Social media: the attention economy explained

I started wondering last evening what twitter would be like if in addition to followers we could also see who was actually being paid attention to. The groups many of us use in clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic, for example. So in the midst all of our positive talk of transparency and authenticity, I found myself chuckling at the opacity we in fact rely on to make it through the day.

There's nothing wrong with this, and while some may see a cynical twist or twitter's dirty little secret (nobody's listening!), I see instead perfectly reasonable social media coping mechanisms. ;-)

Social media's two audiences
Social behaviors are shaped and informed by design, but not explained by design. The obvious reason that none of us can see each other's twitter usage (groups, or subsets of followers actually viewed and paid attention to) is that if designed into twitter, activity would change instantly and radically. This is not just a matter of privacy, but a deeply social matter.

Reflecting on this last night led me to thinking about the social and public space constructed across all social media. There are, in mediated social contexts, always two audiences.

• There is an audience we'll call social, and which we describe in terms of proximity: it's a internalized social world of friends, peers, colleagues: known individuals.
• And there is a second, anonymous public, which is not internalized but is imagined.

Any person known belongs in the social and is potentially present. Any anonymous individual, because we don't yet know them (as soon as we do, they move to the internalized social world), is possibly present.

Potential and possible relations
Potential social relations become active relations, or interactions, when we communicate. Possible relations become actual relations, based on the action of following, when we are seen and found.

I think the doubling of audience could go far in explaining the power of social media.

We know, for example, that the probability of actually having a conversation is less in social media than it is face to face. There's simply a lot more at our command in face to face situations by means of which to have conversation. However, face to face situations limit us, of course, to those in our presence. Social media may reduce the probability of having real conversation but increase the opportunities for creating conversation.

This seems, to me, the main reason we use social media. Not mass, but mini media. Or, "me"-dia, in the context of social, not mass audiences. The distinction between social and mass media being that relations are possible in the former, not so in the latter. (This is changing as mass incorporates social.)

The medium's three modes: mirror, surface, window
Back then to attention, and the veil of nondisclosure from behind which we engage in social media. I like to say that the social interface has three modes: mirror, surface, and window.

• We see ourselves reflected in social media: this is it's mirror mode.
• We consume content of all kinds off the screen — sites, apps, communication — all using the screen as a presentation layer: this is its surface mode.
• And we talk to each other through social media: this is its window mode

Modes of attention
Social presence, proximity, and attention are then each implicated in a mediated social context that has ways of seeing and ways of being seen.

Consider this, for example. We enjoy accumulating followers, seeing ourselves referred to, commented to, and otherwise being made visible. Doesn't matter whether this involves acknowledgment, recognition, or validation; the point is that the medium does create a kind of social visibility. Call it, for simplicity's sake, "being paid attention to."

Well, attention doesn't correlate with actually engaging in conversation. Many of us sometimes ignore a request for communication, for whatever reason. It's part of daily life; in real life it's called "civil inattention," and is handled by acknowledging others in ways that also indicate to them "I see you, recognize you, but I'm not available to interact." Simply put, politeness.

Now, consider the social media space. Attention paid to others may not be visible to them. But if it's given, such as by taking any action recorded and captured by the medium and surfaced by design, then this action can have two social outcomes, not one. This is the power of the medium, and the net effect of the doubled audience mentioned above.

Social actions, social relations
One translates as the potential for further social action. The other translates into the possibility for social relation. For the social world already has relations but has activity only on the basis of user actions. And the public world has activity but lacks the connection until a relation is established.

• A social action has been made which can be picked up by any user who sees it: potential for further action
• A social action increases the user's visibility: the possibility of being seen

The possibility of being seen is motive enough, for some. While communication is no more probable, the possibility is there. As they say of the lottery: your odds of winning increase dramatically if you buy a ticket.

The power of this second audience, the public, which creates infinite possibilities and which is motivation for much of what we do, explains a lot of how the attention economy works.

Perceived and transactional influence
Attention, interestingly, is described in economic terms: paid, spent, given, taken. Note that the first two are zero sum and involve the temporality of attention. Paying attention takes our time. The second two are non-zero sum and transactional.

Giving and getting attention is the simplest social action. Nothing yet has to be said or communicated verbally: attention can be given a person, and that in itself, is socially meaningful.

Now consider how we attend to the attention economy in social media. Brands, as well as users, watch and attend to it. Brands, as well as users, transact in it.

• Social capital, the perceived value of a brand or individual, collects attention paid and spent on that brand or person. Call this perceived influence.
• Social currency, the transacted value of a brand or individual, is attention given and taken by the brand or person by means of social actions. Call this transactional influence.

Unfortunately, perceived influence, which is just social observation, is grossly under-rated. It's much more difficult to measure because there's no action taken. Brands can't see the value in it for it's not in the numbers provided by metrics and analytics tools. For it lies behind the veil of personal social media use, in the activity of paying attention to twitter, or more specifically, to the users we actually follow.

I say this is unfortunate because i think much social action is preceded by long periods of social observation. Consider the difference it would make, to brands and to users, if all social media were split screen interfaces: what I see and what you see. Real life social situations are like this: I see you looking at me, and can see reflected in your face something of how you see me (what you think of me).

Motives explained by the social and the public
The dual public also helps to explain many of our motives in using social media. Again, our actions can lead to potential further action, and if not, are at least possibly seen. Tweets, like comments, reflect these motives.

For example:

• Tweets or comments intended to get attention from the author
• Tweets or comments soliciting or appealing for direct response
• Tweets or comments that are a direct response
• Tweets or comments that continue a conversational run or thread
• Tweets or comments intended to garner attention to their author

We could break each of these down and show that for each, the user's motive may be to appeal to the author's attention, to get visibility in front of the public, to solicit a response, or to respond. Tweets and comments, in other words are not just that: (Nothing is explained if we describe social action by its form of content.)

Summary
To conclude, then, I think that the fact that any use of social media can have outcomes in two distinct audiences may explain its uniqueness as a medium, and its use by brands and individuals alike. That the attention economy involves both looking and being seen, posting and responding, would explain why motives for participating in social media reflect to the "presence" of two audiences. These are properties particular to the sociality of the medium, and to the sociability of its uses.

Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime

The realtime web is living on borrowed time. Not in the sense that time's running out on realtime. But in the sense that the realtime web actually involves two kinds of time. One is the time in which information is delivered. We call that realtime. The other is the user's time, which I'm going to call streamtime.

Realtime is immediate, streamtime is borrowed. The realtime web operates immediately. The streamtime experience is immediacy.

A lot has been said about realtime and our immediate access to information, but little has been said about streamtime, or the immediacy with which we experience realtime. And since streamtime relates to our consumption of realtime content, the concept might be worth unpacking.

The web collapses the distance between production and consumption. In realtime web terms, the stream delivers information instantaneously. The user, in streamtime, has access to it as if it were there. So where realtime information delivery has to do with simple clock time, streamtime involves the immediacy with which we relate to realtime information. This immediacy is actually a kind of proximity — of the kind sometimes called "ambient intimacy."

Streamtime is about proximity. And proximity combines two concepts: closeness and now. Immediacy as here, and immediately as now. And since there is no "space" on the internet, when we say proximity, we mean it in different terms: not spatial distance but presence.

But when we say presence, we usually mean individual presence: the presence of other people sensed through realtime social tools. So the streamtime experience actually contains two separate kinds of proximity: that of the information itself (delivered in realtime) and that of its sender.

Of course, we don't think of the information source as a sender — we think of the person. It's this trick of imagination that allows us to "feel" connected through the wire. (What I've called "approximity" in the past.)

For example, streamtime, not realtime, is the dimension in which attention is paid. Attention is awareness (directed mental attention, or focus), and time. Attention is paid by when we mentally select something to pay attention to, and is paid for as long as we hold that in our awareness. So streamtime then involves a commitment of attention to a steady stream of incoming information, much of which is messages (updates, tweets, etc).

Some of these messages are personal messages, some are system messages. Personal messages are communication of a sort. System messages are as if sent by a person, insofar as they report on a user's activity. They are sent automatically, but we read them as if they were personal messages and can sense who they are about. Activity updates may not be in the words of the user, but they're nonetheless a proxy for communication.

Streamtime, then, not only takes attention paid to the information and content itself, but also takes the attention we pay to each other, and which we spend by communicating. Where information is just that, information, communication is actionable. We can respond to it, reflect on what a person meant, reply, or forward (RT) it. Or rather, we can respond to the person, not to "it."

Streamtime raises the constant possibility that we might take up communication with a person — at a minimum it requires the increased attention we pay to people (over information straight up). This is the demand on the attention economy staged by realtime and experienced in realtime: that we think not only about what's been said but about the person who said it.

Social tools to help with the demands of interacting and communicating may be an area still ripe for innovation. These demands are real, and they affect not only users and how they maintain friendships, but also brands and how they connect to customers. If the cost of realtime is paid in streamtime, then communication, not just information, is the problem we're facing.

Structured Tweeting?

Adina Levin of Socialtext posted recently about Tags for ActivityStrea.ms. I've been enjoying online conversations with Adina quite a lot of late; there's a constructive Venn overlap between our approaches to design for social media and social interactions.

Given the amount of time we all spend skimming through Facebook status updates, twitter, and blog posts and comments, the idea of tagged activity streams has a strong appeal for me. But without going into detail into the proposed architecture for activity tagging (which I would like to do separately), I want to just conjecture for a moment on the question this idea begs. To wit, structured conversation.

A while back, Stowe Boyd and Chris Messina launched a related effort around microsyntax. I don't know where it currently stands, but the idea — to codify and back inline (in the tweet) syntax that would permit tweet parsing for some common types of tweets made a lot of sense to me. Besides location, consistent syntax could be used to identify any number of things, from reviews and recommendations to requests, offers, invitations, and so on.

Where microsyntax uses structure embedded in the tweet, activity tagging would place rely on structure outside the message (as I understand it). External structure has some advantages, not the least of which is a certain robustness (microsyntax depends on the user's written compliance with syntax).

However, and this is what I wanted to conjecture about, both are signs of a need for structure. Or if not need, then at least a nascent interest in structure. Years back, the structured blogging effort made a go at wrapping classification around the blog post format. It was abandoned for several reasons. Its taxonomies were probably excessively detailed. Its success would have required participation by search engines and blog indexing services. But most of all, it required a lot of extra work on the part of the user. The structured blog post was not a replacement for the standard post (subject, body, datestamp, tags) but a set of supplemental formats that could capture review, music, product, and other types of posts. (Fields were added for product name, manufacturer, rating, etc).

One can easily imagine the potential benefits of structured activity updates, as well as tweets, and other status updates. In fact one can imagine structure scaffolded around individual posts rich and connected enough to provide a back door into social networking and profile-based groups and communities. Theoretically, there's a slippery slope from structured conversation to the navigation and page-based organization we enjoy on the web today. In other words, messages could form the basis of browsing and finding just as pages do today. In theory.

But in theory, the idea is quite compelling. If "information overload" stands today as the single-most unwanted byproduct of the conversational turn in social media, then structure could help to solve some of its problems. One might imagine a set of codified values and attributes that authors and readers might use on messages. Messages could be classified by linguistic expression (or linguistic action), such as request, question, answer, comment, invitation, offer, forward, and so on. Twitter's codification of replies is one such example. Structured updates might then also be sucked into sites that organize them by their attributes, thus enabling group and community-like activity. Updates and tweets might ultimately form the basis of a kind of "message board" system (sound familiar?) built around dynamic aggregation of individual messages. Pages would not be content containers, but would be "written' by aggregation of distributed content.

None of this seems likely, however, for several reasons. Search engines and readers would have to participate around shared standards. And users would have to make the effort to classify their updates. Neither seem very realistic. But it's a compelling idea!

Twitter: the Self-ish Meme?

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

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

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

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

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

These are gross generalizations, but

• if Virtue was the Self of the Greeks


• if Truth was the Self of the Middle Ages


• if Knowledge was the Self of the Enlightenment


• if Labor was the Self of Industrialization


• if Information was the Self of the Information Age


• is Speech the Self of the Communication Age?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twitter etiquette: reading between the lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are a few examples:

Twitter Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts

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

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

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

And some of the tips include:

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

10 Twitter Etiquette Rules

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

Twitiquette: 10 Twitter Etiquette Tips to Get and Keep Followers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading tweets: it's complicated....

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

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

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

....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some types of statements

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

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

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

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

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

....

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

Opportunities for interaction around Twitter

What would an F8 application space built around twitter look like? This thought occurred to me as I was pondering twitter this morning. Twitter is still all the talk in social media circles, and the company's recent acquisition of Douglas Bowman (recently ex-Google) suggests that it may have more up its sleeves yet in the way of user experience enhancements.

I'm most intrigued by the notion that in a social space like twitter, which is fundamentally open, might accommodate structure and organization on-the-fly. Twitter's lack of social organization stands in contrast to the contained and persistent presence and relationship structure of Facebook. Facebook not only guarantees a higher level of attention and visibility around user actions, its super social activity-oriented architecture and design allow the company to offer developers templates for social interaction, a means of distribution among friends, and feeds by which to publish activity and participation.

Twitter, on the other hand, is built around asymmetrical, often un-reciprocated member relationships. it's activity stream is organized only by time, not by space or application as it is on Facebook. It has virtually no symbolic languages or gestural systems, and few means of routing and addressing communication, not to mention differentiating it aside from what the user says.

Where Facebook has raised the bar for social actions, Twitter remains primarily a communication space. But in the real world, a great variety of forms of talk exist to organize social relationships and various "kinds of doing" (as Goffman would put it). These have been categorized by sociologists as rituals, ceremonies, pastimes, games, and intimacies. They rely more heavily on unwritten but tacitly understood codes of conduct and behavior. But like social action systems, they involve sequencing, turns, addresing, the distribution of attention, and constraints on behavior as well as speech.

So, could talk-based social action systems be in twitter's future? We've seen hints of this already. Indeed it seems almost inevitable that an open system for talk like twitter would show signs of self-organization, and the emergence of social practices having more structure than the ubiquitous baseline tweet. We would need only twitter apps and services that mine relationships, connect the unconnected, and introduce topical or other kinds of speech-based forms to organize and order activity and participation. On twitter, these might be on the structures designed to work on-the-fly, or to persist over time.

Here's a quick look at how we might approach the field.

The design of social interactions around twitter presents some interesting challenges. We can bundle these into conceptual categories that pertain to the design of openly-structured social media in particular.

• Social organization: organizes participants, defines roles, positions, rank, results, and so on
• Activities: organizes the tweet-based activities, both communication and action based
• Meta: presentation layer for activities, using tweets, twitterers, relationships, data, and content as source material

Social organization

Relationships on twitter can be established without mutual consent (I follow you, you don't follow me back). This means that many are asymmetrical. Asymmetry probably increases the incidence of transient relationships (I follow you for a while, unless you follow me back). Higher transience corresponds to a lower commitment barrier, which might enable passing and temporary relationships with others for reasons other than friendship and genuine personal interest.

This suggests that in theory at least, a relationship could be used temporarily for social organization or activity structure (say, for the duration of a game).

Associative and informal relationships can be suggested by mentioning a person in a tweet. This suggests that passing and temporary relationships of affiliation or association could be used for social organization (say, to create a team).

Groups and audiences. Followers of a twitter @username or those associated with hashtags (categories; see what wefollow is doing) could serve the purposes of transient or temporary social activities. Again, fans and teams come to mind.



Activities

Conversational/Communication-based activities would require users to include terms or phrases required to further a game or social interaction. The possibilities here are endless, from the poetic to the informational, quantitative, descriptive, instructional, normative, and much more. Games or activities could be built around "speech acts" that do or accomplish something, trigger, launch, start, iterate, repeat, or close a run of action, a series of moves, even an operation. (Many ceremonies are carried out by means of following a script.)

Social Action based activities would require not only the saying of things but saying them in order, or addressed to particular "players." The distinction between communication and social action is that the tweet would just be a "move." Tweeting would perform the move. A game would might use a code or set of rules that is played by tweeting. One could play chess quite easily using twitter. Rules of interaction could be designed around the moves, responses to moves, sequencing of moves, who moves, and so on. Again, the possibilities are endless.



Meta

Visualizations could be used to show what is happening across those playing or participating in a twitter-based social game. Tweets might be represented as they are. Or their authors might be represented. They may be shown by attributes, location, historically relevant information, by relation, activity, and so on. Or tweets might be used to control a visualization (much as font sizes are coupled to volume in tag clouds). Real time games could even be played around twitter real-time search results. Data mined from tweets, twitter users, and relationships could be used to bind or constrain games and to design rules of play.

Trends would be very easy to make interactive on twitter, as the timeline is fast participation is easy. Real-time polls and trending lend themselves to twitter. Visualizations could be added to capture results, and also to create interaction systems and controllers. Tweets might be used to create content that is then re-purposed for social gaming. Just think of the many quiz shows, trivia games, and real-time polls that are common on tv and in some online social games...


These are just ideas for how twitter could be used for more structured and organized activities. I thought it might be fun to voice some of this o flesh out the ideas and to delineate some of the structure that is implicit in twitter and in talk in general. I can see these happening, although it's possible that twitter's strong sense of public space will act as a constraint. But it wouldn't surprise me if some brand, some time, creates a hit.

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.

The friendly face of twitter, and the enthusiastic bias

is there a built-in bias towards enthusiasm on twitter? This question was on my mind last night. I was pondering the recurrence of social media fatigue that sets in now and then as a natural kind of recoil against habits of social media overuse. Fatigue is normal experience.

We may each have different thresholds and tolerances for being online, and being in social media — but coming and going is not only common, it's healthy. And we pull back from our social media use often for a good reason: that we have reached a new understanding around what social media engagement means (to us, to others, or culturally); or that we're busy doing something else (and possibly something more productive!); or that the weather has turned.

But there's something else at work in the practices of "status culture," and in twitter especially. Twitter is a very strange form of communication. For reasons of its architecture, its conversational constraints, its character limitations, its tendency to focus on follower counts, as well as the culture that has developed around it, twitter is grossly inefficient at engendering and sustaining conversational runs.

The status update, a version of which is what twitter was designed to serve, grew out of a very small and limited messaging format. It appeared in Friendster and Yahoo 360 as the shoutout. It was then an expression of mood. "How are you feeling?" Blog editors (the software not the person) accommodated the mood statement as an add-on, and it sometimes appeared as an emoticon. One could post something and append a mood to it.

The idea was two-fold: a) to put a face, a more emotive expression, on the written post; and b) to add a facet to the post's appeal to the audience of readers/viewers. Readers or viewers could now respond to the author's statements, or his/her mood or feelings.

Over time the status update was assimilated into other social networking platforms, and has now become a commonplace. It continues to serve the purpose of delivering short and simple announcements. And we vary in how we use or don't use it (expressing our thoughts, location, activity, mood, or telling news, inviting, and so on). And status updates, while being a nearly ubiquitous publishing format, of course take something on from the culture and context in which the site or service resides.

A Linkedin status update is not a Facebook update is not a tweet. Soft and unwritten rules of etiquette, codes of conduct, and cultural expectations govern our expressive inclinations in each "community" or context. These sites have different audiences, and our relationship to those audiences varies also.

Twitter stands alone, however, in having elevated the status update to a form of communication unto itself. The miserly message format originally defined by SMS character limits must now accommodate all types of update, and new practices, and all without the benefit of any meta whatsoever. Given that there's no way to talk about what we're talking about, nor any way to address ourselves to those we're thinking about, writing for/to, or in front of (besides replies and tags), the pressure on tweeting can tend to compress our expressions so that they are quickly and easily skimmed and digested.

One of the reasons for this, and here the bias to friendliness enters the picture, is that twitter cannot easily close the loop on conversation. Even an @reply, which closes the loop with one person, is temporally out of synch. By the time an @reply has arrived, we, or our thinking, may have moved on. Synchronizing is key to good conversation -- as is addressing (the audience for whom the message is intended).

But as all communication, and by that I mean all linguistic statements, contains an appeal (for acknowledgement if not also understanding, agreement, validation, and approval), tweets will appeal more, and to more people, the more simple they are. A greater number of people can pick up and respond to simple statements, friendly gestures, and pleasant declarations than will a negative, angry, or contradictory statement. Banalities on twitter do not indicate that a twitterer is banal -- they are simply a low-risk appeal in a package that can be consumed easily by most everyone.

And that is where twitter's second social bias comes in. Given that so many of us attend to our follower numbers, we will tend towards pleasantries in order not to offend or lose followers. The appeal embedded in the linguistic expression has a social double, is a marker of status and wants to clothe self-presentation attractively.

This is of course not the case all the time, for each of us, with all tweets. But there does seem to be a bias on twitter to the friendly appeal, and a corresponding avoidance of negative or contradictory statements. We use our tweets, sometimes, as symbolic gestures and trade in a social currency and capital that only accumulates as it is expended. And I think that it's for this reason, in no small measure, that we tweet enthusiastically, and rarely when we withdraw.



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.
Read more: "Social Media Consulting and Strategy by a Social Interaction Design Specialist: Improbability of Communication in Social Media" - http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2009/03/improbability-of-communication-in.html#ixzz0ArxjdBR2

Improbability of Communication in Social Media

The floor in front of me is half covered with paper sketches. Blank sheets awaiting diagrams and visuals. Which is in part why they're still there. I have arranged them into short stacks by category. In an attempt to create a series of visual presentations on conversational models relevant to social media, and to flow and talk applications like twitter, I've managed to isolate the elements and need a eureka moment before I can lift them off the floor and start sketching.

The waiting is the hardest part.

Apropos waiting, I want to toss out another concept: probability. Or more specifically, improbability. And to contextualize it to social media, the probability or improbability of communication.

The concept comes out of Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory, in which communication becomes action only when communication by one person is picked up by another. The response to a communication, be it a response to what's said or to the person saying it (person or content), is a form of social action. Social action is how society is reproduced through individual acts and agency, and can include other kinds of interactions (symbolic exchange, money-based transactions, rituals and ceremonies that repeat the social w/o personal claims made).

In the absence of a response, communication is just expression. Online, it's expression recorded as an artifact: a message, post, upload, or other contribution.

Luhmann claims that systems are all about making the improbability of communication probable. A more humanistic view would simply say that we bind through our use of language and interaction; that regardless of whether or not we reach agreements, we can reach an understanding of what we say to each other. And that this alone is adequate to role of communication in having meaningful personal relationships.

All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying that we use social media to connect and to feel connected.

I've noted in this series on "status culture" (the culture of status updates and tweets) that every update/tweet contains an appeal. It appeals to the audience the user has in mind (those s/he follows, those following him/her, or friends -- as in Facebook). Appeals to response, perhaps as an @reply or dm, or Facebook status update comment. Those would be direct responses to the appeal. It may appeal to an indirect response, such as a Retweet, @name citation, or follow (yes, we get followers when we tweet, and we can think of being followed as a kind of response).

The appeal for some kind of response is how communication tries to increase the probability of the Improbable. Time-based applications like twitter dramatically increase that improbability (search will reduce it), for communication flows in time. It is not bound by a container (a Facebook page), nor is it bound by an application (e.g. anything synchronous like chat, IM, skype).

Improbability of communication becoming social action is higher on twitter because we are not in synch on twitter. Each of us is only capable of keeping up with so much of the twitter stream; limits on our time and attention are real, and ever more precious the more people we follow. My mental metaphor of late has been of twitter as a kind of highway in which cars travel in their own lane and at different speeds, and for communication to occur, two or more have to be next to each other. Yes, we can scroll back in time, but only so much. And we all know that we're much more likely to get a response from somebody if they have just tweeted. (Link clickthroughs captured on bit.ly show exactly this -- a near instantaneous peak that decays quickly).

If the improbability of communication is increased in time-based applications because we are not in synch, then that is an interesting design and system feature of time-based talk applications. For the psychological factors, those involved in user motives and behaviors, we might ask: How do we handle communication in systems that make it improbable? What's our feeling about the ambiguity it creates, when so little of what we say is directly addressed and replied to? And what explains our dedication to something like twitter, and our attempts to thwart the improbability of connecting by tweeting more, following more, and seeking more and more followers?

For that we might need to know something about personality and how different kinds of personalities relate to online communication and interaction. A separate article on how we talk is in order for that.

I think the concept of improbability is interesting. It captures the system and market-like features of talk applications, twitter especially, very well. And it raises an important question -- one that is oft overlooked by claims that everyone just needs to join the conversation. It's not conversation and we know it. And yet it's something we do -- and which can be remarkably satisfying.


Related: reading notes on Luhmann
Slideshare presentations on psychology of users, competencies of users, and social interaction design.



This bit.ly graph of click-throughs to this post shortly after I tweeted it demonstrates what I'm talking about here: in time-based applications like twitter, the probability of communication is contingent on temporal coincidence. Communication happens "as it happens."

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.

Southby drive-by... #SXSW tweets for those #notatSXSW

Disclaimer and editorial note -- this is not a rant. I don't rant in public. This isn't even constructive criticism. Or as Joseph Cotten misspeaks it in Citizen Kane, when trying to say "dramatic criticism," this isn't even crimitism. So anybody at South by Southwest (hereafter #SXSW) please don't take this the wrong way. I love you guys and wish I were down there feeding the frenzy with the rest of you.

I've been on twitter this weekend, like many, and following #SXSW as are many others. Now I've not been very disciplined about it, haven't used search #SXSW but figured instead that highlights would fall out of the river of news flowing from friends in attendance -- lord knows they are the uber connected and the best sources and judges of what is gleaming and dull in Austin this year.

But lo, the uber connected are such heavy users that twitter becomes a forum or chat during peak times -- #SXSW being a prime example. And so the tweets I've been gleaning this weekend have alerted me to plenty of the hallroom banter and ballroom backchannel chat, the hotel lobby overheards and happy hour merriment. But I have no idea what's shining this year at #SXSW.

it just seems ironic that the social media gurus in attendance are (of course) primarily talking to each other on twitter this year. This says something about how we use it, and especially when those using it are actually in the same place. Twitter need not then be used to push out to the outside world, but is used by people finding and meeting people at the event itself.

When we're in our own places, twitter helps to thread connections and span the space that separates us. When we're together, it serves as semi-public chat channel and backstage pass. All of which just goes to show that how we use technologies to talk is determined less by the technology, and more by our sense of who we're talking to.

I do wish I were there -- to learn about what's going on though i may have to turn to the blogosphere!

Social media's third law: designing for communication

The third law of social interaction design is that communication is transformed by the medium, which separates what is said from the saying of it. In everyday face-to-face encounters, we say something by speaking.

But in mediated communication, speech is captured and produced only with the help of technology. It is then distributed: as a post, be it text, video, audio, or something else (e.g. virtual worlds, games, etc, which involve a specific kind of communication).

Communication in social media is talk, and social media are "talk technologies." True, updates are written, but writing is the just the form. This is a particular kind of communication, and we need to unwrap it if we are to understand the social media design issues specific to it.

Our first observation is that the communicative form of the status update is that it is always new. It is neither writing, text, nor literature, in spite of how it is captured and published. It is a form of speaking; for each update is a new update. Even a retweet or pass-along is an act of authorship.

Because it is new, it attracts attention. It is attention-getting because we pay attention to new things, and to news of things new.

Updates are made by individuals. As a form of talk, the status update is some kind of self-narration, some kind of telling, telling to and telling about. It is personal, that is, it comes from the person doing the talking. The person posting the update must be able to reflect on him or herself, think of something that can be said online, and then post it. She or he must have a sense for what is worth saying, for what might get attention, responses, and so on.

All of this might seem obvious, but it is important in that it places status updating squarely within a user-centric framework.

This means, first of all, that talk means something to the person who talks. There is a payoff for the user who does the talking. Seen from a design perspective, the user action is: talking. Now, talking in-and-of-itself is not yet communication. Communication requires at a minimum one more user.

If one user says something and no other user catches it, only one user experience is involved (and it's a poor one at that). Still, one user talking who believes s/he is being listened to is still one (somewhat) satisfied user.

Communication is a system of statements and responses using language, or some kind of symbolic form. Because it involves people, it involves what's said and to whom. The statements themselves may be considered the content of communication; the relationship between users can be considered meta-communication.

In face-to-face encounters, meta communication has access to gestures, body language, and more. A lot is accomplished just by looking at and looking back. indeed, a sense of "understanding" is often accomplished not by means of saying things, but by interacting.

We can now make a distinction between interaction and communication, and between saying things with gestures and saying things with words. Here's where things get interesting. Communication doesn't produce its own meta contents or meta communication. Meta is possible only by means of observing the communication. In other words, one cannot say something and also say something about what is being said at the same time.

Unless one were to use body language, gestures, or some other non-linguistic means of expression... Which is of course what we do all the time in face-to-face interactions. "Facework" is the work done alongside speaking and saying things -- and it gives us wit, sincerity, irony, and all other kinds of layered communication.

Recognizing now that the act of saying things doesn't say everything we mean, we can see why communicating online may be neither a) the easiest way to make oneself understood nor b) the easiest way to reach an understanding.

Being understood is not the same as being in agreement. The latter assumes the former; but the former may sometimes be good enough. Both of these conditions, however, are complicated by the use of media. Use of the face, and of expressions, tone, and looking/looking back do seem critical to the kind of being together that is involved in a shared understanding.

To summarize where we are, we now can say that communication online is unique because:

• it is a form of user action
  
• it can suffice as user activity even if nobody responds
  
• it is only truly communication if another user does respond (or take it up)
  
• communication is more than just saying things the medium doesn't do meta communication well
  
• nor does it allow use of facework or gestures, body language, and so on
  
• it creates challenges to making oneself understood and to reaching understanding with another person
  

We are now ready for the next step.

Online communication creates ambiguity. For the reasons mentioned above. Ambiguity in what is said, what is meant, who it is meant for, whether it is understood, whether it is agreed with -- we have seen above how each of these kinds of ambiguity can arise strictly because communication is mediated. (There are more, unique to gaming, dating, and other kinds of coded or ritualized communication).

What is the status of ambiguity? Is it all bad? Is ambiguity the absence of meaning? Noise or confusion? Is it the lack of understanding? Not at all. Ambiguity is the engine of communication -- it is why communication happens. If we understood each other perfectly and at all times, we wouldn't need to communicate other than to instruct one another or express ourselves. Ambiguity is that which we seek to resolve, or sustain, when there is more to say.

Ambiguity, while not providing a clear message, signals that more communication is necessary. Communication, on the other hand, indicates what is an appropriate response. But mediated communication is accompanied by the ambiguity of intent, tone, and feeling. Mediated communication actually creates ambiguity.

Is it possible that ambiguity created by social media might be one of the reasons it is a compelling experience? Is it possible that ambiguity can make it sticky? Is it possible that because communication is the simplest way to create ambiguity, and the only way to resolve it, communication is the engine of all user activity on social media?

Let's consider this, because it could be very important. We have talked about the challenge that online presents to full and rich communication -- as a result of what the medium takes away. But what of all that is added by the medium?

We have focused so far on communication as a form of talk. But communication also includes printed and distributed communication -- as in "the age of communication." We have already mentioned that for communication to become interaction it must be taken up by another person. Online communication may reduce the possibilities of reaching an understanding with somebody; but it also increases the possibilities that communication is taken up.

Linking to a person, @replying to a tweet, is taking up their communication (yes, differently, but still). And communicating online provides infinite possibilities of distribution. Face to face communication, on the other hand, is very limited in space and time (barring use of a megaphone).

The fact that online communication requires some form of recording or reproduction, while decreasing the potential for direct understanding, increases the potential for indirect communication. It may not feel as good, but online, one can communicate without talking. And one's communication can be picked up at any point in time and by anyone who chooses to take it up.

This means that there are two possibilities for understanding the user action of communication: the action of the "speaker," which is to express; and the action of the "listener," which is to act on what's communicated. Two actors who would normally bind in a face-to-face exchange now act separately. Two people are still involved, but not in creating a shared sense of time and presence; rather each acts separately.

The speaker is more aware of what s/he intended; the listener is more aware of what s/he understood. Between the two is a gulf of ambiguity, but it is narrow enough to create both a sense of communication and wide enough to open up the possibilities of what happens next.

As a system, online communication leaves more possibilities open. It is a future-oriented type of communication, aligned to the kind of opportunity that rarely exists in face-to-face interactions. I don't think we yet understand the significance of this: that the online communication system is a kind of communication for future possibilities much more than any kind of face-to-face communication can be. I don't think we understand how important time is to social media.

We relate to the future through anticipation and expectation. I suspect, but don't yet have a theory for it, that social media are a means of organizing ourselves and our relationships in time and in anticipated time -- and that much of what drives our use o social media is a "future pull" as much as a "being here."

(Note: In the interest of space and time, we will cover the corollaries in the next post.)

Related:Paradoxes of social media: Twitter, Facebook, and status culture
Social media's first law: user centric design
Social media's second law: it's a verb, not a noun
Social Interaction Design: Primer



Social Interaction Design Primer II

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.