#Chatmixer, or How I Traveled Back in Time to 1991
Tonight I participated in my first organized group live chat on Twitter. (Please don’t ask me where I’ve been all this time — you’ll hurt my feelings.) There are dozens of such chats that occur on a weekly basis around common topics or professions, which I had been peripherally aware of: Sarah Evans‘ #journchat, for instance, or Mack Collier’s #blogchat. Because I recently started following Dana Lewis (who organized SXSH 2010), I caught wind of #chatmixer, an epic convergence of 18 different weekly chats into one.
The organizers of #chatmixer had provided a convenient Tweetgrid for participants to follow along, which I found to be more than helpful. Participants could see the entire conversation stream in one column, questions from the moderators in another, and messages to themselves in a third.
My first impression, echoed by several others, was that the experience was like drinking from a fire hose. With several hundred people participating, messages whizzed by before you had time to process and respond. This is what I imagine it’s like to be following 114,000 people. But it was a casual conversation, so it didn’t matter too much that the conversation was so fragmented.
My second impression was that these types of organized group conversations around a central topic had the potential to be extremely valuable for conversing with and learning from people you’ve never connected with before. Jon Newman voiced this sentiment strongly, when he proposed that “chats are perhaps the most under-used and highest-value opportunity Twitter delivers.” I had stumbled across a sub-behavior on Twitter that I barely knew existed.
Then, a realization set in. I had seen this all somewhere before. It was a distant memory, as if from 15 years ago…
Wait, it was from 15 years ago. This felt like IRC. Internet Relay Chat was (is) a relatively early form of online chat room, invented in August 1988, and accessible by anyone with a dial-up modem. Though I haven’t used it in years, I remember the days of IRC well.
Pop quiz: What’s the difference between Twitter and IRC?
One is a form of public communication and information sharing, consisting of directed (personal) and non-directed messages; conversation are organized around topics by the use of the pound sign, as in #politics; messages are extremely brief, at times almost cryptic to the uninitiated; the members of this service are on the cutting edge of technology, exploring new frontiers in media and communication; and it has been used to report on international political incidents even when the mainstream media were prevented from reporting on the events as they happened.
And the other is Twitter.
Sound familiar? Yes, IRC is all of those things. Not many people know, as Wikipedia reports, that “IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt throughout a media blackout,” and “was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War.”
Maybe you’re still skeptical? Well, take a close look at these two screenshots. I’ll let you decide which is which. (click the images for full size)
Even if you’ve never seen an IRC client before, you can’t help but notice the similarities. But that second screenshot was taken in Macintosh System 7, which came out in 1991!
The only difference is that now, millions more people have discovered the same value — this time in the form of Twitter. Back then, in my experience, it was mostly just a bunch of hackers screwing around in random channels and not really adding much to society. Now, anyone can connect with the biggest public figures and thought leaders in the world. And loose affiliations of professionals — journalists, artists, developers, and yes, even hackers — can come together to create the leading edge of technology, as they explore new frontiers of media and communication.
UPDATE: I didn’t expect to be the first person to have noticed the similarities of Twitter and IRC, but someone has already taken it to the next level: twIRC is the perfect convergence of the two. Love it. (via Mike Whaling – @30lines)
Twitter Analytics: Where Are You?
Buzz surrounding Twitter’s quest for a business model has intensified recently, ranging from crackpot theories from unknown bloggers (like myself) to major media coverage. There was the unveiling of ExecTweets, a joint partnership with Microsoft, and more recently, major speculation about a possible takeover from Google.
In the meantime, it shocks me that Twitter is not selling one thing already: analytics. Brands, marketers, and even plenty of Twitter Elitists would kill to know more about their influence: from the really simple stuff like visits to your profile, to better understanding how your conversations spread (beyond invented metrics like ReTweetability). Omniture has rolled out a Twitter analytics package, but much of the data I’m envisioning can only come from the mothership. Not only would this provide value to those already well established in the community, but would be indispensable to those trying to build a business case for their companies and clients to dip a toe in the water.
This seems like a no-brainer. The talented developers at Twitter could launch this tomorrow if they wanted. So where are the analytics?
Donations to Social Causes: Closing the Loop
[As I was doing some blog spring cleaning, I came across this post, which I had written back in November '08. For some reason, it slipped through the cracks and I never clicked "Publish." At the time, it was just speculation; but more than anything, it's interesting to see how groups like CharityWater are now doing a much better job increasing transparency in charitable giving than what I described here.]
We’ve all seen the ads: “For only pennies a day, you can make the difference in the life of a child.” The thing is, this is absolutely true. Whatever the cause, whether it’s children in Africa or the homeless in your neighborhood, it doesn’t take much to make a difference. So why are so many of us reluctant to take that step, even if we believe it would be money well spent?
I had the pleasure of catching a live speech from Anderson Cooper in October. He summed up the issue very plainly, saying “transparency is the key to giving money.” This may not seem particularly profound, but it’s implications are. The biggest impediments to greater charitable giving as I see them are the following:
- We don’t trust the brand. Who would give money to an organization they’d never heard of, no matter how passionate a one might feel about the cause they claim to support? Larger organizations like the United Way and UNICEF attract donations despite the fact that they suffer from (relatively) massive overhead and there is no direct feedback about where one’s donation might actually be going. This is because they have built trusted brands, and donors know that these organizations sacrifice a certain degree of efficiency for trust.
- We don’t think it will make a difference if we’re the only ones contributing. A great majority of the decisions we make every day are dependent in a more or less direct fashion on our perception of others’ decisions given the same choices. It’s rooted in our DNA — throughout our evolutionary development, our ancestors were the ones who survived by keeping with the pack, while those who set off on their own more frequently took themselves out of the gene pool. In practice, this is why right now Wikipedia has a graph at the top of every page indicating collective progress towards their fundraising goal of $6 million. To this end, I see services like The Point having a significant impact as they become more mainstream.
- There is no money-back guarantee. This is invaluable in making purchase decisions. I may completely trust and even vouch for a brand like Apple, but if they accidentally ship me a faulty iPod I had better be able to get a new one to replace it. Conversely, I might be willing to make an online purchase from an unfamiliar supplier as long as I know I can get my money back if I don’t get what I paid for. There is no equivalent accountability in charitable organizations, but maybe there should be.
- We can’t see the direct results of our contribution. Even if I trust the “brand” of an organization, this is the final sticking point when it comes to making an actual contribution. If I knew that I could directly purchase lifesaving malaria vaccines for a dozen children in a developing tropical country, I’d do that in a second — after all, it would only cost me a few dollars. But with most charitable giving, there is absolutely no way to know where my money has gone. As a result, I’m going to be much more reluctant to give than if I can see the direct results.
In my mind, the internet and the many different channels of social media have the potential to remedy most if not all of these inefficiencies and ultimately drive verifiable social change around the world. As I’ve written before, social media creates unprecedented opportunities for the dispersal of messages that are truly actionable. Transparency, in the form of feedback and accountability, is the key to closing that loop.
Twestival and Beyond: Social Media Changes the World
I’m blown away by the role social media is beginning to play in international humanitarian efforts. When I wrote about how social media can change the world as part of Blog Action Day ‘08 back in October, I had no idea how close we were to seeing some of those concepts brought to life. I had written,
For the first time in the history of humanitarian aid, individual donors and worthy organizations can connect meaningfully on opposite sides of the world…. You now are beginning to have the tools at your disposal to have a direct, measurable impact on these causes — to help solve the immediate problems, on the ground, in communities with the most need. You can help build a school in Southeast Asia, provide clean drinking water for an entire African village, or prevent domestic abuse in your own neighborhood, with the social media tools you use every day. The real solution is in going straight to the source, and it doesn’t take much…
So I was stunned when this email landed in my inbox last week. It came from Scott Harrison at charity: water.
I attended the Twestival in Boston back in February, but to be honest hadn’t thought much of it since (just starting a new job might have something to do with that). But here was the result of synchronized events across 202 cities worldwide: a brand new well was being drilled to provide drinking water for a village in Ethiopia, and those of us who couldn’t be there in person got to see the actual result of our participation.
And it’s exciting to read about initiatives like SalaamGarage , featured just this afternoon in a post over on Mashable. Founder Amanda TK describes SalaamGarage as “humanitourism meets Web 2.0.”. Dana Oshiro at Mashable writes,
The group sends amateur photographers to developing countries to study and document the work of nonprofit organizations. One recipient organization,Vatsalya, provides food, education and health care to street orphans in Jaipur…. Through Facebook, photo blogs, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube, SalaamGarage has helped Vatsalya gain seven new onsite volunteers and media exposure in major outlets including the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Trip photos have been featured in Vatsalya founder Jaimala Gupta’s book “Eighteen Million Question Marks: Street Children of India” and a 2009 calendar – publications that have raised $15,000 towards the organization’s work.
This is the model for social change through social media — and it is now becoming a reality. Forget how many followers you have on Twitter, or how many eBooks you’ve published. This is meaningful stuff.
This is the power of social media.
Social Media for B2B
(Note: This is a reprint of a post I wrote over on the Hill Holliday blog.)
Enquiro Research recently reported that 93.1% of business technology purchasing decisions are researched online. Not surprisingly, the use of search (and predominantly Google) comprises a significant share of the online research performed.
More interestingly, however, is the fact these same business buyers are startlingly active on social platforms. Forrester recently published the results of a survey of the online behaviors of business technology buyers, which found that they more socially engaged online than the average adult consumer.
Almost all respondents maintained at least a passive level engagement with social media: 91% of buyers in the business-to-business sector reported reading blogs, consuming user-generated video, or listening to podcasts. But social participation among B2B buyers runs much deeper — nearly half (43%) reported actively creating content on social platforms themselves. This figure is nearly double the average among all US online adults.
Social media is staged to play an ever-increasing role in actual purchase influence among business buyers. Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff sums up the situation in a recent blog post: “What does this mean for you? If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late.”
Take the High Road
Just something to noodle on over the weekend. This is from a study (Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To) cited in The Art of Strategy, which I’m finally almost finished with. (Great read if you like game theory, but especially if you know nothing about game theory.)
The nouveau riche flaunt their wealth, but the old rich scorn such gauche displays. Minor officials prove their status with petty displays of authority, while the truly powerful show their strength through gestures of magnanimity. People of average education show off the studied regularity of their script, but the well educated often scribble illegibly. Mediocre students answer a teacher’s easy questions, but the best students are embarrassed to prove their knowledge of trivial points. Acquaintances show their good intentions by politely ignoring one’s flaws, while close friends show intimacy by teasingly highlighting them. People of moderate ability seek formal credentials to impress employers and society, but the talented often downplay their credentials even if they have bothered to obtain them. A person of average reputation defensively refutes accusations against his character, while a highly respected person finds it demeaning to dignify accusations with a response.
Seemingly obvious observations, but I think about the last sentence in particular within the context of a recent post about defending your brand online.
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Responding to Overzealous Followers While Representing Your Brand
Inbound Marketing For The Win!
I got a sneak peek at 6:30am this morning at the music video debut of the endlessly talented Rebecca Corliss (aka @repcor), who wrote, directed, and edited the following two minutes and fifty-three seconds of unbound awesomeness promoting inbound marketing:
Also featuring cameos from Hubspot cohorts Ellie Mirman (@ellieeille), Pamela Seiple (@pamelump), Mike “If you’re not dialing, I’m not smiling” Volpe (@mvolpe), and others (watch closely for the Fail Whale).
The Only Thing You Need to Know About Using Twitter
A contact recently reached out to me with a Twitter etiquette question. Many of the Twitterati have written about “Twittiquette” already, but I see no need for a primer on professional conduct. The people behind the “@” signs that you interact with on Twitter are exactly that — people (with the exception of Sockington and the Mars Phoenix). My response to the question in question was simple.
The only thing I ever suggest to people about using Twitter is to be human (even if you’re representing your company) and be helpful. Stick to those principles and you can’t go wrong.
That’s it. Shortest blog post you’ll ever read.
The Ultimate Measure of Twitter Influence: Average Clicks Per Link Posted
I have a pretty simple metric for how I measure engagement within Twitter and the growth of my own influence: average clicks per link posted. This shows me exactly what my reach is within Twitter when I share something.
Why is this the ultimate metric?
- Anyone can amass a couple thousand followers on Twitter — that’s nothing special (would someone please tell Matt Bacak?). Do your followers listen to you, engage with you, and look to you as a resource? Clicks per link is a concrete measure of the value you bring to your conversations.
- With URL shorteners, links in Twitter are blind — you can’t see the domain, so you don’t know if you’re clicking through to Google.com or VirusThatWillEatYourFilesAndSpamYourContacts.com. Clicking through a link that someone has posted to Twitter requires a certain degree of trust. (To be fair, most of the trust with regard to spam and malicious sites comes from the culture of the Twitter community itself.)
- Since most of your followers are also following hundreds if not thousands of other people as well, the majority of them are not going to see your Tweet as it goes flying by. So your average click per link posted is going to be a very small fraction of your followers (unless it gets re-Tweeted, etc). Guy Kawasaki has made the argument for Tweeting the exact same thing multiple times over the course of a day, to catch the people who missed it earlier, but that’s another discussion.
- Besides the trust and curiosity factors, more people are likely to follow a link you post if you’ve a) engaged them them in the past, and b) demonstrated previously that you link to stories/videos/pages of value (i.e. don’t just link to your own blog all day long).
To measure this (and a host of other information, I use a little-known URL shortener called Cligs (http://cli.gs/). I have been nothing short of thrilled with this tool. It tells me things like: ”The last 100 cligs to get traffic got a total of 1574 hits.”
So I know that in the last few weeks (or however long it took me to post 100 links) I’ve gotten an average of 15.7 clicks per link posted. This is up from a few weeks ago when I was around 13.5, so it would appear my influence is growing.
I can also see at a glance how my recent links have performed on Twitter:
…as well as a map (a la Google Analytics) of where the users clicking my links are coming from in the world…
…and how my link has propagated out through the interwebs (through retweets, search engines, etc):
With Cligs I always know what my influence is, up to the second. And I can at a glance the most important metric of all: average clicks per posted link.
(Full disclosure: I am in no way associated with Cligs — just a great tool I use dozens of times a day.)
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