Socially-mediated branding: identify yourself

If one did a semantic analysis of the language I use in my blog posts of late, I'd not be surprised if two of the words I use most are "many" and "different." I much prefer many and different to "one" and "the same." Which is where I think there are some ideas worth noting about identity online. Identity says to me "one" and "the same."

We think of identity as the identity of a person. But people are far from one thing only, just as identity is far from always the same. In fact we could debate, and many do, whether or not there even is such a thing as identity.

It's been said, I don't recall by whom, that we experience ourselves as complex and differentiated, but that we see others as whole. I don't know if this tendency also permeates how we think of users and consumers. But in the interest of pushing a little on the assumptions we in social media make about the user and his or her interests, I'd like to unpack this a bit.

Philosophically, I'm more interested in becoming than being. Much more interesting, to me, is not the identity of who we are, but the question of how we become. For we become not by staying the same, but by relating to something different. If identity is a valid concept, then to me it is still a process. If identity ever "is," then it becomes so by identifying.

The aims of socially-mediated branding are to capitalize on the many and different ways in which companies can leverage relationships. Relationships through which consumers identify themselves, with or through a brand, friends and peers, values, and other kinds of interests.

The relationship is formed on the basis of identifying with something. This might be the brand itself, or its products, but also its principles, reputation, or values. In the case of a popular brand, and a lifestyle brand in particular, this relation usually involves relating to social perceptions of the brand.

Brand identity is not how the brand sees itself but how consumers relate to it: how they identify with it, and which facet or brand attribute it is that interests them (again: product, brand, values, reputation, etc).

Let's take the example of a user interested in a football team. We say the fan identifies with the team. If this fan is a particularly fanatic one, then this identification may even be called an identity. It's not who the person is, but how he or she sees themselves.

Identity might also be how the person represents him or herself to others, may be clear in how they talk, and will most certainly be involved in who they relate to and how. Other fans will be said to have the same identity. Fans relate to each other as fans of the same team, sharing a common identity.

Identity then is social. How we see ourselves is social. We see our own identities reflected in the social scenes we relate to and with which we identify. It's never enough to ask "what's the consumer's passion" and stop there. Passion is social. It is expressed in how the person relates to others and to the social world of things that he or she identifies with.

We have left the information age and are now in the age of communication. That's where our technologies and "industries" currently show much of the most interesting innovation. And in this age of rapidly socializing media, communication itself becomes a commodity.

Online talk, once it's been captured, can be circulated and distributed, and can attract the value and attention that drives non-money social economies. As social currency spent, and as social capital accumulated, communication on social media represents a very disruptive shift to the uses of media for marketing, branding, and sales.

Whether we like it or not, the commodification of communication by means of social media will be used. It will be used to the consumer's advantage, in some cases and by some brands. And exploited in others. This is how media work, when bound to the math of the bottom line.

As users identify themselves by means of media, as their relationships expose both individual tastes and preferences, as well as social affinities and common social identities, we should be advised that identity is not a fixed property. It is a work in progress and always in play. A dynamic of social identifications by which many and different relationships take shape through interactions and communication.

Brand identities, too, are socially determined. And brands interested in socially-mediated branding would be well advised to spend less on their identity. The brand's view of its identity is not the same as the consumer's. Brands, instead of communicating their identity, and identifying themselves, would do well to embrace the dynamic of identity through identification. Which is, in short, to identify with their consumers.

Newspaper culture, authority, social media, and relevance

Stowe Boyd has an excellent post today on social news. While at first I was going to just leave a comment, my thoughts ascended from commentary to a post in their own right. Not wanting to blogjack Stowe's points, I'd like to continue the conversation by means of referencing the debate around newsprint's decline and the economic threat to journalism here instead.

As I see it the problem facing traditional news media is not just a problem of old media, new media. Indeed, as McLuhan argued, any new medium initially uses an old medium as its content. Old media methods and practices aren't about to disappear simply because attention is shifting increasingly to social media — a consequence of changing reading habits, advertising budgets, expenses and costs of maintaining and print publication in challenging credit markets, a shift from time spent by consumers in print and television to internet-based experiences, and so on.

All those forces are real and are exacting a punishing toll on traditional media, of course. But there's another paradigm shift in the works, and it has less to do with economic forces and more to do with the very social and cultural function of news.

News is not simply reported; it is produced. News media create the news. Their reporting not only documents facts, but through processes of editorial, publishing, and distribution, it also creates the news. The legitimacy of traditional media rested on the authority news media brought to this process. This authority in turn comprised of several "social functions," if you will. For there were different ways in which news media established their positions, defined their roles, and maintained their market leadership and service:

Authority can be had by means of reputation. This is a perception issue, and is maintained by consistent adherence by news organizations to internal (brand) principles, commitments, interests, style, judgment, taste, truth, personality, accuracy, speed, and so on. In this way news organizations might each command a different reputation, a brand identified with authority of a kind, or in a field, or within a genre. In other words authority can be had by a news media leader regardless of its actual credibility and service as a news gathering and reporting organization.

Left of center, right of center, news "lite," — the audience of readers either buys it, and thus legitimizes the organization's authority, or not. This point is important because we should separate authority from the "truth" of reporting events, and the "fact" of news itself. News is created: the process is owned by for profit institutions, and seeks market share and financial performance. News is never just an objective recording of events, but is always a selection and narration of events.

Authority can be had by means of position. This is a general perspective on authority. It claims simply that an authoritative social position bestows authority on the organization, entity, or individual who occupies the position. From a cultural and historical perspective, new media have long occupied a traditional position of delivering timely, relevant, significant, and objective reporting of events, topics, issues, and perspectives. This tradition is surely changing — not only because news media are no longer the best first source of news itself, but because other media (social) compete for the position of authority.

This argument does not claim that social media are better or more accurate, faster or more honest — these are some claims made by citizen journalists and I agree with many of them — it simply claims that authority is a social and cultural function, and that the function can be fulfilled by different entities. (Functionalism argues that the function remains relatively stable, but who fulfills the function is interchangeable.)

There are other ways of defining authority, but I'll leave those aside as they relate more to contexts in which power and force are in play. Now, there's an interesting change taking place in the migration of consumers from mainstream media to social media. It's not just in the content, the communication and "conversation," the social networking and personalization of media, but does involve all of these. We might characterize it more broadly as a change in modes of consumption and modes of production. And here it is where traditional media are at a distinct and overwhelming disadvantage, for their medium of choice is the wrong medium.

In the traditional medium, value is added to news by the production of news as a news medium for mass consumption. The work of producing news was the work that created value for the news organization, and which is consumed by readers and viewers. The mode of production of news was separate from the consumption of news. Social media, by contrast, involve consumers in the process of value creation. The mode of production is also the mode of consumption. There's no distance separating the two: distance that normally permits the transaction fees that cover distribution, circulation, and broadcast.

Furthermore, the value determined in traditional journalism by means of authority as described above, is now determined instead by means of social communication and interaction. This leads to a shift in the value itself: from the editorial voice and authority of journalism to the personal and social relevance of friends, colleagues, and other social relations. Value is no longer measured in degrees of authority but in degrees of relevance. Note the distinction, for there's no underestimating the significance of this shift. It's a change that, for better or worse, re-calibrates the consumer's interest in and consumption of news.

News is no longer "that which is important" and is now "that which is socially relevant." Social relevance rests not on value as determined by a scale or hierarchy of significance (what's worth telling, objectively assessed) but that which is distributed, shared, retold, cited, referenced, quoted, linked to, favorited, and otherwise socially ranked and delivered. Value of news in social media accrues by means of speed, distribution, reach and leveraged influence of individuals who get attention by means of paying attention. Value is a matter of "who chooses" not "what is worth choosing."

This shift from an editorial and journalistic version of objectivity — closely wed to the perception of an authoritative voice occupying an authoritative role &dash: to a unregulated, communicative production of value that is individually and subjectively chosen and socially proliferated constitutes an enormous rebalancing of media landscape. Not only are old media disadvantaged for their medium is non-social and non-communicative, but they are losing their authority and their traditional role occupying that authority. It is really only up to social media to better filter out noise, personalize news and content consumption, continually improve relational controls (friends, peers, colleagues — the whole personal/social/public thing), innovate interaction models to raise the medium's unique production value, and fine tune advertising business models for sustainability.

It seems to me unlikely that we will return, as a culture, to traditional modes of consuming news. There will always be a need for experts, a respect for their credibility and reputation, and interest in voices that can tell, narrate, and entertain. Those skills are platform agnostic. But the genie's out of the bottle. Regardless of how one feels about the quality of user-generated content, the noise of social media and irrelevance of much of its content, the most profound distinction between old and new media is in the relationship between production and consumption. New media content is sourced and distributed by means of social relations. It seems very unlikely that a culture would wish a return to the hierarchy of authority, when the proximity and immediacy of social media offer much of the same information, selected in a fundamentally different way.

Transparency: truth in social media

I consider social media to be talk technologies, and I've been suspecting of late that the debate around "transparency" is a debate about communication. I say this only because transparency is sometimes used to describe branding, advertising, PR, marketing, corporate behavior, and of course, use of social media. All of these activities can possibly benefit, or suffer, from transparency.

Think of transparency and you see clarity. You see through the foil, the "grand gestures" (Deb Shultz), and the clever tactics of corporate marketing and PR. Transparency then describes how a brand relates to its cusomtomers.

Transparency certainly involves a company's interactions with its customers. This impacts the customer's experience, and thus idea, of the brand. From the customer's perspective, you get what you see, and what you ask for, you sometimes get also. We sometimes call this authenticity, meaning that a company is sincere in its customer relationships and communication.

Company walls, too, become transparent &emdash; if not on the inside, then on the outside. Company disclosure is an element of transparency: companies that no longer try to conceal their inner workings, or which are "open" to sharing their activities with the outside world, are transparent. This kind of transparency involves the visibility of company actviities.

Then there is customer service. This, too, is a key feature in the new transparency. Here it generally means treating customers with respect, fairly and responsively (in a timely manner). This involves a kind of equality in relations, in the sense that, as the saying goes, the customer is always right. It's transparency because it puts the company in its right place: not above, but in the service of, the customer. This is the rightness, the justice, or fairness of relations.


To return to the beginning, then, I find these different accounts of transparency interesting because they all involve "truth." I deliberately avoid Colbert's infamous claim to "truthiness," because that is just the image of truth.

There are, in pragmatics (a branch of linguistics), three claims to truth made in all our communication:

• a claim to truth as fact (something is true about reality)


• a claim to truthfulness (somebody is sincere, means what s/he says)


• and a claim to authority (somebody is allowed to claim what s/he claims, e.g. has the social position or authority)

These aspects of truth in communication underlie the concept of transparency.

Transparency is:

• truth in brand communication and behavior: factual accuracy, full disclosure, no manipulation, denial, misrepresentation of the truth


• truthfulness in brand intent: authentic self-representation, genuine, sincere, and honest communication, behavior with integrity, respect, and understanding (including the listening part)


• truth as the right to speak and act: respect for laws and norms, codes of conduct, etiquette, shown by associating with the brand's own community, audience, and marketplace as an equal participant committed to a shared and common future, sustainably and compassionately

I suspected that transparency had something to do with communication when it became virtually interchangeable with authenticity. These are terms we use in describing people, and trust, especially. They apply to people because they involve intentions, actions, speech, behavior: human stuff, deeply social stuff.

We might in fact say that transparency is really about humanizing for-profit companies. That as professionals, and as consumers, we ask for transparency in corporate behavior because it is what we expect from state and government behavior: accountability. In other words, transparency is in the zeitgeist.

One final thought. For transparency is not all that it's cracked up to be, for all and at all times equally. As tax payers, it is a citizen's right to expect accountability in government actions.

Companies that sell products, and which use their brand reputation to do so, are paid by consumers for their products. There is no social contract, but an exchange of money. In other words, the brand that embraces transparency does so in its own self interest. I'm not saying that this invalidates corporate transparency, but that it complicates it. Social media may want to be used authentically. But companies and brands are unlikely to embrace full transparency.

Enterprise and Social Media: Ambient Knowledge, Hidden Knowledge

In the process of considering the differences between "regular" consumer social media, and social media in the enterprise, I've been turning over the idea of ambient intimacy vs ambient knowledge. I thought "knowledge" might not only capture the knowledge management trendline that continues to run through many internal enterprise software applications, but that it might also shift emphasis from social to organizational values. The idea of "ambient knowledge" came up around some webinars hosted by Ross Mayfield (@ross), Laura Fitton (@pistachio), and Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia). The term seemed to suit realtime social media in the enterprise well, namely twitter and, in this case, Socialtext and its Signals messaging platform.

But in the weeks since, the concept has been tumbling and turning over in my mind's eye. The "knowledge" part of it works for me still, but the "ambient," like an ill-fitting shirt drawn from the tumble drier too late, does not.

I went back to Leisa Reichelt's (@leisa) first use of the term ambient intimacy.

"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight." Leisa Reichelt

Leisa's description is about awareness, access, visibility. These are provided by means of messaging and communication. "Ambient" here means a kind of passive connectedness and awareness; the metaphor is visual, specular, spatial. "Ambiance" refers to one's surroundings and place. Here, ambient intimacy hints at Wim Wenders' "Far Away, So Close," a film that is about intimacy, video, vision.

But where "ambient" suggests connectedness where there would otherwise be none, people within the organization are often connected: if not in fact and by virtue of a shared building, company identity, purpose and so on, then also by means of in-house technologies. The issue, as often noted in the knowledge management literature, is less a connectedness problem and more a problem of silos. Awareness, not of what people are up to but of who may have an answer.

Relationships within the organization are structured. They serve functional organization. Communication, too, tends to serve tasks, jobs, projects: communication coordinates activities.

The "awareness" problem, in terms of knowing and having access to knowledge that others have, seems more one of transparency and disclosure. And in the organization, the relationships that could be helped by use of social technologies are the latent relationships: those that could be functionally productive, if the employees knew of one another.

So I have been going with "hidden knowledge" instead of "ambient knowledge" of late.

Lee Bryant, in his (old) post Ambient Knowledge describes a feed and flow-based view of organizational social media use. The fact that this dates to 2005 seems to me, in fact, prescient.

Lee describes three directions for KM (Knowledge Management) as suggested by David Snowden:

• Techno-fetishism: where organisations focus on codification through technology solutions, which is little more than an advanced form of information management


• HR solutions: where it becomes a servant of recruitment, retention and succession policy, owned by HR and run by IT


• Sense making: where the focus is not on sharing knowledge but on enabling better decision making, creating the conditions for innovation and understanding the way we make sense of our world

Lee then reflects on the social interaction model, if you will, for a socialized KM:

"We need to let people organise their inputs by exposing all relevant information in granular feed form and then provide smart aggregation and tagging tools to create a personal eco-system of content, cues and links.

This is what we have been describing as a social interface to corporate information sources: create a layer of feeds and flows that reference content objects, and allow people to apply flexible personal meta-data within a social context to constantly reorganise the links into that content according to their day-to-day needs.

Second, we should help people develop the skills and confidence to move from linear processing mode, where they feel a need to respond to our acknowledge everything (e.g. memos and the email inbox) to peripheral vision mode, where people make better decisions and connections by assisted by ambient information feeds, and where information grabs our attention only when it needs to (e.g. "reading" in an RSS aggregator, sensing importance of links through number of references or recognised trust relationships)."

I think the passing emphasis on action, and on use of social tools to make what might be "ambient" (hidden) knowledge actionable (or connecting up latent relationships to make them actual) is important. Work is focused activity. Work done in part by talking uses talk to coordinate action and activity. Flow-based social media can supplement this kind of work: by routing, distributing, exposing and sharing communication differently. From email to a more transparent and visible kind of communication.

Transparency creates and opens possibilities: for reciprocity and recognition of shared goals and common purposes. It discloses bias and undermines (somewhat) structural tendencies (the schlerotic organizational body). It can work, using social media communication tools, in part because communication becomes more personal (in contrast to professional or employee role and position). And while this personalization may create risks for employees, it can produce coincidental and serendipitous openings. These are the benefits that accrue to activities not designed for their utility (productivity), but for their ability to weave and bind socially (social fabric).

This is where I'm at now with it. I'm still allowing the coincidence, serendipity, and social of social media to tumble about the cranium. I know that the "social" inside a company is not the social we normally mean by social media. But that'll be a separate post.

Social media metaphors: what do we mean to say?

The topic of metaphor came up the other evening over dinner with some friends. Metaphor, and social media in particular. We had gathered at the behest of Andreas Weigend with the express purpose of having an "intelligent conversation" about the social web. Not that most conversations are unintelligent or stupid. But that most are held only falteringly during events and at parties. Besides myself, Mark Plakias Jerry Michalski and Eric Doyle were also at the table.

I raised the matter of metaphor simply to kick off the conversation. I commented that I'd been trying to understand how it is that we talk about social media, emphasizing that how we talk about it often translates into our work: what we design, what we advise, how we analyze trends, and so on.

I mentioned that I'd been interested, too, in how industry leaders talk about social media, and in the sometimes subtle but meaningful differences between their terminologies. Brian Solis has been talking about publics (instead of audiences). Jason Falls talks about relationships.

(Sidenote: Brian talks about putting the public back in PR; Jason about putting relationships back in PR. Both are right, if understood through their own lens).

Tara Hunt's concept of Whuffie is a form of social capital, and related to one's personal brand and influence. Chris Heuer (of Adhocnium and Social Media Club fame) emphasizes the conversation, and if you know Chris, it is clear why. Stowe Boyd hews more closely to the network, or more accurately, its edges, where culture, technology, and social practices co-mingle and conspire to create new kinds of interactions.

I suppose these distinctions are obvious when you get to know these people and their work. I'm not psychologizing friends and colleagues here, but simply making a point about metaphor: we describe things as we see them. How we describe them shapes and informs what we think about them, and thus how we talk about them.

"We assume more than we know." -- David Hume
"A man's reach exceeds his grasp, or what's a metaphor?" -- Marshall McLuhan


Metaphors are ideas that substitute for other ideas. A metaphor is usually a linguistic concept whose meaning is both greater, more ambiguous, and more general than the concept it substitutes for.

There is nothing wrong with metaphors. But we can easily take them for fact, for objectivity, for reality, which they are not. They are expressions (and necessary ones). But when we describe phenomena like "social media" in terms of "relationships" "audiences," "publics," "trust," "conversation," "communication," "markets," and so on, we are in effect making claims built on foundations of sand. Those of us in social media describe it as we see it, emphasizing the actions, uses, insights, benefits, profits, trends, or whatever, that work for us (given what we do and how we make a living):

Brian Solis: audiences > publics = PR people, change the way you think about who you are communicating to.
Jason Falls: promotion > sharing = PR people, change the way you act, treat people with respect for they are partners in a relationship
Tara Hunt: branding > whuffie = Do great things, be a part of your community, listen, and be more an inspiring and person of leadership

We are reflected in how we talk, in how we see things and in how we think they work. All of these people are right, from the perspective they have taken on social media. Yes to Brian, it is about a paradigm shift away from the old, traditional PR/audience relationship to a much different one. Yes to jason, it is about using what you know about relationships to achieve promotion but in a better way. Yes to Tara, it's about the personal and community, which when you see it is really so clearly what branding was always about (but lost sight of).

I find this stuff fascinating, and of course, we have only scratched the surface.

• The design world has many metaphors around users, design, influence and control, and the big one --"use" itself;
• Technologists have many metaphors, reflecting assumptions about problems, solutions, utility, efficiency, and their big one "better."
• Economists and business people have theirs, focused on markets, exchange, demand/supply, production, and their big one: value.
• And so on.

The point here is not to personalize common social metaphors or claims. It's to raise an issue with respect to the social media space in general. Metaphors easily become facts, truths, claims. Ideas taken for granted. They are embedded into arguments, which is to say, opinions. Soon enough we are all using terms like "relationship," "transparency," "community," "conversation," and we don't really know what we mean any longer. At which point it becomes difficult to speak with precision. And misunderstandings then proliferate.

I, for one, don't often know what is meant by "conversation" and I use the term "conversational media" regularly. I don't know what "transparency" means. I definitely do not know what "relationship" means, because I've heard that one used in brand terms that violate my sense of "relationship."

It helps to know who is talking, in order to better understand how the term is being used. But that's not a feasible expectation. And terms, and how we use them, change. When we use a term like "relationship" do we literally mean that Coca Cola has relationships with its customers? I've had thousands to drink and yet felt anything about the brand. I love the taste, love the experience, but the brand? Do we mean "like a relationship?" This will be a topic of another post, as I don't know what "relationship" means, and it bothers me to think that people can really only know relationships with living things, mostly people. So if "relationship" means personal relationships, then we may have a misused and inappropriate metaphor. Perhaps it's time to admit that what we really mean is "communication."

This was what has been on my mind of late. I'm really interested in knowing how social media work, well enough to formalize some of it in a description that works for industry professionals. In studying the field, and coming to know many of its pioneers, I've enjoyed the differences among people much more than the similarities. Each of these people is, wittingly or not, to some degree responsible for new understandings, and for observations, descriptions, and explanations that contribute to the "discipline" (if this is one!).

I probably hail from a place where terminological precision is a more valued facet of communication than communication, and clarity, itself. But I do think we gain substantial insight when we examine our own language, and when we think critically about the terms we use, and how we use them.

Researching social media usage: right research, wrong conclusions?

Just a short post, friends, to rant a bit about a couple social media research posts I've just come across. As invaluable good research is on the uses and implications of social media, I'm sometimes bothered by the conclusions drawn from research. I speak not as a researcher myself, and must express my gratitude to those who get their hands dirty with data collection, organization, and processing. But we all know that research is frequently conducted in order to test a hypothesis — and that consequently, data lends itself to proving the hypothesis to be correct. And there is the fact that some of this research is reported with a flair for the headline, and so the blogs on which we discover internet research may often distort or even falsely report research findings for the sake of a good lead.

I have two complaints. The first deals with conclusions drawn, I think falsely, from research conducted around online communication practices and proximity. The research used Facebook and email habits of users, and concluded that the internet is not a "global village" after all, but that users in fact communicate with people they live close to. Well the research is interesting, but clearly Facebook is not the only way in which people communicate online. And Facebook is a social network for friends. Presumably, if one included the many ways which we communicate with people we don't know: twitter, blog commenting, groups and niche networks, then geographical proximity would not look like the cause of communication. it's not the research so much as the conclusion that bothers me. and not even that the conclusion — we communicate most with people close by — is a bad one (it seems to me an obvious one).

It's the theoretical misstep that bothers me. And it applies to other and similar research efforts. Aggregate user activity, captured in data, are a problematic foundation from which to make claims (such as observations) about user motives and intentions. Even more problematic, in my opinion, is the use of research like this to explain these motives. Either the researcher, or the reporter (bloggers included), will often draw conclusions that are neither supported by data nor expressed by the data. I'm not a scientist or statistician, but it seems clear to me that a finding such as "we use the internet to communicate with people close by" neither refutes the internet's ability to collapse distance; to link disparate and unrelated people, pages, and communication forums; to aggregate commentary around blog posts; to create followings around personalities (twitter) in ways that can subvert mass media's control over image and messaging; nor proves that the global village was a utopian idea, but an idea only.

To make those kinds of claims, one would have to study not just our personal communication habits, but our habits around tweeting, "publishing" and posting, participating in groups, playing social games, subscribing to news, and much more. One would have to know how internet-based discourse networks grow and function. One would have to make cultural claims about access and exposure, oh, and participation, in media events, stories, videos, and other kinds of socialized news.

The village, local or global, is made up of far more than personal conversations. Villages have news, gossip, rumors, and secrets. So it frustrates me when research is used to collapse a concept, when research is used to support conclusions it couldn't possibly contain (because they are outside the data), and when simple stories are created as a means to explain or tell research findings. I'm sure researchers themselves are troubled when this occurs.

The article that prompted this post:

E-mail Traffic Data Casts Doubt on Global-Village Theory
mentioned at Modern Metrix

If you think e-mail is making geographical distance less important, think again. A new analysis indicates that the opposite may be true.
....
Their conclusion is that far from reducing the importance of geographical location, electronic communication appears to have increased it, probably because people swap more messages with those they have personal interaction with.
....
A lot of thinking about economics and numerous business plans are based on the idea that society has become a "small world." There may need to be some hurried rethinking if that premise turns out to be wrong.




And the second part of this rant is sparked by an over-simplified categorization of social media users found at AndersonAnalytics. I am glad that there are others interested in social analytics, and from a behavioral and psychological angle. This has been my bailiwick for a while now. I don't have research to support my "insights" into user psychologies. Anderson floats user types based on a simple form on which users self-describe themselves in ways that unsurprisingly match the characteristics used to differentiate users.

Others have taken this kind of approach, and while I have my doubts about the reliability of self-described behaviors (we don't always know the whys and wherefores of our actions), it's again not the research approach that bothers me. It's the idea that user types may be identified that explain user behavior and experience. This is suggested by the labels: "fun-seeker" (a form question supporting this must be: "Express my creativity", which is an awfully strange way to self-describe "have fun," not to mention that being creative and expressing oneself are different things altogether, that being creative doesn't require an audience, and boring people express themselves, too).

It bothers me when generalizations are made on the basis of data inadequate to the generalizations concluded (our first case, above) or on the basis of data poorly collected (our second case, below). Granted, research in this field is often cited to tell stories that support the cases made by social media professionals. But for those who might take such conclusions as we see here to heart, I want to simply say that online user experiences, and real phenomena of communication, of relationships, of community, etc, are far more complicated than suggested here. If you are in the business of using social media, demand better research and reporting.


From: Anderson Analytics’ Seven Social Network Segments

"To understand the SNS market more broadly, Anderson Analytics has created and profiled seven segments of online Americans. Three SNS Non-User segments and four SNS User segments. The yellow circles mapped below represent the four SNS User segments. The blue circles represent the three SNS Non-User segments."

The Inmates Have Requested Asylum

I spent much of yesterday afternoon listening to podcasts from a conference I wish I had attended: the IA Summit. The podcasts are up on Boxes and Arrows (thank you Chris Baum!) and are well worth a listen. I also found that they looked good in iTunes with the visualizer turned on.

I don't know that I'm an information architect. I was a web developer for seven years but eschewed acronymic attributions on principle and felt that most of us were making it up as we were going along. The design agencies that billed for process and methodology took the designations most seriously, it seemed, and had the design talent that gave them the right to do so. After the dotcom crash many of those methodologies were shelved, as budgets for web work drew the line item for process out of the picture. The industry was commodifying, rates tumbled, and there were few compelling development projects available to small agencies. For a while many of us developers were working like architects being asked only to paint the exterior of a house. The real building contracts were fewer and farther between.

Then the social web began taking shape, and things got interesting again. I removed my entire web portfolio from my site and hunkered down to think about social software. Fascinated as i have always been with social interaction and communication -- in theory and practice -- it seemed to me that new opportunities would emerge for what I started to call "social interaction design" (SxD). I was not so allergic to labels after all -- as long as they were my own. And i pretty much kept to myself, doing startup work and thinking about a conceptual framework for mediated social interactions.

Listening to IA pods yesterday got me thinking about where we now stand. IA, IxD, UX, separately or together is not so important -- the institutional taxonomy and territorial distinctions being beside the point. For I have yet to see an IA drive a social media design or experience. Yet to see an interaction designer lead the team. Yet to see a user experience lead define what a social media application will do or how it will work. From my limited experience in Web 2.0, engineering drives features, marketing drives branding, bizdev drives platform interoperability and open-ness, and web design drives UI, navigation, information architecture. A coffee house, co-working space, or apartment serves as the shop or studio. And process is determined as much by whatever everyone else is doing and launching as it is by internal startup dynamics.

There is no high-level design methodology for social interaction or social media development. IA, IxD, and UX are regarded as a luxury, considered an unnecessary use of funds, and are largely irrelevant and out of the picture. How is it that the very field that should be in front of social media trails it so badly? Why is it that we are still trying to define a tidy set of concepts, for identity, presence, privacy, messaging or what have you, while "web 2.0" startups are out there making this stuff up as they go? Why, failing the means by which to understand social interactions well enough to anticipate them ahead of time, are we cooking up dishes to throw them at the wall in order to see what sticks? Is agile a design process, or another way of saying "we don't know what will happen?" Do we not know what will happen because that's how social media works, or because we don't know how to look at it?

I don't have answers for these questions, but I have suspicions. I do think that design organizes and shapes the user experience. i do think that user experiences, together, produce social practices. I do think those social practices are consistent -- with the designs that facilitate them as well as with the social themes and activities by which we all "know what we're doing" and "what's going on," socially. Something has been built, that something is constrains and enables, and decisions have been made. But our field, the design of social media, is lacking the language and framework by which to conceptually grasp and reasonably anticipate (if not predict) design outcomes. In their absence, it is funders, technologists, marketers (all due respect, but they have their interests and competencies and they are often not user-centric in nature) and visual designers who are making the decisions that shape what a product is, how it (is supposed to) works, by whom it is enjoyed, and what their enjoyment will leave behind. And in the absence of clear thinking and an understanding of mediated social practices, our next best option is to rely on best practices -- which, we know, do not travel well and are frequently lost in translation. (All social media do not need twitter.)

it's nigh on the hour that we begin to furnish the industry, and ourselves, with a solid set of concepts for the "design" of social interactions. They can be obtained and drawn from insightful and principled works in sociology, psychology, linguistics, communication theory, and symbolic interaction. For the inmates have requested asylum. They're not in the asylum. We've misunderstood the very word "asylum." it's not a place that "they" are, but something they want. Design of social media is not containers and spaces, is not identities, mug shots, and IDs. Presence is not roll call and privacy is not just control. People are the content, they're not the contents. I get the sense that in our predilection for design and our visual-mindedness, we have become too comfortable with spatial architectures and confining spaces. That in our emphasis on the user we have forgotten her experience. We treat users as objects, put them in little boxes, and watch them from the panopticon that has been at the center of any post-industrial prison since the idea of control regimes was first thought up.

Design of social media is not a visual problem, as design should not be a method of control. Design should refer to how we think about social media and social interactions -- not something we do in order to design the user's experience. Design should, in this case, be our discipline and conceptual practices. Design should be what we create in order to anticipate individual and social experiences and interactions -- with all of their contingent, dependent, and temporal dynamics intact.

Joshua Porter mentioned, in one of the podcasts, the case of corporate plazas. This oft-cited tale tells of how corporations failed to realize that in their aesthetic self-aggrandizement, they had built plazas and lobbies for themselves that looked good but were barren and bereft of life. William H Whyte, a must-read for anyone doing social, was one of the pioneering researchers to reclaim public spaces for public use and consumption. He proved that we like, and in fact want to be in the midst of, streams of social activity and noise. But he also demonstrated that it was not design, but humans, who negotiate and determine the flow of activity. Subway users in Tokyo, he discovered, could get through a revolving door and to a train in numbers and rates of flow exceeding the theoretical design limits of the door itself.

I worry that unless we catch up quickly, social media will continue down self-reinforcing, and thus increasingly un-imaginitive, cycles of best practices. That we will be left to design corporate plazas. And that we will do so with a taste for the neat and tidy that is our preference as practitioners, but which will only result in lifeless and unsatisfying boxes, and, well, arrows. Imprisoned in the structured containers of thought of our own making. While the inmates, having long left the building, scratch their heads in the yard.


There is so much to learn by thinking outside the box.

Twitter applications and extensions: a list

A list of twitter applications, uses, services and sites. This list is not exhaustive, and I'll try to keep it updated as new services come on line.

I've not had time to annotate the list yet, but i hope to get to that by end of week. I'll be as specific to social interaction design as I can.

Please comment or tweet additions or requests. I won't be ranking anything here -- I could only offer up my own personal favorites. I'm interested in how these apps slice up the twitterverse, create new social practices or utility, measure rank and activity, and so on. For the moment, I'm as interested in that as I am in which are best of breed or which offer the best user experience from a usability perspective, or social practice perspective.

That said, at some point I would like to gather up social interaction design and experience perspectives from you and offer up some "objective" comparisons and identify best practices, along with how they shape use and social behaviors.



aggregators

• PeopleBrowsr
• PRESENCR - one site feeds all
• twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter
• Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networks
• FriendFeed

apps

• 2tweet - Tweet photos and videos by email
• Roomatic
• Twitterchat
• TinyChat - Disposable Chatrooms for the Twitter Generation - ReadWriteWeb
• Mitter - Share Your Video Experience.
• TwitPic / Share photos on Twitter
• Yammer : Home
• Twuffer - Schedule Twitter tweets.
• TweetChat

articles

• YvoSchaap.com - TwitterThoughts
• Information Retrieval on the Live Web > by Paul Ogilvie
• Twitter Search Results on Google for Greasemonkey

clients

• PeopleBrowsr
• twhirl | the social software client
• Welcome to Seesmic

deceased?

• john_erik > Tweeterboard : Conversation Analytics for Twitter
• brabblr.com
• flippedup/twitter
• Twubble
• tweetpeek

directories

• Just Tweet It » THE Directory for Twitter Users
• twibs : Twitter Business Directory - 6,703 businesses and counting!
• Twitter Friend Recommendations | Who Should i Follow?
• Twitter Directory Link Up - Find, Follow & be Followed by the People that Count!
• Welcome :: TweeterTags.com - What are you all about? - Find similar people on Twitter
• Twellow :: Profile Editor
• monitter : real time, live twitter monitor | free live twitter embed widget
• Tracking Twitter
• Twitter ‎(Social Brand Index)‎

extending twitter

• ykyat
• twaction - turning tweets into actions
• TwitterSoap
• TwitterCritic - Film reviews by Twitter users
• TwitterKeys
• FlixPulse: Twitter Tool For Movie Reviews | B.E.T.A. Daily
• Twitter / BeatMyTweet
• Tweetree - gravity7's Stream
• twtvite :: SF Happy Hour Tweetup
• SecretTweet.com - Post your secrets anonymously to Twitter
• Twitlonger - When you talk too much for Twitter
• Get Satisfaction - People-Powered Customer Service

links & urls

• TwitterBuzz - The most popular links on Twitter - URL Popularity

networking, people search

• Tweepler (Tweepler.com)
• Mr. Tweet -> Your Personal Networking Assistant!
• Buzzable
• TwitterFriends - Your relevant network on Twitter
• DoesFollow - doesfollow.com - Find out who follows whom on Twitter
• Twitseeker
• TwitterFriends - Your relevant network on Twitter

polls, social search

• Questions and Answers via Twitter - LazyTweet
• StrawPoll—Tiny polls in 140 characters or less
• Ask500 - Public Opinion Polls for the World
• twtpoll :: a simple survey/poll twitter app.
• Aardvark
• Mosio - People Powered Mobile Search - SMS Search, Mobile Q&A, Text Message Questions, Answers, People, Questionarium, Phone Search, Mobile Social Network, Widgets, WAP, PDA, Mobile Collaboration, Wiki, Enterprise, Mobility, Synchronization, Workforce, Social Mobility
• Twidentify Twitter Search
• ToAnswer » Using Twitter to find answers to your burning questions
• HelpWith: A TweetApp
• PollDaddy Twitter Polls - Send a poll directly to your Twitter stream!
• plusplusbot
• Twitter Answers.
• twittpoll.com - twit your opinion

search & filters

• Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about?
• Twitter Spy
• serendipiTwitterous
• monitter : real time, live twitter monitor | free live twitter embed widget
• Twitterfall
• Public timeline - MicroPlaza
• Public timeline - MicroPlaza
• Twitter Venn
• What twitter people are saying near you :: Twits Near Me
• Twithority Search

trends & tracking

• TwitterCounter: How popular is @nickmarks
• Real time Twitter User and Client Stats - Tweetrush Powered by Rush Hour Analytics
• Tracking Twitter Links: Twitter Analytics Tools & More | Get Elastic
• t|w|i|t|t|e|r|m|e|t|e|r
• Tweetrush
• Twist - see trends in twitter
• Tracking Twitter

twitter app roundups

• SXSW: The Figures Behind The Top Web Apps - ReadWriteWeb
• 14 Twitter directories to find new friends | Webware - CNET
• 5 Interesting Uses of Twitter
• The Top 21 Twitter Applications (According to Compete)
• twibs : find the businesses on twitter - 4,814 businesses and counting!
• BIGLIST of Twitter Tools and Third Party Apps | Online Marketing Blog
• Library clips :: roundup
• http://twitter.pbwiki.com/
• New Data on Top Twitter Applications and Usage
• tweeternet - What is Twitter?
• 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe | FlowingData
• Useful Twitter Applications

stats & ranking

• Twitter Quotient for 'gravity7' | web.forret.com
• Twinfluence - Twitter Influence Analyzer
• TwitterHawk - Introducing you to people like you, near you!
• TweetEffect- When did you lose or gain twitter followers?
• Twitalyzer Clout Details for @gravity7
• TunkRank :: gravity7
• Twit or Fit Top 10
• http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/engine.asp?u=gravity7&lang=&uri=
• TwitterCounter Stats: The Ultimate Twitter Statistics Provider!
• Klout
• Twitemperature: How hot are you?
• Twithority Search
• Twitterless :: Get Updates When Someone Stops Following You on Twitter
• Twitter StreamGraphs
• Twitter Charts
• TweetVolume : Home
• Twitter Stats
• TwitterFriends statistics for gravity7

tagging

• #hashtags - Popular
• Twitter Fan Wiki / TagChannels
• Twitter Teams :: Main

url shorteners & tracking

• Twitturly - Real-time Link Tracking on Twitter
• BackTweets
• POPrl.com / Shrinking popular URLs since 1973 / What's POPular
• bit.ly, a simple url shortener

visualizations

• Twitter Venn
• YvoSchaap.com - TwitterThoughts
• Twitter Spy
• TwittEarth :: Live Twitts all over the world
• twittervision
• twistori

The Gift, and the Spirit of the Word

"In the economic and legal systems that have preceded our own, one hardly ever finds a simple exchange of goods, wealth, and products in transactions concluded by individuals. First, it is not individuals but collectivities that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other." Marcel Mauss, The Gift

The girl is married to the boy. He receives a gift from the girl's parents. It belongs to him now and to his family. The families, by means of the gift, are bound, as are the girl and the boy. His family, by means of the gift, is bound by the obligation of reciprocity to hers. The gift, given to him, establishes a line of credit back to her family.

The gift anchors the line that will bind the two families, opening a conduit for exchange of foodstuffs, tools, and mutual help. The gift symbolizes a relationship of gift and debt, and of mutual obligations. It is the act through which the tribal economy maintains relationships on the basis of debts and obligations.

The gift belongs to what was called by French anthropologist Marcel Mauss a system of "total economic exchange." It is a system in which all relationships, between men and women, between families, and among objects, belong to one single social system. it is an economy in which exchanges belong to relationships. Ceremonies and rituals of the gift serve to maintain those relationships, and to guarantee their perpetuation.

These archaic societies were bound by tradition. They looked back, not ahead. Past rites and rituals were honored and reenacted in order to preserve social order and cultural identity. And, most importantly, to determine the tribe's relationships and social order. Objects and things were, their utility aside, a means of reproducing relationships. They were truly social objects.

In the tribal gift exchange, it is not the gift that is given but the relationship that is maintained. Giving the gift creates debt, and a debt creates obligation:

"The taonga and all goods termed strictly personal possess a hau, a spiritual power. You give me one of them, and I pass it on to a third party; he gives another to me in turn, because he is impelled to do so by the hau my present possesses. I, for my part, am obliged to give you that thing because I must return to you what is in reality the effect of the hau of your taonga." Marcel Mauss, The Gift



Of course that was then, and this is now. We don't have a gift economy. We have an exchange economy. Capital mediates our exchanges: things have a price, the price is paid with money, and the transaction creates no obligations among those participating. Relationships are not bound by economic exchange, but exist separately, to be maintained or negotiated around opportunities and commitments.

Our culture looks ahead, not back. It chooses to forego tradition for the opportunity and possibility of tomorrow. It is not closed, but open. It uses contracts, agreements, markets, and less formal commitments and norms to negotiate relationships.

And in the age of communication, in which mediated interactions supply enormous opportunities and possibilities for transactions and exchanges, but for relationships, too, conversation itself is becoming the new symbolic form of exchange. Our markets operate today not just on goods and their exchange, not just on discrete transactions, but on open-ended talk, conversation, and interaction.

Talk becomes our means of connecting: to the possibilities of relationships, and to opportunities for exchange. Talk that is not a closed off ritual of ceremonial traditions, but talk that sustains the radical open-ness and very future of our forward-leaning society.

In social media, our talk, too, involves gifts, exchanges, and relationships. But our gifts are an offer, not a debt. And an offer can be accepted, refused, or held open. We use gestures, statements, messages, and symbolic tokens -- all elements of the medium. All media artifacts. Artifacts that capture our individual claims but which can be distributed and disseminated, recognized and acknowledged, and picked up by others.

Our conversations are rich, open, and forever new and renewing. They look ahead, not behind. They contain our appeals, to one another, to peers, friends, to communities, and yes, to the public. They can be found, searched, indexed. And of course, they connect and can be connected. And through them we connect to conversations, to things said and offered; and to each other, for a moment, for a short while, or for a long time.

Our talk is our medium of exchange. it is personal and self-expression, but it is in front of people we know and people we could know. It is an appeal, contingent as all events are in our age, on their acceptance by some other, free, and interested individual.

We talk among friends, and our talk is often friendly. Friendship is the nature of our relationships -- not tribes, cults, guilds, or factions. Not ruling classes, secret societies, or even institutional elites. Friendship is our offer and friendliness our offering. It is open, and it looks ahead. Our conversations are friendly, and we are for the most part kind to one another. And in kindness we find our mutual interest; in reciprocity, our generosity and our commitment to the open, and to the future.

And in social media we organize these relationships of friendship. We find ways to sediment them into a soft social commitment, a face to wear, a software to to socialize relationships and markets around friendship. We are drawn to the ways that best suit us, the audiences that reflect us, and the communities that embrace us. It is our way, our way forward, paths intersecting and traced ephemerally along lines of trust and arcs of friendship.

The gift is open, the gift is everywhere. The gift is our talk, our interest, and our interface. It is what connects when we respond, when our response is an offer, an offer to talk. The gift and its spirit return, and are in our world.

The gift is all. The gift is trust. Our future is open. We must speak and be friends. It is the world. And we must give our world our word.


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Who's motivating your users?

Alfred Hitchcock used to say that he never made a "Whodunnit" movie. His movies were "For whom was it done?" In fact a lot of his movies begin with the crime. In some, the victim of the crime turns out to be the criminal himself.

In all of Hitchcock's films, we the audience witness some aspect of the crime. And because Hitchcock was a master of camerawork, and used his camera to let the audience in as a witness, we're usually in on something that one or more characters don't know. Jimmy Stewart's neighbor leaving his apartment in Rear Window, as Jimmy reaches for something he has dropped. The killer's shadow on the shower curtain in Psycho. A vertiginous zoom in on Kim Novack's curled hair -- an audience reveal that winds up the plot's second, and formal spiral in the mystery Vertigo.

Hitchcock's films were as riveting as they were not only for his splendid choices in casting his lead actress, but for his singular talent at subordinating characters to formal puzzles and logics. He is credited as being the first to involve the audience in solving, or "creating," the film. He was notorious, too, for glossing over his actors' needs and for attending instead to the visual narration of the particular puzzle at hand. It mattered more to him the direction in which his actors were looking than capturing their motivation.

Hitchcock knew that a mystery thriller could become endlessly suspenseful if actions were not simply as they appeared, but were instead motivated by another, for another, or on behalf of another. This allowed him to continuously shift the "guilt" and "suspicion" from character to character. We in the audience had the job of figuring out who was who, and who was who to whom.

The solution to the puzzle, and to the crime, always came out when relationships among the characters could be resolved.

Action is more interesting when it is a matter of interpersonal motive and relationship, rather than the accomplishment of the task itself completed by the action. It's a pity there are few good imitators of Hitchcock. (Although there are some; and social films like Crash, Amor es Perros, Red, White, Blue, Babel, and others in which relationships form out of coincidence and chance in a way capture the state of social fragmentation endemic to contemporary society.)

We in social media can learn from Hitchcock. We can learn to ask not "What did the user do" but "For whom was it done." Was it done for his/her own self-image and repute? Was it done for the attention of another? To solicit reciprocal interest of another? To gain notice by a group, club, or circle of peers? To obtain status in front of an audience, or to receive the validation of peers?

I wonder what kinds of social media Hitchcock would design, if he were in our industry. How might he use his "camera" to show the audience something that was off screen to the actors involved in a situation or social interaction. What kinds of relationships he might put people in if he were designing social games. And how he might reveal clues and thread his plot points. Whether the audience might be involved in passing that thread through the warp and woof of a networked social fabric. And how interesting and engaging some of his creations would be, designed not around Who said something but For whom was it said?


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Contingencies in Social Media

There's a concept we don't use nearly enough in social media, even though it describes what is possibly the single-most important phenomenon of online interaction: contingency. It means, roughly, that one thing is contingent on another. One act is contingent on another. Contingencies are critical because they separate the possible from the probable. All systems are subject to contingencies.

In social media, the most prominent contingency is the response. Communication goes nowhere unless it is picked up, or taken up, either as talk or in some other form of online social interaction. Blogs are linked to, favorited, bookmarked, or commented on. Tweets are replied to, re-tweeted, or solicit a direct message response. Twitterer's follow, and are followed. Videos are uploaded and then viewed, favorited, added to playlists, commented on, or responded to with a video response.

The value of any user's action in any kind of social media is always contingent on the act of another user. In some cases just a view is enough, and is still counted by many social media systems.

Contingency is not just specific to social media. Markets have contingencies. Our current credit markets are frozen because of their contingencies: is the counter-party solvent; will the trading partner still be around; are securities worth their rating?

When contingencies go unresolved, either by interacting partners or by the system itself, ambiguities threaten to overwhelm the system and erode its utility and functionality. In twitter, a rise in spammers and dishonest/strategic users increases the ambiguity surrounding Who the user is, and What his/her intentions are. This translates into a certain kind of ambiguity: the identity of the user. Which creates systemic uncertainty, and infuses interaction with risk. (There are two kinds of nteraction on twitter: talking and following, so each one is vulnerable. Do I follow; Do I respond?)

Systems, unlike structures, aren't stable. They're dynamic, and they rely on continuous participation/interaction to reproduce themselves. They can endure only as long as they can manage (and their users manage) the contingencies they permit and produce. When the users or participants in a system have to handle these contingencies themselves -- when the system fails because its own system constraints are failing -- the burden of contingency can kill off the system. Users are required to handle the contingency presented with each transaction individually, where when the system is operating well, those contingencies are handled by the system.

This is the loss of trust problem. The trust that is lost in other users (trading partners, twitterers) corresponds to a loss of trust in the system. Architects of social systems that place a high level of trust in their users need to think carefully about how their system responds to abuse and trust violations. If it cannot correct these at a system level, its own survival becomes a matter of contingency.

The system becomes contingent on the trust invested in it by its users. When this trust begins to erode, system's operation is threatened.

Contingency is doubly contingent in systems. And it is circular (reciprocal).

Current financial markets are all abuzz with talk about loss of confidence and trust -- when systems are growing, their benefits are distributed to participants, who are motivated to keep it going. But when they lose trust in the system, their loss of confidence freezes up the system and a crashing system behaves very differently from a growing system.

it seems that we need to better understand these contingencies. We are heavily invested in open, free, and voluntary interaction systems, and whether for trading, exchange, messaging or other purposes, system architects need to recognize that social system performance will always be constrained by two types of contingency: user-to-user contingencies; and user-to-system contingencies.

Now would be a good time to consider the social interaction controls available to twitter users for improved handling of consequences of system-level failure (problems relating to twitter's architecture, functions, and UX). If twitter is unable to constrain abuses, its users must be able to better regulate and manage their experience. System transformation, if not crash, is otherwise unavoidable.

Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Social media's first law: user centric design

The first law of social interaction design is the law of user centric design. The user centricity of social media is obvious. Social media are voluntary, and they mean to their users what their users put in and take out of them. Users are interested users, not needy or obliged users. Even users who can claim to have goals and objectives are motivated to participate, contribute, even just read and lurk, because they want to. Compelling social media do not compel users -- users become compelled, for whatever short or long-term interest it is that compels them.

That said, we recognize that social media are highly psychological. The reasons that motivate any given user may be rational, or not, may be task or goal-oriented, or may be a reflection of distraction, compulsion, or even "addiction." The fact that social media use involves psychological interests has a couple implications for designers, builders, and users. First, it means that we cannot know the reasons for a user's use, or by extension, the reasons that an application is used. Second, we cannot even assume that a user knows those reasons. I like to say that to know what a social media application does, turn it off. We will soon know why and how we use an application by what we miss.

This leads us to a corollary of the first law: the value of social media is specific to the user. Ask any user why he or she uses it and you will get an answer specific to that individual. Reasons for use are not generic, and are not generalizable. The social media application is individuated by its users -- that is, it accrues uses and reasons for use as it accrues users. Furthermore, ask any user what he or she uses it for, and you will get uses specific to that user. The value of social media is a combination of how a user uses it, and what reasons s/he can provide for using it. Value is in the eyes of the beholder. It is subjective, individual, and non-generalizable. We cannot ascribe one value to a social media application, and should approach any claims about an application's value with caution. (They are likely to reflect the value perceived by that person, given the context and interests of his or her use of it.)

A second corollary obtains from the first law: users use social media based on existing and past experiences with other media. Users do not invent uses for social media wholesale, but rather use new applications to extend their current habits and uses of other media. A user who chats will likely use Twitter differently from a user who blogs. A user who uses IM will likely use Twitter differently than a user who is a Facebook addict. And so on. Research is not required to prove the claim that we blog, update, comment, post, upload, review, rate, recommend, IM, chat, email, and tweet very differently. I'm not likely to suddenly start commenting in all caps on Youtube tomorrow, any more than a heavy chatter is to suddenly switch to Twitter for conversation. Each of us is a bundle of habits and repetitions. And we use social media according to how we can each see them fitting into what we tend to do.

A third corollary follows, and it is that we cannot know what the user is doing and experiencing. The web as biased in favor of the affirmative, meaning, it captures action but not inaction. Clicks are recorded, but not reading. We know only when a user does something, and that something is captured as an affirmation. There are no "contradictory" or "negative" acts counted online. An act of opposition would look the same to the web server as a an act of affirmation. All actions are, in communication theory terms, a "yes." The inability to know what user's experience confounds all media, but it is complicated online by the fact that we can track and measure some things. And we focus mightily on them. In the case of Twitter and in the culture of status updating, however, we have no means by which to know what and how much is being read. It takes a retweet, a comment, or a reply to publicize and manifest the reader's attention to a message. This is, of course, why we count our followers. Their number is a substitute for attention and visibility, meaning relevance and acknowledgment. Each and every tweet solicits a response, and in its loneliness is one of the small moments of irrelevance we suffer through daily in our contract with social media. There is no way of showing others that we are paying attention without making it obvious -- by saying so.

A fourth corollary follows, and we have suggested it already: to show that s/he is paying attention, the user must act. Communication is not just the performance of a statement; that would just be expression. Communication occurs when that statement is accepted or rejected. This "yes or no" response is what transforms expression into communication, what makes of it an action system. Designers know of actions. But in communication, the action is on either the message or its author. It is this possibility, that we can respond to what is said or to who said it, that implicates relationships in social media. And the ambiguity of which was intended that can often subsist in social media use fuels the engine for further participation.


Social media professionals can do no better than to keep the first law in mind. And to bear in mind, also, that users are different. For designers, this should mean occasionally forgoing standards or conventions for something else. Tools designed for writing and publishing online, for example, need not be the basis for fast messaging and lifestreaming. Page layouts common to text-oriented applications will miss out on users who watch and see (some desktop Twitter apps now emphasize visualizing the stream of users over and instead of their posts). For marketers, it is unlikely that top influencers are the ones to reach on Twitter -- other kinds of users are more motivated to retweet and promote. And for inventors, solving some of the big problems, such as awareness and attention, or addressing use cases that involve under-served user types, can offer compelling opportunities.

The law of user centricity tells us that we cannot know what we might do, nor can we know what can be done. But that in all cases we should ask, what is it capable of? We will address this in the second law.


Social media's second law: it's a verb, not a noun

Social media's third law: designing for communication



Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.

Paradoxes of social media: Twitter, Facebook, and status culture

All social media work only because we use them. And thus it's a given that the social technologies that attract and get the most use tell us something about what works: from a technical standpoint as well as from a cultural standpoint. The "status culture" that now exists around use of twitter, facebook's status updates, and a myriad of related tools for talk clearly shows us where the action is. And in social media, it's all about activity. Activity now occurs not only through the use of these tools, but in tracking, monitoring, measuring, and otherwise attending to the activity served by these tools.

Those of us in the business of social media, because we are ourselves users, share an interest not only in using the tools but in knowing what makes them useful. It's our profession to know more than our own experience of the tools, and to understand how others use them, what for, and why. If we are forward-looking, we want to be able to speak intelligently about how these tools can be improved, about how they can be co-opted, assimilated to other uses, extended, and of course what might come next. But the very fact that each of us is a user can easily distort our understanding, insofar as what we get out of a tool is only one user's perspective. We would like to be able to talk about social media objectively. But there is a difficulty in that: we lack an established framework, and good research is hard to come by.

Conventional software design has a framework. It is based on the utility of software and its use. Use of non-social software has value to the user that can be grasped as "use value." Users use software for the value of its uses: hence the value of utility. Software that does stuff. And what simplifies the design frameworks (user interface design, interaction design, user experience design) is that utility can be framed with a reasonable degree of objectivity. Success and failure of software can then be designed for, and evaluated, on the basis of the software's ability to meet expectations of user needs and objectives. In short, use and utility go hand in hand: use validates uitility, utiliity is the primary reason for use.

But in social media, the social interaction designer's challenge is a different one. Each of us has uses for social media, and they vary greatly. They may vary in terms of habits of use, expectations of use, distracted uses, strategic uses, and so on. Each of us has our own subjective experience of social media -- and taken together they do not produce an objective description, but rather a myriad of unique perspectives. Objectivity and objective descriptions of software in the social media domain simply don't exist, for the reason that they are tools used for subjective reasons, satisfying individual interests, and according to each user's personal and interpersonal competencies. Social utility, if there were such a thing, would offer a false promise, were we to set it as a design and experience goal. Use of social software is not utilitarian. We have to accept that in social media, use is not measured in terms of utility. What then, is it? And how do we, as professionals, estimate even the most simple questions addressed to social media: what is it, what is it used for, who uses it, and why? For if we can't answer these questions, we would have to admit to ourselves that there are no design principles for social media, that in all likelihood its evolution is uncontrollable and chaotic, that successes are impossible to predict, and that users simply do what they want with them in ways that are impossible to anticipate or predict. Not a good basis for design and engineering professionals -- let alone the markets hungry to uncork the power of social media!

We can take on the first question, What is it? by dismissing the question outright. Yes, social media are technologies, are tools, are applications, sites, and so on -- they exist materially in the real world, and have features that function and structure experience. But they are not objective events -- the social interactions and personal uses that animate them subjectivize them.
Social media are not objective media, but subjective media. Used by subjects to interact with other subjects, they are best thought of as verbs, not as nouns. So the question is moot: "What is it" is a noun phrase -- a misaligned and misguided question in matters of social activity.

Better would be to ask What do people do with it? That focuses the question on activities and uses. Social media involve users in socio-technical practices, that is, doings that are possible only by means of a technology. They are not doing what the technology does, but are using the technology for what they want to do. Hence the awkward but more accurate term "socio-technical" practices. If we rephrase the question Who uses it? we are even better aligned. For we are now focused on the user of the technology.

User centricity founds the social interaction designer's perspective, as it does the conventional software design. But in social media design, we know that nothing happens without a community of users. So we extend user centricity to the social, and to the social practices that emerge when many users use a social media application. Now we're getting to the heart of the matter. For good social media require that many different users, each an individual with unique interests and expectations, social competencies, "share" some common experience that is rewarding enough that they continue to do so. Nobody forces us to use social media -- each and every user is an interested user.

But is every user interested in the technology? Not really. And this raises a common misunderstanding among those who fund, develop, and run social media. Users by definition use a tool for their own reasons. And these may vary greatly from the reasons the funders and builders created the technology. In answer to the question Who owns social media, it's clearly the users who own it. They may not own the application, but they own their experience.

We now face a bit of a conundrum. If the technology is a real and functioning "thing," but its functionality and use lies in subjective experiences, where does a social interaction designer even begin to formalize the design constraints and feature specs of social media? If architecture is not materials, mass, volume, and space but is people coming and going, what's the design language? What does it talk about, and what can it say?

Social interaction design needs to take one more step away from the technology, away from hard definitions and into the soft of software. The "you" and "I" need to be restored to UI. More, even, for the user interface, really, is better thought of as a social interface.

Which brings us back finally to where we started. This time, however, more properly attuned to the matters at hand. Status culture, or the set of practices that have emerged around social media designed for short-form messaging, micro-blogging, and feeds of personal news and activities, involves new forms of talk. As new forms of talk, the uses of twitter and other feed-based applications engender new ways of communication, new formats of communication, and new experiences of communication. In social terms, talk and communication serve purposes of activity, of reaching understanding, of coordinating actions, of maintaining relationships.

These social media represent new personal experiences of new ways of being social. The tools enable users to contribute and participate for their own reasons -- and produce, at the other end, a record of user-created content. Individual uses and habits, and experiences, are de-coupled from the byproduct, which can again be used by others (searched, quoted, linked to, embedded, and so on). This de-coupling of the act from the product, of the talking from content, and of social "performance" from the social artifacts left behind, defines the tools' essential functionality.

But how, if the use of social media involves a fundamental de-coupling and dis-embedding of talk and communication from the product and content of talk and communication, is this a design-able experience? How, if tools limit and constrain the experiences they enable, do we accommodate the fact that the uses of the tool are limited also by social practices? Can social interactions be engineered? Can talk be structured? How would a social interaction designer go about "improving" the user experience?

To demonstrate just how strange this problem can be for the social media designer, let's take Twitter as an example. The tool was conceived of as a means of passing sms messages to the web. it has become something completely different (though it retains its 140 character limit -- a hard technical constraint that has become an arbitrary stylistic necessity of writing on twitter). Twitter features a couple of unusual, and strictly defined, design "flaws." But these flaws are essential to its appeal. First, the river of tweets each of us sees includes our own tweets among those of -- not those we're tweeting to -- but those we're listening to. Thus each of use sees an illusion: there is no conversation occurring between us and those whose tweets we see. The users who are listening to us are not the ones we see around our own tweets. A more accurate view would require two panels -- one, our own tweets and those following us; the other, those we're following.

This design sleight of hand creates a false impression and illusion -- of being listened to, or of being in conversation with, the wrong audience. it works on facebook, because status updates are pulled from the same audience we update to. There is only one audience on Facebook: your friends. But on twitter there are two. And this is the second design "flaw" that engendered rapid adoption. One could appear to be popular, by follower count, simply by following people. The unilateral and asymmetrical relationships that define twitter's audience aggregation method, like its river presentation, creates an illusion of visibility and relevance. An entire industry exists to measure not the content of what twitter users say, but the envelope of their activity and the impression of their social relevance.

My point is not to denigrate twitter or twitter culture, but to illustrate that in social media, dysfunctional design can be socially functional. If the individual user can make sense of the application's design, and if these experiences scale, social practices can take hold that can make a social media tool successful (from that perspective -- to say nothing of business models).

Twitter offers up further examples for social media designers. Twitter's simplicity and lack of structure stands out. For a tool as stripped-down as it is, a remarkable amount of culture has grown out of Twitter. This, even, in spite of the fact that so many people continue to say "I don't get it." There are applications out there that people don't like, or that they think are a waste of time. But there are few about which so many have claimed that they don't see the point. This may or may not suggest a serious challenge for twitter in the months ahead — if it turns out that many users are simply trying out what they've heard everyone talking about; and if this combination of novelty and churn results in social noise and spammy misuses. Nevertheless, there is a lesson for social interaction design in Twitter's simplicity: the fewer the design constraints, the more uses and users.

Restraint in design itself, reflected in a tendency to "under design" the interface, the user experience, and interactions, opens up and sustains a greater number of possible uses. Furthermore, the less designed a social media application is, the more types of users will find uses for it. This is an architectural lesson. For while architecture delimits and constrains human experience in order to enable and facilitate some (desired, intended) experiences, it by the same token excludes and eliminates others. Twitter's open approach to interface, experience and interaction design shifts the burden of framing the experience from application design to social practice. Where architecture is open, social practices absorb and form the constraints on experience and interaction. Social experiences need "framing" to achieve the consistency required if they are to be sustained. Twitter shows us that social practices will fill in when design does not.

If this constitutes a principle of social interaction design, it has a serious consequence. The more open and un-structured the design, the more open and flexible the user experiences and uses. We have mentioned that social media work by framing experience and engendering social practices. But the wider the range of individual experiences on the way in, the greater the chance of noise and rubbish on the way out. The user motive for Twitter may be described as "Whenever I feel like it." If that describes when the user uses Twitter, the benefit gained by a tool that can be used anytime, anywhere, for whatever reason is mitigated by the challenge in getting more out of the aggregation of uses. Content produced on a "whenever, whatever" application may tend towards the lowest common denominator, and may want for the connectivity, continuity, and sustained threads that characterize higher quality conversation. Furthermore, the asymmetry that exists between creating and consuming in all social media is never higher than when a user can use the tool for whatever reason, whenever s/he wants. Tighter and more structured tools may limit their own appeal, but gain from a sense of common purpose and commonality of experience.

There is much more to cover yet, but we'll take a break before this post becomes so long that it kills its own audience. In the next installment we will take a look at forms of talk, and lay out some basic laws of talk-oriented social media. These will include user centricity, social practices, communication, and mediation. And we will raise some design challenges created by the implication that for social media, social practices bear the burden of framing the experience.


Note: This blog post belongs to a series on "status culture." The posts examine status updates, facebook activity feeds, news feeds, twitter, microblogging, lifestreaming, and other social media applications and features belonging to conversation media. My approach will be user-centric as always, and tackle usability and social experience issues (human factors, interaction design, interface design) at the heart of social interaction design. But we will also use anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication and media theories. Perhaps even some film theory.
The converational trend in social networking sites and applications suggests that web 2.0 is rapidly developing into a social web that embraces talk (post IM, chat, and email) in front of new kinds of publics and peer groups. User generated content supplied to search engines is increasingly produced conversationally. Social media analytics tools provide PR and social media marketing with means to track and monitor conversations. Brands are interested in joining the conversation feeds, through influencers as well as their own twitter presence.
This changing landscape not only raises interesting issues for developers and applications (such as the many twitter third party apps), but for social practices emerging around them. So we will look also at design principles for conversation-based apps, cultural and social trends, marketing trends, and other examples of new forms of talk online.
These blog posts will vary in tenor, from quick reflections on experiences to more in-depth approaches to design methodology for conversational social media.