On April 9th, I hit what one could call the Social Media Lottery. At 1:25pm I posted this tweet…

With Instagram selling for $1bil & Draw Something selling for $200mm, why would any innovator bother trying to solve real world problems.

April 9, 2012 1:25 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@tomkrieglstein

Tom Krieglstein

A half hour later I logged back into my account and was shocked that my tweet had been retweeted by 30 people. Then, while I was looking at the 30 retweets, another 30 came in. My tweet was going viral. By viral, I mean it was retweeted and favorited at least two times per minute for the entire day. This is the first time a tweet of mine has spread that far.

I call this a Social Media Lottery because there is almost no way for me to duplicate it. The tweet went viral because it was the right content, seen by the right people, at the right time. Essentially, it was luck, because the right content, people, and time are ever changing.

It’s April 11th today and people are still retweeting my tweet.

Between the trolls, I did gain some new followers, but for the most part I kinda treat it like a social media merit badge, kinda like when a blog post of mine went viral.

My wife continues to dominate the print media with yet another article about her job as a Ghost Twitterer. Her last media cameo was in Wired Magazine. This time it’s for a Swiss newspaper with a full page headshot! (full image)

Between Facebook, multiple Twitter accounts, Google+, Google’s address book, and our internal CRM system for Swift Kick, I have so many different names for groupings of the people I follow, that it was getting extremely confusing to bounce between each network. I know my network is my net worth and it’s paid me back infinity+1, but that only happens when I can access the correct network at the correct time. So I set out to determine a default list of groupings that I could use across the networks. Here’s where I’m at…

PROFESSIONAL CONTACTS:

• Student Leaders
• Student Affairs Professionals
• Alumni Professionals
• Entrepreneurs
• Investors / VCs
• EO Members
• Speakers
• Education PR People
• Other Education Folk
• Other Professionals
• CrowdFunding / MicroFunding Professionals

PERSONAL CONTACTS:

• Family
• Extended Family
• Colberts
• NYC Friends
• Chicago Friends
• College Friends
• Highschool Friends
• Forum Members
• TechStars NY
• Swift Kick
• SuperCamp

ORGANIZATIONS:

• Student Affairs Accounts
• College Accounts
• Alumni Accounts
• Alumni Organizations
• SA Organizations
• CrowdFunding / MicroFunding Organizations
• Other Companies

OTHERS:

• World News / Info
• NYC Happenings
• Randoms

Those who know my wife, know she has a ridiculously amazing writing ability. Just peruse through her Twitter feed and you’ll see what I mean. Her mind is like wikipedia and her pen is like David Sedaris. She can pull out references to just about anything and make it funny. This is why she not only has a collection of online adoring fans, but has also landed her a two page interview in the December Wired print magazine. Though not her first brush with the media (here, here), it’s for sure her biggest. You can’t buy the magazine off-the-rack any more, but if you have a copy, turn to page 94, and you’ll see my lovely, and talented, wife talking about her life as a Ghost Twitterer. Here’s the opening line…

“Think your favorite celebrity posts awfully clever tweets? They’re probably written by Annie Colbert”

Luggage Porter by ColbyBluth

The day before Hurricane Irene made landfall along the Eastern Seaboard, a friend asked my wife and I to help volunteer setting up an evacuation center in NYC. While helping out, I was trying to be as nice as possible to the people coming in seeking shelter. I’d stop my work to help people carry luggage up stairs, answer questions, and clean up water spills. All of which I thought was part of my job as a volunteer.

After helping a family carry their luggage up some stairs, a supervisor stopped me and said…

“You shouldn’t be helping the evacuees as much because we need to train them to know that this is a self-help facility. They need to do things on their own. Training them that we will help them with everything is just setting us up for failure because there will soon be a lot more of them then there are of us and we won’t be able to help everyone.”

As soon as she said that, I flashbacked to the day before when I was doing an orientation training at a school and the president spoke before me. In his closing remarks to the orientation leaders, he said…

“No matter what, make sure to never, ever, ever let a parent pick up any luggage.”

Then a couple days ago on Twitter I saw this Tweet…

So my questions are, are we doing too much for our new students? Are we training them that no matter what they need, we are going to make it happen for them? Are we turning college into a daycare facility verses a place where you are expected to carry your own bag because after all, it’s your life?

A couple months ago, a debate erupted over the possible elitist nature of the popular online student affairs community, #SAchat. The discussion lasted for several days, before trailing off. But the idea of elitism stayed with me for a while afterwards because back in college, my student activities group was also accused of a similar thing. Ironically, the whole purpose of our student group was to promote student involvement on campus.

Thinking back on my time being involved in college and my experience of being with #SAchat since the beginning, I think I have another view on the elitist debate that I need to go back to a dance floor to help explain.

Let’s start with the idea that on any dance floor there are varying levels of engagement from five, being the most engaged, to neutrals, being the least engaged.

The most engaged people will tend towards the middle of the dance floor and the least engaged people will camp out next to the wall. Go to just about any dance around the world and you’ll see this same structure.

Most of the time the most engaged people tend to stay dancing in the middle of the dance floor because that’s where they’ll have the most fun. They get to interact with other fives who are just as excited as they are. And the longer they stay in the middle, the stronger the relational bonds between the other fives, and thus they’ll want to stick around even longer. Being a five in the middle is addictive and will make you forget that there are other people on the dance floor. Rarely will a five unconsciously break away from the other fives and spread out to the neutrals on the edge.

Unconsciously we all want to continue to hang around the people with whom we’ve built up the strongest relationships with and who are excited about the same things as we are.

Leadership is about consciously thinking about how you interact within any situation. It’s easy for leaders to clump together and celebrate how cool it is to be a five. But that doesn’t help the greater cause of bringing more people onto the dance floor. It’s hard to break away from your group and reach out to someone brand new. But if fives continue to only interact with fellow fives, I can see how easy it is for someone to call them elitist, and over time, for the fives to be the only ones left within the community.

Over the past week we experimented with a new series called “Yesterday in #StudentAffairs” as a way to capture, and re-purpose, the amazing amount of knowledge that flows through #SAchat every day. We originally used a person’s Twitter username to give them credit, which worked fine when their real name and Twitter username were basically the same thing. But when the person’s Twitter name was something totally different like @sunnysuzysunday or @ramblingmythoughts, it felt odd using it as a citation on the post because it didn’t feel like a credible source. So we switched to using everyone’s real name that is attached to their Twitter account and then hyperlinking back to their Twitter account.

It reminds me of my first email address back in highschool where I picked something that I thought was fun and creative, but then as I got older, realized that school admission officers, employers, etc. didn’t think the same way, so I switched to my real name and have stuck with it ever since.

Most schools do a pretty good job of teaching students to be aware of what their email address is, but we need to extend that education to all our public online accounts.

It’s your choice to use something besides your real name for your online persona, but know that others may react to it in a different way than you want them to.

Can’t get your real name as your username? Try

- Tom.Krieglstein

- TomKrieglstein1

- Tom_Krieglstein

- TomKrieglsteinOnline

Q: What’s the best way to engage with successful and driven people online? – N. Beil via Facebook

A: The internet opens up a lot of possibilities that allow you to engage with successful and driven people. The first step is to focus in on what topic/industry you want to network in. Once you’ve narrowed your focus, here are four ideas for engaging your hero…

1. Personal Blogs – Do a Google search for the person’s name and see if a personal blog/website shows up. If so, subscribe to their RSS/Email list to get updated on new posts. Then start engaging by reading and commenting on the person’s posts. Make sure to make your comments/questions insightful verses just saying “That was great!” or “Thanks!” While those type of comments are nice for a blogger to get, they won’t help you get on their radar. Another tip is instead of commenting directly to the blogger, find comments from other community members that you can respond to and respond. This tactic will not only get the attention of the blogger, but also positions you as a host or leader of the community. 95% of people will comment directly to the blogger, stand out by spending your time commenting on other’s comments.

 

2. Twitter – Search (NAME Twitter) on Google and see if a Twitter account shows up. Make sure to do this search on Google verses Twitter as the Twitter people search is unfortunately bad. Once you’ve found your hero, follow them. Instead of jumping right to asking questions, build up your credibility with the person by commenting on their Tweets and reTweeting their content. Once you’ve built up credibility, then you’ve earned the right to ask them a few questions.

 

3. Personal Projects – Everyone is working on something. Find out what project your hero is currently working on and offer your time (for free) to help grow the project. Some ideas are…
   • Researching content
   • Data entry
   • Data gathering
   • Event volunteering
   • PR support
   • HTML help

 

4. Facebook Fan Pages/Groups – On Facebook, search for your hero and find their personal/company Fan Page/Group. Like it. Then, just like with your hero’s personal blog, comment on posts and engage other users. Additionally, upload multimedia (video/pictures) content that relates to the topic. Just make sure it’s relevant.

These are four ideas that will get you networking in no time. Just like with washing clothes, the goal with all of these actions should be to rinse and repeat. Become a regular in your hero’s world as someone who keeps providing value. Over time that value will start paying you dividends.