Twitter is often seen as one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters when it is compared to the multimedia beauty and the wealth of numbers that the 800 million plus engaged users that the Facebook social network offers.

Facebook is the girlfriend you would be happy to take home to dinner with your parents but Twitter is often seen as a bit too quirky, strange and cheap to introduce to the family and folks.

Too short and dumpy for most.

If you take the time to get to understand Twitter with its quaint 140 character limit and its charming simplicity, it can be a very powerful tool to distribute information and ideas in real time to enhance your marketing and promotion efforts.

Twitter Power

Twitter has some advantages that are sometimes not seen as a strength.

1. Simple

It doesn’t get much simpler that 140 characters and that is why texting (SMS) has not gone away but continued to grow.

2. Focused and Targeted

Twitter followers tend to be loyal and follow other Twitter users because they are interested in information or news about who they are following. This is not leveraged by many marketers and “the secret“of how to use this capability should not be ignored. Over the last 3 years I have utilised this Twitter capability to spread ideas and information to a targeted global audience. Don’t underestimate this capability!

3. Highly Shareable

The retweet feature of Twitter allow the user to quickly pass on information by retweeting the news and information contained within its headline and link to their network.

Why Politicians and Celebrities Love Twitter

Politicians and celebrities love Twitter and celebrities have found that one tweet can cause a storm of sharing. It can enhance (or destroy) their personal brand and get their ideas out instantly.

Twitter has just announced that it will now be revealing how many retweets  your tweet has received instead of just showing “50+”

Making the retweet count visibly quantified will help marketers find what does and doesn’t resonate with their target market and audience. This will help adjust the writing of tweets and the topics to find what people really want to read.

A Cool Tool to Count Retweets

TwitSprout have quickly responded to this announcement and have provided a tool that allows you to check out your most popular retweets.

It is called “MyTopTweet” and allows you measure your top “Tweets” for sharing

This will provide you with some real numbers on what tweets your users are finding worth sharing.

Nothing like a some numerical feedback to adjust your Tweet direction!

If it isn’t being shared then you need to look at some key elements such as the headline of the tweet, the number of followers and the level of engagement.

The 3 Top Retweets in the World

That Twitter announcement of this change has allowed Twitsprout to also find out what are the most powerful “Tweets” and here are the top three.

1. Justin Bieber

2. Kim Kardashian

3. Lady Gaga

Now you may not have 10 million followers but growing your Twitter following will provide you with a focused and powerful network that will share your ideas, information and news.

How are you growing your Twitter followers?

Read More

• The Marketing Secret About Twitter That Most People Don’t Know
• How To Get Targeted Twitter Followers
• 8 Great Twitter Tools that will Get You Tweeting like Pro
• How to Write a Mind Blowing Headline for Twitter

Image by by Fred Seibert

Diffusion of innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. This theory was first studied by a French sociologist Gabriel Tarde in 1890.

In 1962 Everett Rogers published the book “Diffusion of Innovations” where he synthesized research from over 508 diffusion studies and produced a theory that proposed 4 main elements that influence the spread of an idea.

1. The Innovation

An idea, practice or object that is perceived as new

2. Communication Channels

The means by which messages get from one individual to another

3. Time

The relative speed with which an innovation is adopted by members of the social system

4. The Social System

The people that are engaged in joint problem solving to achieve a common goal

He also outlined  the following adopter categories that reveal the percentages of the types of participants that are involved in the innovation cycle.

The Google+ Social Experiment

The Google+ Project has drawn the innovators and early adopters into its web and  it is producing activities that have surprised myself and others.

As I have been involved with using Google+ in its initial field trial stage I have been able to observe as well as participate as people started entering Google+. As I started prodding its features and watching the crowd I noticed revealing activities and behaviors that were different it seemed from my experiences on Facebook and Twitter.

The field trial by nature and design attracted the innovators and early adopters that will tweak every knob and play with every shiny new object within the new environment.

One of the first things I noticed was the high level of engagement and interaction that Google+ ecosystem seemed to facilitiate. Posts and updates seemed to drive comments and interactions at hyperactive levels with 70 or 80 responses being created over a very short time frame.

Mashable ran an experiment to compare Facebook engagement with Google+ engagement and the results verified my anecdotal observations.

Facebook vs Google+

Mashable started discussions on both platforms about a study that claims 34% of iPhone users think they have 4G. The posts were published at roughly the same time and had similar prompts, posing questions about the study’s results.

Facebook

57 likes and 40 comments

Google+

183 +1′s and 116 comments

The difference is significant with Google + receiving 321% more approvals and 290% more comments than Facebook, which is highly significant statistical difference.

Their comment regarding the results was “Granted this is only one post of many, but it’s still quite telling”

Chris Brogan in a recent post commented on this phenomena and his anecdotal observation was that updates on Google+ seemed to drive 3 times the activity he had experienced elsewhere.

Google+ seems to be a more natural platform for conversations.

7 Reasons Why Google+ Drives Hyperactive Engagement

This is my take on the Google+ and the key elements that are producing this marked difference in engagement.

1. The Google+ Project is currently highly populated with innovators and early adopters that are both influential and very active and are poking and prodding the new levers.

2. The well designed UI (User Interface) encourages ease of use and consequently more interaction. So good design matters!

3. The speed  of the Google+ channel . It seems to be almost Twitter like in real time updating to the Google+ stream which keeps the topic hot (it would be interesting to compare the lag times between Facebook, Twitter and Google+ on updates into the streams on each channel)

4. It is not limited to 140 Characters like Twitter and so encourages people to interact more naturally rather than think long and hard about how to make it fit to the 140 character limit.

5. It is more engaging because it is multi-media rich in real time

6. The inviting ‘red button” hinting at more notifications is compelling and addictive (according to a comment from Nancy Loo after I posed this question on Google+)

7. The “shiny new toy” effect.  People are curious about this new Google social network so if they had to choose between the new or old toy, they want to play with the new one. (Thanks David Polykoff)

This is indeed a second generation social network that is taking online engagement to new levels through good design and technology that truly ‘works’ and is intuitive and highly responsive in real time.

This is No Accident

My bet is that this is no accident, this has been designed by Google to happen from day one.

They have taken the issues such as time lags, privacy and ease of use that have been learnt from Twitter and Facebook and other social networking channels and invented a better mousetrap.

Why do you think Google+ drives such high levels of engagement?

More Reading

• How to Increase your Google+ Followers
• Google+ Sets New Growth Records
• 50 Fascinating Facebook facts and Figures
• The 10 Best Facebook Campaigns
• How to Create a Twitter Marketing Strategy that Rocks
• How To Write A Mind Blowing Headline For Twitter So People Will Read Your Blog

Image by Peter Forret

The growth of Google+ has had statisticians, programmers and apps developers in a spin over the last couple weeks as everyone scrambles to measure and monitor the Google+ second generation social network.

The irony is that Twitter and Facebook are driving a lot of the buzz and growth as the conversations circle the globe. The many to many viral capacity of the social web has driven traffic to social network and social media sites including blogs and portals where comments and shares continue to spread the Google+ story.

Discussions have even emerged about whether Google+ will make life difficult not only for Facebook but also the other major platforms such as Twitter and even LinkedIn.

Google+ Dominates Conversations on Twitter

On Twitter the Google+ tweets have been dominating the Twittersphere with the Pew Research Center reporting that on Twitter the new Google+ social network took top billing, with 35% of news links for the week.

According to their monitoring Tweeters were mostly excited about the new Facebook competitor, especially when it came to the issue of privacy.

At number two and three respectively were Global warming at 11%  and “Hackers and al Qaeda at 9% and at fourth was the European Economy at 9%.

Who is the Top Person on Google+

Who would guess that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook with a current following of 184,842  would easily lead the list!

The founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin are embarrassingly at positions two and three.

The list is dominated by the top bloggers on technology such as Robert Scoble and journalists such as Leo Laporte. Also in the top 10 apart from some Googlers, is Kevin Rose (the founder of Digg) and now a video blogger and Angel investor and Felicia Day, a professional actress well known for acting in web video “The Guild”

The Top 100 People on Google+

So who are some of the other notables on the top 100 list on Google+?

• Peter Cashmore the founder of Mashable
• Chris Brogan the social media blogger and speaker
• Loic Le Meur the founder of the Twitter app Seesmic
• Gary Vaynerchuk the Wine Library TV video blogger guy
• Michael Dell the CEO of Dell
• Seth Godin the marketing blogger and speaker
• Guy Kawasaki the author speaker and entrepreneur

It will  be interesting over time to see how this list changes as as personalities and stars take a presence on Google+

What is surprising is that organisations such as Mashable are still being allowed to participate  despite Google making it public that brands and companies would need to wait until the the Google+ Enterprise profiles were launched. I would suggest that the Mashable Blog and others such as the Ford Motor company are still being permitted to have a profile so as to continue to drive the buzz about Google+

If you want to view the full list you can visit the social statistics site

How to Get the Google+ Statistics Widget

To add to your widget list on your blog you can embed a Google+ Statistics widget in your side bar that keeps a real time update of your followers and friends ( to get the widget visit this page)

I have embedded it my WordPress blog for a bit of fun and it is easy to do just using the “text” widget feature where you can copy the code once you have entered your Google+ 21 digit ID code.

So who in the top 100 list is a surprise to you?

More reading

• Google+ Sets New Growth Records
• How to Increase Your Google+ Followers
• Why Google’s New Second generation Social Network Google+ Will Threaten Facebook
• 50 Amazing Facts and Figures About Google
• Insights into Google’s New Google+ Social Network

Companies and brands have refined processes and systems for ascribing value to their physical assets and bricks and mortar properties but when it comes to the measuring of their online properties value there is mostly a big yawn.

We live in a knowledge economy where information is vital and critical to ongoing success as we transition to a post industrial age where workers don’t carry bricks but laptops, iPads and iPhones.

Increasing the value of your online assets which displays a brands knowledge and thought leadership to the world should be made a priority for any modern business.

These assets are now not just restricted to online properties you own such as your website but anywhere you have a web presence and this includes your social media channels.

What are Social Media Assets?

Online assets are not just your website, it is any web presence that makes it easy for customers and prospects to find you and engage with you and this includes any social media channels that you participate on as an organisation.  These channels could include the company blog, Facebook page and YouTube channel.

These channels are where prospects ‘start’ buying from you whether you are aware of it or not.

Social media is transforming the web and with the rise of Facebook there has been an unseemly gold rush by brands to make their online presence more social. This social participation broadens and deepens the reach and influence significantly of any brand and organisation.

Google is Taking Social Very Seriously

Google’s announcement and field trial of its Google+ social networking platform has revealed how serious Google is taking the socialization of the web and the threat of Facebook to its core revenue stream. Google group product manager Christian Oestlien said

“Google+ is just the beginning of  a very long journey towards making Google , our properties and products more social”

So focused is Google in its endeavours on becoming more social is the fact that the Google+ project has had 30 plus enterprise wide project teams working on the new social platform for more than 12 months and Google’s executives incentives are tied to its success.

Ideas on Valuing your Social Media Assets

Companies and organisations in their marketing audit should be assigning value to their social online properties and here is a core concept and some ideas to consider.

Take the top line core value for each social media asset and attribute a simple numerical value and then come to an overall headline total that can be called your social media asset valuation index.

Here are six social media assets that you could attribute a value to.

Blog

The value you should be measuring here includes key elements such as the amount of traffic, inbound links to the blog articles (that is the number of websites and blogs that are hyperlinking to your content) and the number of comments. To kick off the the core measurement value without overcomplicating it,  just take one key measurable asset to start with and an example of this could be the number of page views per month.

Example: Blog page views per month: 10,000

Facebook

Facebook’s value to an organisation starts with ‘likes’ or the number of fans, liking of content and comments and links left on the page.

Core value to initially measure could be the number of ‘Fans’ on your organisations Facebook ‘Page’.

Example: Facebook Fans: 1,000

Twitter

How do you measure the value of  Twitter? This could include the number of followers, the number of retweets and the traffic that it drives to your blog. To start let’s ascribe the number of Twitter followers as being a valuable social media asset to measure. In measuring this I am not devaluing what is also important such as the quality of the those that follow you on Twitter and if they are following you because of the value of the content you are tweeting that leads back to your blog that is relevant and targeted to their topics of  interest.

Example: Twitter followers: 3,000

YouTube

YouTube can be your TV channel where you can educate your prospects and customers.  The numbers to measure here include subscribers and the the number of views.

Example: YouTube views: 6,000

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a more closed community than Facebook or Twitter and its value is measured essentially three key ways and they are the number of connections, quality of the connections and the level of engagement. Quality and engagement are hard to definitively measure.

Example: LinkedIn Connections: 600

SlideShare

This platform’s value is often underestimated or often ignored but showcasing the knowledge of the organisation in a presentation format can have long lasting residual value. On Slideshare you can measure, views, downloads and embeds as well as other elements such as retweets and Facebook ‘shares’. To keep it simple we can just measure the number of views.

SlideShare Views: 1,000

Example: Total Social Media Asset Valuation Index: 21,600

Now, this is just a high level quantification example of your social media assets valuation that can be helpful in providing a top level snapshot in time that can be quite revealing.

This should not diminish in any way ascribing value to the quality component of important elements of online social engagement and other qualitative measurements.

Are you investing in your on line assets?

What is your social media asset valuation and is this worth measuring?

Image by whoswho

I regularly take classes for college students and often I ask them the following question, “How many of you use Facebook?”… the response is inevitably unanimous. In fact I don’t think there has been one class where any student was not on Facebook. Following closely behind is my next question, “How many of you are on Twitter?” Rarely are there more than one or two lonely hands waving in the breeze.

Gen Y and the younger generations who have grown up with a smart phone in one hand, an iPad in the other and a PC embedded in their DNA have not really taken to Twitter. They often ask me “What’s the point?” The reality is that they don’t get Twitter.

So Facebook dominates the latest generations psyche in social networking and also for most other generations for that matter.

Will Twitter ever get the mind share and market domination that Facebook commands on the social web?

Apple just last week made an announcement that just might change the game.

Maybe this announcement could be foreboding for Facebook that missed out on this gig with Apple with new data showing that in May it lost nearly 6 million users in the USA.

Will Apple’s Announcement Change the Social Media Universe?

Apple announced that Twitter will be deeply integrated within Apple’s new iOS 5 Operating system. The implications of this news seems to have escaped most press pundits but maybe it was because it was lost in the noise and clutter of  nearly 200 new upgrades to Apple’s software for iPads, iPhones and iPods.

From birth Twitter was built for the mobile phone with a 140 character limit and third party apps such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite working well on Apple. So this synergistic marriage between the two companies has the potential to shake up the social media fraternity.

What are the implications of this announcement for Apple and for Twitter?

I think the effects will be major and the ramifications will rumble through the web over the next few years. The other reality to keep in mind is that the mobile smartphone use will far exceed laptops and PC’s as the Web becomes increasingly mobile and wireless.

With Morgan Stanley predicting that mobile Internet usage will exceed desktop by 2015,  Apple and Twitter have now booked themselves a  place at the front of the queue of the two of the fastest growing trends on the web, mobile and social networking.

5 Implications of the Twitter Apple Marriage

1. More People will Sign up to Twitter

With Twitter built into the native menu system and apps it will make it compelling for people (and maybe even Gen Y) to sign up to Twitter. The synergy of the numbers are huge (Apple has more than 200 million people using its operating system and Twitter  has over 200 million users). The question will be how many will now join up to Twitter to take advantage of tweeting and sharing with their friends seamlessly from within Apple’s operating system. My read on this is that we will see a huge increase in  the growth of Twitter.

Screen shot of Twitter within Apples native menu system

2. Apple gets Access to Over 200 Million Twitter Users

This will provide more impetus for people to buy the Apple devices from the iPad to the iPhone. Adding a seamless and low friction environment to share with friends will add even more allure to Apple’s magical brand that has disciples and raving fans rather than just customers.

3. Apple Now has a Social Network

Apple has known it was lagging badly on the social web and instead of trying to compete in a space where it isn’t strong this partnership will provide synergy and impetus for both brands. The beauty of this integration of Twitter within the iOS 5 operating system is that people can share content and information within Apple’s menus without having to go out to the Twitter app or third party apps.

4. Twitter gets Access to the 200 Million Apple Users and Over 500,000 Apps

It will make a lot of sense and provide  a compelling reason for app developers to be scrambling to weave Twitter into their features and functions. So with one stroke Twitter will now start to be integrated into over half a million software applications that will spread on the global mobile ecosystem.

5. Apple Apps will be able to Leverage Twitter to Spread their Brand Seamlessly

Twitter has shown to be a highly leveraged and low friction network  and the effects for apps to to spread will be multiplied by this decision. According to Techcrunch the social networking questions and answers platform Quora says that any Tweet sent from Quora results in 30 retweets, resulting in huge traffic and apps could potentially see a similar effect. Using a built in Tweet Sheet feature (essentially a Tweetbox that overlays on top of any app), any app can leverage Twitter’s network effects

So did Apple make the wrong decision with integrating Twitter rather than Facebook? I think not. The synergies and the two companies are complementary and this  marriage will have major repercussions on  several market segments including mobile, apps and social networking.

My Big Brave Prediction for Twitters Future Growth!!

Twitter will add one hundred million users in 12 months once the iOS5 hits the streets!

What do you think?

More Reading

20 Creative Ways to Use an Apple iPad

10 New Apple iPad Facts and Figures

How 3 Mobile gadgets are Transforming our Lives

Social Media and Mobile: The Perfect Addiction

3 Key Elements Needed to Take Social Mobile to the Next Level

Is Mobile Social Media Making Women Geeks

Why You Should be Optimizing Your Blog and Website for Mobile

Image by jovike

I’m looking forward to being on Michele Price‘s Breakthrough Business Strategies Radio on February 28 at 12pm Eastern (USA) on #BBSradio to discuss everything Blogging and Social Media for business and how to create and grow your influence online.

The Breakthrough Business Strategies Radio is a popular weekly broadcast over the Internet that has featured famous business authors such as Tony Hsieh of Zappos, author of “Flip the Funnel” Joseph Jaffe, and author of “UnMarketing” Scott Stratten.  The broadcast gives listeners the chance to ask the experts questions in advance as well as tweet them out during the live broadcast.

Michele herself is no newbie to social media and is a peer who has amassed a lot of success in both speaking as well as consulting not only on social media but also on one’s personal or business online presence.

Some of the topics we will cover in my show with Michele will be

• How do you drive more traffic to your website and blog with social media?
• How can you plan and implement social media marketing to increase your sales?
• How do you double your email acquisition for your eNewsletter database and integrate it with Social Media
• How to use the different social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs and other social media channels for business
• How to position your company as an expert and thought leader in its sector using social media and blogging
• How to use social media to promote brand “You”
• How to use your existing content and social media tools to drive inbound sales rather than  cold calling or the yellow pages

I look forward to having you drop by on February 28 at  12pm Eastern (USA) on #BBSradio.

There are 6.6 Billion people all around the planet forming a gigantic social network. At some point somewhere in this network, an idea is cooked up in the brain of one person, or sometimes a few people  – a node or a small cluster of them.

From there the spread begins. This is Social Networking.

The power of an idea that springs from love, passion and energy is hard to contain. The book “Cold Mountain” started with this embedded.

It is a story told by a father to his son about his great-great-uncle, a Confederate soldier who deserted from the army while recovering from his battle wounds. The son finally wrote a 449 page book from this thin outline. The book finally found it’s way to a professor of social psychology who included it as one of the options for a graduate-student project.

Typical communication in the age of mass media start with two steps

1. Mass Media to Network Hubs
2. Network Hubs to the rest of the population

But “Buzz” refuses to follow neat patterns. Cold Mountain’s buzz didn’t start from the traditional marketers text book .

So what made the book spread? What were the contagious attributes?

1. A tremendous amount of energy and passion behind the book from the author to the publisher.
2. There is no substitute for good writing
3. Time and money put behind a product. ..the publisher spent hours walking the shelves at Barnes and Noble writing down the names of 150 authors who they felt would be interested in in reading “Cold Mountain”
4. Your believers back you every step of the way
5. Every one in the chain of influence put in time and effort to promote it
6. It was on the best seller list – creating more momentum
7. Trust – Buzz travels with less friction on channels built with trust (eg ..this is a comment I recieved today on my blog “ For me I only follow links that have great descriptions about what to expect when clicked. Like I clicked on your tweet about this survey that was retweeted by someone I follow.”
8. Credibility- no matter how much credibility one has has the best buzz comes from third parties.. not the company putting out the product itself.
9. The Word of mouth is passed on authentically- it is un-coerced
10. Recognition from your peers – in this case other publishers

So does your blog, book or ebook have contagious attributes?

Last Christmas break was a busy socializing extravaganza with family, friends and business colleagues. There was much wine consumed, gifts given, food eaten and stories told, both tall tales and true. Superficial but interesting conversations were engaged on topics like movies recently watched ..such as “Avatar” and  questions such as … “Is it a paradigm shift in the way we watch and consume movies?” and is it a movie worth going to see?

Most of these conversations were offline and face to face. Some conversations were about social media and social networking and we discussed issues such as “Does Social Media trivialize real human social interaction because it is not face to face?”

On a plane tonight coming back from a weekend on the Gold Coast, where I caught up with friends and family, I read a book by Emmanuel Rosen titled “Buzz..Real Life Lessons in Word Of Mouth Marketing” that discusses the viral effect of conversations online and offline and how word of mouth spreads, especially in how it relates to marketing.

Some of the questions he asks and discusses are

• How do you create far reaching influence or a “Global Cascade” of conversation?
• Do you need to find the “Influentials” that  are the gatekeepers to social networks to start the conversation Buzz?

or do you you only have to find a “Critical mass of of easily influenced individuals”  to create far reaching influence.

A study by Dodds and Watts in 2007 in the Harvard Business Review was about how “Social Epidemics” occur where recommendations for a product like Avatar can be promulgated and enhanced through conversations with friends and colleagues. They found that if three friends recommended a product or brand to a person, in most cases it had no influence but with the fourth mention in the positive that they became “infected” and spread the gospel for that product. So with that, Rosen went on to list the 10 principles that he believes are at work in social networking which has a high degree of relevancy to social media.

So what are the 10 principles at work in Social Networking?

1. Social Networks are Invisible...even in the age of social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace

No matter how hard you try you cannot find the “strength of the tie” and this comes down to

• the privacy of the networks
• people don’t reveal their true network ties
• there is a lot of  noise in the data that comes from these sites

2. People Link With Other Who Are Similiar To Them

An example of this is that each sport has it’s own social network, Golfers hang out with golfers and compare notes on things like golf clubs. This “Homophily Principle” has 2 basic implications

• They tend to form clusters
• The more similiar your employees are to your customersthe easier the communications will be

3. People Who Are Similiar To Each Other Form Clusters

This can be simply shown with examples of why do Hells Angels travel in packs or girls in second grade play together. Clusters can informally adopt products together such as “Apple” fanatics.

Note: If you product becomes becomes the standard within a cluster , it makes it dificult for competitors to uproot you from this postion.

4. Buzz Spreads Through Common Nodes

This means that even though we as human beings might have only “6 degrees of seperation” that transferring buzz between different structures or nodes has a high degree of friction.

5. Information Gets Trapped In Clusters

You can have different clusters in the same building or company such as Marketing and PR. Spreading buzz from one group to another is rare. It normally means that a story can be trapped within the marketers or PR.

6. Network Hubs and Connectors Create Shortcuts

There is an example of some German Birkenstock sandals that were discovered by an American Margaret Fraser on a visit to a Yoga trainer in Germanywhere she discovered these really comfortable sandals that on taking them back to the USA and became the master distributor that have now become a $120 Million dollar a year business. The connector enabled a quick way to get the product discovered on the other side of the world.

Note: Venture capitalists are also a good example of the role of the connector between “clusters”

7. We Talk To Those Around Us

The Internet does cross geographical boundaries but those that are in close proximity are the ones we still influence with the most ease

This highlights the following

• Geography still matters
• 74% of all comments are transmitted through simple face to face conversations (Keller Fay, 2007)
• When marketing a product or service that you hope will have a a national or global appeal. It is important to create a presence in every geographical location.
• Traditional marketing based on Zip codes, database marekting and bricks and mortar locations is still important

8. Weak Ties Are Surprisingly Strong

A study in the late 1960′s by Mark Granowetter of Harward showed

“Word of mouth through acquaintances had significantly more impact than word of mouth with close friends and relatives”

The takeaway on this – people outside of our close networks are important in bringing in fresh data – in other words diversify your connections.

9. The Net Nurtures Weak Ties

It’s easy to maintain weak ties on the Internet. The increase in weak ties on the internet can explain why information travels much faster today. The Internet creates millions of shortcuts of weak ties that bridge social clusters.

10. Networks Go Across Categories

Politicians used to be able to take one message to a core group of supporters  and a different one to the general public but not now. The internet and the new social networking channels are blurring the lines among different categories. What  was once a private message to the loyal followers is now public conversation within seconds and minutes.

So how could you apply these 10 principles to creating buzz about your product or service?