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One of the facts that gets quoted every now and then by people advising bloggers on how to write articles is that the top bloggers use the word “you” more often than “me” or “We/Our”. So I thought I’d take a look and see if this is true, or another Social Media Urban Myth.

As a starting point, I took the blogs of 8 of the top Social Media Bloggers and looked at their percentage use of “I”, “We”, “You” and “They”. In each case, I collected at least 5,000 words, which for most equates to between 6 and 8 articles.I know it’s not a very large sample of writers or words, but I wanted to see if any patterns emerged. And they did!

Louis Gray blogs more about developments in SM and emerging technologies, so I had thought that perhaps he would have used “me” more often, as he is often giving his opinion. But he still managed to use “you” more often than “I” and “We” combined

Chris Brogan uses the first person singular a lot in the sample tested but there’s a good reason for it – among the posts that I sampled were several explaining how he uses mind mapping, how he doesn’t use LinkedIn as he feels he should etc.. I’m going to go back and examine his more general articles to see the pattern there.

As can be seen from the table, all of the others use “you” almost twice as often as they use “I”, the exceptions being Seth Godin who uses “you” 3.5 times as often as he uses the word “I” and Karen Skidmore who uses it a whopping 8 times as much!. This is entirely consistent with SM articles being about engaging with other people and drawing them in. With the exception of self -disclosure articles of the type Chris Brogan has been writing recently, most of us would soon get bored with, and probably stop reading, writers who used “I” twice as much as they use “you”.

There’s a lot more I’m going to be analyzing, such as percentage of past, present and future orientated words, the percentage of nouns vs verbs etc

The conclusion? These people are some of the top in their field – anyone wanting to be up there with them needs to be looking at their writing style. The small words matter. You will find another article here that examines the subject in more detail, and announces a new service for writers.

Wow, I’ve read over a hundred really cool articles this week (thank goodness for Google Reader)!

Again, in no particular order, here’s my pick of the week.

Will The Business People Please Stand Up? by Amber Naslund
I have to confess up front, I like Amber’s blog and could easilyhalf  fill this post with her articles. But this post struck me as being important as it makes a point that is often neglected: The most successful people in business are People who can admit what they don’t know, and seek knowledge or help.  The article is full of wisdom and if you have the time, treat yourself to the follow up article, Tough Love.

How I Leaped from Pagerank 0 to 4 in 21 Days Without any Connections by Henri Junttila
This article is included as it offers a golden tip. It’s so easy to focus on our blog and on filling it with great content, but commenting on other people’s blogs is what drives visitors to our sites. It’s something I have been very lax at and is one of my goals for 2010.

Branding Battle: Favicon to the Rescue by Seth Godin
A comprehensive post about the importance of, and how to create, a favicon. It never ceases to amaze me how many cool looking sites don’t have a favicon. And for those who use WordPress, there’s the useful plugin Shockingly Simple Favicon

Convert shortcomings into advantages — without lying by Jason Cohen
Sometimes it’s easy for the sole trader to become a little gloomy when trying to compete with much larger organisations. Jason Cohen’s article does a great job of turning some of the perceived weaknesses of the small organisation into strengths.

Deepen Your Networks by Chris Brogan
Another blogger whose articles I always read and possibly my favourite article of the week, this should be printed out and placed by the screen of every blogger or blogging wannabe. The bullet pointed list providing tips on how to deepen your network are worth the price of a book. And Chris says, it only takes a couple of hours a week to deepen the quality of relationships with people in your network. This is definitely one of my key words for 2010 – ‘focus’.

Does Your Customer Want What You’ve Got to Offer? by Sonia Simone
An article that gives great advice about the content of our articles; it uses food as a very cool analogy.

Can We Live In Private and Demand Companies Be Open? by Louis Gray
The theme of the next article is exactly what is says in the title and comes on the back of the weird announcements recently from the head of Facebook.

Use it or lose it! 5 Tips on How to Keep Your Blogging Regular by Darren Rowse
A candid article by Darren Rowse that warns of the perils of taking your blog’s readers for granted or not keeping in regular contact with them.

Why a portfolio of web content is as valuable as a portfolio of property by Nick Tadd
A very thorough piece from Nick Tadd about SM and the need for clear objectives

How to set up your mobile blog design – Step-by-step guide by Marko Saric
An extremely comprehensive article that does exactly what it says on the tin – provides a step-by-step guide to setting up your blog design for mobile platforms.

Happy Reading!

Sometimes we can feel buried under the avalanche of blogs on SM issues. Below, I’ve detailed ten of the best that I’ve found from the last week, and listed them in no particular order – happy reading

Louis Gray on Blogging for Business, Social Media Sales, Strategy
Louis recently published three more short videos, including sales advice in the world of social media, how to launch a high quality business blog that gets traction amidst all the noise and three steps to a robust social media strategy.

Chris Brogan on How to Reach Out to Bloggers
Timeless advice form the author of ‘Trust Agents’ on how to connect with bloggers and get the word out about your product or service; how to find someone who’s interested in what your company is offering, and then share the pertinent details so that hopefully the blogger will write a decent story about you, maybe even include a few links; and how to get  a better return for your SM efforts.

Chris Brogan on The Soul of A New Business
Chris Brogan asks important questions that few businesses ever ask such as  What is the soul of your business? What resides at the center of all that you’re doing? What is the ecosystem that surrounds your business?

Marko Saric of How to Make my Blog.com – 36 favourite posts from 2009
There were lots of posts like this at the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010 and I like this one more than most, mainly because of the breadth of issues it covers. Well worth a read as is this post, that he wrote, about the  posts from other people  in 2009 that he found to be inspirational.

Darren Rowse of Problogger wrote this answer to those people who say that the only people who make money from blogging are those who sell material on how to make money blogging.
He uses his own experience to show that the statement isn’t true and it’s a well-argued post.

Steve Hodson of Shooting at Bubbles – I get mine back at all those slimy marketers on twitter
Annoyed at getting spam Tweets from “all the marketers and their following me just because I mentioned marketing in a message or a post here”, this post details Steve’s revenge – he set up a website to name and shame these marketers, called Twitter’s Marketing Hell. It will be interesting to see if the idea takes off.

Steve Hodson of Shooting at Bubbles was also responsible for making me laugh out loud with this post – This was almost too painful to read
I won’t spoil the fun, just read it and make sure you’re not drinking coffee at the same time!

Olivier Blanchard of the BrandBuilder Blog – wrote this blog on other Social Media absurdities.
Olivier Blanchard, whose slide show on Social Media ROI I posted earlier this week, was sent an e-mail offering him certification in Social Media! OK, the post is older than the last 7 days but creeps in as it is referred to in Steve Hodson’s post above. It goes to show that people are always inventing new scams.

Mitch Joel – What a website will be and Never Be
Author of one of my two favourite SM books of 2009 (Six Pixels of Separation), wrote this piece advocating the owning of your own online presence, building it and nurturing it and using the SM platforms to promote or extend the brand. Nothing particularly new in it, but it is well written and sums up the issues nicely.

Mitch Joel – The Google Phone
Unsurprisingly, there have been lots of posts on the Google Phone and I like Mitch’s the best, mainly because he takes a differrent line to many other writers. Whilst they are blogging about Google having released a rival to the iPhone, Mitch Joel argues that it’s about “A computer that is in every person’s hand that connects them to information and everyone else in the world.”