Author Archives for Josh Krafchin

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!

10. It’s really easy to fall off the posting frequency band wagon.
9. Just because I tweet stuff (even when I tweet a lot of it) doesn’t mean people respond.
8. Tweeting is like playing scratch off lottery.
7. Tweeting sparked interactions “offline.”
6. Be careful who you give veto power over what you publish.
5. Facebook is frightening. It’s like my first day of Kindergarten.
4. My wife is just as lovely online as she is offline.
3. I may be getting addicted to that physically anxious / ecstatic sensation I only get when I’m deliberating over whether to press a button, click, etc.
2. Asking “When can I be considered to be a part of ‘social media’?” is not a punishable offense.
1. It’s thrilling, exciting and frightening to be participating in a more public way. Wanna try this out together?
.5. Make sure you tweet the right link.

I have this incredibly strong gut sense that everything is about to get a lot better for everyone and that somehow social media is a big piece of it. The case for optimism.

The irony, on many levels, is that other than creating a few social media accounts, I’ve done next to nothing with it, and I’ve found all sorts of justifications for my social media indifference:

• It’s not Clever Zebo’s business focus
• Social networks make people unhappy
• I’ve been plenty successful with phone and email, thank you very much
• The social media industrial complex privacy conspiracy

That’s all code for: I’m afraid. The refrain replays in my brain: “I can’t reveal too much, or something bad will happen to me.”

But WHY will something bad happen to me? What have I done wrong? What will you all find out (and despise) when I drop the filter and just let it flow?

I’m coming around to the view that transparent living is a big part of the solution to human suffering. The more transparency in a system, the more opportunity there is for accountability and debate. Corruption is when a system prioritizes personal gain over transparency.

Yes, there are all the unknowns and vulnerabilities of suddenly going extremely public, but the water’s never as cold as it looks from the dock (except when it is?).

So how to jump in?

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell posits that the key to success in any field is 10,000 hours of practice. To jump in, I’m replacing “hours” with “actions.” An action is any post, share, reply, etc. that is public to access.

My goal is to get to 10,000 actions by the end of year which seems pretty much unattainable, both because that’s over 100 actions per day, every day but also because I haven’t found a good action counting analytics tool (recommendation in comments, please).

Why does volume matter? Don’t I risk annoying people?

The specific number is arbitrary. It is large, though, as a tribute to the future in which I believe superior input interfaces and inter-connectivity will make us laugh at 100 actions per day the way we laugh today about early computers with 4KB memory.

What do I personally get out of this?

1. To join the global conversation. Brilliant people are building the tools to empower my participation. Participate, Josh.

2. The more I influence and understand social media, the more value I can bring to my clients.

3. It’s a small step toward a much bigger vision.

4. I’m curious what it would be like to be (embarrassing revelation alert) famous. (Still not clear how this will make me famous, but it has a better shot than watching Breaking Bad for the third time through.)

5. There’s a certain person whose name I dare not mention but who has promised to shave his head when I surpass his Twitter following (50K+) — really want that one

6. I’ve observed that what matters in social is growth rate, not necessarily starting point or current volume. Coming from near-zero, I can hit high virality acceleration quickly.

So what are the details?

Duration: Oct. 1 12AM – Dec. 31 11:59:59PM (PST)
Launch party: #freedonuts 10/1 8:30 AM Montgomery + Market
Networks that qualify: Any social media, news or publishing platform that enable public posting at no cost to the consumer
Follow me at @joshuakrafchin to stay in the loop.
Experiment Design Brief

What can you do?

Pay attention as much as you can stomach. There’s no pressure to do anything. Any amount of support is deeply appreciated. Whether you’ve yet to create a Twitter profile or a have millions of followers, join me. The idea is to do it together.

Causes I’m promoting

– End all violence and mistreatment, especially against other humans.
– Promote Web X.0 literacy.
– Happiness, fulfillment and self-love for all.
– Goodbye fear, hello world.

Game on.