Archives - June 2009


Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought?

The blogosphere’s been buzzing with commentary on the latest ‘OMG Twitter!!!’ article, this time a Time cover story – How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live (ignore my cynicism – it’s worth a read). It observes that lovely though the ambient awareness of others’ daily lives that regular status updates afford us are, the more interesting application of Twitter is in the way it can add a second layer of dialogue & bring a wider audience into exchanges which would have previously been closed – delivering a “super fresh” web of real time conversation.

Wired’s Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought takes this one step further, exploring how these new ways of communicating may actually be changing the ways we conceive and develop thoughts and ideas:

The most important thing about [Twitter] isn’t the messages themselves — most of them are admittedly banal — but the form of the message: 140 characters or fewer

If you want to understand how and why that matters, think about another textual medium — the book. For the last 2,000 years of Western culture, the book has been the ideal, default form of the written word — the organizing shape of thought, the fundamental unit of knowledge — and no one should expect the humble 140-character tweet to take its place. But the invention of the book was world-changing not because it made possible the kinds of extended thoughts that fit that shape … but because it gave them a radically expansive new form, allowing us to mass-distribute, study, catalogue, cross-reference, and otherwise get them out of our heads and into the world in powerful ways not previously imaginable.

And just so, too, by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation.

NYU professor Jay Rosen talks about “mindcasting” – whereby the germ of an idea may be tossed out in a tweet (vs a fully formed blog post or think piece), and then shared, picked up by others, and thus critiqued, reshaped and developed in the process.

Nick Carr’s controversial piece in the Atlantic last year (Is Google Making Us Stupid) argued that our habitual consumption of bite-sized content online is shallower than the more intense and sustained consumption of long-form content from printed books, which in turn has a detrimental effect on our cognitive abilities by diminishing our capacity for concentration and contemplation.

Whether or not Carr turns out to be right remains to be seen – there’s no conclusive proof either way (although a UCLA study found that amongst older adults, web searching actually appeared to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that’s not activated during reading). And we all know that sometimes we need to knuckle down and focus on a task where we need to block out other distractions – where continuous partial attention simply isn’t appropriate, hence shutting down Twitter and avoiding checking email allows us to focus our minds. But by the same token we can also get great mileage out of the nuggets that tools like Twitter allow us to access – then spread, share and reformulate into longer form blog posts and think pieces:

It’s not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven’t always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It’s just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life.

June 19, 2009 in Communication | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Find Vs Search

So amidst all the hype around Bing, I gave it a whirl, to see if it really was all that and a bag of chips. Yes, it’s pretty. And yes, it’s got some nifty little features (although I personally detest the auto-play of videos on rollover – is clicking really that hard?). But few would disagree that Google’s pretty much nailed the issue of effective and efficient search (leaving aside the challenge to its hegemony posed by the likes of Twitter in real-time search). And I can’t see that the most important thing about Bing is the name itself – even if it is a backronym for But It’s Not Google.

Although the exact components of the Google algorithm are notoriously secret, it’s well-known that the number of links to a given site, and the quality of those links, is a core driver of PageRank. Which is great, although the wisdom of crowds isn’t always tremendously wise – it can be gamed and it doesn’t have the intuition to know what you’re after.

Which is the inherent issue with search. You query, it scrapes and brings back the results. Great, but often the real value is in find, rather than search.

As this article in Business Week highlights, we need human filters to find information for us, to add value via recommendation:

The value of most information has collapsed to zero. The only scarce resource is attention.” So how do we figure out where to direct it?

The easiest way is to get tips from friends. They’re our trusted sources. At least a few of them know us better than any algorithm ever could. Little surprise, then, that the companies most eager to command our attention are studying which friends we listen to.

One of my former clients was a well known telecoms enquiry provider, and central to their core proposition was the value of find vs search. But even intelligent search doesn’t have the value of a truly curated find from a trusted source. Google Squared is admittedly seriously bloody impressive. It scrapes the web for “data structures on the web that imply facts”, to structure unstructured data and give you a table of organised results. Companies like Mahalo, and indeed my former telco client, position themselves as providers of human-powered search, whilst Wolfram Alpha describes itself as an answer engine. These are all well and good, but an engine can’t (yet) make truly personalised recommendations the way a likeminded friend can.

Engines like Aardvark are trying to offer personally relevant recommendations – by harnessing your own friends, so it’s essentially a redirection service. Aardvark users add the service to their email or IM buddy list: you can then email or IM it a question, and the engine checks your network of participating friends (and friends-of-friends) to find someone who might be able to answer it. But friends must have signed up with Aardvark to be considered, and they can control whose questions come to them, and when. OK, it’s early days – as of April 2009 they claimed 10,000 users. But at the moment this social search engine is still just a connection service – matching you with someone who’s willing and able to answer your question in real time.

The value of influencers within social networks is huge – hence why the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are investing heavily in teams of sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconomists to better understand who we trust & pay attention to, how and why. But as research from Facebook’s friendship laboratory shows, the most valuable interactions depend on reciprocal relationships:

To rival the power of human find, the killer engine would have to be able to sift through data to find the most relevant results for us, based on its understanding of our likes, preferences and behaviours. And there’s the rub. To do that we need to engage in a reciprocal relationship. The more data and behaviour we share, the better recommendations we’ll get back. But it’s a very different matter to share this level of personal information with companies – who will ultimately look to monetise their offering – than with our friends. We want to have our cake and eat it. We want an engine to understand what we’re after and provide us with exactly what we’re after – but we’re not (yet) comfortable with giving out the information the engine would need to achieve this. It’s an incredibly fine line, but the company who’s able to crack it and truly harness the power of personalised find will really move search to the next level. Within this context, for all its claims to be a groundbreaking ‘decision engine’, doesn’t Bing feel rather more like a gentle hop in the evolution of search, rather than a revolution?

June 10, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | 1 Comment

Always Changing

[ via ffffound ]

June 10, 2009 in Inspiration | Permalink | Leave a Comment

You don’t control the conversation…

Dear clients. We know that you’re hearing all about Twitter and it sounds very exciting. It’s great. And you want to get involved. Which can also be great. As long as you think carefully about why you’re using it, how you’re using it, as long as you actively engage in the conversation and don’t use it as a broadcast medium, as long as you dedicate real human resource to it, as long as you’re nice, as long as you think carefully about the implications of partaking in the social space. As long as you understand that you don’t control the conversation. The crowd does.

As Skittles found out:

And as did Starbucks.

They launched a multi-million dollar ad campaign which included posters in six US cities, and attempted to “harness the power of online social networking sites by challenging people to hunt for the posters … and be the first to post a photo of one using Twitter” – with the contest rules stating that participants should use predetermined hashtags.

Mr. Bruzzo said Starbucks’ social media presence gave it an advantage over competitors with gigantic ad budgets because its fans wanted to talk about it online. “It’s the difference between launching with many millions of dollars versus millions of fans.”

Yes. Except that you can’t control what people are going to say about your brand. When you encourage a conversation, you have to be prepared for the fact that you might not like what the other party has to say.

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s documentary about Starbucks’ unfair labour practices debuted the same day as their Twitter campaign. Which he then hijacked, to spread the word about Starbucks’ treatment of its workers.

He encouraged people to “tell Starbucks to stop screwing workers” by taking pictures of themselves holding signs criticising the company’s labour practices, and then tweeting them using the “official’ campaign hashtags. Within hours, dozens of people had taken up the cause – getting the anti-Starbucks video over 30,000 views, a front page mention on Digg, and 10,000 signatures for a petition to urge CEO Howard Schultz to allow workers to unionise. Admittedly not as public nor as widespread a FAIL as Skittles, but nevertheless not great news for Starbucks.

Starbucks forgot – or chose to ignore – the fact that how a company or organisation behaves says just as much about the brand as its marketing activity. Everything communicates. They forgot that social tools are democratic. Designating the hashtags as ‘official’ doesn’t give you ownership of them, and you can’t stop people using them how they please. Social tools give people a voice to have their say – you can’t just issue a set of instructions and expect to control how users behave. It’s not a campaign – it’s a conversation. And you don’t control it.

I’ve joked about the sadly all-too-common ‘e.g. Twitter’ brief – the brief which asks you to consider how the brand should be using social media- ‘e.g. Twitter’. 3 years ago this would have been the ‘e.g. SecondLife’ brief. 2 years ago the ‘e.g. Myspace’ brief. Last year the ‘e.g. Facebook’ brief. This year it’s the ‘e.g. Twitter’ brief. It seems Starbucks got so excited about the idea of using Twitter that they failed to consider that it might not just be fans who would want to join in.

Did Starbucks take the feedback on board and respond to users – either to defend their labour practices, or acknowledge the criticism and explain how they planned to improve things? No. They were caught with their pants down and closed the competition.

Social spaces are transparent and democratic. So not a good space to play in if your organisation is neither of these things.

[ via boing boing ]

June 5, 2009 in Communication | Permalink | 3 Comments
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