Not much, obviously. The reason is simple: I’m writing two blogs - this one and Opinionated Marketers - and the topics are just too closely related. So, I’m going to focus blogging over there, where you can also read the work my esteemed colleague Maureen Rogers.
So head on over for the latest!
A few days ago I had the privilege of being a guest speaker at my friend Thom Haller’s information architecture course at the USDA Graduate School in Washington. We discussed the future, and questions about who will own the social graph and how we’ll manage privacy and what types of media will enjoy widespread adoption, and I found myself thinking about the bigger question: what’s across the chasm?
I’m referring, of course, the Geoffrey Moore’s concept of “crossing the chasm,” and the idea that the early adopters of technology are very different from the early majority users. In other words, the people enthusiastically using something new will not behave like the early mass audience.
I think this is true of social media. There is a core group of very heavy users, the people who debate whether Twitter, Friendfeed, or Plurk are more useful, who are immersed in blog conversations, who live and breathe it. But will their (our) use of social media mirror its broader use?
In other words, how will social media work for regular people who’ve never had the slightest desire to send a tweet?
Martin Edic of social media tracking firm Technrigy points out a “commenter’s bill of rights” from Disqus. Disqus runs a third-party commenting system.
Do comments need to solely belong to the blog on which it sits on? I’m not so sure it does. Comments are, in some way, the currency in which bloggers are paid for their posts. Bloggers want to encourage active discussions on their site. A way to encourage discussion is to give the participants more control of their contributions.
This blog post is largely inspired by Hank Williams’ blog post which asks, Who has comment copyright ownership? Hank makes the point that blog platforms and services such as Disqus should make this clear for both bloggers and the people who comment. I agree.
These are interesting issues, and there’s no real standard for them. They’re also important for marketers using social media, as comments are a critical part of the online conversations taking place about our businesses. From Martin’s post:
Comments comprise a very large amount of the user-generated content in social media. As Daniel points out, comments are a form of currency for bloggers, indications to both readers and search bots that this blog is a legit (since no one would bother commenting on an obvious spam blog (or ’splog’). Commenters also build reputation and, from a monitoring POV it’s really important to understand who is commenting and what they’re saying.
Adding to all of this is the plethora of commenting systems (blog native or third-party), the difficulty of following comments (something that third-party solutions like Disqus and tracking systems like Commentful and CoComment are trying to address). It’s not easy to keep up with comments. It’s not easy to monitor them. How do you handle this challenge?
Twitter’s ongoing technical challenges have been the talk to the social media universe for the last week or so; this
rundown of Twitter alternatives by Corvida at ReadWriteWeb gave me a unexpected chuckle.
After a rundown on the obvious Twitter alternatives and their flaws (the biggest: all the people you Twitter with aren’t there, or aren’t connected to you yet, so you’d have to rebuild your whole network) Corvida suggests this:
If you’d rather not make a switch to another service, try these offline alternatives to Twitter:
- Phone
- Events
- Parks
- Meetings
- Fairs
- Parties/Clubs
I really, really hope that was tongue in cheek!
Over at the Houston Chronicle’s Techblog, Dwight Silverman wrote about the annoyances of social networks, referring to a PC World piece on the subject.
The comments are worth reading. They come from a group of people who are more web-oriented than average (because they’re on the Chronicle web site, reading a blog about technology, and commenting on it) and the general response to social networking is lukewarm.
Not a scientific sample, of course. But a good reminder for those of us immersed in social technology that it’s still not quite a mainstream activity.
The other interesting thing about the comments? Complaints often have to do with the social network infrastructure - the number of networks, the bad behavior of Facebook apps - more than the concept of social networks itself. And a number of people mention the value of specialized networks - communities for a defined set of people sharing a specific interest, which provide immediate value to users.
Think about specialization and simplicity when you think about social media strategies…
This post from the Twitter blog is astonishing and wonderful.
We’ve gone through our various databases, caches, web servers, daemons, and despite some increased traffic activity across the board, all systems are running nominally. The truth is we’re not sure what’s happening. It seems to be occurring in-between these parts.
I added the emphasis above. I’ve worked for companies that provide services and have run into technical problems - every company that provides an IT-based service has run into problems at some point - and the idea that the people at Twitter are actually telling us that they haven’t figured it out is amazing.
Some might say it’s amazingly foolish - won’t users lose confidence in them? I think users will appreciate the honesty. Because nobody gets a lot of confidence from the way service providers usually respond to these things: “Because our service is so industry-leading, unexpected demand has strained our network, but we are addressing it with new technology investments that will support our ground-breaking product roadmap which includes even more leading-edge features!” Meanwhile, elsewhere in the building, an engineer is saying, “I don’t know why the damn thing keeps crashing!”
Having seen all of that up close, hearing “We don’t know, but we are working on it” is very refreshing. It’s like something an actual human being would tell you. And that’s followed by this:
We’re busy working on instrumenting and adding meters to provide visibility into what’s slowing Twitter down. We’ll use this data both to alleviate the current woes and to help inform our long-term architecture work to make Twitter a utility service people can count on. We’ve definitely failed that aim this week.
“We’ve definitely failed.” We’ve all seen companies fail at something. It’s so rare for them to bluntly admit it. And that, too, is refreshing.
None of this gets Twitter off the hook for making their service work properly. I think, though, that users are a bit more patient when they are hearing the people there talk about what’s going on in an honest, human way.
This is a topic that may turn out to have the staying power of “Mac or PC?” At least until Twitter does make money, or simply disappears in a 140-character puff of virtual smoke. The latest entry is a post by Aidan Henry on ReadWriteWeb and its title is peculiar: the “ultimate” revenue model turns out to “let’s monetize those eyeballs with ads!” straight out of 1997.
I think any scheme that involves putting ads into those 140-character tweets is doomed, and will send users running over the FriendFeed (or the latest interesting thing) faster than Twitter’s reliability issues already are. Ads on the Twitter web pages? Perhaps.
But “like what Google does, only really small” is almost always a losing strategy. Here’s what Twitter’s got that is cool and useful: a community (albeit relatively small) that uses it constantly. And a fantastically simple opt-in messaging network that operates across a whole bunch of devices.
So maybe that’s an angle for Twitter: let the individual users tweet away for free, but sell access to the infrastructure (and the people using it) for a fee. So, things like their recent work with Xpensr to let you tweet your expenses into their web expense tracking system cost money. If you want to send up a company or organization news feed that people can get via Twitter - with total control over when they get messages on the web, a client, your phone, IM, etc. - that costs money.
Then all the individual Twitterers aren’t a cost, they’re the fundamental asset of the company, and the more of them there are, the more valuable access for organizations is.
Next Friday, May 23, I’ll be speaking at the New York Digital Basins Software Forum in Auburn, New York. My colleague Sean Branagan and I will be leading a lunchtime session on Interactive Marketing and the Business of Social Networks.
If you’ll be there, say hello!
Yes, I’ve been a bad blogger. However, I am breaking my unplanned silence to tell you that I will be back to regular posting soon, as life calms down a bit, and also to direct you to this lovely post by Valeria Maltoni about the power of words. No, it’s not directly related to social media, but it’s an important idea, wonderfully expressed.
In our increasingly twitterized world, it’s easy to forget the value of words. “Less is more,” as communication gets stripped to its barest essentials. Syntax, elegance, and grammar — all gone, in the service of utilitarian economy.
But just because we’re no longer chipping our thoughts into stone, we shouldn’t assume their lack of permanence or effect.
Read the whole thing.