All About the Birds, the Bees, and Crazy Social Growth

Non-native English speakers may not catch the reference to the Birds and the Bees. We use the birds and bees metaphor to explain to children how humans make babies. 

I always thought that was strange. Using a whole bird is far too kinky. I should think a feather would suffice. 

Also, using a bee would likely be painful for the woman.

Not to mention the bee.

It all reminds me of a joke whose punchline is, "Doctor, can you give him something just for the pain?"

I digress.

Twitter's logo is a bird. beBee's is a bee. There are obvious parallels here. (tweet)

No, not that one, I mean that Twitter and beBee seem destined to work together.

Twitter is ten years old. beBee is less than two. Twitter is riddled with adolescent angst. beBee has it together despite its tender years.

They can and do play well together. They are different enough to maintain interest. They are similar enough to create affinity.

The first part of this post aims at us bees in general. The second is more technical in nature and is a rough suggestion/dream on how the power of both platforms can combine in a gestalt. 

Remember though, contrary to what floats around, an ambassador has no special access to Javier's or Juan's ear. 

I can suggest, just like you can. They decide.

The Part for Bees in General

Twitter is absolutely amazing at promoting stuff. (tweet) It took me three swings at Twitter before I figured that out. 

They may call themselves a "micro-blogging platform." They aren't. They are a "get out there, get known, get talking, get other people talking" (tweet) If anyone knows Jack Dorsey, tell him that.

beBee recognizes Twitter's promotional value. It regularly tweets bees' posts. So do I. So do a ton of other bees.

Yet, many, if not most, of you don't have your Twitter handle in your beBee profile. Some of you don't even have a Twitter account.

Those are mistakes. Those are huge mistakes!

For those of you who don't think they need a "micro-blogging" account, I get it. What the hell is a micro-blog anyway? 

The name itself is silly.

Ask yourself this. Do you need a "get out there, get known, get talking, get other people talking" account?

The answer is probably, "Yes!"

If you have a Twitter account, even a dormant one, dust it off and add it to your beBee profile. If you don't have one, get one.

A few tips about your handle

It's about branding. A Twitter handle can be up to 15 characters long. Just keep three things in mind. 

Make yourself findable: If you tweet under a company name or under some cryptic name, add your real name to your profile. It's hard to tell that Dean Owen is @QuimojoTweets or that Kevin Pashuk is @InvisiTech. Kevin's name is in his profile so he's easy to find. Dean. . . not so much. Not that I'm picking on you, Dean. It's just that I searched for it so often, I remember.

Your handle represents you: SexyBitch_69 probably isn't the impression you want to make. If it is, fine. Otherwise, consider starting fresh.

Your handle represents a segment of your market: Some people say you should open a single account and make that one count. That's fine if you deal in one specific thing to one group of people. 

Who does that?

Targeting is important. 

If you work in, say 4 sectors but have a single account, any post you promote is irrelevant to 75% of your following. You are training them to ignore you. That's not a good idea.

I had a client in the restaurant equipment field. They sold to Independent Restaurants, Institutional Kitchens, Franchises/Chains, and  Hospitality/Venues. 

They split their sales teams along those four categories. But, their marketing, blogging, and social presence were a single catch-all thing.

They maintained a single email list and a single Twitter account.

How does that make sense?

I split everything into four chunks and their engagement (and sales) jumped.

This ain't rocket science, people.

The more Technobabble-y part

Feel free to skip over this part if you feel your eyes rolling into the back of your head. I'll try to keep it light, but we will delve a little into Twitter's API and how it might relate to massive growth rates.

One of the issues that plague any new platform is the "starting-over" problem. I came from 1500 connections on LinkedIn. I had 15,000+ followers on Twitter. 

I started with nada on beBee. 

Is that the only way?

Wouldn't it be fun to start with a pre-built following? Wouldn't it be fun to start knowing who already follows you (and vice versa) on other platforms? 

Imagine if I opened my brand-new beBee account and it automatically populated with hundreds of connections from elsewhere.

Let me stop here for a second. I am an ambassador bee. Contrary to popular belief, that does not give me any special powers, insight, or access to Javier and Juan. I am not privy to global beBee strategy. I don't know anything about beBee's back-end configuration other than what I can infer. I don't even know if my suggestion is physically possible to implement. I can only suggest, just like you can suggest. They listen, but they decide.

Apart from being a superlative promotional platform, Twitter has 313 million active monthly users. That's 3 to 4 times as many as LinkedIn. (tweet) Nearly all platforms, beBee included, allow you to include your Twitter handle in your profile.

Let's hold that thought aside for a bit.

Twitter has a killer API. An API is an Application Program Interface. In short, it's just a series of methods to access selected parts of the main program. In this case, that main program would be Twitter itself.

APIs are generally split into two families of commands, GETs and POSTs. As you might guess, GETs "get" information. . . they read. POSTs, "post" information. . . they write. (Oooooh, stop, Paul this is too complicated... NOT!).

Commands are called, "calls." API calls run through OAuth. I definitely won't go into detail on that! My own eyes would roll back into my head. Let's just say OAuth is an authentication method/protocol that makes sure the person calling the API has the right to call the API. 

OAuth also allows Twitter to track calls to its API so that it can impose rate limits. As you can guess, rate limits are limits imposed on how many calls can be sent within a specified time. Twitter's specified time is fifteen minutes.

We won't dive into all Twitter's possible calls for a few reasons. 

First, I don't even use most of them, not even for the Web-App-With-No-Name (yet). Second, I would need to write a book to cover them all. Last, we only need to look at three of them here. 

Step One: Match Screen Names to Ids.

Tweeps have two identifiers. Your screen-name can change. Your Twitter Id doesn't. I'm screen-name @PaulCroubalian and I'm id #3261013612. You'll see why this is important in a minute.

Twitter gets miffed when you hit rate limits often. (tweet)

I realize there are 11,500,000 users on beBee. I realize the first pass would take 5 days to run on a single server. Subsequent passes would only be for newBees.

On the other hand, not every Bee has their Twitter name on their profile. Whatever.

This call gives us far more info than we need in a neat JSON* format. We just need to match a screen_name to an Id. 

Once we know that PaulCroubalian is 3261013612, we can store that and move on.

Step Two: Get Twitter followers for a Bee

The basic call,  https://api.twitter.com/1.1/followers/ids.json returns the latest 5000 followers. Adding the cursor parameter to the call will send back multiple pages of up to 5000 followers each. 

I have 15,747 followers. In my case, that would be 3 pages of 5000 and one of 747. Suspended accounts, if any, wouldn't show up, so it may be less.

This call returns Twitter IDs only. We have screen names here. That's why we need to have a standing dictionary of screen names and their corresponding ids.

Step Three: Get a Bee's following.

If you can get followers, it's logical to assume you can also get who you are following. In fact, you may guess the API call would be  https://api.twitter.com/1.1/following/ids.json. 

You'd be wrong. 

The call is actually https://api.twitter.com/1.1/friends/ids.json.

I don't know why Twitter calls tweeps you follow "friends." Why do they call tweets "statuses?" 

Anyway, it works the same way as getting followers lists. 

These lists will be a problem. You can only pull 15 requests per 15-minute window. Again, to be safe, you would need to dial that back a little. Let's say 1400 lists a day per set of API access tokens. 

Ouch!

That could take a while.

The Web-App-With-No-Name (yet) gets around (sort of) that issue. It isn't a single app. Every user runs his/her own instance of the same code. I guess it's natural fro a ghostwriter to think in terms of ghost-coding.

 It would be far too complex to organize that for 11,500,000 people.

beBee would need Twitter's cooperation to pull this off. (tweet)

Stop laughing. It isn't impossible. 

Twitter is looking to build its user base. So is beBee. Maybe something can be worked out. beBee is all about affinity. Affinity and synergy are closely related. (tweet)

Step Four: The mutual follow list

A server side script pulls out only those IDs that are both following and followed per bee. This list, well, actually, these 11 million lists, need not be stored. They would be processed and forgotten.

Putting it all together

Let's go over what we would "have." 

We have a master list of Bees' Twitter screen names with their corresponding IDs.

We have a list of Twitter IDs for each bee that represents their mutual follows.

How does this help?

Doesn't it stand to reason that a mutual follow on Twitter may imply a desired mutual follow on beBee?

It should be possible to have every newBee start with a well-populated audience. Match up Bee's Twitter Handles to their mutual-follow lists and boom... instant reach.

Wouldn't that remove the "I need to start over from scratch" barrier?

Of course, I may be talking out of my ass. 

The process is relatively easy to do. It's pretty much what version 2.0 of the Web-App-With-No-Name(yet) will do next year. That's when we will get to hyper-targeted growth hacking. 

I'll only need to do it on a few thousand members who each have their own API access credentials. 

Easy is not the same as simple.

Repeating the process 11,500,000 times and counting, on a limited number of API tokens is a whole other story. 

It would be nice.

It may not be possible, at least not until beBee gets its own API.

Until then, I can dream, can't I?

*JSON is pronounced either "Jays-ON" or "Jason," like the name. JSON is not an acronym. It's shorthand for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is a way to store and pass data in a regular text file. XML does the same type of thing but less efficiently. A JSON file with the same data as an XML file will be about 30% smaller.