The question “do you deserve your following” might sound a bit odd. After all, if it is a followerbase like on twitter that you have, people have the option to unfollow you once they feel mistreated. Nevertheless it is a good thing to stop and think about how you treat the people that follow you online. Yes, of course there might be real life friends and other contacts represented in your following, but quite often posts on how to deal with your following tend to lean towards “what do you get from it”  side.

Thus I thought it was nice to come across this blogpost, asking how you really treat your followers. It’s a sad thing really, that posts like these have to be made, but I do think they are necessary, even though the answer to what a “good way” to treat them is migth be easy. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever taken a survey recently, or maybe several surveys? If so you might have wondered about several things. And maybe those things are exactly those things that bother me about surveys. One could have, of course, something against surveys altogether, but they remain a powerful research tool, that is one thing that’s for sure. Even though I’m personally calling for a broader way of doing research, I don’t think we should abandon it.

I do think we should look more into some of the things that come to mind when you look at a survey. These things are often related to a certain tradition that lies in doing survey based research and indeed in a sort of tradition that is created per tracker survey as well. Not changing things for tradition’s sake, is one of the worst things a researcher could do and still this seems to happen all too often. Survey methodology in general is one thing, but a lot of me wondering about survey research is the lack of changes, of innovation.

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I already wrote about the KOPTE model, that defines 5 basic factors that are of influence the success of your social network. I’ve tried to explain what each of the five points means and how this can work in practice. But how does it work in practice? What does it mean if you apply each of those five points to your (Social Network) organisation?

It is nice to see that someone has actually done just that. (Based on a Dutch article I wrote about this model earlier this year.) In the professional case “Working open source”, the five point model I described is used to analyze the open source business model of ZXZW. (An annual festival in “celebration of independent culture”) Read the rest of this entry »

Something different, perhaps, than the usual article you’ll find about twitter. I may have a lot to add to any article that’s out there already, but as people have been publishing so many articles in the past two months or so it might be best to let it all just be for a n while.

There are a lot of excellent and less excellent articles out there about how you might use this microblogging tool to your advantage and I’m not going to add to that, for now. Instead I want to talk about a more basic thing and that is the structure underlying the whole tool.

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