Part 1 of this post is an analysis of the Joshua Krafchin Social Media Experiment progress.
Part 2 is a list of all the super-fun creative output the Experiment has generated.
What is the Experiment? It’s a concerted, conscious effort to engage in social media, fully express myself creatively and ultimately amplify my voice at scale.
Part 1
In absolute follower numbers, Day 11 of the experiment doesn’t look much different than Day 1. I’ve only picked up a handful of Twitter followers and little other movement. In past attempts at “joining social media,” this is about when I’d give up in frustration and ego-bruising.
BUT from a growth and momentum point of view, there are some positive signs.
You’ll notice the big spike was in late September when, after years of relative lethary, I started posting dozens of times a day (Note: the official experiment start date was Oct. 1). What’s encouraging is that even though my posting frequency fell off in early October, my Klout score didn’t and actually started rising again today, gaining a point from October 1.
For a while there, it felt like absolutely nobody was reading anything I posted on Twitter, but as this next graph proves, I’ve improved from “nobody reading” to “less than nobody reading” with both replies and retweets growing relatively in proportion with tweets.
Compare that to the September graph where (if you ignore September 18th and 19th because I literally spent all day wracking my brain on how to get instant traction those days) my reply ratio dive-bombed as the month wore on, even if I was posting more frequently. More importantly, pretty much no one retweeted anything I posted.
Although October’s numbers are small, they show that even with less posting, I’m getting some engagement traction.
The biggest area of growth has been Quora. If Klout tracked Quora, my score would have jumped by a lot more than a point. A few highlights:
1. According to https://www.quora.com/views, I had never had more than 165 views of my content until September when I had 924 views. In 11 days of October, my content has had 2850 views. Amortized, that’s a 8X+ improvement.
2. This question about fission received 7 answers, 4 comments, and the top answer has 46 upvotes as of 10/11/13 evening. I know, this ain’t one of those questions with hundreds of answers and thousands of upvotes, BUT it proves that traction and improvement are possible for me.
3. Everything I’ve asked or answered has related to something personally interesting or important to me. This isn’t work; it’s fun.
One last observation. Check out my network breakdown:
Arguably, Twitter is the toughest place to get engagement, especially when you’re a newb, because people are conditioned not to pay close attention to most tweets. Notice I’m playing where engagement is toughest first. My bet is that when I do finally get over my fear of Facebook and execute my posting strategy there (top secret for now unless you listen to my second podcast listed below), there will a) be way more engagement and b) it will reinforce what I’m doing in Twitter and accelerate efforts there.
Part 2
While, sure, there’s some ego in the metrics, I’m sharing them mainly because I’m an analytics-driven marketer, and this is my company blog. Increasingly, my obsession with self-validation through social media metrics is being replaced with a very simple joy: it’s really fun to express myself and be in conversation with interesting people.
The last couple weeks have seen an explosion in my creative output:
– 2 episodes of the new podcast series Sunday Nights with Joshua Krafchin (coming to iTunes soon)
– 1, 2, 3 blogs
– This video walk through of how Outbrain can improve their conversion funnel
– Posts 1 and 2 about the Joshua Krafchin Social Media Experiment.
It’s been thrilling. The name of the game for now isn’t to build an enormous following — I have faith that if I stick with this it will come. The goal is to stay engaged, be creative, lose my inhibitions and figure out how to leverage all of this incredible technology to help humanity do remarkable things.
AND in case you have any issues with any of this, I’M SORRY!