Building Expert Networks with Social Media
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Sep 27, 2010
Ken Sickles (@bstg), global product director with Dow Jones & Company, presented an unusual use case for social media at the 2010 American Marketing Association’s Marketing Research Conference.
From the dawn of civilization to the year 2003, we created as much information as there are grains of sand (7.5 * 10^18, according to the University of Hawaii). We now create that amount of information every three days, according to Eric Schmidt of Google. With all that information, one out of every three web searches fail.
Social technologies offer hope for sorting through this information: LinkedIn has 80 million users, Twitter has 160 million users, and Facebook has over 500 million users. Originally, the World Wide Web was about connecting and linking to documents; but now the social web is about connecting and linking people.
We are rapidly approaching 100 million tweets per day: 20% mention a product or brand, and 25% contain a link. As a result of such traffic, social networks are driving more traffic to sites than Google: for instance, 35% of USA Today’s traffic is from social networks, with 6% from Google. By this time next year, Facebook will refer more people to video than Yahoo! does today.
Ken uses Twitter as an expert network, looking for:
- New sources of information
- Filtered view of what’s important
- Companies and products
- Thought leadership
- Industry trends
He looked for the really smart people on the network and saw where they were directing people. He discovered industry associations for procurement and rankings of procurement technology, providing valuable background. A Google News query would have many stories on supply chain disruption, but experts who track this every day provide a filtered view of the world. The experts talk about the challenges as well as potential solutions, demonstrating thought leadership.
When getting started with Twitter, it’s about who you follow. Use directories and lists, checking out directory services like Listorious: build lists to manage large networks. See who the experts are following, and add them to your lists.
When getting started with LinkedIn, reach beyond your colleagues and former co-workers and join discussion groups.
When getting started with Facebook, it’s about the Community Pages and Groups. Facebook creates community pages when Facebook sees enough traffic on a keyword. You can see who is commenting, and who is driving discussion.
Start by listening to what people are saying, and then engage when you’re ready. There are facilitation services out there, such as Aardvark and Quora. The strength of your network is going to help you more than your ability to search with Google. “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”