I’m going to balance these entries between semi-rants about the myths of influence and practical tips of influence that fly under the radar too often. One thing that will help to frame these views is to debunk the idea that Twitter is a content meritocracy. I’ve seen way too many folks fall into the trap that “I don’t need to put effort into tracking good content, Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook etc surfaces it all for me.” 

There’s a few serious problems with that: 

- When you dip in and out of the stream periodically, you may miss items that don’t appear in your stream or lists at that time. When we get busy, we run the risk of missing more. (Keyword searches and tracks can help with that, more on that in another post).

- Much of the best content flies under the radar. Many of the most shared/retweeted posts are not necessarily the best content but the best marketed. Now that many marketers are on Twitter, they will seize upon on and retweet posts that have a tone  or emphasis they want to propogate. (Or that are authored by someone they want to curry favor with - something few of us are wholly immune to). 

- Curating and sorting the good content from the not-so-good is not something to put solely in the hands of our friends. They are great people but they are often posting their cool vacation photos and not thinking about sharing the three articles that influenced them the most that week. And if they do share it, we may not see it.  

There are two implications: 

1. Don’t lose heart if you post some really great content that you busted your tail on and it doesn’t get much social attention. That is not a reflection on that piece of content. If you know it’s good, it probably is. People adjust their topics and content too much based on social reception and click throughs. That stuff is nice but it’s fickle as all hell. The best way to win out is to keep doing quality work that moves YOU. If it moves you, other people will pick up it - over time. Don’t let the twitterati get you down with their infatuations of the moment. 

2. Look into setting up a central hub where you can subscribe to content that matters to you. If someone stokes your imagination, get it in your inbox or your newsreader or however you like it. (I’ll explain in more detail some of the options for subscriptions in future posts). Once you have this setup, you can look into how best to prioritize the content that comes in so it doesn’t overwhelm you. And you can figure out how to share the best of that content with others, which is another stepping stone in genuine influence, if there is any such thing in the social sphere.

If you want to dig into more details on this now, check out my detailed piece on “The Power of Pull in the SAP field” and how I became an enterprise news curator.

Social can fill a void but don’t trust it to validate your worth or the quality of the content you need most.