions on copyright and privacy issues that might have an impact on practical work in online communities. I like Ars Technica because it provides long form and in-depth articles on both technical, social, and legal issues.
As I said, I ruthlessly filter my feeds by collecting what I think are the most valuable into one section of my RSS reader. I also skim articles and either tag or save them to an offline reader such as Pocket so I don’t feel bogged down reading each and every article as they come in.
Digging even deeper, I prefer to go straight to academic research papers. First Monday is a free peer-reviewed online journal devoted to the topic of the internet. Juergen Derlath’s - The Virtual Community Blog reviews and integrates several papers on a particular topic to offer both an understanding and practical tips. I also use Google Scholar to search for new and old academic papers. As I find papers that are relevant and interesting, I go back to Google Scholar to search on author names which often leads me to additional relevant papers and research.
If I find a paper that is interesting but it’s behind a paywall, there are two tricks that I use. The first one is to find the authors profile page at their institutions websites. Often they have permission to be able to publish their own papers. If you don’t find the paper you are looking for, try writing directly to the authors as they may be allowed to send you a copy if you request it. The other trick that I use is online journal access through a public library in a large city. I know San Francisco, New York City, and other cities offer services where if you live in their state, you can get a library card from a large urban library that gives you access to online journal databases. Also, even local libraries may have interlibrary loan services that can get you access to academic journal collections.
I also like to go to conferences and there some specific ones that happening in 2014. The CMX Summit has already taken place as of this podcast, but videos of the speaker sessions are available and we’ll have links in the show notes. Coming up very soon is the Virtual Community Summit in London. ForumCon takes place in San Francisco this June.And later in July is the Community Leadership Summit in Portland, Oregon.
In addition to conferences you may find local meet ups around social media and online community. Meetup.com is a great place to start looking. Other places to look are local co-working spaces. If you can’t seem to find anything, consider starting your own and start gathering folks around you. We’re community builders. This is what we do.
Sometimes you can’t get to a conference and there are quite a number of online places to be able to gather with other social media and community professionals. Twitter chats are great. There are two that I recommend. The first one is #CMGRchat and that takes place every Wednesday. The other one is #CommBuild, and that mainly focuses on non-profit communities. Social network platforms such as Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn host groups. I recommend checking them out, lurking a bit to see who are having deep, meaningful conversations, and introduce yourself.
Marc: Social media is a big topic and you can certainly find information all over the internet, the newspapers and in many conversations. People are talking about how social media affects politics, business, new opportunities for living, new devices. How do you focus in on the most important messages to try to save some time and stay on top of all of these?
The basic method is to use your social network as an organic knowledge filter. I have cultivated over many years connections to a lot of really smart people. By listening to the right people what they’re interested in often is what’s interesting out there. The organic knowledge filter, using the people you connect to help you identify what’s new is clearly an important technique. It’s essentially the application of the sociological concept of social capital, moving from the idea of know how to know who.
That having been said there are certainly a lot of meetings or conferences that are places where really important work in this area is being presented. I’m thinking about the upcoming Sunbelt Conference. That’s the conference for network analysts, the International Network for Social Network Analysis. INSNA.org holds the conference every year. That will be in Florida and 500 people who care a lot about social networks will be there. Worth looking for, the hash tag will be #sunbelt2014.
Later this month in February there’s the Strata Conference. That’s the O'Reilly conference on big data. A lot of social media has essential become a new source of data for Big Data Analytics so the Strata Conference is a good place to go as well. One of the best conferences of the year I think for social media and research would be ICWSM, the International Conference on Web Blogs and Social Media. Just type that into Google. It has some of the best quality research and findings about people studying the shape and dynamics of social media. That’s certainly a place to go and listen to for new findings in this area.
The other thing to do is of course to pick the right people to follow on services like Twitter and all of the other social media platforms. If I could pick anyone, I guess somebody like Duncan Watts who is currently a researcher at Microsoft Research who is publishing some very empirical work about how social networks move messages from place to place, how they diffuse, who is actually an influencer and who isn’t. That’s somebody I like to keep my ear pointed to.
Randy: We’d like to thank Ryan Crow one more time for asking a great question. Thanks, Ryan.
Marc: Thanks, Ryan.
Scott: Thank you, Ryan.
Marc: Good question.
Scott: If you find our podcast valuable, please help others find us by subscribing to us on iTunes or Stitcher, liking us on Facebook, and sharing podcast links through your own social networks.
Randy: The hosts of this podcast are available for consulting, specializing in social network analysis, online community management, and social media product design.
Marc: I’m Marc Smith, and you can find me at marc@connectedaction.net.
Scott: You can reach me, Scott Moore, at communl.com and on Twitter @scottmoore.
Randy: And my email address is randy.farmer@pobox.com. You can see a list of my consulting services at rosenfeldmedia.com.