Consider the following two sentences:

You are an excellent salesperson on Twitter.

You are a very persuasive person on Twitter.

Now I haven’t done a scientific study on this by any means, but I have been exploring a number of stories about Twitter users lately, and I have generated a significant amount of discussion around my previous two posts trying to tie Twitter behavior to the Tipping Point theories. While I have been learning a lot, and realizing the riddle might be harder to solve than I initially thought, one thing that I’ve been noticing is that while few people have a problem with the maven or connector label potentially applied to them, even fewer people are comfortable being called a salesperson (I’ve gone away from the framework adopted the gender neutral term here).

So this is where the power of the single word comes in – if you read up on the Tipping Point on Wikipedia, Salesmen are clearly defined by a single word – persuaders. So in terms of my (hopeful) analysis, if I say someone is functioning mostly as a salesperson on Twitter, I am saying they are persuasive – so the two sentences I started this post with are basically the same thing.

But my hunch is that they’re not perceived that way. So what do you think – does it matter, and if so should I change the word as I explore this issue? And is it a petty game of semantics, or is there a fundamental difference – in peoples minds – between being an effective salesperson, and being persuasive?

Not sure if it helps, but here are the traditional dictionary definitions:

persuade

–verb (used with object), -suad⋅ed, -suad⋅ing.
1. to prevail on (a person) to do something, as by advising or urging: We could not persuade him to wait.
2. to induce to believe by appealing to reason or understanding; convince: to persuade the judge of the prisoner’s innocence.

salesman

–noun, plural -men.

a man who sells goods, services, etc.
n. A man who is employed to sell merchandise in a store or in a designated territory.

Yesterday’s post proved a few important things to me. One, when someone like Chris Brogan re-tweets you it can drive a lot of thoughtful activity on your site. Two, because of #1, if you think that a conversation might get started don’t put up the post / tweet about it and then head off for a 4-hour dinner – I imagine the activity would have been that much greater if the comments were going “live” immediately, rather than waiting for my approval (most came in a very short time frame). And three, perhaps most importantly, I might be onto something interesting here.

So the original question was whether Gladwell / Tipping Point theories, particularly in relation to mavens, connectors, and salesmen, apply to Twitter users. As a starting point, I looked at follower / following ratios as a distinguishing characteristic. The most interesting comment for me came from Amanda – wondering if I looked at re-tweets and @ responses. I hadn’t, and I should of, because it looks like it could add a lot of richness to the analysis.

This is where I start brainstorming out loud. Different types of “tweets” are used to different types of things. While some are more easily measurable than others, we could probably break them down into a few categories. Re-tweets (RT’s) are one easy one, and @ replies are another – both easily measurable. Other possibilities include tweets that link back to your own posts, and tweets that link to other posts you have discovered. For the sake of simplicity, lets ignore all others and start with those.

So an RT makes what would seem to be a clear statement – someone else has said / linked to something that I thought valuable enough to promote to everyone else. This activity would certainly not fit into the maven category. If forced to pick, I think it fits best in the connector group – people that link us up with the world.

An @ reply is something that seems very different. In general, someone has said / asked something that you think you should respond to directly. I feel this activity would certainly not fit into the connector category… and I’m thinking it best represents salesman – those working to make others want to agree with them.

Linking to your own blog posts seems straightforward to me – a Maven activity. You believe you have, or have created, some new information / context that people might be interested in.

Linking to other people’s blog posts… well that seems a lot like the RT thing. Someone else said something you like, thus you are trying to connect it with others whom might be interested.

So… this looks promising. Based on  looking at a few different types of tweets, they seem to bucket fairly naturally into each of the three categories. Now as referenced in the previous post, I think this social media stuff is blurring a lot of lines here, but perhaps some benchmarks could be set to determine which category each person fits best into. In the simplest terms, if you RT a lot, you are probably functioning mostly as a connector; if you @ reply a lot , you are probably functioning most as a salesman; and if you link to your own posts a lot, you’re primarily functioning as a maven. What “a lot” is… well that’s open to debate.

Does that make any sense? And if so, anyone interested in collaborating on a project to figure out the numbers behind this thing? There might even be potential to cross-reference it with the follower/ following ratios… but that might just be confusing.

So I’ve been thinking about how Gladwell’s Tipping point – and particularly the 80/20 rule, where the 20% doing most of the work are broken out into connectors, mavens, and salesmen – might apply to Twitter. I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I was trying to construct an argument that beyond a certain threshold of activity, following / follower ratios could be used to bucket people into the 3 categories. On the other, I was thinking that perhaps the ease at which people can connect through social media platforms like Twitter might make the distinctions irrelevant.

In the first case, my thinking was going  like this. The people that have a low following / follower ratio (for example, from my “following list” Tim O’Reilly and Mathew Ingram at 1/58 and 1/8, respectively, would fall into this category) might be considered primarily as mavens – information specialists. Those with ratios closer to the 1/1 range (such as DaivRawks and ChrisBrogan) would be considered primarily as connectors – people with a special gift for bringing the world together. Sort of by default, if this structure was to work that would leave those in the (say) 8/1 range as salesmen – persuaders with powerful negotiation skills that make others want to agree with them.

But as my inclusion of the words “sort of by default” might indicate, I think things kind of fall apart for this last category (salesmen) - and one might even argue that if you’re in an 8/1 following to follower ratio, perhaps you better fit in the 80% category (i.e. those not doing much of the “work”). So I pondered this a bit, and that’s what led me to wonder whether platforms like Twitter make the connector / salesmen distinction redundant.

Using ChrisBrogan as an example again, I’d certainly call him a connector – but I’d also consider him a very persuasive, charismatic person that “makes others want to agree with him.” In other words, he’d also be a “salesman” in his area of interest. And looking back at the Tipping Point definitions, the number of connections he has (in the 30,000 range) makes the connector “threshold” of 100 or more individuals seem kind of antiquated.

In turn, I guess the argument would be that one of the most powerful things about social media is that it’s enabled connectors to effectively, for lack of a better term, disintermediate the need for salesmen. But then as I think about this more, I’m not fully comfortable with that distinction either, because I see a lot of maven elements in the top connectors as well.

So… I guess I’m confused. I’d be interested to know if anyone else has looked into or thought about this – basically how (or if) the tipping point theories connect with social media, twitter, etc. When I search for stuff, all I keep finding is question about when a tipping point might be hit (i.e. when usage might explode), but very little tying into the connector/ maven / salesman idea. Any thoughts out there?