Twitter promotional tweet strategies

As some of you know, I find the conversational strategies of branding and marketing on twitter fascinating. And of using feeds/streams for talk-based marketing in general. But I'm just now catching up on twitter's recent announcement, so take this post with a few grains of salt. I may not have this entirely right. But I thought I'd share some thoughts on the implications of twitter's new platform on marketing and the twitter ecosystem overall.

The Altimeter Group has a great overview from which I'll excerpt the introduction:


First Take Analysis: What Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” Means To The Ecosystem


Summary: Twitter has launched Promoted Tweets, combining paid and organic media. Brands can now advertise promoted tweets on search pages, however the community has power over which tweets will appear measured by Twitter’s new metric called “resonance” which factors in behaviors like the retweet, at, hash, avatar clicks. Brands can now purchase CPM based ads to promote these popular tweets at the top of a Twitter search term –even in categories they aren’t well known in, influencing awareness. Marketers beware: unlike traditional advertising or social marketing this is both a combination of earned media and paid media. For Twitter this experimental move makes sense as it taps into deep pockets of online advertisers without jeopardizing sanctity of the community as users will self select which tweets will resonate and thereby become promoted ads.


How it will work, a likely use case scenario:

1. Twitter users will continue to interact with each other, and popular tweets will receive a high ‘resonance’ score from Twitter. Some of these Tweets will be created by brands, and some by the users themselves.
2. Tweets with heavy resonance can be purchased by advertisers in a CPM basis to appear as the first ’sponsored’ Tweet on a search term. The sponsored tweets will be clearly labeled and have a different background color.
3. These promoted tweets will only stay if users continue to resonate with them, those that don’t will disappear and a different tweet with resonation will appear.

(Read the original post. As usual, the Altimeter Group has done a fabulous job breaking this down.)
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Twitter's promotional tweet strategy will create a very compelling opportunity for brand managers, customer service, sales, marketing, and community managers. It will permit more experimentation, more learning, and more insight. It will also create new risks, for the platform introduces a new set of practices to twitter that will inevitably raise the stakes around transparency, intent, authenticity, and reputation. These will be true not only for participating promoters, but for twitter users themselves.

Any doubt cast on the authenticity and intent of a tweet will rub off not only on the originating promoter, but on all those who "resonate" with it. Any doubt as to the motives of participants will also impact originating promoters and resonaters. These are characteristics that attach to the "speaker," and to speech. The same will be true of interpretation, or as we might say, the "listener." Not only will there be questions around what a resonater is doing by promoting promotional tweets — there will be questions about what to do with it (pass it along or not). For example, Does the resonater really agree with it? What aspect of it? Am I supposed to take this seriously, and reflect this user's interest, or not?

These are fine-grained questions, but they are intrinsic to the very nature of twitter's system of talk.

Some sample issues and questions

• What's the credibility of the twitter user promoting a promoted tweet?
• Is the twitter user gaming the system — Digg-like?
• Does the twitter user genuinely resonate with the promoted tweet?
• Why is this promoted tweet resonating?
• How do I look if I promote this tweet?
• Can my followers tell if I'm promoting this tweet because it resonates genuinely?
• Can they tell if I am being facetious — that I'm promoting it tongue in cheek?
• Will I lose followers?
• What is the reputation capital risk of promoting promotional tweets?
• Will there be a perceived difference between promoting retweeted promotions vs the original promotion?

Some implications of promotional tweeting
The odds that a Digg-like group of marketers emerges to circulate promoted tweets and to create resonance by combining large follower networks, a karmic — and measurable! — social contract and mutual commitment to circulate one another's promotions, seems high. This will immediately raise the risk of a two-class order of users: genuine users and promoters.

• Twitterers belonging to the promotional order will make it onto lists that are to their benefit, but used also by others to unfollow.
• In an effort by genuine users to clear their names, protect their standing, and more immediately, to avoid their own inclusion on promoter lists, a follow/unfollow episode may ensue.
• Some third parties might possibly then provide tools to help genuine users in bulk unfollowing those who have been identified as promoters. They could do this by providing lists, or managing databases of promoters so that they can be easily unfollowed.
• Opting out will now become a cultural practice and code of conduct, as in: "If I ever catch you promoting a tweet I will unfollow you on principle."

Marketing opportunities: conversational strategies
The new system of conversational promotion will create some compelling opportunities. These will hopefully not only include messages but also short-form narratives, games, stories, puzzles, and more. The most creative campaigns will hail from agencies and brands willing to take the user's side and deliver content that is an interesting read if not also a compelling activity. Some brands may invent participatory dramas, interactive story-based offers, group or affinity marketing strategies using shared discounts, rewards, and incentives. Those smart enough to try to leverage social graphs will design strategies that percolate through twitter followers as well as Facebook pages, etc. Visibility will be lensed and market segments will be defined in terms of their responsiveness and activity as well as traditional valuations of consumer interest.

Marketers will see here an opportunity to create multi-modal and multi-wave conversational campaigns. These would include messages targeted to different audience segments, tests of content style, offer, brand message and image, call to action, and so on.

• A marketer might create and test a dozen different tweets to track and measure resonance.
• Tweets might be sent at different times of day, be targeted to reach influencers, be designed to resonate with existing intra-day news and events, hashtags, conferences, and other ecosystem attributes that are known to accrue fast distribution
• Marketers should benefit from much greater insight into messaging effectiveness
• Marketers should be able to learn from resonance:
• times of day
• days of the week
• repetition
• contextual topics, themes, events, etc of use to the campaign
• competitive analysis
• responsive vs non-responsive influencers based on individual influencer behavior and attention
• responsive vs non-responsive influencers based on individual influencer network speed, reach, and resonance

ROI: Go for it, or engage with transparency?
Promotional strategies will unavoidably butt up against the choice between using or targeting effective promotional communities (Digg phenom) and more organic, and dare we say "transparent," strategies. The former will deliver the numbers, and make any marketer pushed to simply show the numbers happy. The latter will more likely result in honest and credible brand capital. A two-tiered community of social media professionals will continue to emerge, separating those committed to good content and interaction from those hot in pursuit of numbers. Both will have to deal with SEO, and twitter realtime search, but the former group will develop skills in organic conversational strategy, while the latter will preside over a network of promoters with high follower counts and "guaranteed" results.

Marketers may seek new ROI criteria for:

• Influencer and network reputation capital (amenability of influencer to promote; which promotions; around what interests, topics; style)
• Resonance capital (in speed, reach, and distribution; aggregate traffic; conversion; new follower counts)
• Marketers may have to consider effectiveness of circulation by highly resonant promotional "communities" vs organic and "authentic" resonance
• Marketers may be called out by twitter users for leveraging promotional communities
• transparency might then involve not only the messaging, but tactics of promotion
• the rapid and proven traffic gains of using promotional campaigns will be weighed against risks of backlash from users who perceive a brand to have sold out by using these new promotional tactics

What do you think? I'm all for a distinct class of commercial tweets if it helps to sustain twitter's platform model. It beats the corruption that would be inevitable if commercial tweeting were indistinguishable in form and delivery from normal tweeting. Norms are bound to form around use of promotional tweets. Influences on those norms will come from the brand strategists and experts consulting to companies interested in promotional twitter campaigns. They will also be influenced by those who can leverage the platform's inherent weaknesses to game and guarantee results. Twitter now has its own search facet, a search engine facet, and a new form of tweet — so lists, third party client accommodations, and of course tweeting practices are all affected. The user experience need not be at risk, but is clearly in play.

Rethinking thin: social relationships in social media

In a recent post titled The Social Media Bubble, Umair Haque raises some provocative questions concerning the value of the relationships we form on the internet. His post has drawn some attention, and I'd like to quickly throw in my two cents.

Haque wites:

"I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships."

Now I don't have a quarrel so much with some of his conclusions. I have an argument with how the issue is framed.

I don't believe that we should be thinking in terms of relationships. Rather, I believe the issue should be framed in terms of communication. My reasons are fairly straightforward. If we focus on relationships, we attribute to the relationship what actually belongs to communication. We call them thick or thin, we describe them as strong or weak ties, and we measure the value of connectivity in terms of network density and connectedness. We place emphasis on the tie, rather than on the subjects (people) knitted together.

My issue with this is twofold. First, I think it's a mistaken transposition of the logic and analytic of social network analysis to the attributes and qualities of human relationships and social organization that social network analysis doesn't really address. In social network analysis, the tie is privileged over the node, that is, the connection over the subject (person). But all ties are not equal. And ties are not really relationships.

I cannot imagine a psychologist inquiring as to a client's network density, Dunbar number management issues, or presentation of negative Facebook connectedness symptoms. Ties, used in social network analysis, are a means to abstract and diagram the connectedness of a number of nodes/individuals deemed to be connected. It's got nothing to do with the experience of relationships, the depth of human commitments, feelings of isolation or involvement, not to mention the substantial domain of emotional and communicative wealth that is transacted daily in the form of civil social conduct.

If we are interested in the meaning of social networking at the human scale of experience, then ties are the wrong way to think of it. The social network analysis model of social is an abstraction. It neither lays claim to causal explanation of interpersonal communication and meaning, nor to a properly humanistic observation of the emotional and lived life of members of a society. What it can do is abstract the number, density, and connectedness of members of a bounded network. And in that, surface patterns. But to mistake the tie for an intersubjective relationship, or to subordinate the tie to the mode of its reproduction -- which is communication -- is a mistake.

And this is where we trip ourselves up. For when we talk about social relationships and the social web, we inevitably turn to our own experiences. We rally in defense of the thin tie, the weak tie, follower numbers, connectedness, and what have you, in arguments based on personal experience. But of course! Social networks, and social tools of talk, as I prefer to call them, are quite simply a new means of mediating communication and interaction in a manner that captures and preserves interactions on a publicly accessible medium. Ties are not the explanation, communication is.

My second issue with the misuse of ties-as-relationships has to do with relationships in general. They don't exist. We relate to each other, and in our communication and interaction, express and "exchange" the content of communication and the meta-contents of emotional and affective interests. We are relational; society is relational. But never and in no social theory that I know of are relations reducible to this notion of a tie such that subjective human experiences can be described adequately by the tie. There is no tie -- there are two or more subjects committed for a stretch of time to pay attention to one another, take interest in each others' interests, handle the interaction in an acceptable fashion, and to some degree commit to communicate again. If, in social networking, we exchange tweets with one another for just a moment, but never again, then we have had a passing interaction. It's that simple. Ties and relationships don't have to be brought into the equation.

The medium facilitates asynchronous communication between people whose mutual connectedness online can make them present to one another in a fashion that transcends the limitations of physical co-presence. And which, for its capture and storage of that communication in the form of a digital textual artifact, renders this communication in a way that, within the medium only, lends it some persistence and durability. All of which leaves behind content for later use, re-use, recontextualization, and what have you. That's what it's good at: mediated communication and interaction.

While I suspect that our tendency to use social networking metaphors as descriptions of "the social" owes to the fact that we as much technologists as we are sociologists, the whole matter of social relationships has been a matter of some cultural concern for a while now. It's perhaps a post post-modern thing. Or a technology and disconnection thing. We have seen it in pop culture for years. Movies like Crash, Babel, Amelie, and countless others take up social relations and society -- as characters are brought together over seemingly arbitrary and random events and connections. In TV shows like The Wire and LOST the theme is explored in terms of the multi-layered interdependence of different social classes and institutions, or in the formation of communities out of nothing but a random event. And these shows are direct descendants of earlier works by Altman, Godard, Fellini, even Fritz Lang (M) and so many others.

The organization of the social is a perennial interest. We want to know what relates us and how we relate. We want to know what a commitment is, what trust means, and how loyalties and friendships are created, sustained, and preserved. Technologies of communication are a means -- in this day and age of communication, they are a means of production. A means and mode of the production of communication. And for this reason, a contributing factor in the organization of the social. But they are not a metaphor for the social, are not an abstraction of society's connected architecture, or an explanation of social byproducts and human experiences such as friendship, intimacy, groups, or communities.

Relationships are maintained by communication. Interactions frame the possibilities for communication between subjects whose attention is focused on the shared experience of a social situation. Social tools change the nature and modality of both interaction and communication, simply because they permit both to occur disembedded for time and place. It's not the tie that is the relationship, it's mediated social action by means of which communication is used to relate. And as we all know, and have experienced, the meaning of relating to one another online comes in all forms and shades of significance. Furthermore, relations may be unilateral and one directional, bidirectional, or triangulating and mediating. They have affect and real human interests: we like each other, admire each other, pay attention to, support, encourage, quote, refer, include, remember, and forget each other. These are our experiences and in our experiences are how we relate.

The tie has no such attributes, and in social network analysis, may not even capture directionality. Ties are not mutually affirmed or reciprocated. Communication and interaction is. What's more, the tie may falsely sustain the appearance of a bind that exists. But as we live our friendships and communities, and use our social tools as means of communicating, we pass in and out of attention as well as through different periods of interest and engagement. Much of this is even just social observation; where is the tie and how would it be captured when the act of being involved is an informal and somewhat haphazard habit of following twitter. The experience of social observation is hardly counted in social networking, for the simple reason that our tools can only capture actions.

It is easy to undersell the value of social tools on the basis of relationships. But to conflate relationships with the processes and practices of communication and interaction is a mistake, and places the cart before the horse. Relationships form out of communication and are sustained and reproduced during stretches of interaction -- stretches that include periods of passive engagement and un-involved social presence. That these aspects of subjective experience cannot be captured and represented in the form of a tie is just the misapprehension of human relationships in the form of abstract models of connectedness. Social life is transactional.

Related:
Social Media in Isolation is Useless to Government, to Business, and to You Mark Drapeau

Umair Haque Is Another New Spatialist Stowe Boyd

From followers and game mechanics to more valuable social functionality

Some interesting perspectives appeared this week on game mechanics in social media and the corrupting devaluation of social systems, user experience, and metrics that seems to accompany follower counts, foursquare check-ins, and other numerical incentives to use.

I just want to throw in my two cents from a social interaction design perspective. I agree that the simplicity of incentive models predicated on growing your numbers (and status) exist. (What I've called the apparency problem in social media: the apparent appearance of social status and relevance.)

But I think these are systemic outcomes and not necessarily a reflection of human nature alone — as is often argued.

I'll start with context, and with brief excerpts from Peter Michaud, Dare Obasanjo, and Louis Gray. And begin with a status update from Alex Payne of twitter. (Contrast with this recently from Craig Newmark: "Design and esthetics don't solve problems")

"Game mechanics aren't going to fix your product and they aren't making people's lives better. Great essay: http://j.mp/aN66i8" Alex Payne, twitter

Peter Michaud, in an aptly titled post on Achievement Porn, writes:

1. Our society is set up to make us feel as though we must always achieve and grow. That’s true because individuals growing tend to bolster the power and creature comforts of the groups they belong to with inventions, innovations, and impressive grandstanding (Go Team!).
2. Because of this pressure to grow, there’s another incentive to make growth easier. More perversely, to make growth seem easier.

Dare Obasanjo, reflecting on Peter's piece in Achievements, Game Mechanics and Social Software, agrees that game mechanics should not be used as an easy fix but notes their marketing appeal:

"I will say game mechanics can more than “fix” a social software product, they can make it a massive success that it’s users are obsessed with.
....
Finally, is it better for me as a person to have traded achievement treadmills where I have little control over the achievements (i.e. number of blog subscribers, number of people who download a desktop RSS reader, etc) for one where I have complete control of the achievements as long as I dedicate the time?"

Finally, Louis Gray, writing yesterday in an un-related about followers, addresses the metrics, value, meaning, and bias problems:
The Followers Game Is So 2008. Time for New Metrics.

"Humans have this innate sense of need to be ahead of all others, to measure themselves, and deliver some level of self-assigned worth thanks to what are questionably valuable statistics.
....
We have got to achieve more accurate ratings of influence that determine value.
....
How would social networks be improved if we just hid them away entirely, and stopped looking at growth or relative sizes? My value is still the same, in terms of quality, whether I have an audience of 2,000 or 20,000, especially if I have the right people."



I think there are several points worth making here from a perspective of social interaction design.

First, it's not humans or human nature that are the cause of this. It's systems and the design of social experiences and systems. To attribute the follower incentive and achievement reward dynamics to human nature I think falsely attributes outcomes to essential human values. Social theory tells me that individuals of any society will choose and reflect values validated socially. And viewed empirically, societies around the world are organized in wonderfully different ways, manifest in a tremendous range of culturally diverse traditions and pastimes.

So I think this is a matter of social organization and not of individual human nature.

Secondly, we need to consider not only the outcomes for social systems — those being a devolution of interaction and a devaluation of meaningful differences — but also the user experience and user actions the system enables.

Social outcomes, including those that characterize the dysfunctional if not failing state of many social media designs, reflect aggregate individual user choices and selections. Users can only do what the system permits them to do. And in the case of social design, user choices are a reflection of individual nature and interest only on the first order of interaction — where users engage through UI and features.

At the second order of social interaction, where aggregated individual activities are presented back to the population and used to thematically distinguish the tool as a social experience, system choices lend bias and weight to activities that matter and privilege those that make the most difference.

Social media are intrinsically socially diffuse and the social activities possible in them are for the most part only loosely coupled. Given that a user's interest in a social system is a reflection not only of his or her interests but of his or her social position, actions and activities that make the most social difference readily stand out.

Actions like following and follower numbers matter because system designers choose to surface these numbers as an individual difference made that makes social differentiation possible.

The problem is in the simplicity of these social models or mechanics. Following is a unilateral action. It may solicit reciprocity but is successful, as an action, without it. That's Michaud's easy achievement but stripped down to the basics: acts that make a social difference. (We don't need to attribute the act to human interest in achievements and a cultural inclination for success. For we could refer back to psychological validation, interpersonal recognition, or many other motivations just as equally.)

Furthermore, following serves as a gesture of interest, of one user in another. But as a form of communication it lays no burden on the one followed to engage or participate. So in a blind social regime like twitter, it offers a low-risk means of connecting precisely because it's asymmetrical. And in a disconnected social order like twitter, connection is the first step to social relations.

That we pay attention to this stuff, as we all are profoundly aware of, is testimony to the fact that these systems have successfully provided one metric by which to measure social value. But it is clearly an underwhelming and uninspiring metric, when viewed from the perspective of user acts and not overall influence or status. The attention accrued to status achieved by means of numbers and counts betrays the user's interest in deeper and more meaningful interpersonal or social engagement.

In other words, the value surfaced and valued by the system is not very valuable from the perspective of attention paid and sustained by users, or value derived from use and experience. Consequently, our social uses of social media (the micro) suffer devaluation at the hands of system values (the macro). It's a bit like being in a country that continually devalues its currency.

Social systems can function technically and operationally even when they are dysfunctional socially. In ways our entire social order grinds along in spite of or perhaps because of fundamental and internal dysfunctionalities. It would be hard to tell the difference in fact between a social system that reproduces itself in order to fix its problems from one that reproduces itself because it is successful and growing.

The challenge ahead for open and distributed social media is, I think, in coming up with better and more well understood social dynamics. Acts and actions that satisfy on the first order of user experience but which result in more compelling, meaningful, and socially interesting system dynamics and outcomes. Ambiguity needs to be our friend, numbers less so.

All social systems can handle more information as they complexify internally. So our information problem may be an internal complexity problem. But if so, then one to be addressed by differentiating the ways in which communication communicates and makes a social difference. This, not coincidentally, at a time when social media encourage ever increasing amounts of communication.

Greater differentiation of social activities and better social design at the presentation layer will permit more user behaviors and activities to make a difference. And when that happens, social complexity and differentiation will engage more, better, and with richer and more diverse results.

I see us moving forward from a phase in which basic and open socially networked communication tools established early and basic practices, like following, and now begin to integrate more and different types of social interactions. If this pans out, simple means of getting attention will fade in value and be replaced by activities that are genuinely more interesting.


Related:
Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews
Social Interaction Design: Leaderboard
Social media: the attention economy explained

When social search gets personal: ChatRoulette, Peerpong, Aardvark

A couple of items in the news this week got me thinking about the social search space. But not from the usual angle. We have all heard about ChatRoulette by now, and of the random acts of human exhibitionism that take place there. Well, apparently some of those random encounters were too good to let go of. And so some visitors have taken to the a new Missed Connections to find people they met on ChatRoulette.

Cue "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." Yeah, by U2. And maybe that should be "I still haven't found who I'm looking for."

This is a great example of unintended social outcomes, and how in openly-designed social systems, users will find ways of addressing what's not handled by the application. Since ChatRoulette is anonymous by design, we can already anticipate that one of its social facets will be identity. Anonymity and privacy get users in, but on some occasions they will want to find each other again. Anonymity is coupled to identity (who). Just as random is coupled to specific (what).

Missed connections may be where users have to go now to try to re-locate people they met on ChatRoulette. Or ChatRoulette could accommodate this need in the future. It would then in effect be providing more than just random encounters — and would be providing a kind of social search.

Another item in the news this week related to social search was PeerPong, which received funding. (Disclosure: I consulted to PeerPong early on.) Described now as Aardvark for twitter, Peerpong matches user questions to twitter users who may be able to answer them. As aardvark uses one's social network to distribute questions and solicit answers, Peerpong uses twitter. (As you probably know, aardvark was just acquired by Google.)

The social search issue here is obviously different from that happening around ChatRoulette's missed connections. But they have one thing in common worth mentioning. It is: what happens when social search gets personal?

Social search tends to suggest traditional search supplemented with search results qualifed by social relevance. Using, say, social algorithms and user input (ratings, votes, etc) to deliver complementary results. Social search as regular search plus long-tail social data mining.

But there's another kind of social search. This kind, of which aardvark, Peerpong, and missed connections are all examples, uses people to solve search problems. We usually call these question/answer services. And in this area, success can be more elusive. Where in algorithmic social search there is one user experience issue, in question/answer services there are two.

Both questioner and answerer must have a satisfactory experience for the service to work. In fact the service really hangs on the experience of the answerer. The questioner has an immediate and present need or interest — not so the answerer. His or her motives for participation have to be incentivized or contextualized by other means.

The possibility that social search gets personal can be a systemically reinforcing and, as a user experience, much more compelling (and human) means of solving "search" issues. (Question/Answer services are much more than "search".) But this potential for the social to get personal is also a barrier to use — put plainly, people can get freaked out.

ChatRoulette's social search problem will be reciprocity and mutuality — solved only if both parties agree to re-find each other. Presumably the experience these users had on webcam was enough to take care of trust issues (which is not to say it's free of risk). For aardvark and peerpong, the challenge is relational.

What commitments or obligations to ongoing social search will a user have to another user in the future? Users don't know each other, even if they may be connected through twitter, through shared topical interests, or by social/peer networks.

Context of use can address some of this. By contextualizing search experiences and answer contributions, services like these can reduce the freak factor, using social context then to de-personalize perceived obligations, expectations, and commitments. Context can help reduce user fears of expected future participation commitments. And context can be used to supply alternative incentives to use — game contexts, expertise ranking, and the like. In short, using social to absorb some of the personal.

One wouldn't have thought ChatRoulette would have anything to do with social search. But the random selection of users is guaranteed to produce its inverse as an effect and byproduct. When people connect, algorithms become unnecessary.

Cue U2.

PeerPong Raises $2.8M for an Aardvark for Twitter
Calling All Romantics: Chatroulette Now Has Its Own Missed Connections
ChatRoulette, hall of mirrors
ChatRoulette, I'm watching you (watching me)
Google's Aardvark acquisition: Questions for Buzz?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ChatRoulette, I'm watching you (watching me)

Thus at bottom the message already no longer exists; it is the medium that imposes itself in its pure circulation ... the universe of communication ... leaves far behind it those relative analyses of the universe of the commodity. All functions abolished in a single dimension, that of communication. That's the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That's obscenity. The hot, sexual obscenity of former times is succeeded by the cold and communicational, contactual and motivational obscenity of today..." — Jean Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication

We "are now in a new form of schizophrenia ... The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world's obscenity ... He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence..." — Jean Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication

"Now I think that it would be better to reveal myself" Mr. Ternovskiy, builder of Chatroulette, referring to a less graphic kind of transparency, in Chatroulette's Creator, 17, Introduces Himself, The New York Times


As is generally the case with a new application on the Internet, and with social applications in particular, users are queuing in large numbers for a peek into the random universe of ChatRoulette. The site is a rabbit hole for voyeurs and exhibitionists alike, mutually and symbiotically united in a simulcast trip through the looking glass in the age of social media.

Viewer discretion is advised, and if you are even mildly sensitive to social allergens, you may wish to keep the lens cap on and your eyes behind a good pair of wrap-arounds, for there is indeed a lot of flashing going on in the aptly named "surreal" world of ChatRoulette (@nickbilton).

What explains the proliferation of nudity and exposure in ChatRoulette (and video chat systems like it)? Is there, as Nick Bilton asks in his review of the service, "a nascent desire for anonymity online."

This doesn't add up for me. There is desire, yes, but not for anonymity.

Nick writes, in The Surreal World of Chatroulette: "our lives used to be private by default, yet with the advent of each new social network, privacy has become increasingly difficult to preserve." But were our lives private by default? Have we not, through practices social and cultural, always sought out and crafted arts by means of which to expose and express ourselves on stage, in front of audiences of all kinds?

The point that social networking threatens to undermine privacy is a point taken, but not as an explanation of the social practices that so easily and readily spring sites like ChatRoulette to life. It is much more likely that there is in ChatRoulette's ability to send users "parachuting into someone else's life" a kind of mediated proximity, realtime in that it's live, co-present in that it telescopes a kind of social watching, intimate in its on-screen coupling, and spectacular in how it attracts attention.

Take desire — a force most decidedly at work in ChatRoulette. Desire desires the desire of the other, as French philosopher Lacan put it. Desire would not desire anonymity — but the desiring person may desire to be seen anonymously. And to anonymously share this desire with another anonymous person. Desire is, when mediated in online adult webcam chats, and between consenting users of ChatRoulette, amplified according to its own internal social inclinations. Desire is for the other's desire: it is reciprocating. This is precisely what Chatroulette does: it shows you the Other.

The modality of the medium in this case is visual. And because it involves seeing people, and seeing them live, it will be about watching. This is the social modality by which users will relate, and the activity in this kind of sociality will necessarily involve the kinds of action coordination, synchonrization, mirroring, and other mutually-interesting aspects of watching one another remotely.

Watching, and being watched. Those are the perceptual senses involved, and thus the basis of communication. So if desire is at play, it is at play in getting attention. At play in self disclosure. At play in the thrill and surprise of synchronizing with another user. But by means of seeing and being seen (mutual recognition is being seen), of watching and being watched (anonymity is watched).

This coupling is an example of one very simple answer to asynchronous communication otherwise so common online. We push media for what they bracket out of social experience, and press at the margins to discover where the medium produces its most uncanny, unsettling, and weird effects. Webchats are live, are a kind of realtime streamtime that occurs in time (feedtime?). In time, not asynchronously and out of time, not in separate streams of user messaging flowing alongside one another's times. A live and streaming realtime. Which means co-presence.

Presence online can be established by artifact and extension, which is normally the case when we are present but not really (available but by notification only, and presented by means of re-presentation of text, messages, etc.). This kind of presence, which we have called ambient presence, is sensed but not seen, makes it into one's awareness but is not verified, and may be social without placing immediate demands on participation. One can be present and fake it this way too. One can be present by proxy. But there's no faking it on webcam, no proxy presence when there's immediacy and an intimate proximity.

Presence by cam is not mediated by text or other artifact. It's truly present. And here the co-presence of seeing and being seen, watching and being watched, and the uncanny special effect of closed-circuit mirroring in mediated interactions with which we also see ourselves seeing ourselves being seen, and can watch ourselves watching while being watched, couples us to others, anonymously or not.

This coupling resolves an ontological crack in the conventional online experience of asynchronous participation: the separation and disconnection of online connectedness. With the exception of webcam and VOIP applications, online social media are one-sided. They present us with a one-sided and unilateral view of interaction and communication.

Not on twitter, on Facebook, or any other social platform do we see what the other sees, view what the audience views, read what another is reading. Webcam chat hookups like ChatRoulette unify the experience in a single and shared (although mediated) reality. (Imagine that we might see another person's twitter view in a split pane. How would that change our sense of the social?)

I wrote last week about the possibility of coupling realtime activity streams, as in twitter, Facebook status updates, and the like. I speculated that coupled posts would permit communication to become action, as users would then be able to respond directly to posts across systems. And that action streams might also permit users to use messages to act — such as send or reply to invitations, purchase tickets, and so on.

Chatroulette is an example of coupled realtime streams. But being live feeds, and being webcam feeds, mutually-visible and coupled activities are up to the user's imagination. No meta is required for the transmission of live activity on camera.

Live feeds may be contrasted further still with the temporality of realtime message streams. I've argued that realtime activity streams are still experienced by users in their own time. That streamtime is not a shared experience of time. In webcam chat time is shared, users are in one another's time, creating a stretch of shared time together. This solves a problem that realtime messaging applications suffer from: the ordering of messages delivered in realtime.

Realtime messages are delivered in chronological order. But this order bears no relation to message content or context. It is simply the order in which they arrive. Consequently, the order created by design, and by means of which messages are posted and displayed, adds no value and supplies no narrative or conversational threading to the content itself (or for that matter to its authors). The realtime temporality of message delivery is extrinsic to its meaning.

Which is in part why the medium creates so much noise and redundancy. For in any social medium, attention is the resource with which the engine keeps running.

Attention is focused in webcam experiences fundamentally differently than it is in experiences that use the screen for display and re-presentation. (See yesterday's post.) The screen modality of webcam chat uses "windows" through which we see the other user(s). Obviously, then, our attention is on what we see (including ourselves seen seeing). And because social media are about giving and getting attention, we hold the attention of the other by visual spectacle. In visual media, attention goes to that which is the most compelling, riveting, ridiculous, funny, or obscene. In short the "sociality of the spectacle."

Which brings us, finally, to devolution and the corruption of social media experiences. Communication and attention being the scarce resource in a medium that produces surplus and excess, a seemingly unavoidable systemic process of negentropy often accompanies the rise of noise and redundancy that occurs with system growth. Negentropy is the phenomenon of increasing order, and it appears in uncoordinated social systems as self-reinforcing dynamics emerge around common practices. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, order will generally emerge around the lowest common denominator: the form, content, performance or expression most likely to communicate (get attention).

In Chatroulette, this is already the obscene. Obscenity, like the raunchy and ridiculous, make for compelling viewing and will thus always attract attention. Attention is sought after by the individual, and secured by the sustained engagement of one other viewer (or roomful of viewers, but one view). The spectacle is singularly interesting.

But in realtime streaming services like twitter, attention is sought amidst a massive audience in a constant flow of messages. Thus repetition is the lowest common denominator in twitter: the trending topic or bit of news whose headline and social significance are gaining the attention of the audience at large. A reference to common knowledge and news, including gossip, rumor, and hearsay, secures attention. Not the spectacle of the singularly fascinating sight, but the spectacle of the massively popular hit or trend.

The sociality of twitter thus involves the attention-grabbing awareness of an audience becoming community or populace. Focusing the awareness of all on one unifying theme. The sociality of ChatRoulette involves the attention-getting focus of one, creating the intimacy of a couple for a stretch of time outside the view of the rest.

And so it is, in my view, that the answer to Nick's question is not that in an age of public social networking we desire its opposite, anonymity. But that in any mediated social experience a number of intrinsic transformations of experience that involve our senses, our interest in others, communication and its modes, and the construction of unique mediated realities, together fashion the constraints and opportunities for paying attention in new ways. Hulu would do well to consider a co-viewing option (perhaps initially pre-screened and using community flagging norms) instead of a messaging platform. After all, ChatRoulette shows us that if it's not anonymity we desire, we do desire new experiences with others.

Social and conversational implications of cross-referenced activity streams

Efforts are currently underway to link up @names and @replies in Buzz and make them share-able across networks using activity streams. If successful, this would mean that naming a user in one service would surface the message elsewhere. A buzz post containing an @twitter_username would resolve to the user's twitter profile. And the mention could be surfaced within that user's twitter stream.

At this point in time the technical challenges are not simple. So the scenario I am exploring here is conjectural. But worth speculating on, if for no other reason than the probability that sharing across activity streams seems in ways inevitable. Note that the points I raise are not criticisms of the effort, but observations intended to spark discussion.

Let's contemplate the implications of conversation across activity streams. Implications involve not only the facilitation of communication between networks, but other factors too, including redundancy, notifications, noise, spam, context, and quite possibly, an increased burden on users to meet conversational expectations. Each of these is a matter of social interaction design — user experience of networked talk and relationships among users maintained in social media tools and applications. I will address these in no particular order.

For simplicity's sake, let's just assume that a single user is named in a single post authored in Buzz, and avoid contemplating multiple username mentions.

Redundancy
Sharing @mentions across networks would increase message redundancy. Our sample message would appear in twitter as an @reply. If it were longer than 140 characters, it would be truncated to fit twitter's format. Alternatively, it might appear as a system notification. For example: "@username You were mentioned by @googleprofilename in Buzz http://link". Or: "I liked what @username said" by@googleprofilename from Buzz. Formatting issues would of course have to be addressed.

Redundancy would accrue according to the number of participating networks our @username belonged to. Each would reprint the Buzz post mention. Our @username would see duplicate notifications in each network, and potentially would receive email notifications of these messages from some networks also. The result: a lot of additional notifications proliferating from that one Buzz mention.

Noise
This notification redundancy, which some might find useful, would be noise to others. My email account is already a bucketful of notifications. Which is ironic insofar as email is already meant for communication. That so much of this communication notifies me of communication gets to be noisy.

Audiences
Each network is also an audience. Users are invested in their audiences, in terms of status; posting habits; engagement with a private, social, or public presence; relationships and the expectations those entail; attention paid to message flow, awareness of audience members (services have different social uses); and more.

In other words, each of us turns to an audience for certain kinds of engagement and according to our individual habits of use. For example, Buzz for peer conversation and discussion, twitter for maintaining a profile, Facebook for friends, and so on (blogs and commenting included). Because these audiences are different and have different meanings for us, the appearance of @username messages originating in one network on other networks may lead to at least two kinds of ambiguity.

The first kind of ambiguity pertains to the appearance of the message. Do I want to see it here? Does it transgress boundaries I might perceive between each network, and more personally, to how I see myself within each one? I may, for example, engage in different kinds of conversation within each network, and prefer to have those boundaries constrain my obligations to participation in each.

The second kind of ambiguity pertains to my responses. There are two distinct issues here.

• The first concerns effectiveness. Which network is best for me to respond in, given my understanding of an author's habits of use. I may want to respond in the network preferred by that user. That's where my response is most likely to receive attention. (Many of us do this already between twitter and Facebook, knowing our friends' and colleagues' engagement styles with each.)
• The second concerns my own preferences for being seen responding to others. In contrast to effectiveness of communication, this has to do with self-perception. I may see myself differently in each network, and am aware of how I (believe) I am seen by others. This reflects on my activity and is taken into account (unconsciously or consciously) as I reply or mention others within each "space" or social context.

Not only are audiences a reflection on our self-image and self-perception within a network, they are constructed differently, too. This follows from the manner in which specific features have been deployed within the network, as well as its population, social practices, and cultures. Audiences have a sociality and are unique to each service. We can even observe tacit norms of use and conventions emerging and then passing in each network. These social dynamics affect use of @replies and @mentions. For example, the twitter practice of using multiple @names to loop users into an exchange, is not a convention (yet?) in Buzz.

A great number of these particular practices could be upset by sharing @names across streams. Others might become confusing, if, for example, @names proliferated so excessively that conventions simply broke down as a result of degradation.

Context
All talk is contextual. It establishes and creates context of its own, as meaning provided by what participants say. It refers to more than what is actually said, too, and so has social context, context supplied by references, connotations, and social significations. It has context according to who participates (including those individuals' reputations, credibility, authority etc). Increasingly, there is context supplied by location, and the different axes of relevance along which mobile checkins and posts are useful. And, of course, context obtained from the social media tool or service in which the talk appears (this informs our understanding of what participants are doing by talking.)

Contextuality will be disrupted by the sharing of @names across social networks. Not only is the originally-authored post reproduced in a new context, but any follow-on messaging will re-contextualize it in ways just described.

This disruption of context may have significant consequences for shared stream mentions simply because context provides so much of the meaning not of the message but around it also. Its references, history, and authors — these implicit cues are invaluable to interpreting (reading) what's being said and what's going on. (Talk in social media is more than what's communicated as content, but is a social activity.)

Loss of original context and re-contextualization within new streams and networks creates confusion. Confusion concerning what a message means, confusion regarding what to do with it, and now confusion about where to continue the conversation. And distributed and disaggregated messaging can mean that each of these steps in the conversational "chain" only further proliferates the branching of the series. Multiple series could conceivably take shape within new network streams. Which brings us to the next problem: expectations.

Expectations and obligations
There is no meta-data supplied with the activity post that indicates the author's desire for responses and replies. We can do this in face to face communication just by looking at each other. But artifacted (text) messages lack this intentional cue.

It is up to users to choose to respond to a message, and with shared stream posts it will be up to users to make choices in more places and in conditions of greater ambiguity. For some, I suspect this will be too demanding. Users who think about what it means to be seen replying to others, and those who might dwell on silences and may wonder if they are being ignored, will suffer the most.

The author of the original post may find the additional demands of tracking and monitoring posts proliferating across networks to be too much. Those mentioned in the post may want for a clear sense of what's expected, if anything, by ways of a reply (and where).

Loss of context robs the original post of some of the implicit and tacit expectation it solicits for responses by audiences. Where users pay attention to and are engaged by this, their perceived expectations and obligations of reciprocity and mutual recognition fail as a means of orienting their behavior.

Conclusions
I have not exhausted the implications of cross-references in activity streams. Multiple @username mentions, message length (Buzz and Facebook posts are not limited to 140 characters), commenting permitted in Buzz and Facebook but not in twitter, realtime search, and geolocation are but some of the practices that would further complicate matters.

But insofar as the technical effort to resolve identity according to some shared protocol, enabling decentralized posting within separate networks to become cross-referential, presents a clear opportunity for engineering success, social and practical ramifications are worth considering. I have only scratched the surface here. So I look forward to where this goes.


The efforts mentioned were kicked off in this post on Buzz:
Envisioning decentralized @replies and notifications with WebFinger.


Related:

• Breaking down the Gbuzz
• If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?
• Google Buzz v twitter: more on micro-commentary
• May I have your buzz, please?

Google Buzz v twitter: more on micro-commentary

I wrote recently about the differences between twitter and Buzz, conjecturing that perhaps Buzz is micro-commentary. I have had a few more thoughts on this that I would like to share.

I wrote in that post that communication in twitter is improbable, given its immense volume of flow. And I noted that calling out another user by name, or by RT, was one way to get their attention. Given that tweets are not addressed unless the user does this explicitly, there's no other way to initiate a directed conversation with another user.

I also noted that Buzz preserves commentary threading beneath a user's original post. (I say commentary because posts are shorter than blogs, and commentary generally shorter than comments. The mode is tighter and faster than blogging, and seems positioned between short-form tweeting and long-form blogging.)

This preservation of context also keeps recently-commented Buzz posts on the page. Presumably this is to sustain relevance and give visibility to unfolding "conversations." If Buzz is a streaming application, these active posts are like eddies or ripples — dynamics of flow where the waters are still until their self-reinforcing activity expires and they are taken downstream.

Twitter has no means by which to surface or capture this activity. If @stoweboyd puts up a hot post, you and I will miss all its @reply traffic and the original blog tweet disappears from view like any other. Twitter, and/or its third party clients, could conceivably highlight these posts to feature them. In fact it would be cool if Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and the rest provided a panel for trending tweets. Relevance would then be captured as it is in Buzz.

In Saturday's post I noted that the act of addressing another user in twitter is separate from the act of communicating. The @reply or @name must be written explicitly. This isn't the case in Buzz, where a comment box takes care of addressing. As is the case with Facebook status update commenting, this may be a small design feature but it's one with significant social interaction design implications.

These implications concern the types of users who may find Buzz a win over twitter, and the structure of the application's conversationality. And these two factors combined will play a significant role in the sociality likely to distinguish Buzz from Facebook and twitter.

First a quick observation on the "feel" of commenting in Buzz. It's very Friendfeed, as many of you have observed. Quick, effortless, and due to the lack of avatars, less self-referential than blog commenting (there's no picture, and no stats or links besides the user name by which to distinguish each commenter). By design, commentary clearly belongs to the post's original author.

Commentary belongs to the author. In other words, in commenting, I relate myself to the author. This is a matter of the conversation's "feel," and an important one.

By contrast, twitter works in reverse. The tweet entry field stands alone and is clearly "my" field of expression. And there is no commenting on tweets inline. @naming or @replying is the only means by which to draw another's attention. In twitter, the act of doing this relates that user to me. In Buzz, I relate to the author, and in twitter, I relate him or her to me.

This is not a small difference, but a rather large one. In Buzz, my comments are not distinguished to my audience of followers, but belong instead to whomever I have commented to. In twitter, my "comments" (@replies or @names) refer that user to me, and belong to me as my expressions.

In other words, twitter allows users to relate others in the social field to themselves, and this act is highly visible. It's probably one of the reasons that many users @reply celebrities even knowing that they will not receive a reply. The act of calling out a relationship with the celebrity in effect borrows the celebrity's status and (quite literally) attaches it to the user who calls him or her out.

A particular kind of sociality has emerged around this simple facet of twitter's social interaction design. One that contributes to twitter's "sense" of visibility, of seeing others and of being seen seeing them.

Buzz downplays this kind of sociality for a more proximate and less self-referential mode of updating. And this fits Google's proclaimed intent to bring email into the age of status — both in constructing shared and porous talk spaces as well as in embracing the form of the update.

(Google Buzz is also an aggregator of other activity stream sources, though it does not make liberal use of system activity messages and aggregate views. The only one I've seen is: "9 posts with less activity from ..." It's likely Google will take a filtering approach to ongoing relevance and noise issues, rather than a Facebook system messaging approach: "_______ and 6 other friends are now friends with _____".)

I think twitter's self-centricity will continue to serve it well, albeit increasingly for broadcasting and thus for broadcasters. Buzz, by contrast, looks good to attract conversationalists — those whose better contributions are perhaps not in talking about themselves but in addressing points made by others. And they will benefit from the conversational aggregation that accrues to top users and interesting posts.

I have further thoughts on the topical possibilities of Buzz. And thoughts on the devolution that heavy users like @scobleizer have noted about open talk spaces like Friendfeed. And some thoughts on what looks like an interesting and perhaps precedent-setting embrace by heavy-hitters of normative self-constraint — to wit, not importing tweets to Buzz. But these will each require a post of their own.

• May I have your buzz, please?
• If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?
• Breaking down the Gbuzz

If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?

After spending more time in Buzz I thought I would share a couple observations on the sociality of Buzz in comparison to that of twitter. Notable, and obvious to Buzz users, will be that Buzz is more conversational. It has a lot in common with Friendfeed, in that threaded comments accrue to popular posts in a self-reinforcing manner. The more commented the post, the more attention it gets.

This is interesting in that the sociality in Buzz, which is based on the social graph of gmail + followers, is constructed by means of comments. The most connected users are the most visible. Their most interesting statements attract comments. Buzz reinforces the attention paid to these posts by notifications that appear in gmail, and by pushing commented posts to the top of the page.

Twitter, by contrast, has no threading of tweets and their replies. Tweets and their replies are neither shown together (contained, as they are in Buzz), nor do replies preserve the relevance of a tweet. Twitter, or its client applications, could conceivably preserve tweets that receive large numbers of replies, and thus sustain attention to conversations in the way that Buzz does. But twitter doesn't thread replies inline as responses to the original tweet. This is why Buzz is a much more natural conversation application.

In twitter, sociality is constructed by addressing other users by @replies or RTs. The twitter stream flows so quickly that tweets are now lost to history in just four minutes on average. That is, if a tweet fails to pick up an @reply or RT within four minutes, odds are it's gone.

Sociality emerges around the efforts of a population's members to relate visibly and meaningfully. In conversational tools and practices of the day (FB status, twitter, Buzz, and their micro-messaging kin) this occurs through two social functions. First, the act of communication (the post). Secondly, social action, or interaction, represented by a response/reply (RTs, comments). Follows are a form of action that implicitly solicit reciprocity, and as such are gestural (they involve no linguistic statement and are just a social act).

In all communication systems, perhaps especially those that are built on networks (instead of spaces or containers, like chat rooms), the improbability of communication is the system's most salient problem. Improbability of communication can be addressed by communicating more, but this increases noise. Or it can be addressed by means of actions that increase the probability of communication. (@replies, RTs, starring, favoriting, bookmarking and so on are all system features that, as user actions, raise the vsibility or distribution of acts of communication.)

Communication in twitter is improbable because of its sheer volume. Simply "saying something" doesn't secure the attention of a desired audience, let alone an individual. This places burden on action as a means of increasing the probability of communication. @replies address an author, increasing exposure to one's own followers and finding their way into the @repies of the intended addressee.

Because twitter is made of un-coupled tweets, its conversation space is limited by the @reply and RT. Neither of these are captured in a view that threads conversation and makes it visible to others. Consequently, it makes little sense to try to tweet conversationally in twitter. Conversations require that statements be displayed serially and in order. Twitter can't do this. It thus makes more sense to tweet one-off statements, links, and for the most part monological messages.

Buzz solves the coupling problem: by eliminating the need to address the original author directly, and by threading comments beneath the original post. The distinction will result in a much different sociality. First, high profile (well connected) users will be more visible. They will not need to buzz as much to get visibility. Their more interesting and dialogical statements (questions, claims, arguments, etc) will attract commentary, which, reinforced by Buzz's notifications and privileging of commented posts, results in a conversational sociality.

Influence, then, might accrue to those not just with the greatest number of followers and most repeatable and reference worthy posts, but to those with the more interesting and "relevant" things to say.

Now Buzz doesn't have any topical organization, so at this point posts and comments will remain vulnerable to the topical degradation and noise that belongs to streamed messaging systems. Some topicality will emerge around particular individuals, as it does today around domain experts, pundits, and so on. But still subject to the noise enabled by a two-degree commenting boundary (First degree: I see Louis Gray's posts because I follow him. Second degree: I see the posts by others who follow him.)

If Buzz also had personal groups/lists, I could organize my view of Buzz conversations. I can group users within Gmail contacts, but I don't believe there's a way to sort Buzz by those groups.

And if Buzz had public groups/lists, common social spaces could become a step in the direction of topical relevance (akin to Friendfeed's groups). Then, of course, Buzz becomes a social space and is no longer just an evolutionary step away from email, and an answer to status updating.

Buzz makes commentary so quick and easy that commenting on blogs now seems archaic. It makes replying so easy that @replying in twitter makes me feel oddly aware of twitter's unfortunate social overhead (that I need to @reply to get the person's attention, and that I can't couple my @reply to the message I'm replying to or commenting on).

In other words, Buzz does have commentary right. This isn't replying, and it's not commenting. It's a conversational form in which limited but socially visible and relevant commentary will accrue to those with interesting things to say. Much more than to those who post the most, or have the largest followings. Which I like.

I'm looking forward to seeing how conventions of use develop in Buzz and to its development. And I'm very interested in the implications of Buzz integration with shared standards and client api's.

Realtime streams: now and then

All social media involve a dislocation that de couples the act of communication or interaction from its artifact, which is a text or recording. This is a shame, in some respects, but one that creates possibilities that wouldn't exist if it weren't for the medium. The medium allows us to be always here and now but visible elsewhere anytime. It has a built in "anyplace, anytime."

This anyplace, anytime is brought into focus by each of us when we use social media. For us it's always now. When I use twitter, I use it now. If I read your tweet, it's now. Your now, which is now "then," is again "now" for me. In reading your tweets I experience them in my own time, even though they were written by you in your time. On your time.

These different times become irrelevant to the medium, for each user's activity makes them present. But the differences do have consequences for some of the medium's particular capabilities. One of these being its way of focusing and harnessing our attention.

Media theory makes the observation that media, or mediated experiences, amplify along some axes of experience while bracketing out others. The phone: voice, and talk. Tv: the eye, and watching. Twitter: the now?

If each of us is in the now but in our own now, then the dislocation and de coupling of a tool like twitter is exacted on the time dimension. We don't experience it that way, because we're always "in time." But we do experience the temporal artefacts, if you will, of the dislocation.

For we in being on twitter, now, we're paying attention to other people, seeking attention from other people, who are not there now, or not in our "now," even though the tool makes it seem so. There's a temporal illusion, if one may mix metaphors ontologically. And I think this may have something to do with the residual practices that develop around attention and which contribute to the attention economy.

I am on twitter now, and for all intents and purposes you seem to be too, or rather, I'm experiencing you now (even though it's now "past" and "then" for you). If I pay attention, by tweeting, tweeting to you, retweeting you, or even simply by reading/observing (which is paying but not giving attention), then I'm being social. I'm engaging in a social act. That social act connects us virtually, because I'm paying attention to you. And if I tweet, some part of that attention wants to close the loop with you. It wants a response.

All social action, mediated especially, intrinsically seeks a return look, a response, if not from you then some other person. It's a tacit social principle and basic social binding mechanism, meaning that it goes without saying.

"Goes without saying." Communication, because it has other people in mind, does a lot that goes without saying. The return is what we want from twitter — and the reason that so many new users drop it. The simplest return is the follow — and the reason so many use following strategies. But talk intrinsically begs the question, makes the appeal, and suggests the response. Talk is structured so that every linguistic statement suggests appropriate, valid, responses. That's how language and meaning work.

The dislocation of all these attention flows, for we are all in the flow of attention, from the streams that result from them, creates a fundamental social "desire" for relocation, or connection. All these mediated forms of talk are looking for ways to make communication more probable, more successful, and more valuable.

The dimension of time is a hidden dimension but one that we know is there, and which operates at a deep level, because twitter is a tool of now. We may see the streams of others, but we experience them in the flow of our own.


This post in continuation of a thread:
Synchronic and diachronic readings of activity streams
The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing
Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime
Activity Streams: Content and Flow

Brands, and putting twitter word of mouth in context

An interesting study of twitter's viability for eWom, or electronic Word of Mouth marketing, has been making the rounds (Twitter Power:Tweets as Electronic Word of Mouth
). The research involved analysis of 150,000 tweets, treated as natural language expressions, or "talk". The aim of the research was to study tweets in which brands are mentioned for a number of attributes relevant to brands, including sentiment, purpose, frequency, and so on.

I found this interesting for several reasons. First was that I've been arguing of late that the conversational turn in social media (twitter, status updates, et al) makes everyday speech into a commodity. That the medium's translation of talk into a form that can be captured, saved, studied, mined, and so on only points to the further use of consumers for marketing purposes. (While I don't personally like this, it has a whiff of inevitability about it. The frontier having shifted from what we consume to what we say.)

This research is a rich study of the tweet in its commodity form: removed from the context of twitter user relationships and from any kind of transactional or conversational context. (Tweets used were extracted for their mention of a brand names studied.)

Secondly, the research finds that "most tweets that mention a brand do so as a secondary focus." I described this in much less precise terms last week, arguing that brands might focus less on how they are reflected in consumer sentiment and more on how the consumer seems to identify with and through brands in online social contexts. The research seems to have found, in other words, that brands are not the sole object of tweets that mention them. Brands are mentioned in passing, in conversation, yes, but not with the intent of soliciting interaction with the brand.

Interestingly, the research cites an assumption examined elsewhere that "consumers engaged in relationships with brands in a manner similar to the personal relationship they formed with people," adding that in online branding "These brand relationships may be the result of participation in brand communities."

I think there are nuances here worth some investigation. A brand's significance to a consumer may in fact have little in common with human relationships. Of course this changes if the brand community manager and consumer interact online. But the "brand" seems to me more likely to involve values, interests, and personal as well as social meanings associated with a brand but not directly caused by it.

Perceptions, reputation, trust, admiration, coveting... these are aspects of human relationships but are not in themselves relationships (to me, at least). And I think they are shaped socially, not in direct reflection on the brand's messaging and image-making.

Also of interest to brands in this study would be the preponderance of positive sentiments expressed in tweets that mention brands: "more than 80% of the tweets that mentioned one of these brands expressed no sentiment. This indicates that people are using Twitter for general information, asking questions, other information-seeking and -sharing activities about brands or products, in addition to expressing opinions about brands or products. Of the 268,662 tweets expressing sentiment, more than 52% of the individual tweets were expressions of positive sentiment, while ≈33% of tweets were negative expressions of opinion."

If I were a brand manager I would want to see these tweets in context. A research or monitoring tool able to show me context of conversation and something of the relationships that leap to life in the course of that conversation.

And I think it's important here to note that "relationships" can be fleeting, transient, and as they often are in conversational media, a sign of the medium's "coincidensity" and speed.

Referring to the brand model of Esch, Langner, Schmitt, & Geus, the authors write of online consumers, that "current purchases were affected by brand image directly and by brand awareness indirectly."

This will be obvious to a brand manager, but current twitter and social media analytics tools can derail the most disciplined analyst. Mentions are the most easily captured signs of social media relevance to branding. But "indirect awareness," which I read as "socially-mediated branding," is harder to track and quantify. Lest the ROI debate threaten to rear its head here, I still think that a softer, more subjective, "sociability" review belong to the social brand's marketing efforts.

Of the four types of brand-relevant tweeting listed here, for example, it would be interesting to know who sentiments were shared with; who was information solicited from; who was it provided to; and in what was the brand comment a reference to?

Furthermore, and I know that these questions aren't yet supported by tools, and so don't scale well: can the brand learn from how it is identified with, whether its social standing is increasing or slipping, or what kind of person the band information is sought from? Are users with social status, fame, success, knowledge, credibility as experts or reputations as critics, solicited or offered brand-relevant tweets?

I suspect that the types of expression listed here would need to be read closely for how they are addressed, and for how they might reflect on their authors. For tweets that mention brands are often a reflection of social relevance. A tweet asking for ticket information on a band is also a sign of an excited concert-goer: a sign of support and interest as much as the need for information.

• "Sentiment: the expression of opinion concerning a brand, including company, product, or service. The sentiment could be either positive or negative.
• Information Seeking: the expression of a desire to address some gap in data, information, or knowledge concerning some brand, including company, product, or service.
• Information Providing: providing data, information, or knowledge concerning some brand, including company, product, or service.
• Comment: the use of a brand, including company, product, or service, in a tweet where the brand was not the primary focus."

It's good to see research on this, and especially good to see research that regards tweets as utterances. If we are ascending the ladder of meaning and complexity from the word through the search phrase, on to the utterance, then perhaps it's not so far out to hope we will reach the rung of conversation in the not-so-distant future.

More from Twitter Power:Tweets as Electronic Word of Mouth:

They report that: "Of the 14,200 random tweets, 386 tweets (2.7%) contained mention of one of the brands or products from our list (Table 1). There were 2,700 tweets (19.0%) that mentioned some brand or product, inclusive of the brands that we used in this study."

And of greater interest to brands, would be the preponderance of positive sentiments expressed: "more than 80% of the tweets that mentioned one of these brands expressed no sentiment. This indicates that people are using Twitter for general information, asking questions, other information-seeking and -sharing activities about brands or products, in addition to expressing opinions about brands or products. Of the 268,662 tweets expressing sentiment, more than 52% of the individual tweets were expressions of positive sentiment, while ≈33% of tweets were negative expressions of opinion. This is in line with prior work such as that of Anderson (1998), who showed that there was a U-shape relationship between customer satisfaction and the inclination to engage in WOM transfers. This suggests that extremely positive and satisfied and extremely negative customers are more likely to provide information relative to consumers with more moderate experiences."

"As can be seen from Table 7, most tweets that mention a brand do so as a secondary focus. These tweets account for just under half of the branding tweets in this sample. Users expressed brand sentiment in 22% of the tweets. Interestingly, 29%of the tweets were providing or seeking information concerning some brand. This shows that there is considerable use of microblogging as an information source. This would indicate several avenues for companies, including monitoring microblogging sites for brand management (i.e., sentiment), to address customer questions directly (i.e., information seeking), and monitoring information dissemination concerning company products (i.e., information providing)."

Twitter, Google Wave, and Online Talk

This post is a reflection on some questions raised by Adina Levin in a post on Google Wave dated July. I haven't myself used the product, so this is not a product review but is instead a continuation of some of the thoughts Adina raised around Wave's social models. I'll speak here more to the ongoing innovation in conversation tools rather than attempt even educated guesses as to Wave itself. I should also say that this post is un-premeditated and off the cuff.

Wave is a communication tool. In that, it will be compared to twitter. But there seem to be substantial differences between the two, as many (some) will no doubt have experienced from using Wave. Regardless of Google's strategic interest in launching Wave (as a response to twitter or not), they seem to bear resemblance only in their contributions to the conversational trend in social tools and social media.

Twitter creates a mediated public, and this means that twitter users are not only using it for communication but for social reasons also. As I tried to show in a recent post (Social media: the attention economy explained), the user's awareness of this public results in incidental social effects, byproducts, and outcomes.

Communication in twitter is not just a matter of talking to people but of being seen talking by the public — or at least being aware that one's communication may be seen. The tweet itself thus takes on two forms. One, the statement itself, which may be described as communication (what a person says). And secondly, the commodity form of the tweet, which is an artifact of digitally mediated communication and which results in statements being re-distributable.

As I've written elsewhere, this makes many conversational tools a means of production: of the self, of relationships, of visibility, presence, status, and so on. In the communication age, these tools are an intrinsic part of the attention economy and of the manufacture, if you will, of a mediated self: one that is extended across time and space, represented and captured online.

Note that the "Self" is always extended across time and space through relationships; but media offer the possibility of representing this extension. This means that distribution becomes as important a factor in a social tool's use as communication (talking with the purpose of reaching understanding with somebody about something).

The tweet as commodity form plays into and allows many social and cultural practices involving social visibility, status, reputation, and other aspects of individual identity and social position. Redistribution of the commodity form of the tweet, as seen in retweeting "influencers," sharing news, linking to blog posts and sites, announcing one's activities, engaging in social rituals such as #followfriday, social and event pics, declarations of gratitude — all these social activities are achieved using direct and indirect acts of communication.

They use both forms. Loosely coupled or un-coupled linguistic statements; and the commodity form of the tweet, whereby the tweet is essentially a social object, and the act of distributing it supplements its meaning.

The meaning of an act of communication, the stated meaning of the tweet in other words, is the communicative act. The commodity form is the meaning the tweet has that's not in the statement but obtains from its use. A retweet is a statement retweeted and thus the act of retweeting is a social act which has its own social meanings above and beyond what the retweeted tweet actually says.

Twitter thrives on the supplementary meanings that are produced in the wake of its unique discontinuities: de-coupled conversational turns, out of synch and time, each experienced in a view particular to the user's own selection of followers. In contrast to Wave, twitter is a disaggregated social space. Each of us has his or her own window onto a social world taken in through stretches of thin but durable attention streamtime.

These social acts, which are virtually unlimited in possibility given twitter's open structure and lack of social design (no groups, virtually no functional syntax, no navigation besides chronological, etc) result in a highly inefficient social space rich in ambiguities that are as compelling and engaging as they are frustrating.

My position on this is that ambiguities of social action and intent, as well as of linguistic meanings, are the fuel of conversational media. For the greater the ambiguity of intent and meaning, the more social relationships and interpersonal handling (interaction) has to do. The more it has to do, the richer the social possibilities.

Social conventions and practices supply understanding to compensate for design inadequacies. In short, loss of context is addressed by social action and emerging practices. Practices provide a different type of context, one not of design but of interaction.

Google Wave seems intended to capture conversation in its context. It is not a public social tool, and not likely to engender the types of social visibility, identity, status, and so on that have made twitter what it is. As such, it seems interested in providing a functional improvement to conversation, by means of design, by means of containing the audience, by means of capturing and offering playback of past conversation.

Adina writes: "Wave is a toolset with even more flexibility than a wiki, with even more interactive content. This poses even greater challenges to help people understand how to use it and be productive."

I would object somewhat to the suggestion that conversational tools ought to be designed with productivity in mind. And to the idea that the tool has a way of being used. Conversation itself has structure and organization, both internally (linguistic statements have grammar, syntax, and semantic stabilities) and pragmatically (conversations involve moves, turns, and many selections that expose how participants interpret what's going on).

Adina addresses Wave's threading: "When there are comments interspersed between paragraphs in email/forum threads, it can be difficult for newcomers to get the gist of what has occurred. But there is a time-honored way to bring people up to speed — summarize the conversation to date. The summary has a social purpose, too, it steers the discussion toward a state of current understanding." I beg to differ, again, on the last point. I don't believe there is such a thing as "current understanding."

Conversation is itself an action system. Communication, say a statement, that is not answered is only an observed act of communication. Communication that is picked up is social action. The act of responding to, or picking up, a statement is an act. It has linguistic meaning (what's said in the response) and it has social meaning (to those participating). So from the perspective of mediated social interaction, conversation is more than reaching consensus ("current understanding") about what's been said so far.

Many participants, in fact, will have relational interest in the conversation to date. Not just what has been said but who said it, to whom, how, and so on. This is the drama and performance of talk, and has a great deal of social relevance to participants as well as to those who use the playback feature.

Adina raises good questions about Wave's social models, and directly poses the matter of groups: "The differences between these models make a vast difference between how the tools are used and what they are good for." Again, I wonder whether groups are even the right design approach in conversational tools. It could be that we need to think in terms of social action, interaction, and conversation rather than groups.

Groups aggregate an audience (participants included in the group), capture attention, provide social inclusion (and exclusion), and create a place or context for communication. Wave might make some of this irrelevant (I would need to use it to better understand design implications and models).

I have a preference for thinking in terms of frames of experience and interaction, over abstracted social models, and particularly those that imply containers. For in conversational tools, the interactions can have order and organization (for example, they have temporal order: a matter clearly addressed in Wave) without need for audience containers (groups, pages, place). Context can be created ad hoc as messages are threaded, arranged, re-aggregated, and so on.

That's about all I wanted to say. Conversational tools are in part such a rich turn in social media's evolution because the act of talking in front of others, in a form that can be redistributed and stored, will always engage social interests. All statements have a double meaning. That of the statement and that of the act of making the statement. It belongs to communication itself that we can tell the difference between the statement and its production (utterance and the uttering of the utterance). So for this reason, open public social spaces always enjoy the social play of ambiguity: of intended meaning and of the social act of making, circulating, referencing statements (and their authors!).

Wave seems to want to streamline the conversational experience. I cant see how it would possibly relate then to the unique sociality of twitter. That it might offer up possibilities not only for use of conversation, but for meta functionalities derived from the observation, visualization, navigation and analytics of conversation seems, however very clear. But that would be a different post entirely!