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So What the Heck is Twitter?

I’ve been using Twitter now for 2.5 years. Honestly, I’m still grappling with the question: what the heck is Twitter?

Wikipedia, never short for answers has this:

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., that enables its users to send and read other user messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page.

That’s not really what I’m looking for. You see, I certainly know what it is, in terms of that dry level of description. What I’m looking for is more of a contextual view of where it fits, and that is where we go down the rabbit hole…

I’ve always hung my hat on “it’s a tool in the web/community developer’s toolbox”. That’s true, but what kind of tool? Obviously there’s a gulf of difference between a sledgehammer and a micrometer, and in Social Media, there is probably even more of a divide between some of the tools.

In order to put it into a little more context, perhaps a history of the general trends I’ve seen in Twitter might be of use:

2.5 years ago, it seemed to be mostly people tweeting about social media, cup cakes and bacon.
2 years ago, the hash tag began to appear in greater prominence. It had been around since almost the beginning, allowing us to work our way around the obvious failing of the system in its lack of categorization.
1.5 years ago it was all about the fail whale. Twitter’s down, oh my God…the world is ending.
1 year ago, the anti-Social Media backlash started to play in. Too many wannabes, posting information that was wrong, self serving, or outright plagiarized.
.5 years ago – the rise of accounts on auto pilot. They randomly tweet quotes, but strangely never engage with anyone. And somehow they get right around 54k followers in couple months. Spam spam spam spam…

In that time, many of the folks I used Twitter to converse with have come and gone. The burn out rate must be staggering…I really would love to see some stats on that. From my point of view, the folks that stick with it tend to be the folks with a common interest, such as my friends from the Red Sox hash tag. Simply being on Twitter to be there doesn’t seem to be enough to really engage users long term.

Having watched over the years at the open rates on the links I can share, I can definitely say a couple things:

The open rates on links are way down.
That may be due to me posting more information that is arcane or of interest to a very limited audience.
I suspect it really as to do with a fundamental change – I think Twitter is becoming even more of an echo chamber and most users are more interested in the outwards flow of information. They’re here to lecture, not converse…

The whole idea of brands on Twitter has been a failure for me. I go to Twitter for conversation. I don’t want to talk to a #$%@ing brand, I want to talk to people. If I want to buy something I Google it and go get it. Period.

Content brands are a different story. I do like getting news alerts from sites via Twitter. For me, the pitch has to be right. CNN does a good job, so does Drudge, but I found I had to drop TechCrunch and several others who simply flooded the stream with stuff of little to know value for me. I can’t tell you what is right for you, but I can certainly tell you when you’ve crossed the line.

So, what the heck is Twitter?

A good back channel communication stream
A great way to open discussion on formerly closed communication streams like TV, sports and events
A lump of clay that maybe you might mold into something useful
A system in search of a reason raison d’être

That I’m still asking the question, this far in, is in part the answer. It is, at least in part, a failure, in that it hasn’t managed to truly define itself after several years of existence.

So I ask you all, what is Twitter to you? Fill the comments with wisdom…

16 Aug 10 | Personal, Social Media | Comments (2)

“I Coulda’ Had a V8″ – Social Media in the Real World

It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with the substance of Social Media. There’s a reason for that. Mostly its become that which I always said it would: simply a tool in the toolbox of the community developer.

So where are we now, really? We’ve certainly passed the point where Social Media was the next big thing. While not all the cool kids have moved on, there are signs that even the most ardent NMDBs are tired of the endless prognostication and the vapid cries to “join the conversation.”

So let us pose this question: what if we tossed up a social media community and no one showed? Is that the point that we realize that there’s more to this thing than A round financing and having a kickin’ launch party?

Case in point (how to do it wrong): DeKupers launched a community last fall for bartenders. On the surface, all the things we might have told them they needed to have: profiles, friending, pro tips, internal messaging, facebook connect, etc.

It died quietly in its sleep about a month ago, with under 2k users (from what I saw in the user stats, just prior to the lights going out). Even among those users, on the few times I checked in, I have to admit I never saw anything that approached a meaningful conversation. However I do know that Tammy from Philly’s favorite drink to mix is a Screwdriver. High art, that mixing of vodka and orange juice…

A second case in point (how to do it right): American Express built “Openforum.com” – the place where businesses (who use the Amex card) go to “Join the Conversation” about “A new solution to help businesses get paid faster.” Egads, it sounds as though they didn’t even bother changing the names off the Social Media 101 presentation they watched. Luckily, they appear to have worked their way through that faux paux.

Inside, they’ve got compelling content from the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Adam Ostrow of Mashable, Shira Levine of Business Insider, etc. Since we certainly don’t have any other place to go to grab that content. Heck, Guy is so stretched thin over the net, he’s has not one, but two, ghost tweeters handling his twitter stream. Forget “joining the conversation” just pay someone else to do it for you…

The two spikes in traffic I believe are tied to media spends, particularly tv ads I saw during those periods. Amex touts the site as a success, and I won’t disagree with them. But let’s consider this: three years to grow to this point, from a captive audience of businesses using the Amex “Open” credit card of…(sorry, can’t get details on that, but it’s got to be substantial).

My point is this: American Express had a boat load of dollars, a captive pool of members, and it took them 3 years to get to a relatively comfortable traffic level. What we don’t know (and can’t know from Compete.com, the numbers just aren’t good enough) is how active the members are and how often they turn up on the site.

Rubber Meets the Road

So where are most communities falling down?

“Hey gang, let’s put on a show” – the idea is utterly ill conceived and not thought through.
“Build it and they will come” – communities don’t spring up in the middle of no where.
“Set it and forget it” – it may work for Ron Popeil , but it doesn’t work for communities.
“The overgrown garden” – Like good gardens, good communities must be tended.
“Marketing, we don’t need no stinkin’ marketing” – yeah, who’d actually want to publicize their community.
“Welcome, please submit DNA sample here…” – the age old issue – mile long registration forms that’d make the IRS green with envy. We’ll know everything about our users. Both of them…
“Okay, we’re launched, where do I cash my check…” – best of luck to you. The big secret is that most Social Media communities run in the red…for years.

Moving Forward

So where the heck do we go now? The shine is off, and we’re starting to realize that this stuff is, uh, real work. Even better, it’s got a real possibility of it crashing down around our heads if we screw it up.

I see us at the same point we were at in 2002. Yes, some folks made mistakes and tanked. It happens. From here out you’ve got to get all your stuff in line. No screwing around…be serious or stay home. CupcakeCon, NMDBcamp and any place that bad powerpoint presentations go to die is a waste of your time. Find the people who are really doing it and learn from them. Hint: those won’t be the big names in SM.

Best advice:

Have a niche and a natural path to community – owning computers is no longer enough of a reason to bring a community together. Find a niche that is under served and serve it. Or find one that is poorly served and steal it. The trick will be to be narrow enough in focus to keep it real, but not so narrow that there are only an handful of potential users. Think about that natural pool of users that American Express has…
Find the three key features that the community needs - look for the features that the community needs and doesn’t have. Don’t worry about anyone copying your idea…do it, then add more. Let them all play catch up.
Devote resources (people) to running the place – everyone wants to belong to a place where they’re made to feel at home. Have people to help, especially if you’re dealing with a less tech savvy bunch. Moderate, curate and cultivate…
Preach the Gospel – yeah, you have to get the word out. You’re gonna live this thing if your going to make it a success, so be your own ringmaster. Market in every possible way…

In summary, is Social Media dead? Absolutely not, but it is certainly changing. The “new car smell” is gone, and as developers and community managers, we need to adapt to survive.

20 Jul 10 | Social Media | Comment (1)

Demand Media and the New Economy of the Journalist

Demand Media has been a constant topic of conversation among online journalists of late. It all began with this article in Wired entitled “The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model“.

Plenty of other companies — About.com, Mahalo, Answers.com — have tried to corner the market in arcane online advice. But none has gone about it as aggressively, scientifically, and single-mindedly as Demand. Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers.

Demand Media is what we’d generally call a content mill. Instead of the old days of the newspaper where the editorial and advertising teams eyed each other distrustfully, in this case, the entire editorial side is essentially outsourced, and it’s done at rates that would make any professional writer cringe. From their Wikipedia page:

Contributors choose among available titles that were previously identified by the company’s algorithm. They are paid once their work has been automatically checked for plagiarism^[7] and is approved by editors. Typical compensation is $20 for a video clip, $15 for an article of a few hundred words, $2.50 for copy-editing an article and $1 for fact-checking an article.^[6]

To put that into context, I used to write similar content online for a rate of $500.00 per article. Ouch!

For the record, there’s a huge gulf between what you buy for a $20 article and a $500 article. In the $20 version, I’d suggest that some of the little things go out the window, such as revision, or perhaps even contacting sources. Wired puts it well:

Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal.

The question I have in mind is this: at what point does Google start to put some weighting behind their search results that will,instead of just promoting stories that are well optimized for SEO, help good content rise to the top?

In This Week in Google’s latest podcast, Matt Cutts, spam guru at Google made the statement that 2010 would be a bad year for low value content, when Leo Laporte pressed him on the issue (note: this is not a direct quote, I’m going by memory here, but the gist is fairly clear…).

How do I think they could add value to search results? A few suggestions:

Leverage the actual search experience of real users with vote up, vote down, hide capability.
Identify and utilize subject matter experts to fine tune results.
Allow us to add weight to the search experience of our friends (note: that doesn’t simply mean using everyone in our contacts list!).

In the long run, fixing this hole may make things a lot harder for those of us who do SEO optimization as part of our services. However, I’ve got to think that things only improve for those who use the only time proven SEO tactic I know: providing good pertinent content in a tight, well ordered presentation.

The thing that truly worries me is what this portends for journalists. We’ve seen steady erosion in jobs for journalists over the past couple years, as newspapers and magazines cut back. Now it would seem that even online their services are devalued. Is there room in this new online economy for good content at a fair price?

I certainly hope so…

22 Feb 10 | Publishing Technology, Social Media | Comments (0)

The Blogs as Aggregator

Over the past two years, we’ve seen the genie come out of the bag on blogging. In the good old days if you wanted our content, you came to our blog. Now, our content is being automatically posted in a bunch of spots, perhaps on Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Reader, and even the headline shows up on Twitter.

Then we throw our participation on those other sites in, and now we’re all over the place. It’s hard for us to keep up with everything we’re doing, but our readers are at best getting an incomplete picture.

So I pose this question: should not our blog be the place where all of our participation is aggregated? Maybe this site indeed should be “All Things Cahill” as the name implies.

There are several problems:

We need to filter for unique content. The recent Google Buzz launch has shown that cross posting between services can lead to some truly weird looping problems. Multiple copies of the same post start to show up as Buzz posts to Twitter and Twitter sends to Buzz. Honestly, I’m surprised some of you haven’t unraveled the fabric of the universe…
What about the unique flavor of those services? Personally, I like the distinct difference between my Twitter posse, the Facebook crowd and my audience here. They’re all different communities and the idea of tying them all together here might be somehow denigrate that. For the record, Facebook tends to be my long time friends, the folks I have physically met, whereas Twitter is a more general distribution.
Does removing the message from the service remove it from it’s context? Quite probably, esp. in the situation that my comment is part of the ongoing discussion.

So I ask the question: does it make sense attempt to pull in as much as possible from around the web? Obviously twitter is here, how about Google Buzz, Foursquare, Yelp, etc.?

Deep down suspect we’d find overall the non-blog content is generally of much lower value. Share your thoughts…

16 Feb 10 | Blogging, Social Media | Comments (0)

Mattel Adds SMDB Barbie

Mattel today announced they’ve add “Social Media Douche Bag” to the list of Barbie’s professions. The new Barbie, which comes complete with it’s own iPhone, iPad and Twitter account will hit store shelves soon.

“This career just kind of happened.” notes Mattel product coordinator, Roberta Smith. “We had a ton of left over ‘Journalist Barbies’ and ‘Dental Hygenist Barbies’ and we had a quick look at where those folks were going when they were laid off, and there it was, ‘Social Media Douche Bag Barbie’.”

Smith notes that “It was surprisingly easy. When we started looking into the profession, we couldn’t really find anything they really did. We did consider adding a voice chip that would tell everyone to ‘join the conversation’ but in the end, we felt that less was more.”

The project was not without it’s problems:

The new Barbie immediately monopolized access to the Barbie Dream Jet, flying around to conferences.
There were internal problems, when SMDB Barbie tried to tell Computer Programmer Barbie “she didn’t get it” and that you could “make up for lack of revenue with scale.”
SMDB Barbie had an annoying tendency to post confidential strategy on Twitter and Facebook. Even worse, it signed a consulting deal with Hasbro and began divulging Mattel secrets. Luckily, it had no real knowledge to share with the competition.
The doll kept demanding large checks for doing nothing.
The release date had to be postponed as SMDB Barbie “was presenting at SXSW” on the initial date.

If you’d like to own this doll, you should be aware there are some requirements for ownership:

You must have high speed broadband. This doll uses bandwidth like you can’t believe, Twittering, Facebooking, and using virtually any other social network it can find. Except MySpace. Cuz it’s not cool anymore.
You will be expected to wait in line at ToysRUs every time a new tech accessory is released. A new android phone? You’ll be buying it for her. A new Apple lappie comes out, you will be waiting in the snow to buy it for her.
You must own the Barbie Dream Jet, Start UP CEO Ken, and the Barbie Dream Loft.
You may NOT have Skipper or Computer Programmer Barbie. They are utterly incompatible.

Tags: Satire

14 Feb 10 | Social Media | Comments (0)

NY Times: When iPhone Apps Are Too Smart

The big secret of iPhone apps is coming out of the bag: most apps that are downloaded are rarely, if ever used.

While I’m not saying we’ve jumped the shark here, it is important to note that if the New York Times has picked up on this fact, then it’s approaching common knowledge. Read their article, “When iPhone Apps Are Too Smart” here.

So, for every zealous owner whose iPhone is loaded with little-known programs that predict asteroid fly-bys, there are many more Caroline Cuas, who seldom venture outside the predictable. Most say they’re too busy, too lazy or just plain flummoxed by the choices.

“I think I’m supposed to want more of them than I have,” said Julie Graham, a psychotherapist in San Francisco who echoed Ms. Cua’s vague anxiety. “There’s this sense that I’m missing out on something I didn’t know I needed.”

Ms. Graham, 50, said friends were shocked when she confessed to having failed to download Urbanspoon, a compendium of restaurant reviews. She now has it — and seldom uses it. “I don’t have time,” she said.

So what does it all mean? I’ll put it simply: don’t put too much stock into how many times your iPhone app (or any other) was downloaded from the App Store. More importantly, build in the appropriate mechanisms to allow you to find what the actual usage was. Once again, it comes down to a pure matter of metrics. How many page views, how many purchases, etc.

Similarly, we’ve got to bridge the gap between coding neat little apps that get downloaded and get to the point where we have serious apps that get used.

A few things to consider:

What is the core user need your app is fulfilling?
If there isn’t an existing need, what need are you creating?
Are you applying the tenets of online community building to maintain user interest?
What are the top apps you use? What is it about those apps that makes them compelling to you?
Have you closely examined competitor apps? What’s good about them? What isn’t? What can you do better?
What are the real metrics for your app? Compare downloads vs. actual usage.
Talk with real iPhone app users, not the Tech/SM crowd. What do they really use for apps?

Let me know what you see…I’d love to share info on this!

01 Feb 10 | Social Media, Technology, iPhone Apps | Comments (0)