Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

This is a short braindump of ‘online influence’. It’s an interesting topic, and one that needs more research into, and more reflection on my part to clarify my thoughts.

Quite simply, numbers do not matter. The greater amount of people that want to listen to things you say, does not directly correlate into a great number of people respecting your thoughts and being influenced by them.

You could have the widest distribution network for your ideas, thoughts, concepts and such. This could target thousands of people. Yet, does it matter? How many people are going to read what you said, or more accurately how many people are going to read AND care about what you said?

So don’t get hung up on the numbers, surely a more tightly knitted group of people who DO care about what you say is more important.

Think of it like a mailshot, you can send your leaflet out to the whole of Birmingham, or you could spend some more time being careful and just send out your leaflet to those people in Birmingham who care about it’s content.

Look at the outcomes instead, what has happened. Have people read your article, commented on something, send you an email. People you care about. People who care about the topic.

In summary, if you’ve got 100,000 facebook fans (and no doubt a ton of those have ‘hidden your updates’) and 20,000 Twitter followers it doesn’t mean your message is more effective than someone with 1,000 facebook fans and 300 Twitter followers.

Instead, look at the metrics around engagement on the topic, and whether your message is targeting the right groups. Numbers ARE important, metrics are extremely important, but the size of them does not necessarily reflect your influence.

In Birmingham, we are fortunate enough to have a variety of nice coffee places. Such as Hudsons, Saint Caffe and Urban Coffee. The later is one of the more sociable companies I’ve come across.

Sociable, in the sense of user engagement and interaction.

From a historic perspective, I was only aware of them as they had followed me on Twitter – before they had actually opened the shop. The fact that they were to be located around the corner from my office made me interested, and I awaited their coffee and also how they would use their Twitter account.

What I’ve spotted @UrbanCoffeeCo get upto:

-When people ask where they are – they respond back with directions, and even a map now and again.
-When someone got a new job – they were congratuated.
-If people visit, they ask how it was

Through my circle of friends, I’ve only heard good things about it, but with the internet and their twitter account so have a lot of other people. The fact that people can say “I’m off to @urbancoffee” can lead to interest in their followers.

They also seem to ‘get’ how they can use twitter:

I can’t quite remember exactly when they opened, but you can see a consistant tweeting effort by the company, that said, when I’m on holiday in Oct they did go a bit quiet

Now their target market is going to be the people in and around the Colmore Business area, or living in the locale. Which ties in with the tweeting occurring mainly in and around their hours, and key ‘peak’ times – like lunches and late afternoons on the weekends.

Yet it’s not all one way traffic, the brand respond, and also alert followers to things of interest. Whether it be the latest filter on, the soup of the day etc:

What it shows is that by simply engaging with your users, and they will engage back.

Lately they are offering whoever is Mayor of the coffee shop a free coffee once a week. Which is encouraging people to ‘check in’ with Foursquare, and when they do – their friends know exactly where they are – helping spread the word about the coffee shop, and of course you can only be mayor by visiting the most in the last 60 days. . . so a lot of coffee will end up being drunk.

They are encouraging people to use Foursquare, and it will be interesting to see how other Birmingham Businesses start to use Foursquare, and whether they have similiar customer interactions.

What are your experiences of Urban Coffee Co, and other businesses that have a web presence?

Visualisations from:
Tweet Reach
Tweet Stats
Twitter Stream Graphs –May appear, server unresponsive.
Tweet Paste