The 30 Secret Rules of Social Media

Every now and then I try to relax and look at see things from a different perspective. A few months ago, I imagined a world formed by social networks, each network being a country (if you think a little, the total population of those social networks could easily be higher than the population of an entire continent, so it’s not that strange anyway). But no country is a real country until it has a set of secret rules. Here are the 30 secret rules of social media (take them with a little bit of salt and pay attention to the last one, especially ).

Twitter

1. You are what you retweet.

2. Don’t DM without permission. It’s like trying to sell elephants in a porcelain store. Your goal may be achieved, but the price may be higher than you think.

3. If you tweet more than 8-9 times per day, your followers will be worried. It’s like getting out in front of your house and saying: “man what a nice weather today” 8-9 times a day. Your neighbors will be worried.

4. Don’t trust a follower with a nice woman picture as an avatar but with a nickname containing more than 4 digits. The photo is most likely a fake and you’re dealing with a nice looking spammer.

5. If you stop tweeting for 7 days in a row you should get yourself another account, your current one will be officially marked as obsolete.

6. If you see the fail whale, do continue to tweet on post-its. Don’t lose your momentum. Stick them on the walls of your office.

7. If you appear in more lists than the total number of your followers, that could be a pretty solid confirmation that you have a multiple personality disorder.

8. You know you had too much Twitter when you’re looking for the “follow” link on the business card you just received.

9. Automating your tweets is like sending clones to the social events you don’t like. Sooner or later, they will catch you.

StumbleUpon

10. Laws are changing every day in this country. Your friends are not your friends but your subscribers, which in turn may or may not be you visitors.

11. Stumbling is actually highly valued in this country. But do not fake it. Try to genuinely stumble otherwise you can be accused of inappropriate behavior in public.

12. StumbleUpon is the Hollywood of social media: it can make you famous in a single day, but you can also be forgotten in a week.

13. According to a number of experts, the SU toolbar could be the most widely used mouse click exercise on Earth. Emptying your SU bar from 100 shares in 10 seconds is considered pretty common sense. If you don’t know what a toolbar is, or what a share means in SU, then, by all means, don’t try to find out. Just stay happy.

Reddit

14. If they talk bad about you, don’t talk bad back. It’s not polite. Being talked bad in Reddit is a sign of high appreciation. Sometimes is a sign of pure rejection too.

15. Ask a question at least once per month. Don’t pick a specific topic, be as random as you can but do ask a question ever once in a while. Asking questions in Reddit is like drinking beer in Germany.

16. Starting your own subReddit is the equivalent of graduation. Everybody does it, sooner or later.

17. In Reddit, you actually accumulate karma, you don’t burn it. You’ve been warned.

Digg

18. If your link got buried, be happy. It’s the first sign you’re becoming important.

19. In Digg, who you are as a person is not even remotely as valuable as who you know. I also saw that in business. A lot.

20. Reaching the front page of Digg is equivalent in some cultures with winning the lottery. The probability, I mean.

21. If you get comments on your submissions, but no diggs, you’re doing something extremely wrong. Nobody will tell you exactly what, get used to it.

22. There’s no real difference between friends and fans: both can bury you alive.

Facebook

23. If you want to say something nice to some of your friends, think twice, there might be an app for that.

24. There will always be some causes to join at some point in your life, so don’t rush on the first one.

25. Farmville is a very crowded city in Facebook. Rumors has it that some people who entered Farmville never got back from it.

26. If someone likes your link that doesn’t mean you have to automatically invite him/her on a date.

27. You will receive crazy, totally useless, nice looking small gifts. Get used to it. It’s not spam. It’s gifts.

28. It’s compulsory to have your own fan page. If you don’t, people will assume you want to become somebody else’s fan and act accordingly.

29. Never respond to a message that says: “You have just been accepted in Mafia Wars”. Real mobsters don’t do that. They send someone over.

The Final Rule

30. If you’ve read everything on this list and agreed with at least 50% of what’s in it, you badly need a life. A real life.

I’m A Twitter Citizen, Work In StumbleUpon, Occasionally Travel To Reddit

Last month StumbleUpon had around 7 million registered users. Twitter is coming up pretty close, with around 4 million registered users, while Facebook watches all this from a distance, with more than 200 millions registered users. Why are those numbers important, apart from dry media statistics? Because they are not just numbers, they represent populations.

One of the most surprising and most important effects of social networking is the creation of a new type of country. A country which is not defined by physical borders, but by domain names. A country which is ruled by Terms Of Service, and not Constitutions. A type of country which, in some cases, is far more rich than most of the traditional, physical bordered countries.

If you’re surprised by these affirmations is good. It means you are from the old fashioned generation which thought email is the final frontier. If you’re not surprised, I bet you are one of the happy citizens of those new countries. You are already an active member of that population and help the economical growth of that specific country.

Well, for those still surprised, I will try to uncover in this article why and how the social media is shaping the new digital-political structure of the world, the structure that will overlap in the end the familiar geo-political structure.

Traditional And Digital Countries

A traditional country model is defined by borders, physical borders. A citizenship is defined by a special identification document, by which you are recognized. The traditional model of a country is territorial. You can’t really DO something outside the physical borders and your citizenship. The value is defined inside a territory, where there is a currency which you can trade for value. A traditional country is defined by fixed factors, like geography.

On the other hand, the digital countries are defined by interactions. Your citizenship is your username. In the Amazon country, you interact by buying things. In the eBay country you can do even more, you can sell your stuff too. And in the Monster country you can hunt for a job. All of these are interactions. And all digital countries are defined by interaction, instead of physical borders. Interactions performed over the internet. (more…)

Thesis Hooks for Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit

I love my wordpress theme, I really do. In case you haven’t noticed so far, this is thesis, one of the best commercial themes for wordpress. I don’t like it only for the crisp appearance and nice layout, you can get that nowadays from any decent free wordpress theme. What I like it for is the unparalleled flexibility of the backend. Not only it has 2 different admin pages full of options but it comes with one of the best features in the PHP frameworks: hooks.

Now it’s time to take a break and announce to our precious reader that this post will be a moderately technical one (yes, I know PHP pretty well, among other different skills ) and it will involve some coding. Now, let’s explain what this is all about.

Take Care Of Your Users

I use several social networking sites these days: StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and of course, Twitter. During the last few months I managed to attract a fairly amount of traffic from those services. To be honest, this traffic exceeds by far anything I get from search engines. And what I really appreciate at this type of traffic is its “human” touch. I might get some huge impact from a lot of bots that are searching for “iPhone 3g applications” (btw: I rank pretty well for that) but in the end what counts are the real persons who are seeing my posts promoted on the social networking services.

So, I thought it would be courteous for me to let those people know that I know from where they are coming and to start a little bit of interaction with them. I decided to have this interaction on two very hot spots in the wordpress territory: just before the post and just after the post. Sidebars, header and footer are not so hot when it comes to user action, the content rules. So, I wanted to have a simple line that would say hi to the visitor and tell him I’m on that specific social network too and a little reminder to help him promote the post, and another simple line in the end, letting him know how he can befriend me on those networks.

Pretty simple, of course. I know you can get tons of social networking features packed in a number of very specialized plugins but I didn’t wanted to use another plugin for that. I wanted to keep it extremely simple and easy to control. So, here’s how I did it (don’t worry now for the technical part, all the source code is packed and ready to download at the end of the post). (more…)