To Retweet or Not To Retweet

I read a post titled "Preserve Peace of Mind on Twitter by Disabling Retweets" and started to wonder how much peace of mind I might preserve by doing this tech tweak of tweets.

I have a few friends who have been trying "no tech days" or "no social media" weekends. I don't do any longterm unplugging unless I'm on vacation and have lost the connection. I do deliberately leave the phone behind sometimes on walk in the woods or dates with my wife. But sometimes I want the phone camera to record things and sometimes I upload those pictures or announce my location or activities.

Retweets (RT) on Twitter (to repost someone else’s tweet to your own followers) and Shares and Likes on Facebook and other social networks are a big part of the social experience.

As the article points out, retweets can promote community and boost the reach of stories (including your own) and point you to new people.

But there are people who seem to retweet a lot more than say anything original. To be kind, I could say that they are helping to filter things of interest for you from the landslide of things out there. But retweeting is also a spammish way to try to gain followers (along with following everybody you can find).

You can disable retweets from a particular account without unfollowing the account and still get their original tweets. Some people do that using a Twitter client (like Tweetbot) and you can do it in Twitter (more details in that article).

But should you?

Social Media Books

There's a stack of my books on my basement desk that I'm using for the social media course I'm teaching this summer.

Some of these were books I had read, some were recommended - some I own, some I borrowed from the college library.

My students are reading at least one of these based on their own area of interest in social media. The original list of titles was crowdsourced online.

1. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected, Connect Your Business to Everyone.
2. What Would Google Do? - Jeff Jarvis
3. Power Friending - Amber MacArthur
4. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices - Christopher Locke
5. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky
6. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li
7. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations - Amy Shuen
8. Designing for the Social Web - Joshua Porter
9. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins
10. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website - has more of a software and design focus
11. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services
12. Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise
13. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown
14. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (From Publishers Weekly) Hunt, cofounder of community-marketing consulting firm Citizen Agency, presents the hows and whys of accruing "whuffie," her word for social capital in the Web 2.0 landscape. Introducing a wide range of post-blogosphere social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr, Hunt clues in marketers to the possibilities with online success stories, influential voices and winning strategies. Detailed, practical profiles of networks and related tools make this a valuable, illuminating title for anyone looking to the ever-expanding realm of online social life for business success.
15. The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, the authors' 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.
16. Visual Thinking  by Rudolf Arnheim - more for art students perhaps - takes the premise that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading.
17. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site -  by Gavin Bell
18. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Safko
19. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins.  This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture.
20. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green

Titles recommended that I didn't get to preview:

• The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success
• The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue
• Social Media Marketing For Dummies
• The Social Media Marketing Book
• Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online
• Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance
• Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs
• Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business 
• Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business 
• 10 Steps to Successful Social Networking for Business (ASTD's 10 Steps Series) 
• Get Connected: The Social Networking Toolkit for Business 
• Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications
• The Facebook Era
• Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time

Six Pixels of Separation

Is it important to be connected? Well, consider this: If Facebook were a country, it would have the sixth largest population in the world.

The truth is, we no longer live in a world of six degrees of separation. In fact, we're now down to only six pixels of separation, which changes everything we know about doing business.

This book integrates digital marketing, social media, personal branding, and entrepreneurship in a clear, entertaining, and instructive manner that everyone can understand and apply.


Through the use of timely case studies and stories, SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION offers a complete set of the latest tactics, insights, and tools that allow you to reach a global audience and consumer base-and, best yet, you can do this pretty much for free. Digital marketing expert Mitch Joel unravels this fascinating world of new media-but does so with a brand-new perspective that is driven by compelling results. The smarter entrepreneurs and top executives are leveraging these digital channels to get their voice "out there"-connecting with others, becoming better community citizens, and, ultimately, making strategic business moves that are increasing revenue, awareness, and overall success in the marketplace-without the support of traditional mass media.

What Facebook Quizzes Really Reveal About You

I came across this in Facebook. A quiz authored by the ACLU of Northern California that will give you a scare or at least make you pause before you take one of those Facebook quizzes.

You know - the ones that will tell you what writer you resemble or what your mermaid name is or try to beat your friend's score on name the drunk celebrity.

The surprise that the ACLU is trying to give you is about how much of your personal information these quizzes can access.

And it doesn't matter if your profile is "private." When you take one of those quizzes some unknown quiz developer can access almost everything in your profile. Depending on what you have ther, it might mean religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups.

These quizzes also have access to most of the info on your friends' profiles, so, even if YOU avoid taking the quizzes, they could be giving away your personal information.

So, the ACLU created a Facebook quiz that you can take that will show you just what they can see about you. It's at http://apps.facebook.com/aclunc_privacy_quiz/?ref=nf

Of course, the irony is that they are warning you about Facebook quizzes by asking you to take a Facebook quiz. As they say at the start of the quiz, "at least you know who we are and that we have a real privacy policy that we're committed to upholding. Can you say the same for every unknown author of every quiz you or your friends take?"

Facebook Popularity

Who do you think is the most popular brand on Facebook?

With over 3.6 million fans, Starbucks has passed Coca-Cola to become the the most popular brand on Facebook.

Their Facebook Page plus promotions plus paid ads on the Facebook home page must work. They added almost 200,000 fans this past week.

As old-fashioned as it may be, people still love coupons. They gave away a free pastry this month and that caused a big spike in new fans.