Answer services: satisfying two user experiences

Interesting article about Aardvark in the New York Times over the weekend. In
Now All Your Friends Are in the Answer Business, author Randall Stross covers a few "answer businesses" alongside Aardvark's recently public IM service. Yelp and Yahoo Answers are mentioned. Mahalo's Answers is not, but could have been.

The answers space is a difficult one to crack. It continues to attract companies interested delivering a solution to what would seem to be a fairly straightforward problem. Given all the people connected online at any given moment, why can't I get an answer to my question from a person who knows the answer?

Think about it: Google searches documents. It is up to the user doing the search to qualify search results, and try again if first results aren't the right ones. In other words, the user doing the search knows the answer, or knows enough to recognize it, or its source. Google doesn't do well at questions that a) the user can't recognize a qualified answer to b) involve some further contextualization or "human" assistance.

All questions are not alike. The ones that we pose to search engines tend to be a particular kind of question: a query. Queries can be captured, parsed, and addressed by a combined use of data and algorithms. Matches, made relevant by means of filtering sources and sorting the order of results (popularity, authority, recency, etc). But the user experience of a google search is still more a quest than it is the posing of a question: users are given enough to continue to look through results for what they need.

The problem addressed by answers services is a completely different one. It involves matching a human answerer to the human asker. Two minds, not one. This ought to provide an advantage. Two minds ought to be able to tackle issues that a search engine cannot: whether the question is properly phrased or stated; whether it is properly directed; whether it can be finessed or better constrained. The question can create an opportunity to refine the question. The asker asks the answerer, who in turn asks the asker for more information, and so on.

But this also creates issues. There are now two user experiences to address (and satisfy). Furthermore, the user experiences are asymmetrical: the asker has a clear motive (his or her question, in mind, here and now); the answerer has no motive (until being asked a question, the answerer was presumably thinking about something completely different).

Furthermore, this coupling of asker-answerer creates a dependency.

• The asker's question determines the experience of the answerer: a dumb question asked of the answerer does not provide a shot at stardom.
• And the answerer's answer determines the experience of the asker: A dumb answer does not satisfy the asker's pressing need.

Satisfying both user experiences, not just one, is the challenge faced by any answer service.

Which is why many wrap the user experience in a conversational or social practice for better results. It's a rule of social interaction that participants can use the rules of grammar and linguistic communication or the rules of ritual and etiquette to negotiate an interaction. If the communication fails (question is misunderstood), participants can use etiquette to reframe the matter at hand, clarify intent, need, and so on. Social rules complement linguistic rules -- and all social interactions are a fragile combination of the two at work, hand in hand, and generally unconsciously.

The success of an answer service hinges as much on satisfying the answerer as in satisfying the asker. If answerers have no incentive to answer questions, the system fails due to lack of participation. The wrapper used by a Mahalo Answers or Yahoo Answers is social. Both incentivize the answerer by providing a means by which the answerer can build reputation, expertise, points, and social visibility/status.

Aardvark wants to leverage friend relations and use those as constraints on the interaction, presumably avoiding the need to incentivize users socially because friend relations trump social (remains to be seen) relations.

Answers services are a good example of why social interaction design needs a two-sided accounting of the user interaction. They're an exemplary case, in fact, because answer services are conversational and interactive in their very definition. There's no clearer example of inter-subjectivity than one subject requesting something of another subject. But the ask-answer situation extends to all social media interactions. Many if not most user activities provide the possibility for response by another user, if not soliciting response then suggesting how a response may be taken. Many, if not most, user activities on social media imply this social dynamic and perpetuate social interaction precisely because users are capable of making claims and responding to claims.

Interactions on social media do not just concern the user's interaction with the software application. They concern the user's interaction with another user, mediated by the software application. The social dynamics on which a successful social media experience depend require the satisfaction of interdependent, interacting, and inter-subjective user acts and actions. Answers services are a good example of this dynamic at work, and are an example of how difficult it can be to successfully align and resolve two distinct user interests at the same time.

Digesting public Facebook feeds: implications for brands

Your Facebook updates are going public. In what's being viewed as a response to twitter's success, and as a protective measure taken before a release of revamped Facebook search, user updates will soon come with privacy controls.

From the release:
Today, we're launching a beta version of an improved Publisher--the main place to add content such as photos, videos, and status updates on your home page and profile. The new Publisher has been streamlined a bit, and its most significant improvement is the new Publisher Privacy Control that gives you the opportunity to answer the question, "Who do you want to tell?" as easily as you answer the question, "What's on your mind?"

There's been a lot written for and against Facebook's policy. So I'll refrain from adding to that conversation. But I do want to go down the trail of implications and consequences a bit, as they are interesting. Particularly from the brand's perspective.

Consider what brands might be able to do, if the analytics tools, campaign monitoring and management services, and campaign managers themselves had the resources to go micro:

• brands will need to develop policies for whether or not to read customer profiles ("profile" here broadly defined as profile, updates, activity feeds, etc)


• profiles may be collected over time


• profiles may be analyzed over time


• social graph information could be used to create social context for a customer: psycho-demographic, consumer interests, personal interests, type of social status, types of online behaviors, type of online personality


• profiles may be categorized, for a new kind of market segmentation


• profiles may be used for market research


• profiles may be used for search engine optimization enhancement


• profiles may be used for future advertising and marketing approaches (advertising into the feed, flow, stream, status update, etc)

This is not exhaustive. Semantic and sentiment analysis could be applied to profile content. Social network analysis could be applied to friend relationships. Conversational analysis to styles of online talk, and activity analysis to online use habits and behaviors.

But much of this is speculative. Most advertising agencies have yet to establish an ROI for micro-targeted ad campaigns. Most do not have the creative skills or resources (not to insult ad agencies -- you're brilliant!) to craft multi-faceted and multi-wave campaigns for proper targeting to audience sub segments. Imagine A/B testing multiple campaigns designed to reach friends of an influencer by means of the topics and interests in which the user has the most influence... But widespread use of this kind of approach is years down the road. On the road to (economic) recovery, perhaps.

Let's conjecture nonetheless. What would brands have to consider, if they were to make use of information provided by user profiles? Brands would need a

• policy of use on whether or not to act on information learned


• they will need a disclosure policy, informing (or not) customers that they use social networking profiles to learn about customers


• they will need a communication strategy for how to reveal to customers what they know


• they will need rules of engagement to articulate the ways in which personal information gleaned might be used in communication or service to the customer


• they ought to develop a code of conduct that would include recommendations for respect of privacy (when users inadvertently reveal or disclose their own, or friends' private activities, news, and so on)

Interesting, too, is who in a company sets these policies? What is the job title? And what does the job description look like? Customer privacy, profile reading, and relationship management would each seem to fall under separate roles today: legal, PR/Marcom, and marketing. Not to mention sales. But the information customers make available could be of substantial value to some brands (entertainment, lifestyle brands especially). Brands that make use of social networking profiles will be those that are capable of translating insights across departments, for a better understanding of who the customer is, how s/he relates to a brand, product, event, or service, and how to reach and communicate with him or her (and friends).

Mashable: Twitter Envy: Facebook Adds Public Content Sharing

Facebook's announcement: More Ways to Share in the Publisher

The power of listening: a brief personal meditation

A friend of mine used to have a philosophy about friendship that I'd like to share. It affected me and and I still lean on it from time to time. He believed that we are each like some kind of "personality structure." And that when friendship is like a combination of two personality structures that empower and open up one another. Good friends amplify us and open up our strengths, skills, powers, and abilities. Not so good friends dampen, quell, close off, and shrink our "structural" possibilities.

The philosopher Spinoza had a similar argument, published during a famous theological debate on the nature of evil. He claimed that evil was the absence of good -- that it does not exist in itself, but is a "corruption" of good forces, and a weakening of the body resulting from forces that contradict us.

This all came to mind recently while reflecting on the discourse of listening that is prominent in social media circles. Brands are learning how to do it; governments are promising to get better at it; companies struggling with the economy are embracing it. Listening is a sign of the times, proof of fallibility and a commitment to humility, honesty, and integrity.

A few thoughts, then, on listening. I like listening. My conversational style changes with the person I'm talking to, and in many ways I adapt more (I think) than many people to situations and encounters. A good friend and I used to say that we could tell when we were in tune. Tune, tone... music makes for a nice example of listening.

Listening creates opportunities. It begins with perception, which moves quickly to recognition. When we listen, we hear what we recognize. What we recognize is something we already know. If we listen only passively, we will hear only ourselves: we will hear what's familiar. What's familiar is the same.

If we listen actively, we may discover. Discovery takes work -- for it exposes what's different. What's different is made available by the other person. The other person's interest, and its difference from our own interest, creates the difference. And that difference, if heard, and listened to, is the gap of opportunity.

The art of listening is the art of openness. Possibilities emerge out of the opportunities we can create by active and attentive listening because there is an open created where there as once our own sameness and familiarity.

Listening is not only an art of the open, and of being open. It is respectful. To listen is to pay attention, and that attention lights up the other. Listening is a giving attention that begets attention.

Finally, the power of listening is transformational. Our personal power is limited by what we can see, and in how accurately we perceive what we see. Situations, opportunities, problems, relations -- we can act only according to what we understand, and understand only by means of how well we perceive. Listening, taking into account another person, their difference and their interests, creates possibilities for action and interaction. But we can move one another only if we are ourselves movable. And a good listener is often moved.

Twitter: the Self-ish Meme?

I'm thinking this bright and clear Monday morning about some thoughts I had last night, when my mind slipped into philosophical musings. I went to sleep reflecting on the state of modernity, and of the rapid rise of communication technologies and their relationship to who we are and how we are. i was thinking about the Self, a concept used with so much abandon as to have little stable or secure meaning left. But clearly an important concept nonetheless.

In the two thousand or so years since the Greeks handed us the western sense of self, we have journeyed through many variations on the theme. We have had the the authentic and virtuous self: the Greek Self. Self as the locus of truth and personal accountability: the confessional Self. Self as the individual, hard-working and ethically-minded: the protestant Self. Self as personal power and critically engaged: the political Self. Self as status, fame, and fortune: the me-oriented Self. And possibly, now, with tools like twitter and Facebook mainstreaming madly: the networked Self.

To riff on a biological claim and metaphor, is there, like the selfish gene, a self-ish meme? Twitter is indeed a self-ish technology, and in its uses, a self-ish habit. But if it is a tool of the Self, and if it fits in with the long-running historical narrative of modernity, how is it self-ish?

Modernity was launched on the harnessing of industrial power. Resources extracted from the earth replaced the domestication of animals and farming techniques to extend and unleash transformations on an exponential level. After thermodynamics and mastery of fluids, heat exchange, and engines, modernity's inventive ideology gave us communication: wireless radio, the telephone, early calculating machines, and broadcast. Modernity's engines were now applied not only to industry but to information. And then, with the arrival of the internet and the PC, the information age segued into an age of communication.

Talk is now everywhere. It has become the medium of distribution, our means of production, and in ways still taking shape, our mode of Self. If the industrial age harnessed the body, the information age the mind, then are we now collectivizing talk? Are the "labor" and "surplus capital" of today our talk and our attention?

These are gross generalizations, but

• if Virtue was the Self of the Greeks


• if Truth was the Self of the Middle Ages


• if Knowledge was the Self of the Enlightenment


• if Labor was the Self of Industrialization


• if Information was the Self of the Information Age


• is Speech the Self of the Communication Age?

Media mediate the Self; that's Marshall McLuhan. Mediation extends the perceptual senses and thus also our abilities. McLuhan understood that mediation is transformative -- and that in mediation our presence in the world, and thus our relationships, and our very experiences, change. Today we think nothing of being connected to people far away. Our ability to communicate has itself changed.

But lost in mediation is our sense of being with. Connectedness is not the same as togetherness (the German word Mitsein is perfect). Connectedness is some strange combination of access, availability, presence projected into and through the wire, and expectations that take shape in our awareness. Hence the ambivalent but canny phrase "ambient intimacy" (an oxymoron, if you think about it).

Not only is connectedness a different kind of experience, it is a different form of media too. Media are not what they are, but how they are used, and are never properly understood in technical terms alone. New social media extend mass media, socialize it, and to some degree are assimilated back into it. Media have traditionally been associated with forms of control, influence, and messaging (if not also power, propaganda, seduction, and so on).

Power and authority operate differently in the age of communication. They are flat, de-centered, and networked -- and they work by means of control and regulation. Traditional organizations exercised power and authority; Modern systems control and regulate.

But tools like twitter, and more broadly, net-based communication practices escape control and regulation. The weekend's events in Iran being just a recent, but exemplary, case in point. This weekend twitter was political -- a distributed, networked, and subversive line of communication, lines of flight unravelling the organs of the state. The personal as political, as feet on the ground and word of mouth.

There is I think a self-ish meme here. Social media are personal media. A personalization of media unfolding particularly in the transformation of talk. Talk as a means of production of the Self, in how we talk, to or in front of whom, and about what. Also as a reflection and projection of the Self, as Self reflection and Self as project. We disclose ourselves in our tweeting: whether we reveal our moods, interests, tell news, make requests, provide help, or simply pass along.

And this self-ish medium is socializing. For it socializes mass media as it socializes the Self. Self-ishness now in the form of social status, audiences, attention, influence, even social capital. The memes are media-based. Status and position, relevance and influence, not by means of money, power, authority, or control, but by means of talk, as signs of status, audience reach and attention, and distribution.

An about face of sorts, it seems. Or a post-face kind of communication. Talking is our new labor, communication, our new work. For better, or worse.

"You're OK. How am I?" Reading through twitter.

My Dad used to tell a joke that would send him into eye-tearing peals of self-induced laughter. He's a group therapist, and trained with Transactional Analysts. TA is the school of thought that gave us "I'm OK, You're OK." And the idea that the real function of talk is the transaction of emotional "strokes." Moments of acknowledgment, recognition, and validation.

"Two Transactional Analysts run into each other in the hall," he'd say, (already visibly giggly...) "One says to the other" (now audibly giggling...) "You're OK! How am I?" (...things fall apart.)

And I had no freaking idea why it was funny, but of course I laughed my butt off, as did my little sister, and for a brief moment the little family that couldn't was whole. That little ritual was our economy of "fine," a transaction guaranteed to work because giggle fits are contagious no matter what the joke is about. And in our infrequent visits with Dad, comedy was the fastest-acting glue we had.

Of course the whole situation was a microcosmic example of TA at work. In our family, "You're OK. How am I?" was a lot more common than I'm OK, How are you? and certainly more common than "I'm OK. You're OK." Which soldered the wiring by means of which I now find myself inescapably drawn to observing and thinking about Other people.

I wrote last week that I thought we social media folks needed to think more about what other people do with our tools (twitter). That there seemed plenty of How To's about tweeting, but little about reading tweets. Lots about success, branding, visibility, status, and so on... but little about having a good experience.

As a user experience guy I can't afford to allow my own personal experience to determine what I think the overall user experience is. But nor can I assume nor should I presume to know what others experience, either. Conundrum. For social media are not products or tools, to me, but social practices, cultures, habits, and personal styles that make use of tools. Making use: not getting utility from, not using for, not using in order to, and not "use cases." Truly using: developing habits and routines, for socializing, soliciting business, chatting, meeting and friending, and so on.

I like to emphasize user experience and social practices not only because I think that social media succeed or fail based on the user experiences they can facilitate. But also because I think the user experience deserves investigation. In my opinion, we too commonly extend real-world situations and practices to the online "world." And we too often lean on metaphors and ideas that may describe, but rarely explain, what it's all about.

For example, we say that social media connect. That they are transparent, democratizing, connecting, social. That they are about friends, communicating, and conversation. Yes, when compared to conventional software, or when compared to broadcast media. They are more connected, conversational, transparent, flattening, and social than those forms of media. But if we try to describe social media as things, our western cultural thing with things gets in the way of our grasping dynamics and processes, habits and routines, expressions and feelings. Verbs. When social media are things used, emphasis should be on the using, not the thing. It is we, not the tool, that make use (and make things useful).

Social media are socially different and differently social. As they are socially differentiating and differently socializing. And open social tools like twitter are so multi-faceted and multi-purpose that there would be little hope of our capturing what they "are" or how they "work" if we didn't know what people do with them.

And therein lies some of the rub. Each of us can only know our own experience. Those of us who forsake observation and study can only hope to connect with people who either believe us, or agree with us. Enthusiasm for social media (because it's new or better or good), evangelism of social media (ditto) only pitch sales. Necessary for the industry, but not sufficient for a design or implementation practice. Critical thinking, observation, self-awareness, and reflection are needed if we are to do more than talk about social media and instead understand how it works, in what cases, and for whom.

The two aspects of social media that we need to grasp, formally if we can, are the social system and its individual user experiences. There are system-level processes, as there are with any social system (an economy, a legal system, an educational system). And there are participants (workers, defendants, students and teachers). The system organizes, has structure, and is reproduced over time by the acts and activities of its participants (who are unaware that their contributions keep everything running, and who don't have the system in mind they they "use" it).

We might use functional descriptions to describe the operations of the system: its elements, processes, and outcomes. And there are intentions, motives, thoughts, habits, plans, ambitions and so on of the participants. Social media are social, but in a highly-structured way. Most of what you or I can do on social media is very limited indeed (excepting talk, which has infinitely possibilities of creating meaning). And what you or I do will seem the same, insofar as what we think we're doing is not captured.

Social media offer extremely limited ways of selecting and acting on information (and objects, statements, links, videos, etc). We can add, connect, qualify, and attribute. Add to a list, collection, or set. Connect information, pages, items, people. Qualify by means of a normalized choice between up/down, yes/no, or quantitative rating system.

There is no fuzzy here. No "sort of," "maybe," or "somewhat" unless by means of the words "sort of" "maybe" "somewhat." Ambiguity of choice is excluded, selections are determining, and all selections look the same once made.

User experience folks know action systems. interaction systems, too, insofar as users interact with software applications. But human social interactions comprise of meaning, and are fundamentally un-resolvable. Meaning escapes codification and stability always and in all cases: it is a negotiation, and can involve either an attempt to reach understanding between people, or effects in the world (including effects on people).

Conventional user experience approaches cover the action of the user, but not the interactions among users. We have no language or framework for the other side, for the response or uptake of a user's action when that action is communication with another user. We're unable to describe social interactions on social media because we cannot accommodate human interactions (with each other). If users use twitter in order to interact with each other, not with twitter itself, then we need some kind of framework that covers not only the acting user but the responding user. The successes as well as the failures -- which I suspect may constitute the vast majority of mediated social interactions.

It's important that we understand that social media are communication systems. That's the "type" of social system they are. They only work if the communicating action of one user is taken up in some way by another user. Now the system can capture the actions of a user and then represent them on screen (these are the "views" of social action we design: lists, boxes, ratings, all that). But it's the uptake of an action that continues the process of communication and connects users with one another. Social media would fail if no users took up each others' contributions and acted on them, spoke about them, responded directly to them, shared them, and so on.

So the design approach needs to accommodate both sides: what is a user doing, and how might another user respond? We're good at the first part, but poor at the second part. We have a one-sided approach to user actions. We don't have a grasp of responses.

I'm a responsive person. That is, my communication style is strongly informed by who I'm talking to. And I can adapt what I say, how, and in what manner and style based on the situation at hand, and who's present. Twitter is hard for me because I don't get enough material from it -- so I read through the wire and try to guage what's meant and intended. Tweeting what I'm doing isn't in my idiom.

They say that we view ourselves as complicated, complex, and changing, but that we view others as whole. I try not to do this. I try to perceive, if not understand, differences. Identities to me are objects. People are differences, and are differentiating. I think that if we knew what kinds of people resonate well together, we might be able to anticipate how a new social media product will succeed. Who will use it, find community on it, relate to others through it. Wikipedians, social bookmarkers, youtubers, facebookers, diggers, lastfmers, yelpers, twitterers: these are all possibly different kinds of people. I like to converse, I never delicious. I like to read status updates, but I often feel silly posting my own.

But the tools don't define the user type. Nor for that matter do market segments. There aren't "creators." What's a creator? A creative person? A person who upload and adds stuff? A blogger? Is a commentator not a creator? People don't break down into types of people who adopt in stages, or who add but don't consume, consume but don't participate, and so on. No, people are doing something, know what they're doing, are interested in what they're doing, and care about what happens afterwards. We get as far as describing what users do, how they "behave" or act, and then stop before trying to understand what happens next. Which is precisely that which makes a social media service a dynamic system of communication: actions taken up in a temporally open, un-bounded, discontinuous, and separated "flow" of activity.

In trying to grasp the user experience, I've tried to learn from others what they think social media is. I have reflected on the many stages of experience I've personally had in social media -- which goes back more than 10 years. I've tried to make sense, with the purpose of formalizing a framework for social interaction design, of different user interests, personalities, styles of use, and so on. Recently, of course, most of our attention has been on twitter. And recently, in particular, I've had some interesting conversations about the state of social media, and about interactions with and around twitter in particular.

I've noticed that people have very different ways of using twitter. Social media experts make many different claims about twitter. Many of these seem to project the person's personal use, and professional experience. Surprisingly, these often disagree or even contradict each other.

Among twitterers, for example, friends and colleagues have described it, and their use of it, as:

• a stage
• a scene
• a conversation
• their reputation
• an extension of their blog
• a way to stay in touch
• a way to meet new people
• a way to let people know what they're up to
• a way to document the day
• marketing
• a way to be seen

This would tell us that some people use twitter for personal reasons, some for social reasons, and some to be seen by the public. The differences among the ways people describe twitter include descriptions of what twitter is (to them), what they're using it for, what purposes it serves, and so on. In how we describe twitter, we reveal something of how we relate to it and to what we do with it.

If these are some ways of relating to twitter, then, similarly, there are different ways of "behaving" on twitter:

• A person who uses twitter to extend his online reputation may attend mostly to himself. He might want to count and track retweets. To grow an audience. To protect his reputation. And maybe, not spend much time with people who aren't in his audience.


• A person who uses twitter to broadcast might seem to have an impersonal style of behavior. She might use it to post updates, circulate news and announcements. Extend her blog. If she's not interested in getting "caught up" in conversations, she may tend to follow back less, @reply less, and pay less attention to what others are doing.


• A person who uses twitter to be a part of a social scene may tend to use it to coordinate social activities. Twitter might primarily be a source then of social news and updates -- from friends and colleagues. The person might use twitter to stay connected and looped into social engagements. His interest, if he has one, in tracking twitter traffic may be insofar as he feels he is getting attention and being noticed, rather than, say, an indication of his reputation as an expert.

And there are many more distinctions we might make among different ways of relating to and using twitter. They would correspond to the ways in which we participate in the "attention economy":

• Giving attention
• Getting attention
• Paying attention
• Soaking up attention
• Attracting attention
• Sharing attention
• Competing for attention
• Mediating attention
• Measuring attention
• Manipulating attention
• Returning attention

How people make themselves visible and relevant on twitter would differ, then, too. Differences in our social skills and competencies come to bear on how we tweet. There are differences in:

• What we say
• Who we say it to
• Who we reply to
• Who we follow and why
• Who we follow back, or not, and why
• Who we RT and why
• What we RT and why

These differences are explained by how we think twitter "works":

• If it is a public medium, then we may pay attention to those who are getting attention.
• If it is our friends and social scene, we may not pay attention to people outside of that
• If our friendships are close and loyal, we may pay good attention to what our friends are saying
• And if we hope to be noticed by those we respect, we may offer our attention and hope that it comes back to us
• If we have a reputation to caretake, we may not want to encourage people who seem not to recognize or know it
• If we have a certain social status, we may think about who we spend it on

Social dynamics are at play in all of these examples, even for those people whose tweeting is only thinly social. These dynamics involve what people do with twitter and why and how, but not simply in terms of their actions. In most of these cases, interaction is solicited, appealed to, hoped for, expected, monitored, measured, or even discouraged. But the dynamic is always there, and its rich texture and intricately nuanced forms of behavior and activity are what make social media work.

This post is much too long. I did not want to attempt to formalize social dynamics, but simply offer some distinctions and lay a few more bricks in the road to a better accounting for the inter-activity of social media. A complete or exhaustive description of the user experience with social media will be impossible. However, a better and more insightful description of social interaction dynamics is possible -- and with it, a design approach that can better anticipate consequences of design choices.

Re-framing the problem: SxD

This post is about social interaction design. I've been gestating around the concept of "frames" for the past couple weeks. Frames of meaning, frames of experience, and frames as a concept for a user-centric description of social interactions.

I like frames because they can accommodate our need for a visual metaphor, a temporal metaphor, and a metaphor for meaning. Metaphors are generally a bad idea in theory, in that they communicate (descriptively) but do not explain. But structural and visual metaphors, spatial metaphors, and value/utility metaphors don't work for me (or for social interactions, IMHO).

Concepts based on containers can lead us to think in and with boxes -- good for presentation but inadequate to the actions that occur around them

Concepts based on place, space, and location can lead us to think in terms of structure and stability -- good for a sense of design control but inadequate to the durations, episodes, and temporal experience of social interactions

Concepts based on structure, which can include containers as well as spaces, lead us to think architecturally -- good for building and designing, but inadequate to the system dynamics of social media

Concepts based on value and utility can lead us to anticipate user needs and objectives -- good for designing for success and usability but inadequate to the psychological dimensions of interactions, communication, and human relationships

Concepts based on writing, posting, and messaging can lead us to think in terms of communication -- good for the medium's shift from information to communication, but inadequate to the speech, performance, and social interaction dynamics of social media

Concepts based on conversation can lead us to think about the emerging flow- and talk-based trend away from pages and publishing to talk and relationships -- but inadequate to the fragmentation and disaggregation of the "conversation" space

I'm borrowing from Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis, a remarkable study of social encounters, and a work rich in concepts of social interactionism. Notably "keying" and "footing," both of which cover the nuanced means by which we can reference social convention and indicate personal disposition and meaning to coordinate interactions.

Of course Goffman was a master of face to face interactions, and his observations and explanations hold for social media only to limited and clipped degree.

The challenge for social interaction design today, and my interest in the use of frames, is that it seems as if the conversational trend in social media may be running away from us. Namely, that both forms of online talk, and the proliferation of system messages and activity updates increasingly interconnected (think Facebook connect), have resulted two significantly (unintended) consequences.

1. The interconnectedness of separate social media sites, services, desinations, and applications increases the number of arbitrary connections. Arbitrariness is increased when two separate nodes are coupled, when a connection is established, a message distributed, fed, published (etc) to a new context. What was contextually relevant in its original context (eg favoriting a video on Youtube) is more arbitrary when it appears on Friendfeed. Connectedness may serve the Friendfeed account holder, or his/her Friendfeed followers also. But the message itself is more arbitrary, or its meaning as an action is more arbitrary in distributed contexts than it is in its original context (where favoriting videos serves to rank videos).
2. The proliferation of talk in social media, or shift from the page to flow, stream, and conversation, increases the ambiguity of communicative intent. Again, interconnectedness means that messages are viewed, fed, delivered, or otherwise included in a greater number of contexts. Facebook status updates in Seesmic, with the ability to comment from outside of Facebook. Aggregation of updates in Friendfeed, widget distribution of tweets, disaggregated listening on last.fm et al to blogs, Facebook, etc. The interconnectedness of communication platforms raises the degree of ambiguity in message and action intent: in what's being said, why, to whom, and even about what.
   

• The arbitrariness of connection can create discovery and serendipity, but also confuse and destabilize the very practice of communication itself. Where does one comment back? Where else will a comment appear? What value is captured by which other site or service if I share, rate, digg, forward, retweet etc an action, a system message, or a user's message?
• The ambiguity of intent can lead to a greater number of possible responses and reactions to an action, but increases the likelihood of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, our failure (from the perspective of communication).
  

Social media are social systems. Conceptually and theoretically, social systems have structure but also have actions and communication: thus a better model than architectures, places, utilities, and communication alone. Social media are reproduced constantly out of the information and communication they produce, and which they made available. In addition to making information visible and available, they permit actions that in turn create more communication and enable more actions. Some of these are system messages (user has done X, Y, or Z); some are human communication (status updates, tweets, comments, posts... ). Systems in other words report on their own use as well as facilitate use: and so they continue, ever producing and reproducing information and communication in the form of news that's meaningful within the social system, actions which select information, and views of those actions which filter, sort, rank, and otherwise apply social evaluations.

As systems interconnect, sharing system messages and distributing user communications among one another, noise levels increase, connections increase, actions (possible and required) increase, and so on.

If social media become too interconnected and if they produce more activity and communication than each can filter/sort and allow users to manage, might they implode or collapse in on their own excess of activity and communication? This is strictly a system question -- not a personal concern (yet).

And here's where frames re-enter the picture. User centric design ought to be oriented to the framing of experience, and in social media particularly, common and shared frames of experience. Also common frames of reference, frames of communication, recognizable frames of action (games, rituals, pastimes etc), and temporal frames (routines and episodes).

Are we losing our frames? In terms of the user experience, is his or her experience running away from us? Can we no longer anticipate the user's experience, due in part to the level of interconnectedness among social media? Can we no longer assess the user's experience, due in part to the increased ambiguity surrounding his or her use of (our) applications and services? Can we no longer manage the user experience, insofar as there is now a high level of arbitrariness in the information selected, actions acted, communications created and sent, among users of social media?

If the user experience escapes us, if it is not possible to anticipate uses, to design and forward use cases, to define and order user interests, goals, and use benefits -- what can we know of how social media will be used? Not knowing how they will be used, how can we anticipate consequences well enough to design for them?

This is where I am at the moment on this. Frames are still, I think, offer a strong conceptual "framework" for social interaction design. But it is possible that, as personas do more for the designer than they do incapturingtruths aboutthe user, frames will offer more to the designer than they will capture truths of social interactions.

There is one possible solution, but I can only suggest it for the moment. If workable, it strikes me it may change the design paradigm (conceptually at least). It's a double accounting system. Akin and reminiscent of the double-entry book-keeping that revolutionized finance hundreds of years ago. I sense, and I've not yet worked this out, I sense that our action system is unilateral. One-sided. As communication is doubly contingent (two subjects, not one, thus two interpretations of meaning to be coordinated through inter-action), the correct framework for social interaction design probably needs to be a double accounting model. Action intended by user : action perceived and interpreted by user. One might then proceed with all design framing by accounting for user actions (by self) as well as views of user actions(by others). Each "side" has actions and an action system (grammar, language, etc). Or if one prefers, action : response.

I have to consider this further. System complexity may simply overwhelm the possibility of a durable design theoretical framework for social media. Or I may simply be lazy.

As always folks, your comments and pass around are sincerely welcome.

If you think twitter is weird, you're not alone

I'm going to write a post that may get me in a wee bit of trouble. A post in which, if I'm honest with myself, I'll need to reveal more of my own experience using social media than might be wise. But there's really no writing this in any other way. This is just me, talking.

Twitter is weird. Or so it is at times. If you think twitter can be weird, I don't think you're alone. If you tried it and didn't "get it," are new to using it and don't know what to make of it, or would like to but simply can't get into it, you're in the majority (based on recent research data).

Twitter is weird, and the question is whether its weirdness is a limit to its success. My personal feeling on this is that twitter's usage, which has leveled out, is a) normal for social technologies; b) a possible sign of intrinsic limits; c) indication that much of twitter's recent success was a result of curiosity.

Social technologies aren't adopted in a smooth and straight line. After early adopters lay the groundwork, subsequent waves of new users join in as the technologies gains recognition. In twitter's case, celebrity use, a low barrier to entry, and recognition by mainstream media still fascinated(and to some extent threatened)with new social media sped adoption. Twitter was not only a tool -- it was a story. Of course, twitter does also offer real utility, and its integration into social networking sites makes it part of the plumbing. It's not going away. But it's not for everyone, either.

In thinking about the impact, potential, and power of social media, I always ask: how do they move people? I don't mean in a sentimental sense, but in the sense of gathering up an audience and moving it. Orienting it. Turning its attention. Social tools succeed when they offer a user experience that transcends the individual and produces something greater. The power of social technology is in the capture and captivation of a captive audience.

Social tools capture when they create a shared social "experience." There are two ways they do this: by mediating interaction and activity, and thus producing social content; and by facilitating communication. Social content may become information. Communication results in relationships. The social content must be interesting enough to sustain interest; the communication compelling enough to sustain relationships.

Twitter has done one thing to the social media landscape that looks, in hindsight, like a paradigm shift: it has made communication itself into the content. Twitter does this by being weird: communication that might have been between people is public. Not only is it public, but it is non-conversational. Tweets are one-sided: messages to, at, and in front of an audience.

Normal communication is two-sided. "Messages" are responses. Talk is just a series of verbal moves that carry on this exchange, keeping those involved interested for as long as the episode lasts. Talk allows people to be present with and to one another.

To get into twitter, you need to be able to sustain this by yourself. There's no face to work with. Which means that you have to be a bit mental. Twitter's power is that it allows us to extend our presence (in the world). Twitter's weirdness is that it does this by means of absence. So if twitter feels weird to you, it's not surprising.

To get into twitter you have to internalize other people. You have to know something about what they mean (to say). You have to know something about how they see you. You have to know something about how your tweets "sound." And you have to know something about the social space and audience you've built up around you: who those followers are, what they're doing on twitter, what they want from you (or not), what they intend, and not.

Or you have to not care. Not caring by not paying attention, not noticing, not being affected by, not thinking about, and not reacting to the other people and your relationship to them.

There are degrees, of course. I exaggerate in order to make a point (Nietzsche: there is truth in exaggeration). There's not a physical world and a virtual one. We've adapted. We can communicate effectively online, and by phone. But all communication systems make it possible to coordinate moves: what's a statement, a request, an instruction, and what's a response. All communication technologies make it possible to coordinate who one is talking to; and most also satisfy our need to know if an act of communication has been received and recognized.

Twitter doesn't, and this is its weirdness, which is also its present limitation but future power.

The "social web" is opening up, getting connected, and becoming more "conversational." Twitter's success is a sign of this, as well as a contributing factor. Many of us do not now relate privacy to the place where we communicate, but rather to how it's distributed.

Interconnectedness of multiple sites and services (think Facebook connect) means that communication appears in front of multiple audiences, and in multiple contexts. Where communication is disaggregated, relationships (networks) re-aggregate. We're moving from thinking about the site, the place, and the community, to thinking about who we know and how we know them. Pipelines, flows, plumbing.

All of which involves social skills -- ones that I didn't have when I started using twitter. And some of which still feel weird from time to time. That's the part that becomes fascinating. I already know that I can think too much about communccation, and in particular what other people mean sometimes. It's an inclination that makes me well-suited to thinking about social media user experiences; I try to take different perspectives, adopt interests, place myself in the other's shoes. It's how I am and how some others are also.

Not so ironically, this sometimes trips me up when I'm using social media. It can take me longer to write a 140 character tweet than it does for me to write this paragraph. I begin to outthink how I'm phrasing something, and then if I begin reading it from another's perspective, I may go down several rabbit holes (one for each person, or for each reading, for each connotation...). Being dry-witted by nature and given to puns, twitter is possibly the worst social media tool I could think of. Add to its limitations on expression, its decoupled conversation style sometimes causes me to over-interpret and analyze what people mean, or don't, by what they say (or don't).

I can only assume that I'm not alone in this. It takes a thick skin at times. As I just quipped to friends, twitter is a bit like talking with earplugs in. Some people, of course, don't have any difficulty tweeting. They'll tweet what they're doing -- quite literally. This makes no sense to me. Why report what one's doing, if there's nothing anybody can do about it, and if the way it's tweeted ("I'm about to get food") adds nothing to one's personality?

But of course people are different. Where I find informational tweets somewhat presumptuous (Who cares? Who would think people were paying attention and wanted to know?), it probably just seems that way to me. Some people can (for whatever reason of upbringing, parenting, etc?) assume that others are paying attention and are interested in them. I don't. I don't think people are thinking about me -- why would I tell them something that they haven't asked about?

But people are different. Some people need to know what the other person is interested in, in order to then get into an interesting conversation. I do -- I tend to ask. The other person's interests, personality, style, and mood are interesting to me and provide me with structure, scaffolding if you will, and content. I don't tell well. Twitter can be weird -- and I often tweet to others, in reply to others, or about things I read, because they structure what I have to say. I don't assume anybody's interested, otherwise; conversation orients me.

But people are different. Some people tell well. They tell about themselves, about what they are doing, thinking about, interested in. Sometimes they tell how they're feeling, but I've noticed that they do this less, or that when they do so, they describe it rather than feel it outloud. This kind of self-talk, which to me seems like a report, may be informational but not engaging. It is the kind of talk that offers me little to catch on to. I have noticed that some people talk in a manner that lacks conversational "hooks." Hooks are, to me, small gestures of interest in what the other person thinks. Some people's talk is not structured to help people like me because people like me need relational offerings, gestures, suggestions: ambiguities to work off and with. A report told is nothing, and the only response for somebody like is me affirmation: yes, agreed, good.

But people are different. Telling is, for some, a low-risk (I think) self-description that also creates the opportunity for another person to respond about or in kind with a telling of their own. I did this. Me too. It's affirmative and clear. Affirmation occurs not only between the people talking, but about what's being talked about. So this kind of talk serves social media well: like-minded people affirm one another and also create affinity groups/networks.

But people are different. To some, the descriptive telling lacks emotion. What it tells and offers in information, it may lack in feeling, mood. People who relate through others' moods and feelings, people who tend to be "empathic," who identify with others' feelings and who relate by feeling the feelings (of others) may be stumped on twitter. Feelings aren't felt or shown, but are described, expressed, told. Feelings can be imagined or projected, but at some risk (of being wrong).

People are different. It's impossible to know what a person means to say on twitter. And by that I mean intends and expects, because tweeting always implies possibilities for response. How much has a person thought about how others will read their tweets? A tweet is never just what it says -- somebody wrote it for a reason, and posted it for a reason. If the person thinks twitter is a public messaging space, he or she may not expect anything back. But if the person thinks twitter is a way to talk to people, then he or she will indeed hope for something back.

This fact == that we hope for, want, or expect a response, is often left out of twitter guides. These guides describe how to write and post, but less about how to read and respond. It's anyone's guess what a person means to say, whether he or she wants a reply, a follow, or nothing at all. So it wouldn't be possible to write a strong guide to reading tweets and interacting with twitterers. If you have been uncertain about responding, replying, retweeting or referencing another twitter user, you're certainly not alone. There's no right way to be: as a social medium twitter lacks feedback.

I suspect this is where twitter fails for many new users. It's "simple" to write on twitter; but it can be incredibly confusing when it comes to relating. Following and following back are simple enough (and probably a reason for the follow phenomenon). But tweets don't tell us what to do with them. And tweets are written by people -- people who have written something that's not addressed to us personally but which is visible to us because we have elected to follow them. That ambiguity creates a significant barrier to interaction!

It might seem that mentioning a person by name is an invitation to interacting. But people are different. Some people don't like being @named by people they don't know. Some people may believe that an @name tweet is self-serving: if I @name you I gain some of your reputation by associating with it publicly. Some people do like being @named and then some also feel obliged to say "thanks," to follow, or to @reply back. Some prefer this to occur in public, while others may be inclined to do so in private (by DM). Some are aware of how this appears to others, and might feel obliged to @reply and reciprocate in general for the sake of being polite.

It depends on who you are, and people are different. Some people think about others, some about themselves. Some think about how they look, and some about what other people think of them. These differences help to make interactions and communication interesting -- and are a part of what people use to negotiate spending time together. A twitter obscures much of this nuance and subtlety. For this reason, some people may find it uninteresting; and some may find it more compelling.

....

Twitter is used in so many ways, measn so many things to people, and provides so little that it seems there may be new kinds of competencies required for its success with a greater audience. One of these would be flexibility and agility with ambiguity and an understanding of the many and diverse kinds of people and communication happening through twitter. And with that, I need some facetime.

Twitter etiquette: reading between the lines

I've never been one for the top ten do's and don'ts of twitter. And there's been a proliferation of these lists of late. But rather than dismiss them out of hand, as I have been, I decided this morning to look some of them up. What I found was actually kind of interesting, maybe not for the insights, tips, suggestions, and advice given, but for what it all meant.

In addition to practical tips and suggestions for how to use twitter, we might perhaps glean some insights into what twitter is, or has become. Do's and dont's are written by users, after all, and as such can tell us a bit about what each user thinks twitter is. We can also learn a bit about how different people believe twitter should be used, and what it's good for. We can also see some of twitter's evolution into a mainstream media tool, and in many cases learn about how industries and professions, marketing and branding particularly, suggest twitter be used.

My survey was unscientific and somewhat arbitrary. I googled twitter tips and etiquette, and clicked through to the top results. What I noticed first was an emphasis on writing tweets over reading tweets. Most tips concern writing techniques. This might seem obvious, but it tells us that most tips are written by active twitter users. Perhaps the tips for reading supplied by lurkers are just more difficult to find; perhaps active twitterers are more likely to want to tell others how to tweet. Given the social media industry's somewhat inconsistent embrace of the "art of listening," however, I found it somewhat telling that most of the tips involve how to talk.

How to talk is in fact interesting, because many lists of do's and don'ts include the reminder that twitter is conversational, and that good tweeting is conversational tweeting. This strikes me as a wee bit odd, given that there's some cognitive dissonance for me in being told that twitter is conversational, alongside nine other suggestions about how to talk. Either twitter is not conversational (and thus we need tips), or we don't yet know how to conversational, or conversation is something we can control (which would hardly be conversational).

Twitter is, like any social media tool, what you make of it. So it's illuminating to see what others make of it, by reading their to do's. Not surprisingly, common perspectives include:

• Twitter is a branding medium, in which you can control your message by staying on point, avoiding personal tone and content, offering followers value and utility, attending regularly, practicing generosity, and so on.
  
• Twitter is for building an audience, through which you can achieve individual or personal brand success, build a following, get retweeted, establish expertise within your niche, drive traffic to your blog, connect with peers, and so on.
  
• Twitter is an open social space, in which you can find both interesting content and interesting people, wherein etiquette, reciprocity, mutual recognition and other common social conventions can help to sustain the experience for all, contribute to a common good, and resist commercialization.
  
• Twitter is a personal social tool, an extension of blogging and open form of slow chat, a means for staying in touch, coordinating one's social life, discovering and meeting new people, and maintaining online presence.
  

Here are a few examples:

Twitter Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts

"You should only follow people who you trust, you think are interesting, or that you learn from," says Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang), a senior Forrester analyst who researches social technologies and keeps a blog on Web strategy.

"It's like wandering around at a cocktail party," Boyd says. "You don't just want to hang out with people you only know well. Pick ten of your friends who are using Twitter, follow them, and then pick ten of their friends and follow them. You can always drop people and add new ones."

Also, if you're just getting started, it's not recommended that you start following the more celebrity accounts or power Twitter users who tweet a lot, says says Laura Fitton (@pistachio), who runs Pistachio Consulting, which advices businesses on how to utilize Twitter. "They'll dominate your stream," Fitton says, whose Pistachio account has more than 18,000 followers. "I say follow me on RSS instead, which is an option on Twitter."

And some of the tips include:

• Be Up Front About Your Twitter Aspirations
  
• Be Personal (to a point)
  
• Reciprocate Gracefully
  

10 Twitter Etiquette Rules

• Remember, Twitter is a conversation.
  
• Ask questions; don't just pontificate.
  
• Transparency is vital -- just as with any other social media.
  

Twitiquette: 10 Twitter Etiquette Tips to Get and Keep Followers

• Stick to the Topic
  
• Be Original
  
• Hold Your Tongue
  
• Keep It Brief
  

Digging down a little deeper, we can distinguish between different kinds of suggestions. I think all of these are valid, and mean no disrespect in drawing them out. I merely wish to offer these as observations, as none of us here are fools, and knowing something about an author's perspective can be useful in placing his or her advice into context.

• Suggestions based on what twitter is
• Suggestions based on how twitter works
• Suggestions based on what to say
• Suggestions based on how to behave
• Suggestions based on how to achieve results

In comparing these perspectives, we see that there are of course different ways of measuring the utility, purpose, service, functionality (technically and socially), normative conventions, benefits, and strategies of tweeting. If twitter were youtube, we could imagine these lists as comprising of recommendations for how to create good videos. By analogy, we'd expect recommendations on whether or not to talk into the camera, whether to fix it or use handheld, whether to conduct interviews or shoot first person confessions, whether to edit and produce or keep it real and authentic -- and so on.

What I found little of, and which bothers me a little, is advice on how to be creative, and how to communicate with relationships in mind. I don't know if this is because that kind of advice would be pure speculation and conjecture, or if it's because most to do lists are pretty simplistic and common-sensical. It would be nice to hear from some folks how twitter can offer more than just a means to personal status and "strategic" results. It would be nice to see ideas around content creation (story telling?), how to be helpful, how to use questions to elicit interesting responses, and how to sustain audience interest over time.

Few of the tips suggest that twitter is a community, for example. Perhaps this says something about twitter, or perhaps it just indicates that we tend to emphasize individual benefits first and foremost. It could easily be that many of the lists seek to help newcomers and to offer guidelines for how best to use twitter in ways that avoid common pitfalls or which address some of its socially uncertain and ambiguous attributes (follow, @reply, auto follow, dm, etc). And few of the suggestions take into account the attention economy on twitter: the emphasis is on getting attention, not giving it, and success is cloaked in personal benefits over communal or social results.

We overlook the simple fact that if all of us just use twitter to talk, then who's doing the listening? To that end, it seems there might be an opportunity for social media "experts" to make some suggestions as to how to carry on conversation, how to sustain interactions, how to unfold and deepen exchanges and extend twitter through third party applications and feed aggregators to make more of it than is obtained in 140 character message bites. I'd like to see a few tips on how to respond, for example. Where to respond (on twitter, in facebook, on friendfeed?). Or how about debating differences -- there's a lot of affirmation on twitter and little high-quality debate: there's an obvious element of etiquette at play here, but if the medium is to be truly conversational, then surely it ought to be good for debate. (Somebody start a debate format!)

There's a lot I haven't covered here, including search and findability, hashtagging and social conventions (microsyntax? followfriday et al), twitter and analytics, and more. So feel free to comment away if you have thoughts on where to go from here.

Behavior: hard-wired or soft-aware?

Josh Porter has a nice post out this week on the importance of taking user behaviors into account in social experience design. In Behavior First, Design Second, he makes use of an example I often use myself: what if twitter removed the follower count from user profiles?

But I differ with Josh's reasoning, specifically that some social behavior is hardwired. It may be the case that certain human qualities are enduring attributes of human nature (ack, don't like that term...). It may be that from the Ten commandments through to the Seven deadly sins, qualities like vanity, jealousy, greed and some number of others are simply human. But if they are, I'm inclined to consider them impulses, inclinations, tendencies -- effects but not causes. I like to think that these social qualities are most often reactive, are responses to situations, social context, and social relationships or dynamics.

Josh cites the accumulation of followers on twitter as an example of a tendency to collect. It might be that all humans are inclined to collect; I'm more inclined to think that collecting is a social phenomenon. Be that as it may, collecting is related in my mind to ownership and possession. It's related also, but in a different way, to numbers and magnitudes. A collection is a number of things and a pile of things. It might be that I like the pile, or that I like the number. It might be that I can show off the collection, or talk about how many... Owning and telling are different in my book.

Collecting, then, isn't to me the behavioral explanation that Josh puts forward, but is a behavior behind which may be different psychological motives:

• Some twitter users may collect followers and be happy in their hearts for the number they can count
  
• Some may think about being seen having a large number of followers
  
• Some may think about their own status in terms of their follower count
  
• Some may think about the attention they're getting from their followers
  

In other words, counting followers is a design-related behavior in which other motivational and psychological (and psychosocial) factors are implicated:

• status is derived from number of followers
  
• attention is attributed to number of followers
  
• status is projected onto number of followers
  
• status is associated with some important followers (not all followers collected are the same!)
  
• vanity is reflected in a number of followers
  

In other words:

• Collecting can have a social function: expressing or standing for status or position
  
• Collecting can have a communicative function: a representation of status to others
  
• Collecting can have a personal function: making one feel that there's an audience that pays attention
  

and so on...

Collecting is probably not the original or primary cause or motivation behind the follower behaviors seen on twitter. We may count things, but I don't think that's grounds to assume that we count people in the same way. Yes, we count the number of people, but that's not quite the same. The number can represent and signify to others; our motives for signifying are not our motives for collecting.

I think it is probably more likely that the follower phenomenon on twitter can also be explained by means of interaction design. Twitter is a communication tool. Communication, as a system of action or interaction is contingent on the participation of another person. I can tweet, but I cannot do anything to make somebody else respond. This may be the single-most common reason that new users stop using twitter -- they simply don't get anything back. The only type of interaction that does work, independent of any other user's attention, recognition, response (etc) is following.

I would claim that following provides success. It's an action that works, an action that can be completed without involving interpersonal or social contingency. It's an action that to many users may also serve as a friendly gesture (I'm following you!); which may also involve an expectation (follow me back!), and these have little to do with collecting and a lot to do with exploring the sociality of a tool using competencies developed over a lifetime.

In fact one could argue, though it's a bit of a stretch, that the expectation for reciprocal following (which is the habit of new users) is a social workaround to the asymmetry of relations designed into twitter. That symmetry is preferred, socially speaking, to asymmetry: and an etiquette of reciprocity is the hack that overcomes the design flaw...

I just wanted to comment on this because it is endlessly fascinating. And because I think the motives in social interaction are multiple, escape attribution to a single behavior or practice (eg collecting), and should be understood and unpacked with an eye to the social dynamics of the site or service in question. Social media interactions are a result of social dynamics, and escape explanation by means of the behaviors of individuals only.

We should be talking about this stuff -- and I'm glad to see it covered -- because the social practices that emerge around mediated communication and interaction are a complex of personal, social, community, and public uses and utilities, values, and actions.

I hope this is taken in the right way. I want to move this kind of thinking along; my disagreements or distinctions are always with respect and, I hope, a shared interest in learning.


From Joshua Porter's blog:

We don't just collect attention, of course. We collect lots of things. Most video games are built entirely around the premise of collecting things. The more you collect the higher your score. The more coins that Mario and Luigi collect, the better they do. It's a causal relationship. We understand when playing these games that collection is the way to achieve success.

As designers we must remember that behavior comes first. Always. The quirky, the obscure, the vain, the annoying, the wonderful. We need to observe human behavior if we are to support it in design. If people collect things, how can we support that? If people are vain...how does that affect the design? Will it kill some interesting behavior...or will it help drive adoption of the service?

So, back to behavior. Some behaviors that drive us nuts are core to the human experience:

We want attention.
We collect things.
We want status.
We are vain.
We make judgments accordingly.

Reading tweets: it's complicated....

Conversational media may be new to brands, and talk may make for a new kind of marketing, but there's little new to what we talk about, do with it, do it for, and with whom. What's changed is the medium we use, and with that, how we phrase our talking.

Even in image and eyeball branding, marketers and advertisers have known how to approach tone and voice in their messaging. Pictures tell a thousand words, and they too express subtleties and nuances that can be used to strategically appeal to and target audiences.

The differences with conversational media, of course, are that the medium is itself personal, and communication is two-way. Brands now reach audiences on personal media and in personal accounts, both of which make two-way conversation possible. Much of this talk also happens in public, or in front of audiences (followers, fans, etc), so there is an additional constraint on one's style, manner, and content of "speaking," for much of it will be overheard (and searched, tracked, etc).

....

When we hear of brand "voice," we might think generally of a brand's use of twitter, and more specifically of how it talks. How personal is the brand. How friendly, responsive, helpful. Or how authoritative, useful and informative. These are not all voice, technically speaking, though I don't mind if we simplify matters occasionally by referring to a brand's "voice."

There are things we say, how we say them, and what we do (or is done) by saying them. Each statement (tweet) may also solicit or attract a response. For example, tweets can be informative, in which case they may be passed around for their information value. If they come from an authoritative source, they may be passed around in part because they have been spoken by an authority.

Take @guykawasaki, whose influence rank is based on his follower count, activity, and retweet count. @Guykawasaki is good for a lot of industry news, whether you agree with him or not. He is a news service for many twitter professionals. His social capital is built less on his personal opinions and more on his audience reach value as a source of news. One might say that his capital, and that of other individuals who use their accounts as a news wire of sorts, comprises the twin values of news: information and timeliness. (The value of news is that it is new. News actually means two things: the content is relevant, and new. Old news is less valuable not because it is false or lacking information, but simply because it is no longer new. In fact the persistence of information that was once news transforms it over time into something else: a story.)

@Guykawasaki may get a lot of retweets, but some will be simple rebroadcasts, and some will also confirm and contribute to his status. A smaller number of retweets may serve as agreement with his opinions, but only a small number. The social capital of a newsmaker is not expert capital, because expertise requires opinions, perspectives, and analyses. (This is not to say that Guy Kawasaki is not an expert -- I'm speaking here only of tweeting activity)

By contrast, @jowyang, whose rank is also up there, tends to tweet his own perspectives, activity, and news. He voices as an analyst (which he is). When he is retweeted, it is more likely that a user confirms his authority as analyst implicitly or explicitly. When @jowyang tweets a perspective, retweets implicitly affirm that perspective. Retweeting, in this sense, comprises a kind of conversation by proxy: the retweet is a repeat or citation, and in many cases nothing is added to the retweet to reflect on or add to the original tweet. The retweeter can associate the perspectives offered in the original tweet with his or her own, thus speaking by proxy. And possibly attributing proxy status of the original tweeter to oneself.

(There is a strange reference to the social operation of mimesis here. In mimesis, symbolic acts and values are reproduced within cultural practices by means of imitation. To imitate or copy cultural influences is in some ways to seek the status of the influence(r) by means of imitating him/her. People do this stylistically, or by behavior, activity, character, and so on. Retweeting, in some cases, may also involve this kind of social logic, but operating by "stealing" a person's words. Not putting words in another's mouth but taking them out... The practice of retweeting in a normal conversational setting would appear bizarre indeed, not to mention make a farce of conversation! Conversational media are in many ways socially dysfunctional.)

These two examples involve "influencers" who have also established themselves as personal brands. Corporate brands are for the most part a different case altogether. In their case it is not a matter of branding the person, but personalizing the brand. Hence the importance of face, personality, character, and behavior. Using conversational media, the brand can make use of the opportunity to build relationships, humanize a reputation, reshape image and impressions of that image, and of course actually provide service, support, help, and other kinds of direct customer assistance. The fact that all of this occurs for posterity (search), and publicly, provides an abundance of strategies, tactics, and techniques.

Because the means of production is also a means of distribution (communication technologies), conversational branding involves matters germane to communication as well as media. In communication is the distinction between what is said and how it is said, as well as the performative (what is accomplished in the saying of it. For example, help is actually provided, politely, by means of providing information requested by a customer. That's the communication. In terms of media, the fact that this service can be seen by others contributes to perceptions related to reputation, authenticity, "image," responsiveness and so on.

We could systematically go through the effects and value of different kinds of statements. In the interest of keeping this short, however, I'll simply offer some types of statements and we can perhaps pick them up in comments or future posts. Note that these statements include different kinds of content as well as different expressions:

Some types of statements

• News and announcements
  
• Information
  
• Invitations
  
• Questions
  
• Answers
  
• Recommendations
  
• Offers
  
• References (links to videos, podcasts, pages, products, events, etc)
  

Each of the above statement types does something, appeals in some way to a response or action, reflects on its author, and may count towards relational value. (Sometimes called social capital. I say relational because social capital is not a fixed attributed, thinglike, owned or possessed, but is instead a measure of (power/influence) relations. Social capital has no "existence": it is actualized, realized, put to use only by means of interaction/communication with those whose perception of that capital value determine its influence. It is a kind of power belonging not to its owner, but to those who believe in it.)

The differences between these kinds of statements (tweets) not only relate to what their author finds interesting or worth tweeting about. They also suggest responses (retweets, @replies, follows, and conversation). Questions, for example, suggest what counts as an answer. Recommendations indicate taste. Statements of location may serve as an invitation to meet (they are ambiguous). Invitations are easily passed along. All of these kinds of statements suggest responses or actions that others can take around the message. They are just a small number of examples of how things get done by means of talk -- and how it is that conversation by means of tools like twitter must compensate for the fact that messages are out of context, situation, and face-to-face dynamics.

Some of these twitter-based acts of conversation accomplish or achieve something for followers, or for certain followers. Some help. Some answer. Some inform, and so on. But tweets are seen by a public -- and this may be reflected in how they are written. Users seem to vary in their sense of the twitterverse as populated by people, whether those people are friends, and whether they're paying attention. Users vary too in their relation to the medium, which may be a personal communication tool, a social tool, a community service, or public medium. These differences in proximity and relationship to the medium and its audience are broad; and they make it very difficult to identify strategies or approaches for twitter.

There is no simple correlation between what a user or brand does, and how it should "voice" itself. Every tweet, regardless of its author's intentions, will have meaning attributed or interpreted by those who read it. Meaning in social technologies is less in the hands of the author and more in the hands of the reader, for there's less of an opportunity to negotiate or work out a common understanding. A brand's voice on twitter is not entirely in its control: audiences draw their own conclusions.

....

There is much more that could be said on this, time permitting. But I'd rather continue this in comments. There are too many strategy and tactical differences and nuances to cover properly in a single blog post.

Users: which is which, and who is who?

Who knows?
On the phone yesterday with friend and colleague John Cass (SNCR), he happened upon an interesting topic. One for social media professionals of all kinds: designers, builders, funders, pundits. The question came up: doesn't our expertise, built over years of spending time online, qualify us to see what's really going on with social media? How it works and doesnt?

Or, on the contrary, does one have to be in the target market, amidst the majority of users, to know best what's going on?

Who knows best -- the person with the most experience in the technology, or the person most like the mainstream user? One is old, one is young. The older person may not know what's most hip, hot, cool, or in. But the young person may not have yet learned things, call them technology's symptoms or side effects, that the older person has.

I was reminded of a debate that plays out among anthropologists and other cultural academics (those who study human "sciences"). Take a culture, a new, foreign culture. It's texts, rituals, pastimes. We want to study it, to understand what's going on, and what these practices mean. But we have a problem: as outsiders we cannot know that our interpretations of the practices are accurate. We are not on the inside; and therefore we don't know the validity of our observations and interpretations.

It's called the "hermeneutic circle." Inside the circle, one knows by right of membership and practice what's going on. Being on the outside, one can only observe as an outsider.

So cultural anthropologists turned to comparative techniques, and by comparing and contrasting practices across cultures, drafted a set of structural principles and descriptions. The method is simple enough: look not at the content of a ceremony, but its structure. Look not at what's on the mask, but on which member of the tribe wears it. Look not at the dowry, but at the obligations and debts that flow back to the family that has paid it.

Rules of the game, not the game play itself.

This distinction occurs again in communication theory (especially in pragmatics). Language is not speech. Language is the system in which meanings can be preserved and through which they can be reproduced. Speech is the performance of communication, and uses language as its means of expression.

We are, it is said, unique among creatures in our ability to separate the meaning of statement from the performance of a statement.

What am I getting at? Designers ought to recognize where I'm going. As a designer of social interactions, John and I had to ask, who knows better: the teen who uses Facebook or the old guy who knows social media? The user or the observer? The performer or the structuralist?

Which is more meaningful: how social media is being used, right here and now, by these people. Or how it works, across different applications, regardless of who is using it?

Who knows best? The insider or outsider?

I do not have an answer. Both, I suppose. The user may know this application, or use case, best -- but know little of why. (So it goes anyways in cultural anthropology: the member of the group knows what's happening but doesn't have a reason -- it takes being an outsider to think in terms of reasons). The observer can see the structure, function, and process, but may not be able to play the game.

As many folks know, I come and go with social media for the reason that I have to be in it to be a user -- but out of it to reflect more freely on it. As it happens, coming and going is also good protection against burnout.

I recently took time out of twitter to catch up with some sites and services that i hadn't used in a long time. Built a small dbase to capture notes on screens -- in the hopes of writing about the grammar of social interactions.

I had to write this piece to get the question out of my head as well as to raise it among professionals and practitioners. We know that our own experience(s) on social media are neither universal nor common. Most of us have been doing this for a while -- and are no longer captivated by novelty of technique, result, or effect. Many of us are (variously) strategic in our uses of social media. We may have reputations to keep, peers to respect, tongues to bite.

So how do we know that we know better or best? Knowing the technology isn't enough --it all comes down to user experiences in the end. "Technology" is a thing, and social media are not "things" but are actions, interactions, communication, and distribution. One might describe qualities of a thing, features and functions of a thing and entirely miss what it can mean, and how it might help make meaning.

My own personal take on this is that one must first admit to multiple users and kinds of users. Multiple uses and use cases. This might seem to be stating the obvious. But I have heard time and again, from those who should know better, that "social media is ____". That what it is, is based on that person's experience.

That said, we have to make observations. Simply knowing the user experience is (if it were possible to know many) still not enough. Knowing what it's like to drive doesn't make one an auto maker. Process, function, design, architecture -- those things that will ultimately facilitate and help produce an experience for (many) users -- these are structural forms and rules necessary to build by. Structures still empty of users are still structures. Structures inhabited lead to habits, in time.

At the end of the day, because there is no one right, global, or universal experience or perspective possible, the professional's I think comes down to flexibility. An ability to shift perspective, to take perspectives, and to contextualize an application or user audience as clients (etc) demand. It then becomes a matter of changing one's own mind.

I think the designer's approach is as much his or her own mental awareness of the problem space and opportunities, of familiar and common forms and actual uses and practices, as it is anything else. This ability to be in, or out; to know how it goes, but also what makes it that way.

Tweeting with authenticity: genuine or strategic?

A rather new friend of mine recently launched a blog. I checked it out the other day and she had posted on authenticity. In the post she raised a point that would resonate with most of us (or so I hope): that we feel more connected to authentic people.

I asked her, and we have yet to discuss, whether this was a matter of feeling or a matter of fact. In other words does the "authentic" person have to reciprocate? Feel connected to us, in return? Or demonstrate and act on their authenticity in any way?

Or is it a matter of appearance, impression, and vibe?

You probably know where I'm going with this. It may be easier to impress authenticity on a person online. Impressions we make and take of people we don't know online can be far from the mark. Impressions are twice as likely to be off:

• The impression we make of a user reflects our own interpretations
  
• The other person's expression is not fully captured when it's online
  

In other words, the other person expresses less fully, and we fill in more. The impression we have of the other person, and their appearance to us, are informed more by our interpretations than by their intentions and expressions.

So is authenticity online something that we project onto the other person? Is it something that even if they intend, they can't fully express? Is a connection formed online a matter more of a connection we imagine and attach, and invest in -- or is it still a reality created by our communications and interactions with each other?

Regardless of how you feel about authenticity (we prefer it) and feeling connected (ok, some of the feeling is projected, but authenticity does seem to secure connections), there's no denying that it can be faked.

Since fake authenticity is a contradiction in terms, we need to distinguish between intention and appearance. Sincere intentions can appear insincere, and vice versa.

So if you're a brand using twitter, and you wish to reach your customers authentically and sincerely, how would you do it? How would you show it?

• Would you emphasize your actions -- make sure that you're being real and genuine in what you say, share, and do?
  
• Or would you consider how you appear, and instead create a sense of authenticity strategically and tactically -- recognizing that it's not ultimately in your hands and the other user's impression of you matters more than how genuine your feelings are?
  

I'm not just splitting hairs here. The people who post for brands that use twitter are real people. Every day they must choose to tweet as themselves, personally, and genuinely -- or post inauthentically and insincerely. In communication theory, this has been described as the difference between understanding and effect. Authenticity contributes to a shared understanding; strategy merely has to produce results; communication being simply effective.

As much as we want to see authenticity win, there's no logical reason why a brand wouldn't choose to communicate disingenuously, and for effect. Realizing that the "customer is always right," and that it's really the (other) user who makes the impression, strategies might be better if they are designed for effect. It is contrary in spirit to "conversational media," but it's more consistent with advertising/marketing. Seduction, deception, appeals to price, value, image, quality... impressions of brands need content!

The argument against this of course is built on time and repetition. None of us is fooled, over time, by the disingenuous behavior of a brand acting according to strategy and plan. Over time, and through ongoing or recurring interactions, we augment our impressions with experience. Trust grows. And with it, the risk of damage to the relationship.

The reason for authenticity then it not strictly in the impression you make, or in how you appear. Authenticity begins as an appearance but becomes experience over time. Brands that intend to keep using twitter, for example, might choose to communicate with greater effect now, frequently, with new followers -- or instead sustain relationships over time (at higher cost perhaps).

The former can be achieved with effective communication -- the latter demands consistent and genuine communication. Or so it would seem.



Riffed and inspired by a post on Lizasperling.com.

Repentance of a Spymaster: Lessons learned

Yesterday i posted an enthusiastic and embellished missive on the increasingly notorious game Spymaster. I was "in" and into the game at the time. Too much into it, some of you might say, but then I make social media user experience my business, and anything new and memetic warrants a test drive, at a minimum.

Later in the day, something odd happened. I sold a safehouse for the purpose of an upgrade to more distant and safer parts (Berlin to Rio). Funds from the sale didn't appear in my dashboard. So I checked the link to the Swiss bank (which I'd not yet accumulated enough money yet to use). The bank showed 4.7B. Which I assumed must be the holdings of all bank members -- for the number was too big for it to be mine. I checked with a friend, who said he had nothing in his bank account. Curious, I transferred money out. And there it was -- tens of millions in my dashboard.

Thinking something weird must have happened -- that i unwittingly gained the funds through an ill-fated assassination attempt on me by some extraordinarily rich player -- I bought all the safehouses and loaded up on guns.

Well, it turned out that there was a player in the game who had figured out that one can transfer funds to oneself, and double their sum each time. After stashing away trillions, he transferred funds to members with accounts within a particular account number range (else he would have had to ask members for account numbers). Numerous unlucky players were quickly implicated in what the game authors called a money laundering scheme and player conspiracy, and after repairing the script bug that had enabled the hack in the first place, reset accounts to zero (and levels back to 1) for those involved.

An outcry went up on Friendfeed's Spymaster group (launched to spare twitter from spymaster discussions, to allow those of us to talk game without upsetting our ungamely followers, and with all-good intentions, set up to help and provide feedback to the game authors). One of the members had posted a youtube video demo of how to transfer funds to oneself. The video suggested that players in on the hack get to work while it was still possible, and transfer monies to friends in the game.

Spymaster had caught this and taken blanket punitive action against all members with excessive funds. That discussion, well over 100 pleas, rebuttals, apologies, requests, not to mention a few epithets hurled and reprobations argued, can be seen at getsatisfaction, which ought to be renamed getdissatisfaction for the time being. The developers are in the process of eliminating bot accounts and restoring users to their levels (-1) prior to the banking fiasco. Kudos to them for not assigning culpability to users (most of whom were innocent, a few of whom exploited a script bug, and a small number of whom intended to game the game but probably not to ruin it for their friends). The blame belongs not with the user for something that was broke, and shouldn't be placed on the user even for exploiting the bug. Responsibility for the game's functionality clearly rests on the game's developers.

But that's about as clear as it gets. I'm "in" the game still and am writing this simply to process what happened and perhaps extract a few lessons and make a few observations. For they hold in general and apply to community relations, community management, and brand relations in social media. What's fascinating to see in the reactions of users to the entire debacle is the diversity of responses. To wit:

Some of us have taken this as a matter of handling: the guys screwed up, there was a bug in the code, ok, the game's in beta, but you didn't have to reset our accounts! It wasn't our fault!

Some of us have taken this as an exploitable game feature, a gameplay element that is not part of the game, but has become part of the game because a gamer decided to make it so -- and that's in the idiom of games (that are software based and sometimes imperfect).

Some of us have taken offense at having lost time and rank, and at having what we feel is a violation of our experience and personal investment.

Some of us believe that there is right a way to resolve the problem, and have offered suggestions along the lines of restoring user levels, funds, and stuff (some users even offer to lose some stuff, as if taking responsibility for exploiting the feature rather than pointing it out).

Culpability and responsibility, functionality, trust, rights, and handling. The user owns the experience. But the developers have authored a game/product. Who then owns it?

The notion of ownership, either of the experience and investment, sets up the claim to rights, based on trust. Users who feel violated claim rights to their own experience and insist that they are entitled to these rights. The claim implies that a higher authority governs the relationship of player/user to game/product, albeit one that is tacit unless stated in TOU (I don't think spymaster had a terms of use agreement).

The notion of product/software/game sets up the notion of culpability, responsibility and is extended in the user's expectation that the product function properly. Users who view the game as functioning/broken may then take the game's corruption or instability as permission to include the malfunction in the game play itself. And attribute this perhaps to their own skill, domain experience, commitment, research, and so on.

The notion that a bug may be exploited at the game developer's risk, and that a user is entitled to find and then make use of bugs, belongs to the notion that the idiom or genre of gaming involves a developer/player understanding: the rules of the game are transcended by metagame rules (some players who could be developers abide by a code of hacker ethics, some apparently not).

The notion of handling suggests to us that mistakes are forgivable, and developer/player relations negotiable, according to how conflicts and breakdowns are handled. In this case then etiquette, normative expectations, and authority may all be brought into the mix. Communication itself is how differences are resolved, and an agreement reached.

...

There are probably some other approaches to this, subversion being one, competition amongst developers being another. But the differences in user perspectives stood out for me. Who is responsible? What is proper and correct functioning? Who owns the experience? How are conflicts handled and resolved. What is the game -- the game or the design of games?

The game authors stumbled but I want to say thanks for picking up the ball again, in what must have been a pretty thankless and exhausting if not also hair-pulling night of server and account maintenance, rescripting, microPR, and case-by-case user feedback resolution. For the record, I've posted my weaponry holdings here and ask that at some point they be returned to where they were before I began acquiring assault rifles in bulk. Same with safe houses. The maelstrom of misfits and mutineers you've just had to wade through is only testimony to your success with the game.

And whoever the hacker was who got everyone in trouble -- kill him.

;-)