I developed my Twitter practices based on a decade of academic research on religion, culture, and emerging media. Twitter can make you smarter if used correctly. Here’s how:
Identify Relevant Trends
Publish 10-20 Tweets per day, a combination of retweets and originals. At the end of the week you’ll have about 100+ to review. Take time to synthesize what you tweeted during the week, and this will solidify your understanding of the most relevant trends – like writing short papers in school. Aggregated information can be leveraged in writing articles, blog posts, adapting to PPT presentations, or any number of things.
Sharpen Judgments
Daily Tweeting helps to make concise judgments about what is the most important. The necessity to distill your point into 140 characters or less forces you to think clearly about your audience. Similarly, the short length keeps other people’s information down to a minimum.
Quality Filter
Don’t read blog posts if you’re in information gathering mode, skim them first. Use Twitter as a first line of research, almost like a social bookmarking tool. Mountains of information can seem mind blowing and overwhelming.
Determine if the post is “good enough” to share – each tweet you are effectively publishing something to thousands of people. You don’t have to read every word of everything you endorse, just enough to decide if it is relevant RIGHT NOW. Wait until you have time to review a few posts to decide if it signifies an actual trend.
Followers Serve as Research Assistants.
Each tweet involves a process of quality filtering. Twitter followers are people that you trust enough to share relevant information. Follow the right people and you create a funnel of information about news and emerging trends delivered instantly in real time.
80/20 Rule
I follow people who publish relevant links generally 80% of the time. If more than 1 out of 5 tweets is a personal update or message to someone else, I stop following, unless I consider the person to be a real thought leader. You have to make judgment calls here, but for the most part if the person is really important, someone else will retweet the best posts.
Lists are Like Focus Groups
Lists turn Twitter users into research assistants, and groups of them into focus groups. My interests generally fall into four categories:
Social Media
Spirituality/Meditation
Innovation/Creativity
Current events
Lists allow you to segment information from trusted sources for quick reference. They are also excellent to use if you want to find new people to follow. Follow other people’s lists who are experts that you trust.
Beware of the Twitterati
I rarely look at my main Twitter feed because it is clogged with social posts from people who have 30,000+ followers. I keep following thought leaders because occasionally I want to know what they are saying, but for the most part I only use lists.
Many Twitter users are aspiring thought leaders (myself included) and so they like to feel part of the community chit-chat. Pop your head in before going to a conference, pick up some talking points for networking, but otherwise avoid getting caught in the trap that you’re being productive by reading someone is stuck on a plane. Tune out the noise – thought leaders usually express their main opinions on blogs.
Stay Grounded In the Present
Remember, the Buddha says desire is the cause of all suffering. Don’t get carried away trying to stay on top of everything. It is impossible to make qualitative judgments on significant trends when you are stuck in the trenches. You need to step back in order to move forward. Adopt these practices and you’ll start to make synthetic analysis quickly and more concise insights – and over time, you will become smarter!
Would you trust someone to produce advertisements for television because they can use your remote control?
Would you hire someone to do print ads based on whether they could read a magazine?
Of course not, that seems ridiculous, because everyone knows that television and print ads take a lot of skill, training, and expertise to produce.
But look at most classified ads for a “Social Media Guru” and you’ll find that they are looking for people with 0-3 years of experience. Many companies think that they can hire a kid out of college to manage social media because they are regularly on Facebook, Twitter, or write a blog. People become gurus after lives of dedication and experience. Most kids using social media are just being kids.
This points to a fundamental mistake that ability to use a communications platform equates to expertise and knowledge to build and engage communities in meaningful ways. Kids are naturals with social media because their profiles serve as extensions of their real-world identities. They help establish reputations, build trust, and provide the most convenient and efficient way to connect and communicate.
Kids don’t say to themselves “I am going to use social media now”—it is just something that they do. It feels natural and intuitive. And it doesn’t to people in charge at most companies. Some executives have trouble with sending emails and organizing online calendars. Social media is counterintuitive, awkward, and makes them nervous. And because they don’t understand how it works, anyone who can effortlessly use social media must clearly be a guru.
Social media requires strategy and planning, creativity and innovation, as well as consistency of messaging and community moderation. It collapses the roles of PR, marketing, and customer service into a fluid communication medium that demands real-time participation and dialogue. Each comment, tweet, status update, like, or other action delivers a branded message to tens of thousands of people. Social media engagement is more akin to public speaking than it is simply using a computer. The stakes are simply too high to hand over the keys to the Ferrari to anyone who can drive.
Brands need to properly hire people they trust to speak on their behalf. People who can plan and execute a campaign, quantify ROI and creatively incentivize word-of-mouth, and drive real results. Having an active social media presence is just what kids do these days but it’s not enough – chances are if you think 400 Facebook friends makes someone a social media guru, it might just mean you are becoming old.
I worked at Heavy.com years ago. We still have Heavy reunions. They had beer Fridays, a young corporate culture, sponsored events like private concerts with MiniKiss, the miniature Kiss cover band, and it was a fun place to work.
There was no such thing as social media, we did what intuitively made sense and went with our instincts. I miss that. I miss having fun with technology, stuff like:
Chat rooms and posting widgets, choosing songs for my player and custom profiles, and all the fun stuff on MySpace before they lost a handle on SPAM.
Facebook applications, most of which never did anything, but they were fun to play with for longer than the average person’s attention span.
Watching videos that made me laugh, and not thinking twice if they were created by some advertiser, because videos were fun and most brands didn’t have the guts to make content that might go “viral.”
I miss social sharing before it became SOCIAL MEDIA, before companies had to throw money around because of the sheer volume of people who are “social” online. Before there were 10 million experts writing about it. Before there were 20 million people who want YOU to promote their content because they want to be a star.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SOCIAL PART OF SOCIAL MEDIA – SOCIAL, AS IN, FUN?
I’ve worked in social media for years. Before it was a discipline. I know how to develop content strategies, to engage and build communities. I can talk the talk – engagement, metrics, Return on Investment (ROI), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – it’s my job, and I’m damn good at driving real results for clients. I also use social media daily – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, I read blogs and write one, etc.
But I miss the fun. I miss content that just made me laugh. I miss self-indulgent entertainment value. I miss social sharing before it had to have a purpose. When it was enough to be creative, without having to be quantifiable. Social sharing helped forge communities that fostered self-expression because the goal was to do something interesting and fun.
Best analogy might be in my friend Rodney’s recent comment on Facebook, I’ll explain below:
IT’S ABOUT BEING SOCIAL, NOT ABOUT QUANTIFYING THE END RESULT
The rise of SOCIAL MEDIA has led to a deluge of experts on the subject and billions of dollars from corporate interests, resulting in a booming industry focused on how to connect brands with consumers in meaningful but ultimately quantifiable ways. Meanwhile, the masses of people using social media have led technology developers to transform them from platforms of self-expression into conduits of information publishing.
People are quick to dismiss SOCIAL MEDIA users as narcissistic in the same way as they dismiss young kids as hipsters. Doing so misses the point that we are increasingly narrowing the range of possibilities to be creative – or simply, to have fun – and overall the focus on engagement and end results stunts the growth of things like talent or innovation.
AUTO-TUNE OR AUTO PILOT? WILL SOCIAL MEDIA KILL OUR SOCIAL SKILLS?
I was a punk rock kid growing up. I had mixed feelings when Nirvana became huge because I was worried that mass adoption would kill punk rock. I was and still am a huge electronic music fan, but the high fees of touring artists make some of them only accessible at large venues that lack intimacy and impact the overall experience of the performance.
I can live with that. What concerns me, however, is that the change in the content quality across social media is having a similar impact upon how we communicate. That we’re becoming more information obsessed, and somehow less social, and by less social I mean genuinely less interested in the fun times had when people come together.
I saw for the first time last night the remake of “We Are The World.” What struck me about the song was the use of the auto-tune device on vocals, first championed by Cher’s song Believe. There have been so many remakes of things from my childhood, such as Transformers, GI Joe, Nightmare on Elm Street, Where the Wild Things Are, but one question came to mind – are there enough celebrities who can actually sing to do vocals for a short song?
There might not be. We’ve auto-tuned our vocals to reduce talent into screaming through a machine. What might happen to our social skills through using social media?
We are the world, and we can also change it. We can make it fun again. Like the Japanese did when they recorded their own tribute:
A number of disparate stories and new technologies broke in the past week that sparked the following thoughts about the evolution of visual representations and content distribution.
Facebook will roll out live streaming video within their platform with in-player calls to action to like and befriend/fan publishers, while YouTube, Hulu, and other video publishers start to bring HD quality video. As I write this I’m streaming video live from Lollapalooza and listening to Animal Collective as you can see from the screen shot I just took below.
All of these amazing innovations across emerging media platforms open a new realm of possibilities for anyone to become a content publisher. The cost of entry is so low, while publishing tools across social media channels have become accessible to all, giving instant access to millions of people that could feasibly make anyone a competitor with a major publisher. Kudos especially to Comcast and UPenn’s recent launch of the New Media Exchange, a massive initiative to connect thought and industry leaders in social media with nonprofits. The move both furthers the public good while also fostering dialogue among academics, who are often at least two steps behind the industry professionals in the field.
I agree with Jeff Jarvis’s thought piece in the Guardian that Murdoch (and now AOL)’s move opens the doors for competitors, and as a former academic I’m happy to notice a quazi-Marxist trend emerging where quality content publishing seems to present challenges to monetizing it across ALL media (though music and movies are a whole other can of worms to touch in this blog post).
Anyone who works within the content publishing space knows that often times people at the top are not in touch with technology trends, and are surrounded by “yes men” who provide opinions that validate views of their superiors and stakeholders in traditional media who want to save their jobs. My personal sense is that there probably are too many nervous decisions made to perpetuate funneling billions into creating content and not enough listening to the nerdy guy in the corner of the room who understands where all of this is headed in the next 5-10 years.
This is how empires fall and new leaders emerge. On the subject of new media and user-generated content, I couldn’t help ending with a recent video of Jay-Z at All Points West opening with a Beastie Boys cover of “No Sleep Til Brooklyn.”
Britain’s new M16, Sir John Sawers, has been called into question due to information sharing on Facebook by his wife. Entries exposed where they lived, places they frequented, personal details about family members, including a brother that is a known Holocaust denier, and his bathing suit of choice that led the Guardian to publish the story “A Spy in Speedos and Other Sartorial Misjudgments.”
The BBC contextualized the faux pas with reference to the man who coined Barack Obama’s campaign slogan, “Yes we can,” Jon Favreau’s posting of a cardboard cut-out of him and Hillary Clinton on his personal Facebook profile.
Meanwhile, secret forces in Iran have tried using geo-tracking of IP addresses and other targeting to pinpoint people sharing information around the recent elections. The Nation’s blog provides an excellent coverage of how tweets, texts, and video uploads have spawned a worldwide counter-revolution.
Although slightly off in his vernacular with a reference that the revolution was “twitted” instead of “tweeted,” Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic provides an excellent recap of the butterfly effect and the potential implications Iran has for grassroots politics:
as Iranian authorities shut down internet servers, it allowed younger protesters, particularly those affiliated with universities in Tehran, to organize and to follow updates by Mir Hossein Mousavi; by spreading the word about the location of government crackdowns and the threat of machine-gun-wielding soldiers, it probably saved the lives of any number of would-be revolutionaries.
We don’t know how many Iranians belong to Twitter; there seems to have been about two dozen active voices from Tehran, but if we assume a multiplier effect — these 24 people can coordinate with their 20 friends — the use of the technology as a central organizing hub that circumvented official channels of communication cannot be understated. In this way, Twitter served as an intelligence service for the Iranian opposition.
Now TechCrunch, the Christian Monitor, and a host of others are making reference to the Twitter founders deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. Two polar opposite uses of personal publishing with drastically different consequences for national security! Thanks to Jeff Malmad for originally alerting me to the story of John Sawyers published in the Jerusalem Post.
Yakob’s opening presentation appropriately titled “Be Nice or Leave” gave brands the simple advice to add value to communities and to be respectful of the “gift economy” that tends to define communications between members. Just as one would not leave a tip after dinner hosted by friends or family, brands need to be mindful of how they enter conversations and the behavioral norms that key influencers follow.
The rules, quite simply, have changed, and for Yakob a better definition of social media would be to call it “the radical decentralization of the economics of production.” Referencing MIT Professor of Comparative Media Henry Jenkins, Yakob emphasized social media does not consist just of emerging technologies, but emerging cultural practices that disrupt planning and publishing of controlled marketing messages.
Whereas Yakob situated social media in the broader context of postmodern fragmentation of brand identity and content production Ian Schafer created a historical narrative for social media by placing it in the context of the evolving practice of story telling. The ancient art of story telling evolved across different forms of media in scalable ways leading to the addition of advertising as an incremental way to monetize the artform. Rates in turn became based on impressions served.
For Schafer, social media constitutes the evolution of what he terms “fan fiction,” wherein fans come to tell stories using the characters of brands. A playful dialogue emerges in which fans become participants in creating the evolving story of the brand. Paul Worthington, Head of Strategy at Wolff Olins, echoed this sentiment later on by emphasizing that social media not only humanizes brands in the eyes of consumers, but also humanizes consumers in the eyes of the brands.
Brand Exposure was probably the highlight for me during a busy internet week and I look forward to more. Photo above courtesy of Ben Gabbe of Ben Gabbe Photography.
A new report by Channel Insider that covers the $450 billion marketplace of solutions providers suggests many solutions providers remain unfazed if not optimistic of the immediate future despite being in the midst of a great global recession.
According to CI “shifts in business technology consumption and new delivery systems are forcing the rapid evolution of the technology solutions sales and services model.” The greatest projected increase is 38% in Software as a Services (SaaS).
The report advises services companies to resist conventional wisdom that they should cut back on marketing and ramp up sales imprint with existing customers, and instead perceive the current crisis as a transformational period wherein struggling businesses will be forced to adopt new technologies and business models to push ahead to a brighter future.
I have witnessed this firsthand in the social media space where cutbacks in advertising spend on conventional print, television, radio, and banner ads have shifted budgets towards direct engagement models across blogs, forums, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
I believe that technological advances in mobile and digital will continue to collapse advertising, marketing, PR and customer service departments into one another as consumers increasingly demand two-way dialogue with brands, and the companies that prepare for the future by listening to their customers will be the ones best equipped to become market leaders in years to come.
Picture from Geek and Poke under their Creative Commons License.
