Toluu

Global Neighbourhoods

Following Social Media Wherever It Leads

SM Global Report: China's Kaiser KuoOctober 21

Straddling 2 Worlds with Balance & Understanding

             

             [Photo by Guenevere, Kaiser Kuo's daughter, 4&1/2]

I leave for my first visit to China in just 18 days, so this interview is particularly timely for me. For the 55 percent of my readers based in the US, I believe it is also timely for you. It seems to me that China is America's most important relationship. It is also among the most complex with apparent misconceptions on both sides of a very large ocean.

That is why Kaiser Kuo, Ogilvy China Group Director for Digital Strategy, is an ideal subject of this 112th SM Global Report. Both charismatic and articulate, Kaiser seems to straddle the two worlds more comfortably than anyone else. 

Born in upstate New York and raised in Arizona with degrees from both UC Berkeley and the University of Arizona, Kaiser has lived fulltime in Beijing since the early 1990s and his passion and understanding of his adopted country comes through clearly in this interview.

Kaiser has had what one might call a quixotic career. It includes a good deal of professional writing including

Measuring Influence vs. PopularityOctober 20

I had an interesting talk with some folk on Twitter this morning about not mistaking popularity with influence. In fact, I find this to be among the most misunderstood issues in measuring social media. Popularity is easy to measure. All you do, is look at the total number of visitors and/or the frequency of visits. You can increase sheer numbers by a few tricks the the SEO crowd will tell you about, or by posting frequently or by extending a conversation cited on TechMeme. You need to be frequent and you need to drop a lot of big names names like "Google," "Apple," or "Obama."

A killer headline for the SEO folks would be "Googling Apple for Obama followers who use Firefox." You'd get a ton of traffic, but would it be relevant to your purposes? And would you be influencing anyone at all.

But numerical totals actually tell you extremely little about influence. People could be coming because they hate what you are saying and want to keep an eye on the opposing side. I follow a couple of political blogs, for example, where I fundamentally and passionately disagree with the authors.

For a very long time, the site was called Naked Conversations, which made good sense since it was started as a place to transparently write a book of the same name. It took s a while to discover that the site name was inflating our traffic. People were going to Google and typing in graphical variations of the keyword "Naked" and this site popped up. The more searches, the mo

Using Lethal Generosity in Social MediaOctober 17

    

              [Jeremiah Owyang, a pioneer in lethal generosity. Photo by Shel]

It's a term I had  used before, but somehow when I used it at a recent KD Paine & Partners, off-campus client meeting, I saw it jell in the eyes of a few folks in the audience. I call it "lethal generosity," the concept that the most generous members of any social media company are the most credible and influential and as such, they can devastate their competition in the marketplace.

In short, the company whose representative posts the most tips, links, advice, case studies, best practices that followers find useful will always rises to the top, not just in influence but also in search results. The more outbound links you post, the more inbound links you are likely to receive.

One of my favorite illustrations is ancient in social media--over two years old.  Jeremiah Owyang is a senior analyst at Forrester Research and a recognized online community expert. A couple of years back he was at Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), a global leader in data storage a category t

SM Global Report: Fr. Roderick, The Podcasting PriestOctober 6

A Daily Breakfast of Fun & the Human Condition

         

 

I seem to have a lot in common with Father Roderick, the Dutch podcasting priest. We both have a fascination with technology, yet we both are more interested in how to use technology for story telling than for love of source code and silicon. We also both love to write about our travel experiences and the people we meet and we both find ourselves more than a little concerned with the human condition. Sometimes, we use humor, to lightened our subject matter.

There are two essential differences in us. First, from my perspective, his collar is juxtaposed and my in is not.He's also more prone to wearing black than I am. Second, he is an extremely good podcaster, while I have learned to stick with text. Father Roderick is in my opinion, is among the best there is in mass audience podcasting, and trust me, you need not be Catholic or religious to enjoy his highly entertaining Daily Breakfast shows.

My point of these comparisons is to point out something, that he reveals almost daily. People everywhere are pretty much alike, even if our diverse cultures s

The Power of ReTweetingOctober 5

I talked on Twitter a few times this week about "retweeting," or "RT" for short. It became clear there is some confusion about the practice and I wanted to expand on it.

Retweeting allows the power of the network to take place, in pretty much the same way a blog link can extend the conversation from one blogger to a great many, sometimes at a very rapid rate. If you Tweet something of interest and you have an audience of 10, or 100 or 1000 and no one retweets it, that is far as your message goes. But if you have 10 followers, and one of them has 100 and he or she retweets you, your message reaches that many more people. If of you of this wider ring... and so on.

I retweet usually retweet because someone else said something that I believe some of my followers will find interesting. It usually means I like what was said and want to give credit. It sometimes means that I really disagreed with what was said and am curious to see what others will say. Sometimes--when there's a disaster, a fire, an Earthquake or a Red Sox post season loss, a great many people retweet the information very quickly.

News of a San Francisco earthquake and more recently the China earthquake spread around the world many times before traditional news services picked it up. While sometimes this news contains factual errors, the process seems to filter for truth. In fact, many traditional news organizations now follow Twitter to get early information, often from people who are at