The WAYN to do it

While social media is still a relatively new method of communicating online, there are some dinosaurs that have been around for a long time. One of the lesser known dinosaurs is WAYN. WAYN is a relatively small network (15.5 million users) that focuses around finding fellow travelers. Though they are small compared to Facebook and Twitter, they’ve revealed to TechCrunch that they are now profitable. This is an awesome feat for WAYN when Twitter is still not profitable and Facebook, now sitting on 400 million users, has just starting making dough.

WAYN does things the right way for a smaller, more focused social network. It isn’t about broadly keeping in touch with your friends, but specifically in making new ones during your travels through different countries. The site is more popular in Europe because of the closer proximity to different countries and the site started in the UK, but now that you can connect your WAYN account through Facebook, WAYN has dramatically increased their visibility. Using another social networking site, especially a giant one like Facebook, to piggyback a few users your way is a great idea for a niche network like WAYN. Your WAYN account would never replace your Facebook account, so it’s safe and effective to “partner” with Facebook to grab some more users. They way they’ve made most of their money though is through different countries’ tourism boards. Many tourism boards want to get involved in social media and WAYN offers them a direct connection to people who like to travel.

WAYN has a purpose that echoes what got me into using the Internet in the first place — meeting new people. As an only child, I made a lot of conversations with people who I met playing video games or through MySpace just because they were someone new to talk to. The power of being able to talk to billions of people from around the world was unheard of until the Internet became a part of our daily lives. Essentially, it’s really really cool that a social networking site exists that focuses on building your social network rather than maintaining it.

What do you think of WAYN? Do you use it? Or is it too niche to be of use for you?

Filed under: Social Media, TechCrunch, WAYN

Stamina and Control

I recently read a blog post by Drew Hawkins regarding how creating a web presence is a long-term goal. You can’t make a Twitter account and a Facebook page and expect a thousand followers and three thousand fans the next day. Even if you did, they wouldn’t be necessarily great people to have on your side. This sort of goes with my last post and the notion that quality is greater than quantity. I’m not going to completely disregard the merits of picking up a few random people to follow, but it should be to reach new segments of people rather than just to pad your follower count.

The reason I mention this is because it is a very easy thing to go through people’s lists, follow everyone in there and hope to get 10% of them to reciprocate and follow you as well. Unfortunately, with that method you’ll get a lot of people who won’t care about what you’re posting. Future followers won’t see you as a credible source of information; you’re now just another selfish person who’s just discovered the Internet and RSS feeds. I’m not immune to this instant gratification mentality but I try my hardest to put thought and effort into my posts and tweets. The whole point of social media and new media in general is that you are narrowing your audience to people who might actually be interested in your message. You don’t need to drench them in meaningless information. You’ll just be tuned out.

For example, my current plan on my personal brand and it’s web presence is just blog about things I find interesting, follow the people I find interesting and retweet what I find interesting. I feel like that’s the best way to maintain not only my e-honor (funny concept, I know) but to build and keep a consistent audience. An audience that’s interested in social media and it’s implications. An audience who maybe really likes underground hip-hop and old BMWs. All this will lead to an audience that is interested in me and an audience I’m interested in. Reciprocation (starting to sound like a broken record) and building relationships, I feel, are the best ways to create a meaningful presence in social media.

Anything you’d like to add?

Filed under: Social Media, Reciprocation, twitter

It’s alive!

It’s been so long since I’ve worked on this blog it’s sort of depressing. For someone who is on the internet most minutes out of the hour, it seems less than trivial that I should have a working blog – not just an artifact of past interests and political rants. Not to say those won’t crop up once in awhile, but I really wanted something that reflected my current self better than all past iterations of my blogging.

I went to the Communication Career Day here at UCSB and it’s great finding reasons to be motivated. I listened to a few speakers about communication in new tech along with brand development and advertising. It’s quite similar to how motivated I used to get in jazz band when we went to competitions or I heard a really great piece. Your adrenaline starts flowing and your mind starts racing with ideas and future plans. Also, it’s so awesome how incredibly helpful the speakers are. I spoke briefly with Melodie Tao, an entrepreneur in social media marketing, and she gave me some great advice about how to display your social media skills and familiarity when talking to potential employers. Along with that, she even asked me to add her on LinkedIn if I had any other questions. It’s really nice to shed some of the nervousness and unknown about getting into the industry by having at least one potential resource for help.

I also read a really interesting older article on wired about social media and over-saturation of followers/fans/etc. It offers some great insight on how the conversational aspect of social media tends to silence itself after you get too much attention. You transform from a friend to a media outlet and it begins to dehumanize you. While that’s true, I think another aspect of it is that the reciprocation becomes a lot more difficult to manage. It’s much easier to answer 100 followers’ tweets than it is to answer 100,000 followers’ but, I think if you still attempt to respond to as many of those comments as possible and still show there is a chance to be heard and responded to by the sender you can keep that conversation going with as many people as possible. I don’t have millions of followers so I can’t particularly test this theory unfortunately, but I think it’s important to keep in mind the direction you want to take your twitter account/facebook page. Do you want to be seen as that media outlet or as a person?

Filed under: Social Media, UCSB, communication, twitter, ucsb, wired