The Best, The Worst, & The Weird – Vol. 5

The best thing I read this week was a thought-provoking post by Geoff Livingston on his eponymous website. Geoff uses the biological metaphor of the beehive to discuss how large organizations can creatively destruct their ’silos of excellence’ and use social media tools to become more ‘hive-like’ and cooperatory. And anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big fan of using biological metaphors to understand complicated topics. (Runner up status goes to Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb for his article about paid advertising and microsharing called, “How to Sell Your Soul on Twitter and Who’s Buying.”)

The worst thing I read this week was in USA Today, a simply terrible article by Steve Strauss in his ironically-titled “Ask An Expert” column. The column title is ironic because the last thing Strauss appears to be is an expert on using Twitter. His reasons to not use Twitter: (1) You are in business, (2) It offers too much information, (3) It requires too much time, and (4) What can you say in 140 characters? are all easily refutable in theory and in practice. More disturbing is the widespread pattern of mainstream media discounting the power of new media tools while their industry crumbles.

The weird thing I read this week was a list of the ‘The Top 250 People that are the Coolest, Most Influential, or Neatest on Twitter” – that are also very likely to follow you back if you follow them. Services like MrTweet and TweetStats allow one to analyze public Twitter information about how many people a user follows, and how many people follow them. But here’s what’s weird: If someone is a priori likely to follow you back, the follow is worthless. And so is the social network that follows from it. Personally, I’d rather have 100 loyal and interested followers than 1,000 who followed me out of habit.