I’m Dan Oshinsky, and I run Inbox Collective, an email consultancy. I'm here to share what I've learned about doing great work and building amazing teams.
But yesterday, I took a visit to Biloxi National Cemetery, on the grounds of Keesler Air Force Base, and I realized that I’d been ignoring the most obvious closing thought of all: the ones engraved into tombstones. What could be more final than the words printed on one’s grave?
So this week, I’ll be featuring Biloxi tombstones as my #closingthought. There were dozens and dozens to choose from; selecting picking the final five was an impossible task. One, in particular, is getting left out, but it deserves to be seen.
So below, this is the closing thought that every male journalist wants printed on his tombstone:
This made a big splash, obviously, in the news. But I found out about it first through Twitter. One of the airlines offering the sale is JetBlue, who frequently pushes exclusive deals on Twitter and is very active in replying to customers who tweet at @JetBlue. I saw the all-you-can-fly deal when a friend starting using the designated #AYCJ hashtag.[1. The shortened version of #AllYouCanJet.] Hashtags aren’t always useful, but in this case, everyone who’s using #AYCJ is promoting JetBlue for free. The campaign is both viral and easy to share, and that’s a huge win for JetBlue.
But there’s a second airline that’s also hosting an all-you-can-fly package: Sun Country. They also fly nationally, to destinations like D.C., New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas. So why isn’t Sun Country’s deal getting the same kind of exposure as JetBlue’s?
The obvious reason is that JetBlue has hubs in New York, Boston and L.A. — all big cities with major media outlets — whereas Sun Country is based in Minneapolis. JetBlue has more flights, and JetBlue has more name recognition.
But there’s another key factor: social media. JetBlue’s presence on Twitter and Facebook — they’ve got 1.6 million Twitter followers and 300,000 Facebook fans — means that they started to sell out of their all-you-can-fly deal before it ever appeared in a single edition of a newspaper or onto the 6 p.m. news. If JetBlue sells just 2,000 of their $500 AYCJ packages, they’ll make a million dollars, and I’d bet they end up making a few million more. And the kicker? They’ll just be filling otherwise idle seats during a slow time of year. Social media pages that cost nothing to own or operate are generating them millions, and potentially millions more in goodwill.
Now look at Sun Country. They don’t have a hashtag. They don’t offer regular, exclusive Twitter deals. Their Twitter account has 6,000 followers. Their Facebook page has 6,000 fans. JetBlue might end up selling more AYCJ deals on Twitter than Sun Country has Twitter followers.
The point is this: if you’re running a business on Twitter — particularly one that sells things — use Twitter effectively. Offer big, outrageous sales to your followers. Build loyalty. Build followers and fans. Let them advertise your brand for you.
Because even if you do it just once a year, like JetBlue is doing, it could still be a million-dollar idea.
If you’ve been to Times Square in the last decade, you know which one I’m talking about. Other networks have studios there, too — MTV’s ‘TRL’ studio among them — but the ABC studio stands out. Their wrap-around ticker is the reason why.
Around the edges of the building is this wavy, double-deckered contraption that was Disney Imagineered specifically for the studio. Short news bites scroll across the ticker 24 hours a day.
Now I want you to imagine going to Times Square. You’re standing in the middle of the busiest intersection in the busiest city in the world. There are thousands of cars streaming past you, thousands of people walking past you. A giant Coca-Cola bottle is magically refilling and emptying itself, while a dozen Jumbotrons flash ads nearby.
The distractions are endless.
Now look over at that double-decker ticker at the ABC studio, and consider this: you’re standing there, all the world whizzing past, and you’re watching words scroll past you on a screen.
In a way, this is a lot like how Twitter works.
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The problem with the Internet is not a lack of content. In 60 days, according to YouTube’s latest numbers, more video is uploaded to the site than was created by ABC, CBS and NBC in the past 60 years. There are 400 million active Facebook users, and more than 75 million Twitter users.
But that’s before you factor in mainstream media sites, blogs and — most massive of all — e-mail.
All of these sources are creating content [1. Which I’ll simply describe as words, pictures, sounds or some combination of the three.] The problem is — and I am by no means the first person to suggest this — a shortage of filters to sort through all that content.
There are only two filters that most consumers use to find stuff on the Internet:
If you’re creating something on the web, you’re up against an infinite amount of content.
But that’s not the case with Twitter. On Twitter, it’s even harder to stand out, because the amount of content that Twitter produces each minute is astonishing — the site records more than 50 million tweets per day, at last check — and the filters for Twitter are even less developed.
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What this is all coming back around to is this notion that it’s even possible for a brand to stand out on the Internet.
It is.
But it takes a really impressive effort to pull it off.
So consider the example of Nike. The World Cup starts in exactly 21 days, and Nike’s heavily invested in some of the biggest soccer stars in the world, including Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo and Didier Drogba. So Nike did what it always does for a big soccer tournament: they pulled out a massive marketing campaign.
What they came up with — and I’ve embedded it below — features the biggest names in the soccer world. Plus Kobe Bryant, Homer Simpson and Roger Federer. And some awesome footage from around the globe.
This afternoon, over at one of my favorite soccer blogs, I saw the ad for the first time. I clicked through to the YouTube page. The video had only 300 views.
But below the video, there was an unusual note: the video had been “unlisted” on YouTube, which meant that it wouldn’t show up in search results or on Nike’s YouTube channel. The URL was secret; unless someone pointed you to it, you’d never know it was there. It’s the YouTube equivalent of Harry Potter’s Platform 9 3/4. Either you know it’s there and can get to it and experience it, or you can’t. You’re not going to be able to just stumble upon it unless someone else shows it to you.
What Nike was saying when they unlisted the video was, To prove how loyal our fans are, we’re going to make it as hard as possible to find the ad. We’re betting that the video will go viral anyway.
So I tweeted the link to the video and went to take a nap. When I woke up, I saw that my initial tweet had gotten a few retweets. I went back to the YouTube page for the spot to see how it was doing.
It had over 97,000 views.
What the hell happened?
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I went to bit.ly to see if they could offer insight. They did. The link I’d tweeted — http://bit.ly/czPBdf, which redirected viewers to the YouTube video — had been clicked on over 7,000 times. [2. To be clear: I was not the first person to tweet that specific bit.ly link, though if I was video view no. 300, I must’ve been among the first.] 114 of those clicks came from twitterers, some tweeting in English, Portugese, Spanish and even Korean.
But 5,700 people had shared the link on Facebook. Another 1,100 had “liked” the link on Facebook.
So I followed the trail of links.
Nike has only 8,000 followers on Twitter. On Facebook, they’ve got over 600,000 fans.
And how did Nike mobilize that Facebook audience to action? They’d invited them onto the virtual red carpet.
On May 15, they announced that they’d be screening the video on May 20 at 6 p.m. They invited their fans to watch.
So what happened? Nike leaked the video at the appointed time. People showed up to watch it. And then people starting sharing it. And sharing it.
And suddenly, an invisible link on YouTube had 100,000 views in a matter of minutes. [3. Some 48 hours later, the video is closing in on 4 million views. As for the initial link I tweeted: the number of times it’s been tweeted hasn’t changed. But an additional 125,000 people have shared the video on Facebook, and another 70,000 have liked it.]
And the best part for Nike: these were people who actively wanted to watch the video — a video that, I should add, is actually a paid endorsement for shoes and soccer balls. These were people who, technically, were going out of their way to share the video with their friends.
But it didn’t feel like those people were going out of their way. When the barriers to sharing are as low as a click, how could you?
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A few months ago, my dad was asking me about something I had written. He thought more people deserved to read it.
“But I thought you put it out on Twitter,” he said.
I did, I explained. To my 200+ followers. A few clicked; a few retweeted it. And that was it.
“Doesn’t being on Twitter doesn’t make something viral?” he asked.
No, I told him.
But I don’t think my dad’s alone in his confusion about how something gets exposure on the web. He’ll notice content when it rises to the top. He’s rarely aware of that content’s journey to that point.
So here’s the takeaway:
Twitter works best in tandem with an actual event. An election, an inauguration or a big Congressional vote. The Super Bowl. A conference or a class. Anything, really, in which there are large amounts of people gathered and discussing/watching/listening/reacting to a single thing. That’s when you really get to see Twitter at it’s best, because that’s when great discussion is happening in real time.
But when it comes to sharing content, Facebook is still tops. Facebook taps deeper into those Dunbar circles. Twitter tends to hit the outer edges.
If you’re standing in Times Square, Facebook’s that friend from New York who says, “Hey, see that thing over there? That’s what you’re supposed to be looking at.”
Until Twitter creates the filters to replicate that experience, people will still turn to Facebook first to share.
But they are sharing. And for any brand, that is very, very good news.
About a month ago, I started writing a blog post that I never finished. It was about Dunbar’s Number, which explains a simple human limitation: we can only really care about so many people. Dunbar puts a limit on it: 150.
But thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we’re more easily connected to others than ever before. You don’t need a giant Rolodex anymore, just an active news feed and the latest version of TweetDeck. So I started wondering: I’ve got a few hundred Facebook fans and a few hundred Twitter followers. And that’s on top of my normal, Dunbar-defined circle.
The résumé-deflating answer I came up with was, No, I’m not a Supernetworker, and neither are you. See, Dunbar’s theory creates circles, starting with your innermost circle of friends and expanding until you reach that outer circle of passive acquaintances.
Think of it this way: the inner circles will end up at your wedding. The outer circles might get a Christmas card (or maybe a Facebook birthday wall post). Social networking might bring you a few hundred or a few thousand additional connections, but the majority will remain in that outer circle — or beyond.
The irony is, you might engage them regularly — but you can’t really care about them on the level that Dunbar’s describing. [1. The closest thing I’ve heard of to a Supernetworker is Politico’s Mike Allen — who the New York Times describes as a one-man networking machine. He engages a huge network of contacts on a regular basis. But his closest friends also apparently don’t even know where Allen lives. So I’m not sure he’s the healthiest example of a normal human.]
But I was hugely impressed to see a media outlet finally discuss the ramifications of social networking on Dunbar’s Number. It came in a Guardian piece that actually asked Robin Dunbar what he thought of his number’s role in the world of social networks.
I asked Dunbar if he saw anything in the evolution of online networks to suggest that the next stage might extend our social horizons in any meaningful way.
“The question really is,” he said, “does the technology open up the quality of your social interaction to any great extent, and the answer to that question is, so far: not really.”
Exactly. But that doesn’t mean these connections are worthless. As Clay Shirky points out in the same piece:
“What these games and applications do,” he says, “is extend and churn the edges of our network, which is often how new ideas are brought into it.”
So add those friends on Facebook. Connect with others on Twitter. They probably won’t be coming to your wedding, and they might not even end up on your Christmas card list.
But if you’re smart, those fringe circles might just help you create something that your circle of 150 never would have thought of.
You don’t have to be a Supernetworker. You just have to be a good listener.
Maybe this shouldn’t come as a surprise, as I have sent out upwards of 3,000 tweets, but I actually like Twitter. It’s one of the first things I check in the morning. It’s one of my best sources of political and sports news. It’s where I go to find time-wasters and, occasionally, good news stories to report on.
But I’ve been thinking for a few months about how I use Twitter, and it’s a bit selfish. I use it for a lot of things — it’s my RSS reader, my scanner for breaking news and my serendipity-generator — but I don’t think I’m putting enough back into Twitter.
A few months ago, I blogged about the idea of using specific days of the week to tweet about various things, but that idea quickly passed. I wasn’t ready to commit to a Twitter schedule.
I came back to the idea this week, though, about being a bit more targeted in my tweets. What’s the purpose of @danoshinsky? What am I delivering?
Here’s what I’ve come up with:
My Twitter day should be like any good story: it needs a definite beginning and a definite end. So I’ll experiment with this:
-My first tweet of the day will be a bit of morning inspiration. It might be a quote or a YouTube video or a link to an article. But it’ll be a thought for the day.
-My last tweet of the day will be a closing thought. It’ll be an observation, maybe something wise that I’ve learned or heard that day.
The stuff in the middle — interesting links and retweets — will stay pretty much the same. I’ll try to send out 3-6 of those a day. They’ll be interesting things that I’ve read or seen.
As usual: I’ll try to keep the personal stuff to an absolute minimum. I don’t have a smartphone, so you won’t be seeing too many Twitpics out of me. And only a handful of people really want to read my live play-by-play of sporting events. I’ll avoid it, if at all possible.
Your thoughts would be appreciated, either below in the comments or with an @ reply to @danoshinsky.
In April, I wrote a blog post in which I suggested that “we, as Americans, are quickly becoming less interesting. Naturally, I would like to blame Twitter for this decline.”
The diagnosis was simple: as Twitter allows us entry into the lives of friends and loved ones, we’re seeing thoughts both mundane and profound in real time. So when we meet up with a fellow Twitter user in person, we’re finding that the day-to-day details that’d usually make up small talk aren’t really pertinent anymore, because we’ve already read about them on Twitter. And, as such, Americans who use Twitter are finding out that we’re pretty boring.
But now, a doctor — well, a PhD who appears on the “Today” show, at least — is supporting my claim.
“A sense of separateness and “not knowing” is scary, but it’s also essential to attraction. The conventional wisdom tells us that in relationships there should be no secrets, there should be nothing to hide — but if nothing is hidden, then what is there to seek? When you’re in a long-term relationship, you don’t need more information about your partner, you need less.”
The key to a long-lasting friendship, apparently, starts with de-friending.
If you are like the majority of Americans — and I suspect that you are — you suffer from a severe condition that scientists typically refer to as “not being interesting.” I, myself, have more than two decades in the field, and after extensive research, I feel compelled to note that only a small percentage of Americans have anything useful to say.
A slightly larger percentage of these uninteresting Americans are, however, entertaining. But I should note: this condition is not the same as being interesting. This is the reason why people who become stars on YouTube are infrequently consulted when it comes to matters of national importance.
The problem is that we, as Americans, are quickly becoming less interesting. Naturally, I would like to blame Twitter for this decline.
Research shows that blaming Twitter for things is now the number one media pastime in America, just surpassing “baseball metaphors used in a political context” and “finding new excuses to subtly insult that woman on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ for her looks.” We, the media, love to blame Twitter, because those articles will soon be Twittered by potentially millions of people, which, in turn, should exponentially increase the size of our Twitter followings. There is a good reason why the number one most re-tweeted article yesterday was about the rise of narcissism.
Now, I have been using Twitter since the fall 1. I liked my first tweet — “attempting brevity,” I wrote — and little else. I’ve surpassed 1,000 tweets. I have potentially read thousands more. I cannot say that my life has improved as a result.
However, I do feel comfortable saying that I am less interesting than ever. There is a good reason for this: Twitter is killing small talk.
No longer do I have those go-to questions to ask friends; instead, I’m finding out the answers in real time via Twitter. And we, as humans, are not interesting enough to maintain small talk if you take away our most inane questions. Now that I don’t need to ask the basics — “So, how are the roommates?” or “Did the test go well?” or “Was that you I saw passed out face down in a pool of nacho cheese on 9th Street Tuesday night?” — I’ve been left with the cold realization that I’m not that interesting 2.
And the Twitterati will say, “Shouldn’t you have more to talk about now that you have access to regular snippets of information about friends?” Hypothetically, yes. Sadly, few of my Twitter friends are tweeting about topics such as the search for absolute zero. And even if they were, their tweets would just get lost among the avatars on my screen. Imagine that a formula along the lines of “E=mc2” was discovered today. Sure, it’d get re-tweeted 3, but only if Lindsay Lohan wasn’t currently trending on the site.
Look, I understand why Twitter users are so fanatical about the service. Information delivered on-demand from whomever you want is a pretty good deal.
But may I remind you: we are a nation — to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld — built on nothing. Now that we’re microblogging our nothingness, we’re emptier than ever before.
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1.) I use Twitter as a personal news ticker to monitor what’s happening right now (or what happened in the last 15 seconds). I don’t scroll down to see old tweets. Anything that’s far enough down the page has probably been written about in a space that’s measured in inches, not individual characters. >back to article
2.) Completely unrelated tangent: Ashton Kutcher has a million online followers (though, for the sake of this comparison, I’ll add these words: “per month”). The New York Times has 20 million monthly followers. So why does Kutcher get more publicity? Maybe if The New York Times had a “followers” or “articles published” counter on their homepage, people would take notice. >back to article
