50M per day, or pushing the envelope at 600 tweets per second

Twitter is now reporting that 50 million tweets bleep through the grid every single day. It's a staggering number, 600 per second, of which "approximately 83 tweets per second contain product or brand references (20%)" according to coverage in Readwriteweb. Alongside metrics reported for Facebook (60 million status updates per day) and Youtube (1 billion videos per day) I'm inclined to run for cover in anticipation of some great resounding social sonic boom.

No need to do that however as the metricians have yet to find proof that there is a social equivalent of the sound barrier out there to warn us of. Be that as it may, social media giants Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Google Buzz likely enjoy the race for traffic growth more than they know what they would do if we ever gave them a finish line. Boom! More likely the sound of a starting gun in our case than some barrier up in the sky the other side of which lie demons in waiting. The envelope these guys are pushing is no sound barrier but contains instead the big paycheck (and for the true type-A venture guy, the big payback).

Fifty million tweets a day would knock you on your ass if you were at the receiving end of that firehose. But you are! And so am I. But I, like you, am as likely tweeting myself or if not possibly sitting here like a monkey with my fingers in my ears, hands over my eyes, and then over my mouth. In the time that I've been writing this, and since my last tweet exactly 20 minutes ago, 720,000 tweets have blown by me and I didn't catch a single one of them.

I'm like the guy in the Memorex ad seated in some high-veneered-class black leather and chrome Corbu lounger dressed in Ray Bans and with my tie laid out behind me like a wind sock perched at the back end of some Nasa Ames wind tunnel test of the tweet resistance properties of social media power users.

And the tag-line, or the alt-tag, or the tag cloud reads: "Is it live or is it Realtime?"

If I can be exposed to 50 million tweets per day and still retain my balance at the end of it, if I can withstand the shock and awe of that many messages and I'm not bleeding from the ears eyes and nose, and if I'm not wearing some giant camo protective suit like the guy in Hurt Locker who looks like a cross between a transformer and the michelin man impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, then there's something behind those numbers worth peeling back.

Fact is there's probably a lot there worth digging into. Here are some hints as to what we might find, if we had the data and the gear to mine it with. This from Socialtimes:

• A large number of inactive twitter accounts, with around 25% users having no followers and 40% users having never sent a single Tweet.
• Around 80% users sending fewer than ten tweets.
• Only 17% of the registered users having sent a tweet since Dec, 2009.
• The number of active users becoming even more engaged.

"The conclusion of RJ Metrics study was that although Twitter grew tremendously in 2009, a bulk of this growth could be attributed to power users."

Yeah so how do you like them numbers? Obviously, twitter usage stats correlate to what is perhaps a shrinking percentage of active users (somebody dig up the historical data on how many had 0 tweets and 0 followers 2 yrs ago) vis-a-vis a rapidly-rising flow of tweetage from a core set of power tweeters.

(And I'm now seeing the mental image of not a classroom but a markedly larger higher-ed environment kind of hall or auditorium far in the high back left of which is a cluster of excited-looking students yet again engaged in frantic hand-waving and displaying loss of upper-body movement described perhaps by means of words like "paroxysms" and "peripatetic." And if I press my fingertips to my temples I'm getting a strong sense that they want my attention.)

Fact is, twitter is an attention machine. And it's not always a smoothly-functioning affair. It works great if you expect little to come back. It's perfect if you just get a kick out of turning it on. Awesome if you enjoy hearing the buzz. And rocks if you like standing around with a bunch of other folks just admiring the damn thing, like a beast of engineering well-oiled and purring and all coiled up and ready to pounce like some high performance V 8 on the track at Altamont.

Thing is that we don't know what kind of machine it really is. Or was, is, and is becoming. We don't exactly know who uses it, why, and for what purpose. If twitter is an engine for buzz in some circles, a motor of growth for others, a speed demon for fast-moving news cycles, a truck loaded up with discounts and offers, or just a limo with its engine on idle parked where the valet should be while you make your important appearance as it sits, a symbol of your status and overall position — numbers like 50 million don't tell us what engines those 50 million messages are spinning.

I've noticed several types of people who use and benefit from twitter. Obviously a small number of the overall population, given twitter's somewhat remedial drop-out rate. I group them into four main types, as Self-oriented, Other-oriented, Relationally-oriented, and media users. This fourth type is new, as it's not really a personality type but works as a media user type.

• Self-oriented types can use twitter to their benefit as a soapbox. Good for punditry, for talking at more than with. Celebrities fit in here also, along with the pundits who would like to be celebrities but are not.
• Other-oriented types, whose communication skills are a bit less self-centered and monological and who are instead more conversational. These types respond and talk to and sometimes with other people. They don't have to talk about what interests them because they often start with what somebody else says.
• Relational types are more difficult to find on twitter, because twitter makes relational activity hard to engage in. There's multiple @replying and @naming, but no multiple DM-ing. Relational stuff, like gossip, back-channeling, mediating and triangulating good social grist rests on communication that includes and excludes members of a self-sustaining group.
• Media-related types are those who use twitter just for broadcast. As a way to push out content like news, links, headlines. Or some micro-social version of the big media forms of these. Not as social, not as conversational, and, really, not as egotistical. Twitter as smart extension and tool or channel. (Yeah marketing types don't go kill twitter now y'hear?)

At 50 million tweets a day, twitter really is humming along. But I would really like to know who's using it and how that's going. It has helped me see the value in twitter, and also preserve my own cranial structural integrity, to sort out differences in what is posted there and in how people use it. For branding themselves, passing around bits of interest, journaling out loud, climbing social ladders, socializing hysterically like a first-timer half hung out of the sunroof of a towncar in Vegas...but with a megaphone, an octave pedal, and some doppler-canceling device whose chief function is to make sure it passes at a steady and un-diminishing pitch and volume.

I'm digging deeper into this, because twitter and its ilk are, really and truly, and for better or reflux-inducing worse, the Great Capitalist System's new mode of production. Both the distribution channel and media preference of choice for millions of new consumers. And even if at 50 million-G-force-inducing-tweets-a-day-but-nobody's-paying-attention this machine is imperfect and recall prone, it is how we many of us communicate and with that how much of our culture surfaces and makes its waves. Relational, communicative, un-coerced and largely free of the police, twitter is just one in a family of now gangly and sometimes awkward adolescent social tools historically inevitably destined to grow up make the social contributions that are their civic duty.

I'd say stick around, watch, learn, and think a bit. But if you're here you probably already made that choice. It's early days, like when television comedies were radio acts with a camera. The talkies are here. Say something interesting. Keep it real. And never be afaid to draw back the curtain ask: So what does this mean?

Related
Slideshow: Finding Signal In the Real-Time Noise by Louis Gray
Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day; Still Dwarfed by Facebook & YouTube
Twitter Users Sending 50 Million Tweets Each Day

SIM Scoring: Social Media Influence Metrics are an Art

Influence metrics are growing up. According to Adage, Razorfish is about to introduce "the SIM score, which stands for social influence marketing." The new score is covered by Abbey Klaassen in What's Your Brand's Social Score?. Social media marketers have long sought (relatively speaking) a standard measure of social media ROI. I don't know that this SIM score is it. Let's have a quick look.

The SIM score is apparently a social media version of the Net Promoter mode. Adage puts it like this: "How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?" (To get the score, subtract the "highly likelies," or promoters, from the "unlikelies," or detractors.)

And according to the article, the Razorfish SIM score seeks to capture the strength of social media as a medium for organically surfacing recommendations. Quoted in Adage, Shiv Singh, VP-global social media lead at Razorfish also recognizes what many social media marketers have long known: the conversation is out there (like it or not):

"Any mention of a brand, as long as it's not negative, serves a brand-awareness purpose on the web because once it's there, it stays there."

The score comprises of a net measure of sentiment as captured in social media mentions. Again, from Adage:
Razorfish worked with TNS/Cymfony to capture social media content and the net sentiment of a brand: the positive and neutral conversations minus negative ones, divided by total conversations about the brand.

As most folks in the social media analytics space know, as I'm sure is familiar at Razorfish and Cymfony, social media do not make it easy to obtain sentiment and semantic metrics. There are several reasons for this, some of which are specific to the medium and some of which are behavioral:

• The 140 character limit on tweets puts significant pressure on context. Context is often left out of tweets where it can be assumed by the reader. Crawlers of course have difficulty recognizing the implicit references and context of tweets, so some if not many tweets are simply missed.


• Expressions in twitter are colloquial, if not also abbreviated, shortened, and clipped. Again, expressions often don't explicitly reference topics and content (brands, industries, products included).


• People make recommendations in twitter shaped in part by who they follow and who's following them. One can't remove the act of recommending from the audience the recommendation is made to or in front of. People will often make recommendations not only to share their feelings about a product/brand, but also to publicly identify with that product or brand. References made in social media like twitter reflect on the twitterer. Tweets can show a person identifying with something or someone, attracting the attention of someone, showing gratitude to someone, showing affection for someone, and so on.


• In public social media like twitter, a recommendation may also serve the purpose of building a person's credibility or reputation as an expert, influencer, trusted authority, and so on. Consider the difference in recommendations made by @Scobleizer and @GuyKawasaki and @jowyang. Each of these heavy users and influencers has his own way of watching for, filtering, selecting and then tweeting or retweeting. @guykawasaki has influence as a newswire, more than @jowyang, whose influence rests more on his personal and professional authority.


• Recommendations can come as answers to solicited or unsolicited requests for help or information.


• Recommendations may be made as a means of introduction on twitter -- sometimes to get followed back, to get noticed, or simply to be helpful.

These are some of the ways in which recommendations might be distinguished in social media from recommendations made face to face or by other means (as measured by the Net Promoter method). In conversational media, the act of communicating is difficult to separate from the information communicated. Recommendations and the act of recommending can be measured differently, and have different meanings: the intention behind the act, the message or information provided, motives inferred by recipient to the act. (Person A tells person B to go see Harry Potter, hoping to get the question "Oh you saw it?! Was it good?" and instead Person B ignores Person A, wondering to herself "Why is A telling me to see Harry Potter? Don't they know it's not my kind of thing?")

There are also ways in which recommendations may elude attempts to simplify sentiment captured from social media. There are also ways in which social media provide information about a brand's "influence" that are not in what people say but in how they say it, to whom, and what happens when they do. Some of this is what we can call "envelope" information (tweet addressing: to whom, for whom, citing whom, or @name, @reply, RT).

The rest of it is in the distribution: reach, volume, velocity, acceleration. These are aspects of flow and are among the attributes captured by some social media analytics tools. In marketing speak:

• How quickly is brand retweeted?


• Who retweets?


• How deep down a social graph does the retweeting go?


• How far across a social network does the retweeting go?


• and so on

I know that these aspects of social media activity are difficult to track and measure. But it would be great if there were an industry-wide effort to define and codify some of the attributes of social networks, relationship-based communications, and common types of expression in order to better represent conversational activity in social media. The results would not only paint a more accurate picture of brand presence in social media, but would also match the real social mechanics and dynamcis of online conversations. It may take a while for algorithms and tools to emerge for this. In the meantime, I would supplement SIM scoring with insight from a good community manager.

Social capital on twitter: analytics of flow

I've been thinking lately about social analytics, and in particular how it applies to twitter. Twitter is a conversation tool, and content on twitter is more akin to speech than it is to its long-form brethren. The term "micro-blogging" is, I think, a bit of a misnomer in fact. "Micro-blogging" suggests writing (blogging). To me, twitter is clearly talk. Micro-messaging would be more accurate -- but then messaging is micro already.

Because the content on twitter is produced by people talking, it would need to be measured differently than conventional page-based content, social or evergreen. We would want to measure talk, not pages. We would want to measure talkers, not sites or domains. We would want to measure relationships, not in-and out-bound links.

But I think the industry's long legacy in web analytics and web traffic analysis will most likely result in early-generation tools built around the measurement of web traffic. That's the easiest migration path for a web analytics to social analytics tool -- repurpose existing methods and technologies. Visible Technologies, Radian6, Techrigy, and other tools tend to focus on traffic and enhance it with views of topical spaces, tag clouds, and volume around twitter. (See Jeremiah Owyang's coverage of social media measurement.

Having used these tools, I could understand it if some of you have had the experience I have: there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, some of which I wouldn't have noticed, but I'm not sure what it means. The approach taken to blog and web site measurement, which hails from search engine approaches and is in fact closely tied to search engine results, maintains a focus on phrases and words. Value is then assigned to pages (content) by means of relative rankings. The relevance of a visitor or visitors (people) is imputed from clickpaths and search phrases. All of which paints a picture of people looking for something, which we assume is related to the words and phrases we have captured them using.

So to transfer a search-oriented methodology into a conversation space (twitter) seems misplaced and misguided. And may explain why at this point we have no idea what to make of twitter analytics other than to count people and posts relevant to us.

Measuring user activity in order to glean valuable information from it will fail if the measurement methodology is incommensurate with the activity taking place. If a tool's tracking DNA was designed for a population of people looking for information, getting it from pages, and qualifying which ones are valuable by clicking or not, then the search at the core of that tool is misaligned to conversation spaces. In conversation spaces, or the social web, people talk to other people, expressing not searching, and addressing themselves to the public at large, to small groups (followers, peers, affinity groups, friends), or to individuals. The meaning of the words they use is not akin to the meaning of words found by search analytics; what's measured will be misinterpreted by analysts if it is misunderstood as a query.

I believe we have to learn how to mine social capital and flows of social currency in conversation spaces. Users have an interest in gaining an audience. They want to accrue interest and get attention. They speak in ways that attract attention from strangers, and hold conversations with those they know. The fact that all of this occurs in an open social field creates a significant number of social distortions, yes, but those could be accounted for if tools were properly designed to filter out those distortions. An understanding of speech -- in terms of statement types, addressing, response and uptake, distribution, and so on, would be much better suited to the space than the current and conventional analysis of word-based queries.

Relationships among speakers organize and inform how they talk and about what. Open social relationships have a different structure and organization than social networks. So this would have to be modeled and used as a means of making online talk relevant. The user centricity of the space would need to be accommodated, as talk in open social spaces has to do with establishing presence and soliciting the presence and attention of others -- again, a kind of activity in sharp contrast to the use of words in search. Search phrases address the brand or information sought after, making the connection between user and results simple and direct. Words used by people to conduct open talk make an appeal to the attention of others -- the direction of speech is in other words reversed: it doesn't look for and query, but instead appeals and attracts.

Brands of course recognize that influence is involved, but continue to think of it as a property of a person, when in fact all influence (power) is a relation. It can be undone by an audience and in fact it "exists" only in the "eyes" of the beholder. Which is why influence needs to be maintained and sustained by talk and activity. It is not a property accumulated and protected, nor is it diminished when spent. Social capital in fact accrues to the person spending it, and its "expended" by communicative acts perpetuated and distributed by others. This has always been the case with dynamic social capital and status: it must be used if it is to be increased. And yet we continue to count influence by followers, numbers, and quantities that give us the false impression that it is a property owned, not an process sustained.

Time is the difference between the approach taken by existing metrics and those required for conversation spaces. Conversations and their dynamics are temporal. The social dynamics of conversation can only be understood as social proceedings that unfold in time, over time, and having temporal properties associated with human experiences of time: fast, slow, waiting, hastening, pausing... Pace, rhythm, and flow. I suspect that most currency traders would know what to do with this

Influence on Twitter

I have little time this morning to write the post this topic requires, but it's been on my mind for a couple weeks and rather than wait, I'd like to put a few things down on the page. The issue of influence on twitter is not as simple as it might first appear. Twitter is becoming an increasingly differentiated social space, as we'd expect, but its lack of social structure and its limited forms of interaction engender a lot of social distortions. If it is the case that a social field exists on twitter, and I think it's clear that ones does exist, then social differentiation is an anthropological and social necessity. People want to know who they are and where they stand vis a vis the rest of the audience.

Influence has been the most popular way of differentiating people on twitter. In its simplest form, influence is just popularity, as measured by total number of followers. But we know that doesn't really say much. It's a kind of "circulation" model, akin perhaps to circ numbers in the print world, or viewers and listeners in tv and radio. Not very sophisticated, we have to admit, and far less than what interactive media can offer. That said, influence as popularity is, well, a popular metric.

So let's try to break this down a little.

For starters, a few observations. Influence is not absolute, but is relative. Power is not absolute, it is relative. And sociologically speaking, influence can be understood as a form of power. There are different kinds of influence.

Some types of influence:
Social influence, as rank or position within a community: the community may be defined as everyone, or a subset of everyone. Some influence metrics for twitter, such as Twitalyzer, measure one's influence against the entire twitter community. Others, like Klout, must lop off the celebrities (with 250k followers, they are outliers and skew results dramatically) and provide a more meaningful influence score. A simple rank of one's position among all twitter users strikes me as meaningless. (Although it must be fun for those at the top.)

Local influence, as rank within a social group or local community: It makes more sense to measure influence within a circumscribed group of people. The question then becomes "which group?" One answer might be: whatever group we can observe and measure. But let's not limit ourselves to what we can observe and measure today. Let's instead consider some different ways of qualifying influence theoretically:

Influence among followers, those a person follows and those who follow, differentiated by reciprocated and non-reciprocated follow relationships. (Note that without going into details, there is a high degree of distortion here, and dirt in the data, for some people deliberately ignore, say using Tweepler, and some ignore inattentively and coincidentally, and some ignore accidentally. A lot is missed on twitter, and not all people manage followers in the same way.

Influence among an affiliative group, the types of affiliation ranging from industry to social or cultural topic and context, profession, place, and so on. This is difficult to determine today, but over time can be extracted using hashtagged tweets, linguistic markers (words, topics, people names, event names, industry terms and so on), retweets (who is retweeted, what associative affiliation does it suggest), @replies (ditto), and twitter profiles. Scraping other social network profiles will help to qualify this. Here, Peoplebrowsr strkes me as a strong contender but one which, if it catches, will change user behavior also.

Influence as social capital, which might seem like social rank but involves more of the person's actual and perceived social capital. What do I mean by this? There's a well-known distortion in the follower influence/rank model on twitter: people increase their own influence by following the highest-ranked people on twitter. The crude version of following, in which a person follows popular people, probably involves associative social ranking.

By association oneself with a celebrity, influence travels back to the fan (in their minds, of course, but this doesn't matter if a lot of people perceive it). It is an act of following that involves mimetic desire perhaps, and is both strategic and indirect: the person who follows john mayer, with nearly 400,000 followers, is possibly benefiting from John Mayer's huge social rank.

As I understand it, social capital is more than simple popularity, is more than numerical or quantitative popularity, but is a qualified popularity. John Mayer, who follows 19 people, cannot have conversations with his followers. His fans are listening to him, but he's talking at them, not with them. Social capital seems to me a measure of influence in conversational media, and thus involves the expenditure of social capital through conversation and social interactions. It is more than perceived value of capital (John Mayer). it is transactional capital. Because the currency of social media is attention, social capital involves a unique kind of influence: it increases as it is spent, and spending it costs nothing. Social capital involves relationships, and increases with reciprocity. It is engaged and participatory, both of which suit the online medium more than they do the broadcast medium.

One question to come out of social capital as influence is whether or not it is transferable. Does it belong to the person, or can it be extended to what the person talks about? Can it be transferred from a person to a role or position? Do people with lots of social capital transfer it to companies or brands they might represent? Because so much of social capital is built on authenticity and integrity, I think these are as-yet unanswered questions.

.....

Moving on then, there is more to say about influence. There are influential practices. Strategies of accruing influence (macro level influence) and tactics for maintaining, spending, and exercising it (micro, or tweets and "conversations" themselves). Influence in conversation, for example, is an interesting one. Who do we trust? Who do we believe? And for what? I'd like to make a couple points about strategic influence before raising some hairy questions about tactics.

Nietzsche, the philosopher of power and force, taught us that there are two kinds of power: power projected and power attracted. It's bi-directional. Similarly on twitter, there is influence projected and extended, and influence attracted. Jean Baudrillard got himself in trouble with feminism with a book called Seduction in which he described the projected force as male, and the seductive force as female. Without getting into a discourse on the politics of power, we can safely say that projective and seductive forces are at play in cultural influence and identity, and are similarly at play on twitter. Twitter is after all real people, and its lack of a clear social field only amplifies some of the strategies and tactics we use to differentiate ourselves from others.

There is plenty more to say on specific strategies and tactics, but I'm seriously running low on time and need to move on quickly to a final set of distinctions.

Personalities on twitter are distinct. Personality distinctions in social media explain differences in how people see themselves, how they see and relate to others, and in how they interact and engage in social activities. Personality types are not the distinctions made by market segmentation, but are psychologically-based insights into how people behave and why, grounded in interests and motives. While personalities can explain what's really going on, however, they complicate the influence metrics that broadly apply to a population at large. That said, influence becomes much more interesting when we view it as something exercised and as a social distinction that motivates participation. Here generalized models of influence fall way short of explaining individual behaviors.

Without getting into details, for a separate post on "How we tweet" will be required, we can highlight a few personality distinctions relevant to qualifying different ways of exercising influence. I have grouped personality types into Self-oriented, Other-oriented, and Relational-oriented types. These correspond to monological, dialogical, and triangulating social behaviors. And to monadic, dyadic, and triadic social organization. Everything social can be built on isolates (one), dyads (pairs), and triads (three). The modes of talk, or in our case tweeting, would be Self-talk (telling, talking at); conversation (beginning with the other person, or replying); and triangulating (mediating a relationship between two other people).

(the following types are mentioned in my personality types presentation)

• A pundit, for example, may exercise influence by building a reputation, following, and in largely talking at that audience
  
• A buddy may exercise influence by being highly responsive, attentive, and reciprocating
  
• A critic may exercise influence by aggregating and distributing content that belongs together (impersonally)
  
• An expert may exercise influence by talking to a topic in which s/he is personally invested in demonstrating expertise
  
• A harmonizer may exercise influence by becoming involved in small group and social runs on twitter, often event-related
  

and there are more....

The measurement of influence on twitter is fascinating, especially when we move from quantifiable influence to strategies, tactics, and practices of influence. At this point in twitter's evolution as a social space, we're going to want to map the social field and begin to locate and delineate social distinctions. It's what we do when social spaces first appear and populate. But twitter is a highly individual social media tool, and an understanding of what we do with it, and how we each relate to its social organization, can really only be understood if we involve the psychology of behavior online. And that requires an understanding of how we see ourselves, others, and social activity overall, and will be expressed in the different ways that personal and social influence can be brought into play through the conversation and social action possibilities afforded by unstructured social tools and communities.

Related
Twitter applications and extensions: a list


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.