Taking Private Conversations Public

Last week, Lisa Hickey wrote a piece in which she mused on some of the societal effects of social media. She makes a number of good points, but one in particular stood out for me — the relationship between online and in-person conversations when it comes to trust.

Think about all the times you’ve had a conversation with someone, who later asks you, “you’re not going to post this on Facebook, are you?” They’re anxious that something they see as private and personal (a face-to-face conversation with you) will become public. That’s a fair concern, and sensitive people who are devotees of social media need to be mindful of it.

However, I see a divide between the assumptions of people who are users of social media and those who are not. They are in conflict — most social media types assume that conversations are open for sharing unless they are specifically asked not to. But most people who do not use social media see it the opposite way.

As I have been experimenting with video lately, I started a thread on the issue at the video-conversation site Seesmic. Here it is (though I had to shift the video to YouTube for technical reasons):

The full Seesmic conversation thread can be found here, if you would like to see responses and join in.

What do you think? Where do you draw the line? Where do you think society at large will draw it?

Astroturf On Twitter

In organizing circles, “astroturf” refers to the practice of creating the simulation of a grassroots groundswell through robo calls, highly choreographed postcard campaigns, etc. People on Capitol Hill can tell it’s happening when they suddenly get pounds of mail that’s identical.

My friend Jed Miller raises some interesting (related) questions about using Twitter as a lobbying tool. Seems the Sunlight Foundation is urging people to press the seventeen Twitter-using US senators to sign onto a particular bill.

Jed asks:

Twitter’s peer-to-peer, right? Do we really want to single out the decision-makers in the virtual room? If we tweet-mob @JohnCornyn and @Barbara_Boxer don’t we hasten the blown-vein moment that grassroots email to Congress has reached? Where what was once more intimate access is just another crowd to be herded via retractable rope-barriers and CRM filters?

I think this could turn advocacy tweets from nightingales into woodpeckers. I hope I’m overreacting.

(He’s not alone, of course, if you look at the comments on Sunlight’s blog post.)

Jed, I don’t think you’re overreacting, I think you are raising important cautions.

There are new tools — we need to develop new norms for how to use them.

Building A Talk Using Social Media

In late January, the New York Time’s David Pogue gained a bit of Twitter infamy with a stunt. He didn’t mean anything by it. He was making a presentation and as a way to demonstrate the “power of Twitter,” he asked for a cure for hiccups with Twitter running on his screen. He got lots of immediate responses, in real time, in front of the audience.

But when he told the Twitter users what it was all about, he got decidedly mixed reactions. You can read all about it here. The incident has become an iconic example of what it means to treat one’s online social connections with respect and transparency.

One person pointed out that Pogue might have added the word “demo” in his initial tweet, in order to be more transparent.

This is on my mind because I am asking my online social connections for help putting together a speech. As a part of a program with the Phelps Stokes Fund, I’m talking to a number of francophone African diplomats on “transparency and governance.” I don’t want to just say “transparency is a great thing!” so I thought I would go looking for a few ideas.

So, I posted a video on Seesmic asking for help, connected to it on Twitter, and posted a link on Facebook. The response was quick and has been very helpful.

First of all, to my amazement, people I do not know are responding to me — in video — on Seesmic. (See the whole thread here.) Secondly, I have gotten very, very thoughtful comments and FB emails from friends.

If you have time, I do recommend taking a peek at the Seesmic thread. There are a lot of interesting (all video) comments.

I plan to use all this material in my talk. My head is spinning from this brave new world.

Tweets Squeezing Out Rants

Brian Solis of TechCrunch wrote an important review of an interesting trend in today’s social media world.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

With the popularity and pervasiveness of microblogging (a.k.a. micromedia) and activity streams and timelines, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the like are competing for your attention and building a community around the statusphere – the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.

This new genre of rapid-fire interaction is further distributing the proverbial conversation and is evolving online interaction beyond the host site through syndication to other relevant networks and communities.

In most cases attention for commenters at the source post are competing against the commenters within other communities. Those who might typically respond with a formal blog post may now choose to respond with a tweet or a status update.

Result: The “traditional” venue of blogs-and-comments has been disrupted and faces challenges. Just as deadtree news laments its disappearing readership (and hence business model) — blogs face the very same disruptive situation.

This is an interesting conundrum for content-creators. On the one hand, you want to get your stuff out there is widely as possible. So you write a blog post, Tweet it, status it, and import it as a note in Facebook. Oh, and of course you syndicate it. So far, so good. But, that gives multiple access points to your readers, which means that any discussion sparked by your ideas is going to be diffused. For some people, this is not a problem — they generate long comment tails. For others, this is indeed a problem. If, for example, a “hot” post of mine generates, say, five responses, when you spread them across all of my platforms no one is talking to one another.

So that’s one problem.

Another problem, for those who are trying to monetize their work, is how to do this? How, for instance, do you monetize someone “retweeting” your work?

I don’t have answers, just the questions. And I am very certain these are not the only ones. 

Finally, the irony is not lost on me that one way of looking at this is that the immediate (twittering, statusing) is once again pushing out the slower (in this case blogs) — and this is exactly what blogging did to print and other one-way media.

Real World Social Media Workflow — How Much Time Do I Spend Listening?

Social media maven Beth Kanter has been attending a conference on nonprofit use of technology. One of the speakers was Wendy Harman, who runs social media for the Red Cross.

Beth has a great recap of that session here, with these key takeaways:

• First thing every morning, [Wendy] spends a couple of hours listening – reviewing hundreds of mentions that have been captured in their monitoring radar using a variety of free and professional tools, including Radian 6.   Wendy estimates it’s about 1/4 of her time presently.   I suspect it took more of time in the beginning as she developed her work flow and got over the learning curve – and of course was able to upgrade her tool set.
• Senior management is not turned off by the term listening.  She often writes social media manifestos, filled with examples, pros/cons, and shows tangible, measurable results from their social media strategy.
• She has a social media elevator pitch in case she encounters one of the senior people at the organization in the elevator: “I’m the social media lady who builds relationships with our community online.”   Perhaps she extends that to include “that results in increased goodwill, improves our reputation, and donations.”
• She and the others on staff are no longer afraid of negative comments or posts.  “The opposite of hate is indifference, if someone bothers to post a negative comment it means they care.”  She was also pleasantly surprised about how much was positive.  Negative comments are an opportunity to educate and improve what they are doing.  “It is about being polite and honest.”
  
• Wendy balances her personal/organizational social media profiles.  When she uses her personal social networking or twitter account, her rule is not to say anything that would embarrass her mother.
• Challenges include dealing with the tidal wave of information that they have to analyze and manage. One of the values of a professional tool is that it saves a lot of time in the work flow.  Focusing on the how to represent learning in a visual way.  Laura Lee Dooley shared this example (bookmarked posts of people talking about her organization fed into Wordle)
  
• Their community now knows that they are listening and the conversation has changed from talking to how we help you.
• They have an extensive social media participation policy that has helped spur adoption internally.

Looking at my own workflow, I realize that my mornings are often spent “listening” — yet I don’t call it that. I have seen it as time I am wasting and that I ought to minimize. Now I see I ought to perhaps consider boosting it a bit.

Selling To Business And Thinking About Using Social Media? You’re LATE.

A remarkable report crossed my desk from the Groundswell folks at Forrester Research. It’s a study of the social media habits of a representative sample of business-to-business buyers.

These are the folks you imagine are dry. Buying stuff for their company, from other companies. Where’s the innovation to be had there?

Well, you’d be surprised. This group of people are among the most socially active. Fully 91% of them use some form of social media — 69% are using it for business purposes. This isn’t just sucking time with FaceBook. “This means you can count on the fact that your buyers are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media,” according to the Groundswell blog post.

A key finding of the report:

If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late. We’ve seen a lot of excellent activity here from the likes of Dell and National Instruments (both won Forrester Groundswell awards) but a lot of the blogs, communities, and other social outreach from business to business companies is less than mature, to say the least. This is your chance to stand out. Take this report and show it to your boss to convince her that it’s time to get started.

Orgs: Back Up Your Twitter Strategy

Some of my friends and colleagues in a number of organizations have continued to ask me about using social media, and specifically Twitter, in real ways that actually help the organization fulfill its mission.

As I said in a recent post, executives don’t need fancy, shiny tools that are neat — they need things that work and add value.

Rachel Reuben, writing at Amber Naslund’s Altitude Branding blog, recently touched on some important things to keep in mind for any organization implementing a “Twitter strategy.” (Andrea Jarrell pointed the piece out to me.)

This important idea is simple: Make sure you are backing up in the real world what you are doing in the online media space.

Rachel writes:

Imagine what the world would be like if real-life was like our Twitter world. You’d go to a grocery store and there’d actually be a real-life bagger, and s/he would ask if they could bring your groceries to the car for you. (Oh wait, that does exist at Publix in Florida.) You’d go into a Wal-Mart, where everyone has aprons that say “how can I help you?” and they actually would, instead of nervously avoiding eye contact and running away from you when you can’t find something in their behemoth of a store. You’d sit in on a committee meeting at work and offer to help with the next task at hand, and everyone in the room jumps at the chance to help as well. You walk into a packed auditorium and ask if anyone knows how to fix your broken Facebook application, and half the crowd stands up and shouts the answer to fix it.

In reality, most grocery stores I frequent don’t have baggers, would never offer to help bring groceries to your car, and are never around when you need help finding something. Committees tend to be filled with naysayers and difficult individuals who aren’t there to really contribute much.

But… what if they did? What if Comcast repair technicians were all as helpful as Frank Eliason is on Twitter (@comcastcares)? . . .  What if every single employee at Home Depot responded as quickly and kindly as @thehomedepot does — including follow-ups 24 hours later? Do these companies have the same inward culture as they appear with their Twitter personas?

If you’re representing your company/business/brand on Twitter — are you being helpful? Or, are you just “listening” and there for damage control? Excellent customer service is still the foundation of solid business success, and Twitter provides the perfect way to expand your customer service initiatives into this space. If you’re helpful on Twitter, that will build a strong foundation for relationships outside the Twitter world, which is, unfortunately where the far majority of us have to live most of our life. We could use more helpful people in this real life world.

This is important, becuase often organizations spend lots of time “strategizing” what they will do with social media. But the reality is that it ain’t rocket science. The best practice I have run across is to find (or get) someone on your organization who is into this stuff — and let them go to town. Make it their job to be present everywhere, in helpful ways.

Then — and this is the kicker — make sure that your actions are in line with your online presence.

You may find, on honest reflection, that you just aren’t up to the task organizationally. Not becuase you can’t handle the social media piece — because you might not be able to back it up.

If that’s the case, you may want to reassess a few things.

After Facebook

As Facebook turned five years old last week, it marked the passage with a cute retrospective of its various profile page designs and a subdued message from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, suggesting that members give virtual gifts to their friends.

Facebook is a 21st century success story and is the giant in the room when it comes to social networking. It out-cooled MySpace, out-usefulled LinkedIn, and outlasted Friendster. In making a recent investment, Microsoft valued the company at $15 billion. D00d.

Facebook has one tiny problem: it has not yet developed a working revenue model. And its window of opportunity to do so will not be open indefinitely.

In a recent article by Agence France-Presse:

Facebook, unlike other Web giants such as Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo!, is yet to prove how it is going to translate traffic into cash. . . . “There’s no significant visible source of revenue other than investors,” said Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group. . . . “There’s a lot of potential there but they’re still kind of living in this dotcom mindset where a business plan doesn’t make a difference,” he said. “And as we saw with the dotcoms, that has a very unfortunate end to it.”

I love Facebook and I sure hope it figures out how to make real money. But no institution lasts forever. The days of GM, IBM, GE are numbered — as are the days of current behemoths Google, Microsoft, and others.

What will replace them? There is no way of knowing. Maybe Yahoo! will reinvigorate itself and kick Google’s butt. Maybe Canonical Software will convince a tipping point’s worth of people they don’t need to pay for an operating system.

One thing’s for sure, and that is that whatever our predictions are now — they are as likely to be wrong as right.

For now, I am just left wondering: what’s next?

How High Profile People Can Benefit From Using Twitter

This from the well-regarded Pew Internet & American Life Project:

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey. While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites.

Since there are more adults than there are children, this 35% share represents more actual people in social networks.

That item crossed my desk just as a friend was asking me about the “wisdom of Twitter. Seems superficial but fun… What do you get out of it? Others?”

Excellent question. My friend is a serious person who is not interested in using new tools just because they are new or groovy. She already has a LinkedIn profile. So, why should she use Twitter?

(I am keeping her identity anonymous because her question was asked in a context where privacy was assumed.)

Just as I have been blogging since the early days, I’ve had social networking profiles since the early days. I am not bleeding edge but I am an early adopter. I have had a profile on almost all major social networking sites and some offbeat ones too. I enjoy working on and within social networks.

That said, I understand that most professionals have no use or need of many of the tools I play with. I use them because I like shiny objects. However, because I work with organizations helping them change, I have a skeptical sense of what will work and what won’t.

Most professionals don’t need novelty, they need simplicity.

So, over the years, I have come to believe that just about any professional can benefit from using Twitter, from having a blog, and from using at least one social networking tool — preferably Facebook or LinkedIn.

I am not going to go into my argument for that here. I’ll save that for future posts. I will, however, answer the question about Twitter.

In my view, Twitter is a “killer app” and for anyone who has a high profile it’s a must. Why? Four main reasons.

• Status updates. In essence, Twitter is a simple tool that allows you to announce to anyone who is interested what you are up to. These are known as “status updates” among most social network users. This may seem like trivia. But think about all the social interactions that go into your normal day, and how many are trivial but build connections with people. Status updates allow you to have a new avenue for such important social trivia. 
   
• Brevity. Twitter limits you to 140 characters. Why say more?
   
• Ubiquity. You can update Twitter from any device (phone, computer, smoke signals) and receive updates to any device. This makes it phenomenally easy to use as you go about your day. There’s ubiquity in another sense, too: Twitter has become an engine for many other web-based interactions. For instance, when this blog posts, my Twitter status will be automatically updated. This will in turn update my Facebook status.
   
• Asymmetric follow. This is perhaps the most important element, but one that many don’t pay attention to. It is most important for people with lots of connections in the world. The idea behind asymmetric follow is simple: whereas in most email relationships (and Facebook or LinkedIn relationships), reciprocity is assumed. That is, if I want to connect to you, you need to allow this and connect back. (That is, we’ve “friended” each other.) But in Twitter, you “follow” people, and people follow you. I can follow a relatively small handful — and still be followed by a large number. This is important because there is an upper limit to the number of relationships anyone can maintain (aka the Dunbar Number, which most peg at about 150). 

But, is it rude to be followed, but not follow back? Not at all — that is one of the norms of Twitter (and other status-update networks like indenti.ca). People who want to know what I am up to follow me. I follow the people I want to keep tabs on. There is no implied need for reciprocity.

For people in the public eye or with a high business or community profile, this is gold. I know a lot of people with large email lists, but who do not send to the list as often as they like (and should) for fear of irritating too many. That is a valid concern, and one I grapple with when it comes to my small email list.

Asymmetric follow allows me to connect with a larger number of people, more frequently. And you can do so free of fear that you are bugging people, because they have chosen to get your updates already and can “unfollow” you whenever they want.

The frequency is key, as that builds up the sense of relationship. I can’t tell you the number of times people have asked, “Oh, how is such-and-such going?” based on my status updates — as if we had discussed the subject already. I am not saying this replaces actual friendship, or face-to-face interactions. But it does augment those real world connections in a helpful way.

(There is an upper limit to the frequency of updates before people start to unfollow you — I try to keep updates to every couple hours or so.)

The trick with Twitter (and other social networks) is not to get sucked in and just spend all your time playing. Just like it is fun to hang out by the water cooler, it is fun to surf people’s profiles and just send a ginormous number of updates. And just like in the real world, that can get in the way of productivity.

So, I had better get back to work because blogging can take you away from your duties too.

But, for people with lots of connections — either real-world or social network — I really, really recommend Twitter. It’s dead simple to get started. Try it and see how it works. 

Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/bradrourke!

Experts

Through a circuitous route, I got to thinking about experts.

Seems a Ketchum PR man who’s billed as a social media expert was on his way to present on social media (natch) to a key client, FedEx, at their headquarters in Memphis. Upon landing, he tweeted: “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’” This got FedEx folks mad, which got lots of people interested and a fracas enused.

Folks in the communications world are still talking about the boneheaded tweet, pointing out that even in the world of social media, basic rules need to be followed.

(A long time ago, I learned that when making a call on a client, you wait until you are well out of the building and on the way back, in the car, to discuss any aspect of the meeting with your colleagues. Not in the elevator, not in the hallway, not in the bathroom. This is the 21st century example of that dictum.)

Other commnications pros are jeering, pointing out that this social media gaffe was by a social media “expert.” One person pointed out that, at the time of The Bad Tweet, he had just about 1,000 followers (which is a lot but not rockstar status). How is this guy an “expert?” they are saying.

That’s a fair questions but I would flip it on its side: Are there experts in social media? 

Dave Fleet says he used to think it silly to talk about experts in social media — but now he sees the usefulness of it. The area has grown up enough for there to be experts. Another person says, however, that calling someone an expert in social media is “like saying you’re an email expert.”

But, there are experts in email, making lots of money. Some of them do good work, others are all sound and fury. It’s probably the same in social media. The fundamental question is not how big your follower litst is, or whether people see you as an “influencer” or “collaborator” (though those can be markers). The question, as one commenter at David Fleet’s article says, is: “Can you help me make some money?” 

We’re seeing “old” and “new” rub up against one another, “big” and “little”, “social” and “push.” Some rules are changing, and even older rules are becoming yet more important. But one — results matter — remains.