ARI HERZOG

6 Steps to Be a Guest Blogger

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Guest bloggers are people who want to share a point of view.

Among prior bloggers, Lisa Johnson shared how to be an online expert, Brandon Yanofsky explained how Nike embraces social media, and Michael Dolen highlighted credit card companies that fail online.

You can write about any subject.

If interested, here are the steps to follow:

Step 1: Review prior guest posts and recognize everyone has a different voice.

Step 2: Understand the difference between guest blogging and article marketing.

Step 3: Scroll through the archive and see what I write about.

Step 4: Contact me with your idea. Be specific.

Step 5: Receive my response and begin writing. Use keywords. Link to other pages (on my blog or elsewhere) that support your point of view.

Step 6: Upon publication, help to promote the post to your networks and followers. As people comment, respond to them.

Discover My 3 Reasons for Tweeting

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I created my @ariherzog account in January 2009. (Though, I technically started a few months earlier before deleting my account and starting fresh.) I’ve seen lots of changes. The core reasons why I tweet remain the same.

1. Share resources. About 60% of my tweets follow the Social Media Club mission, “If you get it, share it.” The majority of my tweeting is spent sharing others’ voices, ideas, and insights.

2. Collaborate. This involves replying, connecting, and co-creating with like-minded friends and colleagues. About 30% of my tweeting involves networking and forging professional and personal relationships with people including Sarah Granger, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and Phil Gerbyshak.

3. Chit-chat. Whether I am auto-sharing an Instagram photo or replying to something someone else shared, you might see me tweeting to someone about pop culture or sports or science. These simple chats about life represent about 10% of my tweets.

These are my reasons for tweeting. You probably (and should) have different reasons. Care to share?

Why Your Online Friends Are Not Friends

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Every story about social media eventually mentions Dunbar’s number, a theory popularized by psychologist Robin Dunbar about the relationship between the size of your brain and the size of your average social group. He proposed that 150 friends is the average cognitive limit that our brains allow for stable relationships.

It is therefore irrelevant how many friends you claim to have on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media sites. Whether it’s 20 or 2,000, most of them are destined to be acquaintances. Unless you meet them face-to-face, and maintain that level of relationship intimacy, they will never be friends.

Dunbar explains:

“Social media certainly help to slow down the natural rate of decay in relationship quality that would set in once we cannot readily meet friends face-to-face. But no amount of social media will prevent a friend eventually becoming ‘just another acquaintance’ if you don’t meet face-to-face from time to time.

There is something paramount about face-to-face interactions that is crucial for maintaining friendships. Seeing the white of their eyes from time to time seems to be crucial to the way we maintain friendships.”

Moreover, he says, of those average 150 friends of yours, maybe 3% can be relied upon when there’s a crisis or other life change that you want people to care about. Think about that. When was the last time someone interacted with you after a job loss, divorce, or other lifestyle change? I don’t know the best solution but adding more friends is not necessarily the answer.

I’m on Twitter here and Facebook over there.

Feel free to follow or friend me on either site. But unless we meet face-to-face (and that could include digital equivalents like video chatting on Skype and FaceTime, both of which I have installed and enjoy using), we’ll just be faceless names to each other. Where’s the beauty in that?

Remember When Twitter was Born?

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It was April 13, 2009 when Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN.

A ding dong ditch is when you ring someone’s doorbell and run away.

Ashton had about 850,000 followers and the news network had about 900,000. Confident he could reach the million mark before the network, Larry King accepted the challenge and the race was on.

Within three days, Ashton won.

The next day, Oprah sent her first tweet.

It was a pivotal moment in the social networking service. I’d created my (first, now deleted) account on June 9, 2008 and naturally witnessed lots of bloggers who tended to be early adopters of technology with accounts. A handful of DC politicians were using it for constituent relations. Other than the tech-savvy entertainers (actor Wil Wheaton, musician MC Hammer, etc), the entertainment world was not really there. Most of my friends had no idea what it was, either. They still don’t.

But with Oprah getting on the site, as a direct result of the Ashton-CNN battle, mainstream media noticed and Twitter took off.

Fast forward and Katy Perry has 82.8 million followers today. She’s the most-followed on the site.

Justin Bieber has 75 million, Taylor Swift has 71 million, President Obama has 69 million, YouTube has 59 million, Rihanna has 56 million, Lady Gaga has 55 million, Ellen DeGeneres has 54 million, Twitter (ironically) has 52 million, and, rounding out the top ten followed, Justin Timberlake has 51 million.

As for Ashton and CNN today, he has 17 million followers and their primary account has 23 million.

I have about 2100 followers. I’m getting there. You can follow me here.

Two Depps Making Video Headlines

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Two videos were released online this week from the notorious Depp family…

Trump Movie

Featuring Johnny Depp as Donald Trump and a who’s who list of cameos (including Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, Oswald Patton, and Alfred Molina) portraying characters in a parody of Trump’s 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal.”

I wanted to like it. I lasted halfway through the 50-minute video before clicking away in boredom.

The film was produced by the humor website FunnyOrDie.com.

Bieber Tribute

Featuring Lily-Rose Depp (yes, Johnny’s 16-year-old daughter) and an ensemble cast of actors and musicians (including John Legend, Chloe Sevigny, and Nick Jonas) in a 2-minute dramatic reading of Justin Bieber’s song entitled, “Sorry.”

This wasn’t funny per se though there were funny bits. I thought it was genius.

I enjoyed watching this Vanity Fair-produced video much more than the Trump one. That says something.

Twitter: Why I Follow 500% More Than 1 Month Ago

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This Twitter screenshot shows my follower to following ratio during the initial weeks of 2016.

This screenshot shows my following to follower ratio on Twitter.

Courtesy of third-party analytics, you can see a marked increase in the number I follow and a slight increase in the number following me.

The “dip” of followers is intentional as those are forced unfollows, a concept I discovered last year. It’s an automated process via Tweepi that enables me to choose inactive accounts that I don’t want following me. This is because I don’t support outdated influence. I want my followers to be representative of active accounts, not accounts that haven’t tweeted in 6+ months.

Why My Twitter Network is Increasing

If you accept that the network is a mix of who you follow and who follows you, then conditional logic indicates:

  1. If you follow a stranger; and
  2. If your tweets appear normal and insightful; then
  3. You will be followed back and/or shared with their networks as someone to follow.

I don’t want to echo people who follow tens of thousands but I do want to increase my relationships with weak and absent ties.

The majority of the people I follow are folks who were already following me and this is why the number of followers only slightly increased. As I seek out people who aren’t following me and opting to follow them, I’m noticing a percentage of them following me back. These include folks who self-identify as civic hackers, urban studies professors, anthropologists, journalists, social marketing managers, etc.

I’m curious what the above screenshot will resemble at the end of February and I’ll write a new post then.