Scoble's Participation Premium

Robert has a post that dwells to a great extent on the stats between him and Michael Arrington. It is passingly interesting to many people I think, but when you compare their numbers to most people, I think this is really a comparison of King Kong Vs. Godzilla.

Arrington's blog is 10X Scoble's and Scoble's is 10X mine and it happens that I am 10X better read than most people and for most of us this has about the same relevance as a bucket of spit, or so it seems to me.

But Robert makes a couple of key points that I think are very relevant and becoming more relevant as blogging and social media start evolving into a series of different models for individuals and businesses.

Robert's key point is quite simple. No matter what your goal is in social media, the more you partcipate, the more you will succeed. This is very important these days, when a rising number of participants are trying very hard to generate rising numbers of followers.

This striving for high rankings, this love of attracting eyeballs, seems to me to endanger the essence of social media and that is it's about conversations, not publishing. People like Arrington and Scoble are becoming new media properties. The more people who follow them, the more commercial support they get for their efforts and that is extremely legitimate and I fault them for it not at all.

But Scoble seems to spend more time listening, which is amazing considering how much time he spends publishing.

I do much less of both, but I'm pretty certain that I spend more than twice as much time listening, waching and reading than I do posting, tweeting and friend feeding. My business model is evolving into that of an online journalist. I follow social media, and as I start honing my focus, I'll try to cover social media in very much the same way an old-style City Room reporter used to cover his beat.

But that comes to Scoble's second key point. He said that he finds "FriendFeed friendlier."

So do a great many of us. I use FriendFeed differently than any other social medium and that is a result of what has happened for me in other places. I subscribe only to people I know--often in real life, but also people I have been interacting with online for many years.

I have roughly about 150 people I follow in FriendFeed. If I get to 200 people, I will start cutting off one person for everyone I add. Why 200? Because that is when things have blurred for me in previous online spaces. When Google Reader went over 200, I started stressing at the growing pile of unread blogs. When Twitter numbers grew too high, I lost the sense of personal and playful I had in earlier days. I am hoping that in FriendFeed, I can stay more "neighborhood" than I have elsewhere.

None of this may matter to you. You may have entirely different reasons for using the tools of social media. I hope, you have a clear idea of why you are using the tools and you understand that the way you can use a blog is as varied as the way you use a hammer. I hope you understand that if you want to talk to just 10 friends through social media, that is as appropriate as the uses people aspiring to me new media stars are developing.

Comments

[howardgr]

Excellent idea Shel. My friendfeed is about 100 now, and quite manageable compared to other services.
I also don't let people follow me who I don't know. Waiting to see how effective that is.

[LindaZ]

just finished reading your an Scoble's blog...

I am tired of the stat# sharing The SM boys feel they need to tell us about, to make the point that they have a big following. It is not a race and certainly is not why we follow them... participating in great conversations sharing good information is what SM is all about. Numbers go up and they go down who cares. I wish everyone would just stop competing and comparing or bashing SM sites there is room for everyone, if you are interesting and the site functions properly people with be there to listen as long as you participate, respond to their need and proved great information.

[Macon]

Please continue to perform online masturbation of your guys' numbers. Its annoying and no one really gives a shit.

[james s]

Great post. I like your take on this Shel.

[Zane Safrit]

Great reminder: "if you want to talk to just 10 friends through social media, that is as appropriate as the uses people aspiring to me new media stars are developing."

[Liz]

Why don't they just take out rulers and measure themselves? This is ridiculous.

Media "stars"? "Social Media Rockstars"? "Cewebrities"? Get out of your little insular, social worlds and you'll find that the world doesn't care about all of this very much. You'll find that your "friendships" are very shallow indeed.

It saddens me that with everything going on in the world right now, anyone could give the readership stats of their blog or Twitter or FF more than 5 seconds of their attention. It is pure vanity.