In a recent post, Seth Godin talked about how Dave Balter, CEO of BzzAgent, coined the term “scalejacking” to refer to the practice of inflating your social media network followers by any means possible.
It describes the quest of marketers for size at all costs. Because marketers were raised on the scale of mass—TV, radio, newspapers—they have a churn and burn mentality.
You can find this happening on most social media sites but it’s especially noticeable on Twitter where you often will see people with anywhere from 10,000 to 35,000 followers. It seems impressive at first, but then you realize (or if you haven’t, you should) two things:
- There is no way that the account owner can possibly keep up with that many people and much of what they can grasp may be completely irrelevant to their primary interests/goals.
- Many of those followers are likely to be spam or just other people trying to jack up their follower count.
Having such scale is useful for many types of companies and organizations. CNN for example, as a media company, wants their stories to get out to as many people as possible and for the most part it doesn’t really matter who that follower is. This may be the case with consumer companies as well who can benefit from scale, but for most people and organizations, mass scale isn’t necessarily the thing you might want to have. As Seth mentions:
Scalejacking inevitably tarnishes most communities, because individuals (people) hate being treated like numbers just standing by to be filtered. [snip] On the Internet, the mantra that works is, “Be with the ones you love (and the ones that love you.)”
On a personal level, I try to follow this faithfully, in part because I just don’t want the extra work of weeding through all the information/people to get what I want. For example, in Facebook I limit it to people I actually know or with whom I have a significant rapport. In Twitter I will only follow you back if you appear to be someone who is interesting in some way, who may have similar interests to me (mostly marketing, mobile, books, writing, poetry, food, Boston) or who I actually know. I do work to reciprocate follows but in the end, it is about the quality of the possible relationship that decides it for me.
At my company, CA, we have found that with Twitter this is especially true. We’re not looking for mass followers (although in some ways it would be nice and impressive) as much as we’re looking for quality. For example, having 10 influencers (bloggers, analysts, editors, freelancers) following is, for us, better than 100 random unknown followers. Reaching customers and prospects is more probable when we narrow it down to specific verticals than if we are looking for as many followers as possible. Again, it’s more about finding ways to cultivate what might become a mutually beneficial relationship.
B2B companies in particular should steer clear of scalejacking scenarios. Many consumer marketing/communications initiatives might benefit from driving follower counts to huge levels, but for the most part, that’s not the case with B2B organizations. In the B2B world, many products have very long buying life-cycles. It takes a long while to find the customer, sell to the customer, implement and then there may be a long subscription cycle that follows. Quality in these cases is FAR better than quantity. If you can nurture and build a relationship over time, you have a better chance of keeping and up-selling that relationship over time.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Forget The Statusphere. How About The Egosystem? (davefleet.com)
- Scalejacking (sethgodin.typepad.com)
- Social Media is like building a new town (theengagingbrand.typepad.com)
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