Tag: twitter

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Three lessons from my 15 years on Twitter

Today is my 15th year on Twitter. The medium has changed a lot over the years. More importantly, it has changed me. And society. Here are my thoughts.

1. Twitter’s history has been a dance between innovative users and its sometimes canny developers

Twitter’s sudden celebrity will soon become a fight for relevance

The above post on this blog was from its very early days. Twitter was born of SMS, that 140-character text capability that was a biproduct of cell service. The character limit wasn’t alone in suppressing adoption. So was the fact that early cell phones, pre-cell-based-broadband, actually charged you once your texts exceeded a certain monthly maximum.

I was new enough on the platform, following pitifully few people and being followed by fewer, that this never phased me. But it was a problem for danah boyd. She is was anthropologist studying (at the time) youth and technology, before she left academia to work and publish at Microsoft Research.

boyd’s thoughts on the new technology called Twitter, which she encountered full-on at the 2007 South-by-Southwest, could be summed up in her blog post’s lead: “SXSW has come and gone and my phone might never recover. … To the best that i can tell, i received something like 3000 Tweets during the few days i was in Austin. My phone was constantly hitting its 100 message cap and i spent more time trying to delete messages than reading them.” (danah admitted at the time she was under the heavy sway of ani difranco, and her capitalization habits reflected it and still do.)

Twitter’s developers solved this problem within the year, by developing an app-based approach to following and reading tweets. But other innovations came from the users themselves, notably the invention of the hashtag. It was proposed by Chris Messina, late in the summer of 2007:

https://twitter.com/chrismessina/status/223115412

Adoption spread quickly, and soon Twitter had built an easy search mechanism for hashtags that we all take for granted.

2. Twitter has fostered grassroots revolutions and community-based journalism

I feel privileged to have witnessed history as it unfolded. One example is the Arab Spring of 2010-12, where, especially in Egypt and Tunisia, Twitter and Facebook helped to organize protests and, in cases such as Libya, take down dictatorial regimes.

Closer to home, I recall following the updates about the pursuit of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects nine years ago from two screens: My television, tuned to CNN, and my cell phone. As reporters on the ground, and copters circling the neighborhood where the bombers were hiding, were frantically speculating where they could have disappeared to, people I followed on Twitter were already, correctly, speculating they were hiding under the storage tarp of a boat parked in a driveway.

3. Forging friendships and business associations I never could have had

Especially since I quit Facebook, in light of the company’s egregious disregard for member privacy and spreading of fake news, Twitter has been my primary social media app for deepening some friendships and forging new one. Especially when I return to my old stomping grounds in Milwaukee, I often connect with people I have gotten to know on the platform extremely well. Twitter friends only, it’s been fun to meet them IRL.

I’m reminded that “adulting” often gets in the way of making new friends. Twitter has helped me in that important aspect of happy adulthood (and helped me familiarized myself with a ton of coinages such as IRL and adulting!).

Where from here?

These are the three bright spots on what could be a condemnation of social media. But I’m not Pollyanna. I am reminded daily of how Twitter has contributed to the disassembly of professional journalism and proliferation of filter bubbles, leading to no shared community or belief in things that are unquestionably true.

But what strikes me today, on the very day I first registered on the platform, is how much Twitter has contributed to my life, and the course of technological, social and geopolitical history.

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How to get non-Twitter users to tweet

You’d think it would be impossible to get those who haven’t signed up for Twitter to get hooked on the immediacy and community of “tweeting.” You’d be wrong.

Just now I wanted to watch the statistics while I had the USA – Canada Olympic Gold Hockey Game on the television. I logged into the official Winter Olympics site. I found paydirt — and a surprising real-time Facebook status feed. You can click the image for one that’s easier to read:

What struck me about the Facebook feed is I didn’t have to log in. Since I already had Facebook loaded in another browser window, it immediately gave me the opportunity to add my own two cents to the cheering / jeering session. I didn’t, but I did find the flow of other people’s comments to be a fun addition to my solo enjoyment of the game.

I’ve written before about how Facebook is a perfect set of social media training wheels for the newbie. This is more evidence.

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Thriving in a hashtag economy

Kudos to photographer Matt Mason for providing these photos. Click to see the gallery

A question about using social media arose this morning — one that I only had time to half-answer. I was on a panel at a Milwaukee Social Media Breakfast (#SMBmke). The question (to paraphrase): “I don’t sell a sexy product. I’m a business that sells to other businesses something that they need. But they don’t necessarily blog about it or tweet about it. Can social media support my goal of lead generation?” I said yes. Below is the second half of my answer.

I did mention The Long Tail. Click through that link to learn what that is. And if you do, think about that link. Jeff Jarvis coined the phrase link economy. Chris Anderson coined the phrase the long tail. I propose a new coinage: the hashtag economy.

The long tail is the book, and the concept, about how niche markets find what they need in a world this isn’t hindered by the economics of brick-and-mortar. There are no carrying costs associated with iTunes offering one more song that just happens to be obscure. Their inventory is limited only by digital storage costs and the bandwidth necessary to deliver the song when someone buys it.

The link economy uses this free, or nearly free, paradigm. It cost me nothing to create the link that pointed readers to an explanation of The Long Tail. The link led to Wikipedia. There again, the power of almost-free. This crowd-sourced encyclopedia saw the most minuscule of incremental costs to provide you with that definition.

The upshot is this. Since we are rewarded nearly every time we click on a link, we do it more often. That generates something that very often can be monetized: Significant volumes of traffic.

Smart businesses — such as the publishers of Wired Magazine and Anderson’s book — leverage this link economy to sell more books. And they leverage The Long Tail Phenomenon in the very sale of a book about the long tail; Anderson’s book might never have become a best-seller if it hadn’t been offered in a virtual bookstore like Amazon first. His readers might have simply been just too darned “niche” to persuade bricks-and-mortar book stores to stock it in their shelves.

Scott Baitinger, co-owner of Streetza Pizza, and I were talking about niche marketing earlier this week. I complimented him on his use of Twitter Hashtags to find a narrow group and to market to them. That narrow group is @FitMKE. Scott has been peddling his pizzas to this group by tweeting to them with the #FitMKE hashtag.

Analog broadcast channels (those based on radio / television wave frequencies) are valuable enough that they are regulated by the government. There are rules about what businesses must do to earn their right to be there (e.g., public service announcements and public-oriented programming). Things that are scarce have value, and these channels are no exception. A recent auction of analog broadcast channels garnered bids in the many millions of dollars.

Twitter handles are not limited by the spectrum of a radio or television broadcast frequency. If I auctioned off my Twitter handle, I would get zero bids. Why? Everyone who knows anything about Twitter knows you can create accounts limited only by the nearly infinite combinations of letters and numbers.

This makes Twitter a spectrum of a nearly infinite number of nearly-free channels. It draws lots of people because it is so cheap and teeming with variety. It uses both the long tail and the link economy.

Increasingly, Twitter is also spawning communities of likeminded people around hashtags. One example of #SMBmke. Another, ironically, is #MKElikemind (another breakfast group — here’s the info on my blog). Scott, and @StreetzPizza, found #fitMKE to be a channel to narrow-cast his offer of healthy pizzas (and also indulgent pizzas, since — hey — you have to be getting fit to enjoy life, don’t you?).

The Hashtag Economy is one way smart marketers are finding their niche audience within the cacauphony of other channels. They’re tuning in, conversing, and doing business there.

Here’s a challenge, especially for my friends (old and new) who attended this morning’s breakfast: What hashtag conversations have you been a part of? And how have they improved your life and work? More important: What business relationships have formed from them?

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Photo credit: Matt Mason, photographer

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Ambient awareness is to humans what coconut shells are to an octopus

Octopus using shells as toolsEleven months  to the day after David Pogue of the New York Times posted on being a newbie in the “Twitterverse,” I think his piece is still one of the best introductions to the platform. Here’s a sample:

I’ll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, “I’m now having lunch”? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?

Then my eyes were opened. A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As we looked over one particular application, someone asked, “Hasn’t this project been tried before?”

Everyone looked blankly at each other.

Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.

The fellow judge had just harnessed the wisdom of his followers in real time. No e-mail, chat, Web page, phone call or FedEx package could have achieved the same thing.

I was reminded of this again over lunch yesterday, when I was chatting with a couple of really smart tech types. My lunch companions were very Pogue-like in their misgivings about Twitter. One was even leery of Facebook. Both made points that sounded familiar to me.

I acknowledged that when Twitter first came out, I was the same way. This post from 30 months ago is an example of my ambivalence toward Twitter. I have since seen it work as a valuable way to connect and learn, for both me and many of my clients. Some business has come out of it as well.

I’m sold on Twitter. Besotted in fact. (See for yourself, at @TheLarch)

But its success could be fleeting. Twitter is white hot right now, but flash fires often burn out just as quickly.

Maybe I should revise my oath of undying love. Instead, how’s this? I’m sold on the emerging social dance called ambient awareness, a concept explained eloquently in this Clive Thompson article.

Pack up your coconuts and see the world

Ambient awareness is bigger than Twitter, and even bigger than Facebook (now at 350 million users worldwide). It’s like the coconut shells in the arms of an octopus. For those who didn’t see that story, here’s the gist: Biologists diving off the coasts of Indonesia have discovered a species of octopus that has evolved to use a novel tool. Scientific American describes the discovery:

The octopuses were found to occupy empty seashells, discarded coconut shell halves or manmade objects, and on several dives, the researchers saw them carrying coconut shell halves below their body and swimming away with them.

Sometimes, an octopus would carry two shell halves and then put them together to form a shelter, the scientists said…

“Using tools is something we think is very special about humans, but it also exists in other animal groups we’ve never considered before, a low life form, a relative of a snail. These octopuses, they’re not simple animals.”

I learned about that story through — what else? — Twitter. This platform, and the ambient awareness it harnesses, is literally a new tool for helping those who put it to use. It helps us work, play and generally be the social creatures that we are.

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Newer, smaller businesses are adopting Twitter as a channel

The joke is grim but makes its point. Two hunters are relaxing around the campfire before heading to their tents for the night. An angry grizzly bear charges out of the woods at them. One of hunters leaps up and immediately begins running away, still in his bare feet. The other takes a moment to step into his boots. The first one yells over his shoulder: “You’re wasting time! Don’t you know that even with those boots you can’t outrun a grizzly?” The other replies, as he begins making up lost ground: “I don’t have to outrun the grizzly. All I have to do is outrun you!”

In this same “whatever it takes” spirit, many small- and mid-sized businesses are strapping on a new pair of shoes. Their new shoes are social media, most notably Twitter. It’s a logical calculation for businesses that are newer and more agile. Or so it seems, from reading the results of this recent research by BIA/Kelsey.  Here are a few highlights of the survey:

Social media by SMBs is more prevalent among younger businesses. The percentage of SMBs by age of business currently using Twitter for promotion is as follows:

  • 16 percent of SMBs in business three years or less
  • 11 percent of SMBs in business four to six years
  • 6 percent of SMBs in business seven to 10 years
  • 2 percent of SMBs in business 11-plus years

There is considerable thought and effort needed to use a channel like this properly, but for those that adopt this two-way communications channel effectively, it could help them outmaneuver more entrenched competitors.

It’s definitely making the competitive foot races more interesting.

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