As Easy As One, Two, Bree

Logged on to Twitter and saw this funny new trend: #unfollowdiddy

Now, I’m not sure what ignited this, but one thing you have to get used to as anybody online is that there will ALWAYS be negative and crazy feedback to whatever you are doing. That’s just life. It’s hard working with celebrities to get them to understand this. You should always be expecting it, so the question is, are you prepared for it? and what do you do?

Sometimes the answer is: Ignore it.

If your community is strong enough, the positive responses and engagement will just drown out the negative. If you bring attention to it, you are the one making it bigger than it is.

#unfollowdiddy

But, if your community isn’t strong enough in the positive, let’s just say for the sake of argument that Diddy’s isn’t, how do you deal with it? It depends, but here are a few ideas:

Engage Your Top Members, The Influencers. OK, so your community isn’t strong enough on it’s own to let the positive drown out the negative, but that doesn’t mean you don’t still have a few influencers in your army somewhere. It might only be one or two, but you can start with that. Engage those influencers directly, get them involved about what they want to see from you and what they want to do, and get them talking to your community, not you. Any response from you right now fuels the negativity, so it has to come from someone else. Just keep a handle on your influencers to not get defensive. You have to give those influencers the power to engage your community where they can’t on their own yet. The important part is that it doesn’t come from you right now.

Any Publicity is Good Publicity. This isn’t always true, but a lot of the times it is. I say this a lot to artists who get angry about negative posts from Perez Hilton. I tell them, “trust me, you’re lucky he’s blogging about you at all because that means you are still relevant. Worry the day he doesn’t blog about you because that means you’re not even relevant enough for him to make fun of.” This may be the case now with Diddy. Maybe he should embrace it as a sign that he’s popular enough to ignite this sort of negative attention and because of all the attention, people will actually want to follow him. Personally, I would never blog this much about Diddy if it wasn’t for this, so just ride the ride and see what happens.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. People love self deprecating humor if you really embrace it. It knocks you off your own pedestal and puts you back on the viewer’s level and gets their attention again, and maybe some respect, or at least a few laughs. Address the response, in this case #unfollowdiddy, directly, head on, but not defensively, just join in! Maybe diddy creates a new account and Tweets “Hilarious! I can’t unfollow myself, so I signed up as @whatever and followed myself, just so I could unfollow myself #unfollowdiddy.” Everyone laughs, and they move on.

In the meantime, #unfollowdiddy! lol.

*Update: After talking to a few people in response to #unfollowdiddy I need to add another note to the above list, and that is pay attention to your engagement stats! Pay attention to what people are saying. However that may be, # of responses, using TwitTruth, whatever you need to do. If Diddy noticed that nobody is engaged with his tweets (translation: nobody cares) then he might have been able to preempt the #unfollowdiddy trend.

Taking a quick glance down the Top 100 Followed List on Twitter it’s just your typical who’s who of celebrities, tv shows, corporations and random Internet stars. Nothing too out of the ordinary. But then, I stumbled across this brand new site TwitTruth which breaks down Twitter subscriber numbers even more.

TwitTruth shows a table of various engagement statistics including the account holders Reply rate, Direct Reply rate and, my favorite, % of Tweets that engage a user.

Now, all of a sudden that Top 100 List is starting to look VERY different and light gets shed on the “real” engagers of the site. Here are a few examples:

Diddy (iamdiddy):

- 935,000+ followers
- 1/412 chance of diddy responding to a direct message (eh, doesnt sound great)
- 2.5% of tweets engage a user (wow, bad).

When you have that many subscribers, every single message should engage SOMOENE.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable:

- 661,000+ followers
- 1/667 chance of Pete responding to a direct message
- 1% of tweets engage a user (isn’t he supposed to be the social media guru? This one didn’t surprise me, because his Twitter updates got so annoying to me, I turned it off for myself. They really are just updates that the blog is updated, but you think people would comment about the post he is promoting or something.)

Samantha Ronson:

- 324,000+ followers
- 1/14 chance of Samantha responding to a direct message (great odds!)
- 84% of tweets engage a user (now THERE is a number that you want to see).

Starbucks Coffee:

- 183,000+ followers
- 1/5 chance of Starbucks responding to a direct message (go praise that latte!)
- 84% of tweets engage a user (love the corporate social media responsibility!)

There’s just a snapshot to give you a taste, but you can see for yourself at TwitTruth.com.

So, what do you take from all this?

If you are going to spend all that time building a gigantic list of people, you better make sure that they are actually paying attention to you. 1 million subscribers? Who cares? Are they listening to you?

It’s the worst thing in the world, to have a subscriber base that large, but you can’t sell your product or do anything with it.

Wouldn’t you rather have a list of 5,000 ultra engaged people who pay attention and act on your messages? Or a list of 50,000 with only 1% listening to you? Do the math, that’s only 500 people. Pay attention to the bigger picture of what those follower numbers mean.

Go ahead, go look yourself up on TwitTruth too. I won’t look until you tell me to ;)