web 2.0 – Page 62 – Andrew Careaga

The resignation over the weekend of President Obama’s green-jobs chief Van Jones should serve as a reminder to us that we are all public figures.

No, we’re not White House czars of any sort, and we’re not likely to be in the national spotlight. But on a microcosmic level, we are public figures. And like Jones, whose past controversies forced him to resign from the White House post, most of us in higher ed communications, marketing and PR positions aren’t subject to intense scrutiny when we are hired. There are no Senate confirmation hearings for a university spokesperson. Not even a Faculty Senate confirmation hearing.

But on our campuses and in our communities, we are in the public eye, and more frequently than many political appointees. We serve as campus spokespersons. We present at conferences. We share our expertise and our views in the social media sphere of blogs, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace. We post pictures on Facebook. Some of us freely choose to “thrust [our]selves to the forefront of particular public controversies in order to influence the resolution of the issues involved,” and that, my friends, makes us “limited purpose public figures,” according to the legal definition.

I use the term “public” in a very broad sense. But the nature of the public space is changing, thanks to the always-on mediasphere. A savvy attorney could easily argue that any blogger or tweeter is a public figure to some narrowly defined segment of the public.

I’m a part of that sphere. And if you blog, tweet, Facebook, post on forums or otherwise partake in online conversations, so are you. You don’t have to be Tila Tequila — who recently has done a pretty good job of thrusting herself into the forefront of controversy — in order to be considered a public figure in the Internet age.

We should remember that.

I used to think it was bad form to repeat my tweets about blog posts or other information I wanted to get out to the twitterverse. But Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) says it’s okay to repeat your tweet — if you want to drive more traffic to your blog, website or whatever you’re linking to.

Kawasaki tested this theory that repeat tweets bring more traffic, and whaddyaknow, it works! For Guy Kawasaki, anyway. (More on that later.)

In his first experiment, Kawasaki repeated a single tweet four times, eight hours apart. Although the original tweet brought more traffic than the others, “the next three still yielded very good results.”

In his next experiment, he tweeted a post with link daily for nine consecutive days, with results similar to the first experiment.

Let’s assume that I had listened to the dogma and tweet either of these just once. (This would be based on the delusion that every follower of mine read every tweet every day, so repetition is unnecessary if not impolite.) This assumption would have cost me 3,000 to 4,000 fewer clickthroughs.

To which I can only say:

3,000 to 4,000 fewer clickthroughs!? zOMG.

There’s a reason he’s Guy Kawasaki and I’m not.

But, maybe his theory holds water for those of us who have Twitter presences followed by fewer than the 164,000-plus in Kawasaki’s posse. I get the feeling that too many repeated tweets, too close together, would lead to a drop in followership.

Still, it’s not always about the numbers of followers. It’s about quality, right?