It’s Not You. It’s Me. June 22, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.Tags: Facebook, Plaxo, Social Media, Twitter
10 comments
Most everyone starts using Twitter in the same way. Trying to gain some traction, we connect to lots of people for varying reasons: friends, coworkers, business partners, church members, etc. Those connections lead to others and our little Twitter world grows. Over time, we develop a fairly heterogeneous group of followers.
For some (perhaps most) of us, that group winds up with some fairly disjoint communities. As a result, you begin to realize that some things you tweet are meaningless to large numbers of your followers. Instead of bringing value to your followers, you are distracting them. It may get to the point that you stop tweeting things for fear that they won’t readily appeal to a large percentage of your followers. When you reach that point, the whole concept of Twitter begins to unravel.
Some would say that this is no big deal, that part of the appeal of Twitter is to bring these divergent worlds together and allow this cross-pollination to occur. I can understand that approach from a theoretical perspective, but the reality is that there are certain tweets intended for one audience, and other tweets that should only be delivered to another. In my case, most of my friends couldn’t care less about the finer points of IT leadership, while my business connections see little value in the arcane details of my chaperoning the 8th grade class trip.
Other social tools, like Plaxo and Facebook, understand that there are layers of access to our lives. Plaxo, for example, allows you to divide your world into family, friends, and business contacts. You control what each of those groups can see, allowing you to reveal more of yourself to those you are closer to. Facebook has even more fine-grained access control, giving you the ability to selectively expose different items to groups or even individuals.
Twitter has a much simpler access control model: all or nothing. You can lock your account on Twitter, which forces people to request approval before they can see your tweets. This is generally considered to be anti-social behavior on Twitter, where most people tend to keep their streams open. Once approved, people have access to your tweets. Oddly enough, people can see who you follow (and who follows you) even if your account is locked.
Within my circle, I am hearing more and more concern about this lack of access control in Twitter. Real people in the real world have real concerns about what they share and with whom they share it. Our tools should reflect our needs, not vice versa. Twitter has tremendous value, but it falls short in supporting a more traditional model of progressive disclosure in our social interactions.
What to do? I don’t want to abandon Twitter. Instead, I set out to divide my Twitter world, creating a professional stream and a private stream. Along the way, I knew I would have to drop some followers and hope that others would play along. I’d also have to figure out how to help people understand how my multiple Twitter personalities connected.
How did I do it? How did it work out? We’re out of space in this post, so you’ll have to come back next time to find out. In the meantime, share your thoughts: do you see a need for better access control in Twitter? Would you split your account? Does this even matter?
Signal, Noise, and Bandwidth June 10, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.Tags: Communication, Interfaces, Social Media
2 comments
In case anyone hasn’t noticed, it seems that everyone has to deal with a lot more information these days. This whole internet idea, if it takes off, could really make it difficult to stay on top of things. Why, then, are people shifting to technologies that make it harder to keep up?
I recently received an email from a major corporation. In the email was a link to a video, which contained An Important Message For Our Customers. Since I like this company, I decided to watch. The video was a four minute clip of the company president making a speech. It took four minutes to watch a man read a message to me that I could have skimmed in fifteen seconds. What was the point of the stretching the content to be sixteen times longer?
I can see the marketing meeting: “Let’s just email this out over his signature.” “That’s too impersonal; we want to engage our customers.” “We could dress it up with HTML and make the email look really sharp.” “Still not good enough.” “Maybe a podcast?” “I don’t know… how about a video?” “Great! That will really connect with people!”
I appreciate this. Really. But I don’t have time to watch it all. Imagine if every email you received were converted to a video clip of someone reading the message to you. You’d never get anything done! Imagine the cacophony in the cube farms!
I see blogs going the same way. People who used to write a blog are now reading the blog and sending it out as a podcast. Some people are going the next step and converting it to a video. This may be cool, but it makes it harder for people to absorb the information. The content is the same, but the wrapper is much, much bigger. In the parlance of information theory, the signal stays the same, but the noise has gone way up, and you’re burning a lot more bandwidth to send the same message.
There is a delightful minimalism to Twitter. You can skim hundreds of tweets in just a minute or two, stopping to absorb ones that catch your interest. If you had your tweets read to you, you’d never get through a fraction of them.
If you are trying to convey an idea to someone, you must do it in a way that makes it easy as possible for that person to absorb the idea. There is a place for audio and video. If you are conveying instructions, a video may be the perfect vehicle, far more efficient that trying to explain the same idea in prose. If your message involves sounds, audio is the way to go. But the vast, vast amount of what we send back and forth is perfectly captured as text. Wonderful, simple, written words, perfected several thousand years ago. Our brains absorb written words at an amazing rate, far faster than if we were listening to them or watching someone recite them.
As in all things, respect your audience. Send them information in the form that works best for them. Use audio and video where it truly adds value, and rely on the written word for everything else. Your audience will thank you, hopefully in writing.
Focus! June 5, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking, Technology.Tags: Facebook, Interfaces, LinkedIn, Social Media, Software, Twitter, Users
3 comments
In my previous post, I complained about the effort needed to join a new social networking service. It seems that every service wants to create an extensive profile and friend network to provide a foundation for their core feature. The simple act of joining becomes an overwhelming exercise in typing.
The problem is that every social site wants to be all things to all people. As a result, they wind up doing most of those things poorly.
Consider LinkedIn. The grand-daddy of professional networking sites, LinkedIn is the gold standard for capturing your professional resume. I have yet to find any site that does a better job of collecting, categorizing, and managing my career history. If you aren’t on LinkedIn, you don’t exist in most professional circles.
You’d think that LinkedIn would be happy to be the very best in managing my professional profile. Instead, LinkedIn has spent a lot of time to create second-rate messaging, status, collaboration, and search capabilities. Why? Does anyone really prefer to manage their email in LinkedIn, as opposed to their primary email platform? Why does LinkedIn send me an email to tell me I have a message in LinkedIn, instead of just delivering the message? LinkedIn does one thing well; please stick to it!
Plaxo is the best site I’ve found for managing my contact list. It seamlessly backs up my contacts, syncs them to various other systems, and manages role-based security among more than a thousand people in my address book. Why, then, does it offer second-rate blogging and status updates? Why does it try to stream content from other services into its Pulse service? Plaxo does one thing extremely well; please stick to it!
I could go on and on. Brightkite is the best site around for managing real-time location information, yet insists that you build a completely different set of friends within their service. TripIt does a great job managing travel itineraries but also wants its own set of friends and contacts. Facebook is the standard for context-rich real-time personal status, but also has goofy internal email and second-rate contact lists. Flickr is one of the best places to manage your photos, but has yet another collection of friends and favorites to manage.
Twitter, to its credit, sticks to its core function of low-bandwidth real-time information; I hope they won’t be distracted by the need to add some second-rate services to “more fully engage their customers.” We don’t want engagement, we want effective simplicity.
What service do you provide? Is it your primary focus? Are you distracted by trying to expand into areas that others already handle more effectively? It is easy to fall into this trap as we work to serve our customers as best we can. There is nothing wrong with trying to provide more service, but it can be a waste of resources to build things which distract us, annoy our customers, and ultimately reduce what we’re really trying to accomplish.
Focus on your core business. Consider additional services carefully before expanding. Sometimes, you deliver the best service by providing just one service, better than anyone else in the world.
Profiles In Burnout June 3, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.Tags: Interfaces, Social Media, Users
2 comments
Loyal followers of this blog know that I believe strongly in experimenting with new technology, and social media is no exception. Technically, my experimentation goes back to the early days of LinkedIn, but my more focused efforts started about two years ago. While my curiosity continues, my enthusiasm is waning. The idea of trying out yet another social media site seems overwhelming.
It isn’t that these sites don’t seem interesting, or have some promise of community or value. It’s that getting started takes so much time.
Joining a new social community always involves these steps:
- Begin by creating an account. That’s stressful to begin with. Should you use your real name, a previously used ID from another service, or some new moniker that matches the culture of the new site? Your very first decision could color your entire experience, and you’re only 30 seconds into the game.
- With a name chosen, you need to create a profile. How many times do I have to create an online profile? Pages of prompts ensue, for schools, towns, jobs, and employers. Haven’t I typed all this before?
- Possibly the worst part: upload your photo. Which one? Casual, professional, or formal? Just a head shot, or should I include a bit of context? Does it have to scale from thumbnail to fullscreen view? Is everyone on this service using artsy off-center cropping, or black and white?
- Now list all the other services you use. This is both overwhelming and discouraging. I usually don’t recognize most of these services, let alone use them. Is everyone more connected than me? And if I do list the ones I use, what will this new service do with them? Will it potentially annoy or embarrass me?
- And finally, the big one: connect with your friends! This usually involves uploading every email address you have ever acquired from anyone you’ve ever met. The new service is guaranteed to interoperate with some email platform you’ve never used, but absolutely will not work with Outlook without the use of a CSV file and a tedious upload.
That last step is the worst. After going through all these shenanigans, you discover that three people, two of whom you haven’t seen in three years, are actually on the new service. I went through all this to connect to these people?
As new services compete for our attention, they must improve the enrollment process. I think most people have grown weary of joining new services, which bodes well for the current sites but not for the newcomers or for further innovation in this space. We’re still in the early formative years of truly effective social networking, and people are already tired of joining and trying new things.
What’s the answer? I’ve got some thoughts, but I’d like to hear yours first. How can we make the “onboarding” process for new social services easier and faster?
Social Simulation May 11, 2009
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.Tags: Networking, Relationships, Social Media, Twitter
12 comments
Computer simulation is a powerful tool, refined over decades to give engineers unparalleled ability to test and verify designs before bringing them to physical fruition. Simulation is also used to explore all sorts of scenarios that can’t be brought to life: weather, nuclear reactions, global warming. But there is a cautionary adage in the simulation world: Be careful; if you do it long enough, you start to think it’s the real thing.
And so it is with social media. We like to think that tools like Facebook and Twitter allow us to develop real relationships with people we otherwise would not have met. And while we can get real value by interacting with people via these tools, it is a far cry from a real relationship. Like simulation, don’t begin to think that exchanging tweets, however well-intentioned, is the real thing.
This came home to me at the Microsoft CIO Summit a few weeks ago. The Summit affords IT executives a chance to share advice, learn about new things, and generally commiserate. I always enjoy the opportunity to meet new CIOs and build new relationships.
While socializing, I realized that I was learning more about these people in a two minute chance encounter than I would in a month of tweets. While there was value in the words we exchanged, the rich context of the engagement provided all sorts of clues about the real person behind the data stream. How did they shake hands? Are they dressed neatly? Do they hold my gaze or look away? How do they laugh? Do they talk a lot or a little? Do I get a “good feeling” about them?
Your brain is the most advanced pattern matching device ever developed. It takes thousands of data bits and instantly makes decisions that dramatically affect how you feel about someone. Your mom was right: first impressions are lasting. When you meet someone, you are matching them against every interaction, good or bad, you’ve ever had and making a judgment. We call it intuition, and most people trust these impressions.
Social media strips away 99% of this data, leaving your brain with very few data elements to work with. I suspect that we fill in the gaps with optimistic values, leading to better impressions of our social media peers than might otherwise be warranted. Social media is to a real, in-person encounter like Morse code is to HD television. There simply isn’t enough bandwidth to get a good feel for the other person.
That isn’t to say that our social media friends aren’t good people (especially all of mine). But it is easy to start believing that social media is enough to sustain a good relationship. Like simulation, it is easy to start thinking that it is the real thing.
Perhaps we need to think about social media as a place to start a relationship. One started, we need to use traditional tools like meeting and speaking to build on that beginning. As the relationship grows, social media enhances the experience instead of supplanting it. Here’s a novel idea: pick one person that you’ve met through Twitter or Facebook and (gasp) call them. If they live close enough, meet them for coffee. Have a high-bandwidth encounter and see what it does for the relationship. I bet we’ll all be better off for it.
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