Digg’s Kevin Rose, Twitter’s second most popular user with 64,572 followers, follows only 104 Twitter accounts. It made me wonder: who’s influencing one of Twitter’s most influential users?
While looking through his list, I noted forward-thinking technologists, in-the-know tech journalists and the Cobra Commander (awesome). But, I also picked up on another pattern:
Top Row: vikkichowney, adholden, Poshy, iphonegirl
Middle Row: MelKirk, kevinrose, Aubs
Bottom Row: leahculver, ericased, arielwaldman, AllieOops
Well-played, sir.
Based on a random sampling analysis of twitter accounts I conducted, 6 out of 10 twitter followers aren’t actually following you. That would imply that Barack Obama, who has the most twitter followers at 80K, really only has 30K “real” followers.
I decided to take a closer look at the top three twitter tech-heavyweight (figuratively speaking) bloggers based on Twitterholic’s top 100: Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis (#7, 34K followers), Scobleizer’s Robert Scoble (#8, 34K followers), and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington (#13 at 25K followers). Even though Calacanis has a slight edge on Scoble, looking at their “real” followers was a completely different story. Robert Scoble has significantly more “real” twitter followers (13.6K) than Arrington (8.6K) and Calacanis (7.5K). On average, they were reaching 68% less twitter accounts than their follower counts indicated. This isn’t a comment about them, they are fantastic. It’s a comment about how twitter follower numbers are misleading.
Twitter users are pretty proud of their follower counts and they put it on their blogs next to their RSS reader counts. I’m pretty proud of my twitter account and I only have 57 followers. Twitterholic even puts up a leader-board of the top 100. But, the not-surprising truth is that like RSS reader counts, not that many people are actually reading what you are tweeting.
As Twitter continues its impressive expansion and twitter accounts start to become businesses, it will be important to have a more accurate view of the reach of specific twitter accounts.
Several services are making progress on this front (Twitter Grader, Twitterholic) but there’s a lot more to do.
Note: For the purposes of this sampling, I defined a “real follower” as someone who follows less than 300 twitter accounts and is active as measured by having a status update submitted in the last 3 days. It’s definitely not a perfect definition but I hope it was good enough for the purposes of this demonstration.
For those not in the know, new yorkers have been relaying shake shack line lengths using Twitter through a shake shack account a.k.a Shake Shack Flash Mob. I decided to take the data created over the last four months and try to answer the question: When should we try to grab lunch at Shake Shack? After all, no one wants to be in a 60-minute or “third tree” line behind 50 tourists.
As a quick disclaimer: While the mob is active, the sample size is too small to time it down to the minute, but the data does seem to point towards the following conclusions:
-
Pre-noon lunch: Hit-or-miss. You’d think by scrambling down there before noon you’d be okay, but there’s no guarantee. Make sure to check the shake shack webcam
- Post-noon lunch: Not much data collected but not surprising. The flash mob knows better than to insult the Shake Shack gods by irreverently trying to grab lunch during lunch-hour
-
Post-3 pm lunch: This is the ticket. Either starve yourself till then or get a job that allows you to wake up at 11 am
- General tip: If it’s raining, cold or really hot, the line will be shorter than usual but don’t be surprised to still find people braving the elements
- Funniest shake shack tweet goes to ceonyc: “line very short….swarm! Swarm!”
Who’s graciously tweeting away line lengths?
Here’s the full list of shake shack tweeters:
Update: Eater reblogged this post and pitched the shake shack flash mob. Nice.
Update2: Thrillist reblogged the post referencing the shake shack flash mob as “vigilante nerds”
XTRP is one of the models used for Hurricane tracking. While I agree projecting a hurricane’s future path is complicated, it seems like XTRP has thrown in the towel and just started drawing a line up and to the left. (XTRP is the model with the black triangles and dotted lines).
Most recent models for Hannah:
Most recent models for Ike:
Doing some further research it appears that XTRP is just the Hurricane’s most recent movements projected forward. In other words, a very simple model that takes no future variables into account.
Do yourself a favor and join Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis’s new mailing list.
I know, I also thought mailing lists were dead but, weirdly, Jason retired from blogging. He now sends out fantastic and practical essays on technology entrepreneurism through his mailing list. Despite the list being just a few months old, he’s already sent out some must-read essays including:
PR Strategies for Start-Ups
- Rule number one of interacting with a journalist: you NEVER have to bring up what you’re doing
- Be in love with your brand; wear a t-shirt with your company’s brand every day
- Your office space should be a personification of your company’s mission
- Exactly how a CEO should e-mail and speak to a journalist
How to Demo Your Start-Up Company – Part 1
- Show your product within the first 60 seconds
- Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do
- How to handle questions you don’t know the answer to
How to Demo Your Start-Up Company – Part 2
- Use inclusive words like “we”, instead of “you”
- Four methods to start your demo
- Repeat your slogan five times in your presentation
You can find standard advice on these topics all over the Internet, but Jason does a fantastic job of giving you intelligent and practical advice. Get on this mailing list.
If you have been stalking on Facebook lately, you have noticed that the advaned profile search lets you specify what year a person graduated but not what school they went to. Weird and annoying.
But, nothing to fear fellow stalkers, you can actually narrow down by the school people went to. It’s not a facebook feature, it’s a very simple facebook hack.
Perform an advaned profile search as you normally would in your geographic network. When the results come up, and you only want to see people who went to Emory, then you just add “&ed=Emory” (without the quotes) to the end of the page’s url and hit enter. Voila, the results are now filtered by school as well.
If the college you are looking for has a space in the name, like Penn State, then you just add “&ed=Penn+State”.
Get all your stalking done before Facebook fixes this.
Amidst a river of mostly useless tweets, twitter account vctips stands out as a must read full of good to great nuggets of advice for entreprenuers thinking about venture capital.
It’s just starting out, but look at these tweets from some of the more respected members of the VC community:
- Don’t approach a VC directly unless you know him/her well — an introduction from someone the VC trusts will go a long way
- Six slides is better than sixty and probably better than sixteen. Put all the detail in the appendices
- As a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand slides. Show, don’t tell
Of course you can always conitnue to read tweets about how people are sleepy or just bored.
After about a year and a half of wresting with David Allen’s critically-acclaimed self-help book, Getting Things Done, I can confidently say that the recommended organization system is impossible to keep up with for all but the most impressively disciplined / insanely masochistic amongst us.
Was it all a waste of time? The answer would probably be yes except there is one simple and completely realistic piece of advice in the book that dramatically improved my efficiency. I now recommend it to everyone:
- If you find out you need to do something that will take you less than two minutes to complete, do it right there and then
That’s it. Simple and realistic.
If you don’t take care of that small task immediately, it will sit in the back of your mind and rot. You will spend many more minutes constantly reminding yourself of having to take care of it instead of creatively thinking about your business / life. Also, reminding yourself of things you have to do are not exactly “happy” thoughts. Eventually, you will either end up taking care of it or, more likely, forgetting about it all together.
Do yourself a favor and start taking care of those 2 minute tasks as soon as you become aware of them. I briefly flirted with the idea of raising the bar to 5 minutes, but it almost killed me.
