The science of Twitter - courtesy of HubSpot

Hubspot has published an interesting paper on social media marketing and are sharing one of the chapters on Twitter for free.

Here are the main takeaways (but do download the paper, it's a really interesting read)

1) Don't converse - rather share interesting content. Broadcasting beats conversation. Replying and being chatty doesn't serve your followers growth

2) It's very hard to overtweet - do as much as you can. The sweet spot is hit at 22 tweets a day but the curve goes down in a flat fashion after that. 

3) Avoid talking about yourselves. Rather talk about what interesting stuff is happening outside. (exception: if you're a celebrity)

4) don't be negative (duh)

5) Make sure to have picture, bio & homepage. In your bio, don't be afraid to label yourself an expert. Tell others WHY they should follow you. 

6) If you want retweets, ASK for them. Including the words "please retweet" has 4x the likelihood of getting a retweet than not including them

Not sure I agree with that, though - it makes you look like an attention-seeking douche. 

7) Chance to get retweeted is highest on Fridays and any day between 3 and 5pm. Generally, prefer the afternoon for tweeting over the morning if you want to have a high CTR on links

8) Much higher likelihood to get retweets if you're original. People want to retweet NEW info. Also, much higher (4x) likelihood to get retweets if you include a link

9) Longer tweets get more clicks than short ones. 

10) Highest click-through rate in tweets is when you place the link about 1/4 the way into the tweet - not at the end. E.g. "new blog post <LINK HERE> about a man, the sea and the futility of existence"

11) If you ’re sharing content you’ve found from other sources across the Web, tweet it as fast as you want. But when you ’re tweeting your own content to send traffic to your site, slow down and tweet it at a more deliberate pace.

12) Verbs and adverbs lead to more click-throughs than nouns & adjectives, especially action-oriented ones. "check this out". A less douchy version: "Tell me what you think"

And then one interesting comment I heard from marketer @hamishjcameron :

Even if the temptation is big, don't retweet friendly tweets. It's douchy. At a party, you wouldn't either walk around and say "hey, just want to tell you that Scott over there thinks I'm funny". Be on Twitter as you are in real life. Be a human. 

Summary of Google+ hangout with Keith Ferrazzi, Guy Kawasaki and Noam Wasserman

Here's the main points I picked up during the Google+ hangout with Guy, Keith and Noam - perfectly organized by the guys at Google Campus. Thanks!

I came in a bit late and was was interrupted mid-way so please add whatever I might have missed in the comments section. 

Relationships:
KF:
1. Ask yourself, what are the 25 most important people for your business. That definitely should include your spouse, key customers, investors etc.
2. Serve them. Them and others. Gain the PERMISSION to influence. Narcissistic entrepreneurs only take and never give.
3. Find 2-3 people who have your back. The kind of people who have the ability and permission to kick your ass.
4. Candor - having anyone on your team or a customer to choke back what they are thinking is death.

Team:
GK: Conduct the first interview by phone. You’ll pick up less visual cues (dress style, color of skin, voice only is a great equalizer that helps you hire more diverse people). Otherwise, founders tend to hire people who are like them. And that's bad.

Valuation: 
KF: I got a low-ball offer for my company, $2m. Asked a friend who advised me that I should ask for around $5m. Again, power of relationships that helped me.
NW: The market dictates how much you're worth - you don't.
GK: For every full-time engineer, add $500k to the valuation. For every MBA subtract $250k

IP protection:
GK: I don't have any DRM on my book. You can't stop the pirates. If you can't change anything, don't worry about it.
The more an entrepreneur wants to protect his idea and the more paranoid he is, the crappier the product and usually the entrepreneur himself is.

Any investor who is dumb enough to sign an NDA is not an investor whose money is worth taking.

KF: Share ruthlessly and widely. Was very fortunate when someone I shared my biz idea with gave me pointers on how to improve. Holding back the idea would have been counterproductive. 

Incubators 
KF: I'm making my choice right now. There's 3 options: build your own team, go to an incubator, or go to an agency. I would never go to anybody who doesn't have equity: I need someone's blood, sweat tears and someone to tell me I'm a jackass. Someone I'm paying won't do that. Incubator: Will you get brilliant talent there? I'm relying on creating a beautiful product that doesn't have a buffer between user and experience.

GK: Question of your company whether accelarator, incubator, is a low priority. Much higer priority is:
1. product
2. team (distant second: At the time you have to make a decision, it's hard to tell if you have a good team or not. Early on it's about luck.)
If there are two equal teams, one in an incubator and the other one not - probably the one in an incubator will be more invest-able.

NW: Great new word for failure: "Pivoting". Team is very stable - much harder to hit the "undo" key on the team, so make sure that you decide well on the team.
Question assumes that all incubator are the same. But they are very different from each other. If the team doesn't have any holes then going to an incubator is a waste of time and equity.

KF: What is the 1 hard and 1 soft skill gap you have to make your business great?
Immensely valuable to have people around you (Google Campus helps!) who can help you with that.

NW: You need the faculty of the mentors to help you identify WHAT your holes are.


Luck: 
GK: I would rather pick luck over smarts any time. Bill Gates was very lucky.
But also: Luckiest people also work the hardest.

NW: It's about how you deal with things coming your way. You have to be adaptable as an entrepreneur. Gotta be able to adjust on the fly atc. If you can turn bad luck into opportunity for yourself that's the ultimate entrepreneurial skill.

KF: Luck is outside of our control. But I rather count on relationships than luck.

How to get 100 meetings with Top VCs

A friend of mine recently concluded a trip through Silicon Valley, pitching his start-up to dozens of high-profile Venture Capitalists. 
When I asked him how he got so many high profile people interested, he told me an interesting how-to which I thought I'd share:

"The simple answer is network. The longer answer is spend some time thinking about your connection with each of them, why they would speak to you and not the 100+ emails they get daily, and you'll get through.  In order or priority, intros from the following are best:

1. Founder of a VC's existing or previous portfolio business OR the VC's friend a
2. A super angel / someone that the VC respects
3. Another VC
4. An entrepreneur the VC respects / knows / random connection

If all else fails, go cold email, but make it a very individualised email."

Nothing surprising but it's good to have a reminder that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. 

OK, back to perspiring. 

Stupid censors

This image made a few waves on Facebook a couple of days ago. 

And of course people poured their derision on it, proclaiming how terrible these terms were, how they rob the English language of grace and beauty and how the people who use these terms are douchebags.

Normally, I'm quite a stickler for good English and I'm one of those grammar nazis whose blood boils when seeing "it's" instead of "its", "their" instead of "there".
But this list is nothing but a lame attempt at spraying some condescending "I'm better than you" vitriol on newly evolving language that serves a good purpose.

Cases in point - let's have a closer look.

1. The list derides the word "to ping" and that it never meant to mean "contacting". Well, it does now. Get used to it. What's the problem with applying a term from computer engineering to a broader set of circumstances outside of its original realm?

2. "Paradigm Shift" - the author of the list crows that "no one has ever been able to explain what this means". Well, here comes my definition, author. A paradigm shift is a term that describes the process of changing one's vantage point to see a set of circumstances differently and deriving from this a new set of behaviours that can lead to beneficial outcomes. Example: Zappos revolutionized customer service by not seeing it as operational expense but rather as marketing investment and thus became widely admired for outstanding treatment of their customers. A paradigm shift if there ever was one.
Bon appetit with your words, list author.

3. "Thought leader." here a straw man is being built up by saying that users of this term confine everyone else to not be able to think for themselves. This is obvious bollocks. Only because you're not LEADING it doesn't mean that you can't think for yourself. Take Malcolm Gladwell. He popularized the concept of the Tipping Point and provided a framework for looking at interesting social phenomena in the light of how epidemics spread. On the contrary, I have not come up with anything similarly interesting. I am NOT a thought leader. I may have done some great work in other areas of life but I have not contributed to collective human knowledge in the same way as Gladwell has. He is a thought leader. I am not (yet).

Similarly, many other list items can be unpicked. For example, saying that "onboarding" doesn't exist. Well if enough people use it, it DOES exist. And it describes something useful: Namely the acquainting of new members of an organization with the workings and procedures of said organization. "Low hanging fruit" apparently is a douchy concept because, according to the list author, it means neglecting the difficult problems. That's like saying a knife is evil because one can do evil things with it. Using the term to describe something is a bit of a different kettle of fish compared to laziness and procrastination, no?

It is a particular kind of douchebaggery to try to censor newly evolving concepts and terminology and backing it up with your own ignorance and unwillingness to allow language to develop. 

Yes - there are too many startups who claim to be "disruptive" while they are not. Too many people on linkedin describing themselves as "dynamic self-starters". Bullshit bingo does abound.

However, I claim that the problem lies in the actual unwarranted application of grandiose terms to circumstances that do not deserve them (e.g. claiming to be a disruptive business all the while you're just another photo sharing app) rather than in the usage of the words themselves. Some decisions ARE indeed strategic, some projects ARE mission critical and some people ARE thought leaders. Let's keep calling a spade a spade and not compensate for mediocrity with verbosity.

Stop faffing about

I just read a great post on Techcrunch called "First-time tech entrepreneurs - Stop fucking around" that discusses all sorts of procrastination we face when working for ourselves. In writing, I prefer a slightly mellower language, hence the title of this post.

As I'm in the process of starting my own company now, I found the piece intriguing in two ways: First, I recognized myself in some of the ways the author discusses procrastination and at the same time I was happy that I'm immune to some others. Let's take the more memorable ones one by one:

Groupon doesn't always take a 50% cut - the economics of suit tailoring

So I picked up my first tailor-made suit today. Normally I wouldn't splash out on something like that, working in technology where I almost never have to actually wear a suit. But I got it last year via Groupon and the temptation of getting one for £495 down from £1200 was too high.

So the shop owner and I got talking about Groupon and he told me that in his case, he didn't have to hand over a 50% cut as usual. For bigger-ticket items, Groupon tends to take a smaller cut. He didn't share how big it actually was. But he said that he made sure to make a small profit on every suit.
That got me thinking about a tailor's profit margins.

On the internet, dogs aren't helping (in most cases)

The famous adage that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog is becoming a thing of the past (true to form, the cartoon is over 18 years old already!). With Facebook authentication being a popular feature of many sites requiring login and the recent upheaval about the Google+ policy of requiring real names, more and more sites know who you are. 

Overall, this is a good thing. On various levels of an individual's online identity, it is useful to declare oneself: 

• Authentication becomes easier (no need to remember different passwords for different sites, and when you get to a site you visit frequently and that requires login - the cookies do the job in the background)