The Enterprise of One

I read a really interesting post by Stephen Martin on TechCrunch titled, "The Enterprise of One".

Martin talks about how a new breed of entrepreneur is rising, where the determinants of successful enterprise are no longer limited to background, resources or education.

Due to the changing business landscape, rapid techonological innovation, and reduced barriers to entry and transaction costs, Martin argues that "individual strengths, passions, and expertise" are the most important factors in whether an individual or business is successful.

I would wholeheartedly agree with this.

I am my Personal Brand, I am an Enterprise of One.

I believe that I am truly the only person responsible for my successes and failures.

Sure, there is luck and other factors involved, but ultimately it comes down to me, the individual.

I can start a blog or an online business with little or no capital.

I have access to resources where I can obtain funding, or simply advice from experienced entreprenuers who have been there before.

And although I am well-educated, there are still many things that I don't know. But with the web, the resources to do my own programming or SEO are right at my fingertips, meaning that I can constantly improve.

I'm ready to be part of this new class of entreprenuer, I just don't know where to start.

5 Social Media Articles You Should Read

It's one of those weeks. Long and hard, a lack of sleep, tons of homework and studying, but it's finally done. I can relax for about two days because fall break is here. I'm so drained I can't really write a blog post, so I'm just going to do some content curating, which is a new term I learned this week. Apparently I'd been doing it all along; just inadvertently. So I'm doing it now on purpose. Here are 5 articles on social media this week I think you should read. Enjoy.

Social Networks Dominate Online News Distribution

Is Facebook Suffocating Social Media?


The Easy-to-Use Tool To Build A Breakthrough Blog

50 Best Twitter Guides, Stats, Tools and Tips of 2010

Content Curation




 

Are You an Expert in Social Media?

If there's piece of advice that every college senior should know, it's make sure you complete at least one internship before you graduate. There's no debate that a college degree is a very important to having a successful career, but it is only one piece of the puzzle. There are certain things that a college education cannot teach you, and this is where an internship comes in. Internships give students valuable experience and show employers how a student might fare in the actual workplace.

Like the example above, just having a Facebook or a Twitter is not enough to be branded an "expert", or mean that you know something about social media." Trust me, anyone can set up a Facebook page, or send out useless babble on Twitter.

In order to become an expert, you need to actually practice social media on a continual basis, like I'm doing with this blog.

I've never been a big fan of the "work" aspect of school. As a college senior, I came into this year wanting to try as hard as I could in my classes, but I realize that I just can't make myself care too much - and that's ok. Because I have a direction of where I want to go with my career, I know I can just focus on that and everything will turn out alright.

Instead of doing work, I'll often be on my Google Reader, reading over 30 plus blogs and learning more about social media, digital marketing, public relations, and advertising. Instead of studying, I'll comment on the blog posts I found interesting, send out via Twitter the links to 10 articles I read that day, post videos to my Facebook, and blog about the things that interest me.

Through my reading and active engagement on social networks, I'm learning more and more everyday, so much that I've become an "expert" of sorts on social media, so much that some of my friends now come to me for advice.

The best part about all this is that I don't need a traditional resume (I do have one), or have to worry about whether my major will land me a job. The reason being that the proof is in the pudding. Across the internet, on blogs and social networks, I have branded myself as someone who knows a decent bit about social media. When I begin applying for jobs, I hope that an employer doesn't judge me on the basis that I attend Duke University, but rather on the basis that I know how to create, manage and market content, and engage with people across various social networks.

Being an expert in social media is not easy, and its not supposed be, otherwise everyone would be really good at it. It takes time, and it takes practice, but if you're really serious about becoming an expert, you'll put in the effort.

How To Make Classrooms More Social

I'm sitting in my history class, without a laptop (my professor doesn't allow us to use one in class), zoning out because the class is 2 and 1/2 hours long (and I have the attention span of a five year old), when this idea pops into my head, "How can I make this class more social?"

Instead of focusing on the professor for the rest of the class, I was trying to come up with ideas to make classrooms more social. My professor banned laptops because he knows we're likely to spend more time on Facebook than we are listening to him. But it doesn't have to be that way. What if we could use Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks to learn?

Social media can be such a wonderful, powerful tool. Case in point, after class I went home, I popped open my Google Reader, went to the Mashable feed, and there was an article titled, "The Case For Social Media In Schools".

The writer Sarah Kessler, makes some interesting points for why social media should be used in schools.

1. Social Media is not going anywhere.

I would have to agree here. I understand why my professor bans laptops, but in this day and age, a laptop is a powerful tool for taking notes and learning. Kessler makes a good point about how when the internet was first created, there was a similar debate in schools about whether it should be allowed. Nowadays, there's no denying that the internet is an important, if not crucial component of learning in schools.

2. When Kids Are Engaged, They Learn Better.

I can only imagine how much more productive and entertaining class would be if I didn't have to sit and listen to my professor lecture to me. Although there is an emphasis on discussion between students, near the end of class discussion fades because we're all bored to tears.

3. Safe Social Media Tools Are Available - And They're Cheap

This is probably one of the better aspects of the social media - its free to use. Schools nowadays are strapped for cash anyways, and social media is something that could easily be employed at no cost.

4. Replace Online Procrastination with Social Education

If you're a college student, then you understand how much time students spend on social networks, updating their statuses, chatting with friends, tagging pictures, all while they're sitting in lecture. Instead of taking notes for that midterm next week, you're studying up on that cute girl on Facebook. Not productive.


5. Social Media Encourages Collaboration Instead of Cliques


This right here is the biggie. People learn better when they collaborate. Study groups have been around for a long time now. Can you imagine the possibilities of collaborating in real-time via Twitter with say, someone in China?

Or, what if during class, students selected a hashtag, like #ushistory, and for class, tweeted important events that happened in U.S. history. Not only would they be learning together, they would also be adding more information about U.S. history on Twitter. Then if someone had a report to write, they could search Twitter for information relating to U.S. history.

There are many opportunities for social media in education. Bill Gates recently said that the best education will soon come from the internet. Think about when you're writing that history paper on medieval warfare, but you can't find the sources you need for your thesis on the internet. What if you could, with a social network like Twitter or Formspring, ask a question and get a response in real time? And what if the source was a reputed historian living in Britain? And what if you could quote him in your paper?

Now those are some possibilities right there. Education seems poised for an upheaval soon. What will social media's impact be?

How Much Klout Do You Exercise On Twitter?

 That's the question that I end up asking myself every time I log onto Twitter. No, no, that's a lie. The question I ask myself when I log onto Twitter, literally, is "why can't I use #newtwitter?" It's really frustrating. I would share so much more if I could embed photos and videos into my Twitter newsfeed. I do it on my Facebook and blogs all the time, why won't Twitter let me?

Ahem, now that I've got that out of my system, we can get back to the question at hand: how much klout do you exercise on Twitter? For those of you wondering why I'm spelling "clout" with a k, its because there's this company called Klout, which measures one's influence on Twitter.

I created an account with Klout about a month ago, but I hadn't checked it until recently. But today I was reading an article on Ad Age, reporting how The Palms Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas will provide highly-ranking influencers with access to outstanding amenities, in the hopes that they tweet their positive experience to their followers.

What an interesting concept, I thought. But I remained skeptical still. So I logged into Klout,  and saw my influencer score was still at 17 presumably 100. Lousy right? When I refreshed my score, it dropped to an even lousier 5. What the heck! Investigating how I could have dropped so much, I accessed my profile and looked at some of my stats:

According to Klout, @ssunmonu has a low level of influence. Ok, I get it. I haven't been using Twitter regularly for some time. Every takes time off.

Then Klout proceeds to break my score down, and the results were surprising. It says that my "true reach" is N/A, yet it says that I have a "strong true reach". Now I'm not a genius or anything but that makes absolutely no sense. Moving on.

Next up, my amplification. On my profile it says that I have an amplification score of 3, which apparently indicates that my "content is almost guaranteed to be highly amplified". Fine, not too shabby. Except that right above it says 0 total retweets, 0 @ mention counts, 0 unique messages retweeted and 0 in/outboud message ratio. Once again, I'm not sure how they're calculating these scores but it doesn't seem right to me. I don't have many retweets, but no one hate me that much.

Lastly, in the network section, I was hit with the "@ssunmonu does not engage with very many influencers". Now that I would agree with. I try to hold myself to the "Rule of 5", where I must interact with 5 people everyday, except I've never actually done it. Maybe I should call it the "Rule of Fail".

So what does all this tell us? Well for one, that I need to step up my use and engagement on Twitter. A Klout score of 5 is simply unacceptable. I tweet things that are ongoing with me, news, videos, etc., but I need to start engaging with influencers.

Secondly, this tells us that while the concept of measuring one's influence across social networks is a novel one, it has yet to be fully carried out yet, and to rely on one company's view of your influence sounds faulty. From the Ad Age article,

"Klout is like having just one credit monitoring company. You might do spectacularly good or have a terrible ranking but the validity of the ranking system itself has yet to be proven until you have another service to compare it to."

True, although there is another competitor in Empire Avenue, which is actually a social network where users can buy, trade and sell virtual shares in each other. Your stock price goes up from your involvement across various social networks like Empire Avenue, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, as well as RSS feeds.

This is a more realistic approach to measuring influence, and while not perfect, is better than Klout in my opinion. I know that I might not be very influential on Twitter, but I'm fairly influential on Facebook, where I have over 600 friends and try to engage with people daily. I know I'm fairly influential when it comes to my blog as well. This one, not so much. But SunofSam gets about 50 views a day when I post, which is pretty big for me.

This is not to say that Klout isn't a good idea, and that in the future it might play a more important role in business, but it still has quite a ways to go. Meanwhile, I'll keep at that Twitter thing. I've been stuck around 60 followers for a while now; I need to engage more.

Social Network Content Creation Levels Off

I read some pretty interesting stuff on Mashable yesterday about how content creation on social networks appears to have plateaued. A study performed by Forrester shows that while involvement in social networks has increased, the amount of content created by users has not.
The Forrester study breaks up consumers into seven distinct profiles of Conversationalist, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, Inactives, and finally Creators. In the case of Creators, the study found that the number of Creators dipped slightly in 2010, from 24% to 23%.

Source: Mashable.com

What this most likely means is that many people who are joining social networks nowadays are more spectators than they are producers of content, and that's fine. I think people get a little over excited when they mention the people will take the power out of hands of current content creators (TV, radio, newspaper, etc.) and place it into the hands of everyday people.

There's no disputing that the rise of the internet and social networks have allowed ordinary people like me to become content creators in our own right, but not everyone is interested in creating content.

We should also take into account that the amount of information shared across the internet is truly astounding. With so many outlets for news and content, people are more likely to syndicate or share content across the web rather than produce their own. I imagine that I'm the nth person to write about this very same story.

Maybe Ashton Kutcher Isn't So Influential After All

When it comes to social networks, some of the numbers thrown around are truly astounding. Everyone knows that Facebook recently eclipsed the 500 million users mark, Twitter has 145 million users, and Linkedin is not far behind at 75 million. But some of the truly astounding numbers come via Twitter, where popularity reigns supreme. A man much smarter than me (Brian Solis), sums it up best when he writes,

" For better or worse, Twitter introduces the notion of popularity, whereby the numbers of followers and also the friend to follower ratio we possess indicate ones stature within Twitterverse. As I’ve said over the years, popularity does not beget influence, but the egosystem and all who define it, do in fact reward and nurture it."

 Did you know that celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the countries of Israel, Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland? Kutcher has close to 6 million followers, which is a lot of influence for someone who makes mediocre movies, and is famous for marrying Demi Moore.

Or is it a lot of influence? A recent study conducted by scientists at Northwestern University concludes that celebrities who have brought Twitter in popular culture, are actually largely ignored by their followers. Instead, it's less known "experts" who are wielding all the influence. These lesser known "experts", are actually experts in their respective fields whether it be social media, music or rock climbing.

It makes sense if you really think about it. I follow celebs like Kanye West and Fabolous for purely entertainment value, but most of the time I do not keep up with their tweets. I don't see much dialogue being generated from what Kanye had for lunch. This quote from the lead researcher on the study, Professor Alok Choudhary stood out to me:

"A lot of people think that just because you tweet a lot means you may have influence or you are important. But there are a lot of junk tweets.
"Our premise is that influencers are those that dynamically change the opinions of people on specific topics, or the topic of the moment.

So just because Ashton Kutcher is popular and tweets a lot is not an indication by itself that he is influential. I would think people more like Seth Godin or Brian Solis would be more influential, because they are impacting the way people think by tweeting valuable, relevant content.

When I first started using Twitter, I thought it was simply a tool for the inane to spew their thoughts. But as I used it more and gained more followers, I realized that I could ignore all the chatter and find the information I needed. When I became more knowledgeable about Twitter, I became obsessed with the popularity aspect of it; I started following random people in an attempt to acquire more followers, and I would tweet only about myself.

But soon I realized that this was ill-advised. I wasn't getting any interaction with any of my followers because I wasn't offering them anything valuable. So I began tracking conversations and initiating conversations, as well as tweeting articles, blog posts, and other information people might find interesting. Those two things got me more followers than my previous methods.

So in sum, its not about how many followers you have, but rather if you're engaging with others on Twitter and offering them something useful.

[Via Telegraph]