I have one account that I essentially use to deliver content to a special interest group. I manually search for people who might be in this group using a saved keyword search in Tweetie. What I do is follow them just to let them know the account is there. If they’re interested, I figure they’ll follow back. And I don’t do this aggressively — only a few people a month. (Read Twitter’s rules/recommendations for acceptable follow practices.)

After a while, I had a buildup of people I had followed but who hadn’t followed back. And because Twitter won’t let me follow more than 2,000 people, and this keyword search technique is how I get the word out about the account, I can’t waste follows.

So this morning I did a Google search on “mass unfollow,” and found a few tools that would unfollow everybody who wasn’t following you. The problem was that they didn’t allow you to pick and choose, and there were a few of those tweeps I wanted to hang onto. So I did another search for “selective unfollow” and found Tweepi, “the first and only Twitter follow management with stats.” To quote the developer, it’s “very much a beta,” but it did what I needed and more, with a perfectly intuitive UI that required zero learning curve.

Selective Unfollowing

First, I needed to go through over 200 non-followers to decide who would get the axe. So I chose “Cleanup” and got a table that looked like this:

The “Friend?” column showed both people I was following who weren’t following back and “mutual friends.” I wasn’t axing any of the latter, so I clicked on the header of the “Friend?” column to sort the accounts. Then all you have to do is check the checkbox on the right and when you’re done with that page, click “UnFollow Selected.” You can only see 20 accounts at a time (it goes up to 40 if you tweet about Tweepi!), but even though I had to do 60 pages of this, it didn’t actually bother me at all.

Clicking the avatar at left takes you to the user’s Twitter page, but you shouldn’t have to do that. You can also customize the columns to show the info you need to make your decision:

Selective Reciprocating

Then, because I have other things going on in my life besides Twitter (as I’m sure you do too) and I don’t necessarily check out new followers the instant I get notified of a follow, I also had a buildup of people who’d followed the account but whom I hadn’t followed back. For this I chose “Reciprocate,” which showed me only these people, and I went through another 30-some pages, deciding whom I should follow back.

Safelisting

One of the nicest touches is the “Safelist” feature. You know those tweeps I said I wanted to hang onto? I can click the plus sign at the right of their stats row, which protects them if I ever get in a bad mood and decide to do an indiscriminate mass unfollow, which Tweepi lets you do with its “Flush” feature.

Geeky Follow

This is an experimental feature that suggests people you might want to follow based on various criteria. I didn’t test it, so if you do, let us know how it worked for you in the comments.

Not That Much of a Beta

The app did hang up about halfway through my unfollowing process, but when that happened, Tweepi displayed a progress message and provided a link to “safe mode,” which instantly unhangs the app and puts you right back where you were, so it wasn’t an issue.

I recommend this app for those of you who use Twitter for business purposes. And be sure to give the developers feedback so they can make it even better.

What third-party Twitter tools do you use?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

“The simple act of comparing yourself against someone else can stoke the fires of competition. When there are just a few competitors around, making such comparisons is easy but they become more difficult when challengers are plentiful. As a result, the presence of extra contenders, far from spurring us on by adding extra challenge, can actually have the opposite effect. Garcia and Avishalom call this the “N-effect” and they demonstrated it through a number of experiments.” – Ed Yong

Many of us are freelance consultants, and I chose to go the freelance route before the economy took a turn for the worse. In the past few months, I’ve seen more and more people being laid off as a result of corporate downsizing or startups that have closed their doors under the current economic pressures. With full-time gigs becoming more and more difficult to find, many of these people are turning to freelancing and consulting to pay the bills while they continue their search for another full-time job. In a previous post about unemployment, the economic downturn, and web working, I talked a little more about this trend with a few numbers to back up my assumptions.

I’m starting to wonder about the impact of this new influx of freelancers. On the one hand, it seems like more companies are turning to freelancers to fill the gaps in their workforce during hiring freezes, but on the other, any large changes in a market are likely to have unanticipated side effects. After reading the study about motivation, I wonder how these new entrants will impact motivation to compete for freelancing jobs. More companies hiring freelancers could potentially drain motivation even if the chances of getting the contract are the same; however, I suspect that the number of people freelancing is probably exceeding the increase in freelancing jobs thus resulting in more competition and a reduced chance of success.

Keep in mind that the study was looking at motivation in student settings, not careers or job motivation, so the idea that the results may apply to freelancers competing for jobs is speculative, though reasonable, but it has given me food for thought.

What changes have you noticed in the freelancing market as a result of the economic downturn? How does your perception of competition affect what contracts you bid on and how you bid?

Image by nikolai36 from flickr

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Brown herself puts it this way:

“Just as startling, these new alternative workers are not overwhelmingly low-income. They’re college-educated Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year.

Welcome to the age of Gigonomics.”

Photo by Aaron Hockley

Most of the web workers I know tend to be college educated people with reasonably good incomes, and I suspect that most of the people described in the group above are web workers. Many web workers, and I include myself in this group, would never have become freelancers or otherwise left traditional jobs to telecommute from home without the rise of ubiquitous online technology. Fifteen years ago, many of the careers that web workers now enjoy didn’t even exist or would not have been possible given the technology available prior to the early to mid-1990s. While some early versions of the technologies we now take for granted existed back then, the adoption was still very low. Many companies weren’t online at all, and email was used by some people, but not everyone.

This leads me to wonder: What I would be doing now if the Internet really had been a fad, instead of a technology that changed the way that we live and work today?

My last couple of jobs as an online community manager would never have been possible without large numbers of people spending time online, and I doubt that I would have been hired by Intel in 2000, either. The job at Intel came out of my experience with eCommerce systems, and I landed the job by finding them on the web and submitting my resume into their online job candidate web site. This leads me back to my first job in at a Midwestern manufacturing company and the sobering realization that, today, I would probably still be working somewhere in an IT organization, toiling away in middle management bureaucracy if my web worker career hadn’t been possible.

Where would you be today if the internet had never really taken off and your career as a web worker evaporated in the mist?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Photo by _e.t.

I left my corporate job in June to strike out on my own as a freelance consultant working out of my home office and coffee shops. I had been preparing to make the move for a while, and it was something that I knew I wanted to try. The technology industry was growing and there were plenty of job openings in my field of expertise: online communities and social media. I left confident that I had plenty of time to test the waters as a freelance web worker knowing that I could always go back to the corporate world if freelance consulting didn’t work out for me.

I’m happy to say that consulting is working well for me right now, because I’m no longer confident that I could find a new corporate job as quickly or easily as I might have been able to get one a year ago.

The job market is getting tougher each month as unemployment continues to rise. At this point, I should emphasize that I am not an economist, employment guru or other expert qualified to analyze this data, so consider this just one web worker’s summary of the current economic conditions.

Let’s start with the recent employment data. Grim and depressing are the best ways I could come up with to describe the employment data that was released on Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor. Here are a few “highlights” from the report:

• Unemployment rose from 6.8 percent in November to 7.2 percent in December.
• The number of unemployed people in the U.S. is now 11.1 million up by 632,000 in December
• From the beginning of the recession in December 2007, unemployment has increased by 2.3 percent with 3.6 million additional people becoming unemployed.

However, this may not tell the whole story for those of us in various web working professions. In an article by Brett Philbin, of Dow Jones Newswires, John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, predicted that the economic downturn could have an interesting impact on web working:

“Challenger said that the economic downturn could lead to a surge in some workplace trends such as telecommuting as companies look for alternative ways to cut costs. In addition, job seekers may look for creative ways to find employment, including the use of social networking sites and posting video resumes on Google Inc.’s (GOOG) YouTube.”

Telecommuting and web working are growing trends that have been covered recently on WebWorkerDaily with posts about The State of Telecommuting and Trends in Teleworking, so I won’t revisit those trends in detail here.

I did decide that it would be good to get the perspective of a couple of job sites focused on freelancers, consultants, and other web workers, so I contacted oDesk and Elance to get their take on the recent news and learn more about how the economic downturn was impacting their job postings.

oDesk provided me with this data:

• They had 4,100 working providers in December compared to 4,000 in November (growth of 2 percent) despite the fact that December is typically a slow month for starting work on new web projects.
• The number of providers working in Q4 was up 13 percent over the number working in Q3.
• They’ve seen a large increase in provider signups (registrations of people that may not have found a job yet): Q3 signups of 36,000 and Q4 signups of 52,000 (47 percent growth).

Elance sent me these numbers:

• 60,000 new jobs were posted in Q4 of 2008 (up 39 percent compared to same period in 2007). The number of new jobs posted in December was up 48 percent from December 2007 and November was up 35 percent from December 2007.
• Over $14 million in payments made to service providers in Q4 of 2008 (up over 40 percent from Q4 2007)
• More than 55,000 unique businesses in working engagements with service providers in the past 6 months (up 44 percent from same time a year ago).

Keep in mind that these numbers are self-reported by companies with a vested interest in the telecommuting and web working industry, and these numbers include jobs outside of the U.S., so they can’t be directly compared to the earlier data from the U.S. Department of Labor. However, they do highlight an interesting trend showing an increase in freelance and web worker activity.

Now comes the hard part: making sense of all of this data. We have several sets of numbers that may or may not be related in any way showing different perspectives and different conclusions, so here is where you come into the picture. In the best tradition of the lazy blogger, I outsource the analysis (the hard part) to you.

Are web worker jobs increasing in spite of the economic downturn or is the increasing unemployment rate pushing more people into freelancing positions while they look for other work? What other data have you found recently that might shed some light on this question? Have you noticed any relevant anecdotal trends as part of your day to day web working?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

• 75% of small businesses negatively impacted by the current economy
• 72% are reducing overhead costs
• 50% are cutting back on business services
• 23% getting rid of physical office space

Overall it paints a picture of small businesses heading for the lifeboats – but how much can we tell about the reliability of this picture?

Not a whole lot, as it turns out. This particular survey was performed by RingCentral, a hosted phone service for small businesses. They provide a variety of virtual PBX plans, toll free numbers, multiple extensions, faxing, and similar services. While their feature summary is impressive, the reliability of this survey is somewhat less so: it was compiled as an online survey among their customers.

It stands to reason that companies investing in a virtual PBX system are likely to self-select towards companies trying to reduce their overhead costs. This is analogous to a restaurant surveying its customers to ask if they ever eat meals outside of the house. This selection bias doesn’t say anything strong in this particular case about whether the survey results can be extrapolated to a wider class, say all small businesses in the country – but it does give a good reason to be suspicious of the results.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

A confluence of technology, culture, a faltering global economy and fuel costs are helping this fringe working pattern move closer to the mainstream. So here’s a roundup of recent developments in coworking…

Will the Recession Drive Coworking Demand?
The global coworking mailing list has been discussing the impact of recent global turbulence in the economy and its implications for coworking. Commenters have concluded that freelancers and the demand for coworking will rise as the economy shrinks and people decide to take their careers into their own hands. Others go on to discuss that hotdesking isn’t enough, but a powerful and helpful support network of other coworkers is desirable. Interestingly, some predict that coworking spaces will see the arrival of non-digital workers, from realtors to financial professionals.

Holy Coworking!
Jerusalem recently saw the launch of it’s first coworking community, backed by PresenTense, an organisation seeking to energize grassroots Jewish innovators.

FlyTheCoop: A Coworking Co-operative in Manchester
Manchester in the UK hosts one of the country’s thriving digital communities and a number of enterprising individuals have come together in the past to host coworking days sponsored by public bodies at various venues. Now, the nascent coworking community is close to securing its own premises and is promoting collective ownership of the economic risks and rewards by offering all residents the chance to invest in a cooperative structure – called FlyTheCoop. The venture’s ownership structure  was no doubt inspired by the presence of Manchester’s Co-operative Group, the world’s largest consumer owned business.

Corporate Coworking in London
We’ve previously written about companies like Timbuk2 making spare desks available to coworkers as a means of bringing external creativity and influence into their corporate culture. Last week, Sun Microsystems’ Startup Essentials program announced a collaboration with London-based Huddle to offer free hotdesks to members of its program.

Decline of the American Commute?
A recently published study from the US Department of Transportation, shows that between August 2007 and August 2008, Americans drove fifteen billion fewer miles. An astonishing statistic implying a rise in telecommuting, but also signaling that the development of public transport alternatives – funded by gas taxes – may be under threat.

Coworking resides at an interesting nexus of technology commerce, politics and civic development. Though increasingly mainstream in the technology sector, its remains a concept which many find baffling to grasp outside the creative and digital industries – here’s where all of us involved in using or operating coworking communities and spaces need to think more broadly about the applicability of this lifestyle beyond our immediate horizons.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Hold on to your clients. There will be the occasional client who will be slower in paying out invoices, or even clients who give up and stop requesting your services altogether.  Take the time to identify which of your clients might do these things.

Watch for nervous clients that might see your services more as a luxury than a need. Then, formulate a plan to ensure that they will stay with you.  Here’s what you’ll need to remind clients:

• You’re paying extra attention to their needs. Clients will appreciate knowing that you actually care about what happens to their business.  Let them know that you’re open to hearing them out.
• The ROI (return of investment) you’ll provide. Remind your clients how much profit your services will bring to their business.  They should focus on that number and rather than your rates.
• The many options available to them. Instead of offering a single quote at the end of your proposal, offer different packages and optional services so that they can choose the ones that are tailored to their needs and budget.
• Your authority. Why are you the go-to person for your client’s demographic and not anyone else?  Is it because you’re part of that demographic yourself?  Or is it because of your experience with hundreds of other similar clients?

For teleworking employees, now’s the time to be more assertive and upfront about what you contribute to the company.  How much money are you saving the company each month just by teleworking?  How has your productivity increased?  Reminding your colleagues and your supervisors of how indispensable you are as a remote worker will decrease the possibility of being laid-off or called back to work in the office full-time.

Diversify your income. While you could be one of those lucky freelancers who are getting more business than ever, it won’t hurt to try some passive income to give your earnings a boost.  Also, try to explore the different ways you can earn money online.  Find out if there are services or products you can provide that you haven’t fully explored yet.

If possible, cut down on service and app subscriptions. Take the time to evaluate all the services and applications you are currently using, trim the non-essentials.  If you find that you’re not using your landline at all, then why keep it?  Stick with your mobile phone instead.  Also, see if there are cheaper internet plans from other providers and search for reviews online.  You might get a better deal elsewhere.

In an earlier post here at WWD, Aliza Sherman asked about how much we pay for web apps.  I’m glad to say that I pay less than $10 per month for a web app, mostly because most of the apps I need are available for free.  Find out which of your paid apps provide a return of investment, make you more efficient, and don’t have free alternatives.  For the rest, see if you can find a cheaper payment plan or package.

Become more efficient with your time. This reduces computer use and lowers your energy consumption.  Or, if you have both a desktop and a laptop, opt for using the laptop most of the time, since it uses 2/3 less energy.

It also helps to make an effort to be efficient especially with your non-billable hours.  During your workweek, we spend some time filling up invoices, replying to emails, reading blogs about the industry we’re in, etc.  Usually, we don’t bill for these minor work tasks.  Because of this, it’s best to avoid distractions, such as playing Spider Solitaire, while doing these things.

Differentiate yourself. These days, many businesses are mostly focusing on the rates included in your proposal, rather than the proposal itself.  This doesn’t mean you should lower your prices.  Instead, be clear about why you’re worth it.

If you’re letting your branding plan gather dust in a file cabinet (as I have), it’s time to take that plan out and evaluate how it fits into the present.  As you do that, try to answer the following questions:

• Why should a client pick you and not a much cheaper off-shore contractor?
• Do you have any extra training or experience that most contractors don’t have?
• Do all your promotional materials, from your website to your LinkedIn profile, communicate what makes you different?

Answering these questions will allow potential clients to differentiate you from the thousands of other freelancers who want to do business with them.  Plus, they won’t be looking at you based on price alone.

Network. It’s time to overcome our solitary tendencies and make stronger business connections – and I don’t just mean following a thousand people on Twitter.  There are businesses and individuals out there that fit your target market like a glove, but you just don’t know about them.  Find them and make contact.  You don’t have to sell your services on the first email or phone call.  Get in touch first, and slowly build up from that.

Instead of being pessimistic about the financial crisis, we should take this opportunity to reevaluate our businesses and make them stronger.  If we do this right, the most important outcome is that we’ll prove to ourselves that teleworking is as flexible and resilient as promised.

What are you doing to ensure financial security as a web worker?  How has the economic downturn affected your business?

Photo Credit: Image from Rodolfo Clix from stock.xchng

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

And yet, when we asked how the economy was treating you web workers personally, the majority of respondents didn’t report a slowdown. I’m seeing the same pattern in other communities I’m a part of – Rails developers, for example, still seem upbeat on the prospect of more work.

But there’s another aspect to this: even if your revenues are staying high, what about your spending? The Washington Post reports that consumer spending is way down, and the holiday shopping season is shaping up to be a dismal one. Granted, there’s a big difference between running out to the department store to buy socks and ordering a new 30-inch monitor or copy of PhotoShop, but we wonder: are economic worries causing you to rein in your business spending? Have you postponed or cancelled planned improvements to your home office space? Working to get your gadget addiction under control? Or is it still “spending as usual” in your corner of the web worker economy?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

At WWD, though, we’re focused on our own little niche of the economy: the web worker. Here, the picture may be slightly brighter. But there are several forces that affect us directly when things get tight:

• Web workers can end up being viewed as easily-trimmed jobs, especially if they’re not in the office to exercise political clout.
• But contractors may be in a good position, because contracting work out is often cheaper than hiring more full-time employees.
• Tighter budgets may get more companies to consider telecommuting, as a way to save money on office space.

So how is all this playing out for you? Are you staying busy? Has the current economic news got you more worried than ever about your ability to continue as a web worker? Or have you found ways to turn the economic weakness to your advantage, by offering lower-cost services to your clients?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Piwik, seen above, is open source web analytics software. The really cool thing about Piwik is that a community of users contributes new plug-ins on an ongoing basis, and these let you see unusual views of your site data.

Piwik’s plug-ins are called widgets, and you can get a sample of how several of them work in the application’s online demo. If you are a developer, or you want to track new features in Piwik, visit the Developer Zone. Piwik has open APIs that allow you to easily customize your own widgets.

As you add and subtract the widgets you want to use in Piwik, you’re essentially customizing a site analytics interface for your own needs. Piwik also installs on your server, and your data is stored in your own database, not online. This application is worth a look.

I’ve also gotten good use out of Visitorville. Visitorville gets written off by some users as having a cartoon-like interface, but it can reveal unusual trends in your site traffic. Rather than the usual numbers and graphics found in site analytics products, it shows your site traffic within a visual metaphor that looks like a bustling city.

Within the depiction of the city, you can see Google buses arriving, showing the visitors coming to your site from Google, and many more visual metaphors. Visitorville also lets you track your Adwords, Yahoo campaigns and the success of your e-mail campaigns. While you can download a free trial version, you do have to pay moderate subscription fees for ongoing use of Visitorville. The prices start at $19.95 a month for a basic plan, and you can find more information here.

In addition to being useful, these alternative site analytics solutions are fun. Do you use any alternatives to Google Analytics?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks