Category: Social Media

  • Authority doesn’t figure

    The measurement of social media, or rather the lack of it, is a topic that promises to be carried over to 2009 too. I shared this article last week on Twitter, because i felt it voiced most of what I felt on ‘authority’ in social media. Coincidentally, I was also checking out Twitority – an ‘authority based Twitter search’ engine, at the same time. The first article lead me to Chris Baskind’s post on the same topic. Though I’m sorely tempted, I’m going to refrain from using block quotes from that post, because its an excellent read and you should make the effort of clicking the link and reading it all yourself. 🙂

    The new search engine has used the number of followers as a measure to decide authority. TechCrunch promptly suggested the number of RTs (ReTweet) as a better indicator. But while it does place more importance to the tweet than the tweeter, I agree that the number of RTs is just a function of the number of followers. IMHO, we’re barking up the wrong tree – popularity instead of authority. Are they connected? Yes. Are they the same? No.

    If they were the same, Twitter users should still be cheering newspapers and television and all those thingies which we call mass/traditional/heritage media, because they obviously have more ‘followers’ than the aggregate of all Twitter users. But yes, you noticed that Twitter did add a bit of value during the Mumbai events (most recently). So there’s something that’s different about this social mechanism. There’s a uniquely customised experience that we build for ourselves on social media over a period of time. Like Chris Baskind says so wonderfully in his closing  “the ad hoc nature of social media atomizes traditional concepts of authority. We may establish trusted networks, but it’s the relevance of information which really matters.”

    Shefaly threw a good pointer when she replied to my article share with a link to a post of her own. Among other things, she discusses the ‘quality of interactions’, and a four point selection criterion that she uses to ‘follow’ people, but the most important part of the article to me, was the reference to the strategic intent behind what we do on social media. (I’d argue with her on the finer points she raises on this, primarily because of the geography independence that separates virtuality from reality, but I’d completely agree that intent should drive everything else)

    A personalised, trusted network that gives me contextually relevant info (among other things) is what I get out of social media, and to me, ‘authority’ somehow just doesnt capture the way I feel about this very human network. And its not just the term. It makes me feel that maybe we are guilty of taking the term ‘follower’ a tad too literally. In trying to be ‘thought leaders’ and such, the human ego is perhaps trying to thrust upon social media a set of metrics which don’t belong. Authority reminds me of circulation, readership, listenership, viewership, and so on. Maybe its just me, but haven’t we walked that path before? Lets try a different path please.

    until next time, desperate measures?

    PS. Check ‘Mumbai’ on Twitority and you might get a clue on where ‘authority search’ will lead us

    PPS. 2009 (for now) will see this blog with an altered content strategy. The 3 posts per week are being cut down to 2 – one each on Monday and Thursday, but I shall try to post a few interesting links in addition to this. Please don’t sulk 🙂

  • Nick Niche

    Trendwatching has a small preview of the consumer trends of 2009 – half a dozen, to be exact. You can catch all 6 here. The one that interested me most was “nichetributes”, which is defined as

    the power of making products and services relevant by incorporating ‘attributes’ and features that cater to distinct (if not niche) consumer lifestyles and situations.

    While the explanation does say it’s different from the long tail, and is about “additions to existing products”, I am not convinced that its so disconnected. I’d say that its the long tail within the product users. How many times have we wished that this product had just that extra feature we were looking for – from apparel to furniture to electronic goods? But yes, I am in agreement with the fact that it is a hot trend. The explanation of nichetributes ends with the following line

    * NICHETRIBUTES is decidedly not about advertising, i.e. tailoring a mass product’s message to a specific audience; it’s about tailoring the product itself to that specific audience.

    I agree with that too, but why not advertising too, thanks to the web and social media. In fact, I think it would work great if collaborative product building was backed by a communication to let customers know that customised products can be made to happen. This would help engage the ‘minority markets’ that look for these specific features/attributes in their existing product. It could mean more affinity for the brand and may even bring in new users who were waiting for this feature. There are quite a few brands that allow customisation- NikeiD comes immediately to mind.

    In fact, I’d say that this is perhaps a great way for brands to start out on social media. While mass advertising could cater to the consumers that constitute the head of the long tail graph, social media could cater to the thinner portions. It would be great to have product customisation happening side by side, but it could also start with customised advertising to specific ‘minority markets’ – the long tail of brand communication.

    until next time, minority reports

    PS. while on trends, a great read 🙂

  • BoT – Brands on Twitter

    A few days back, there were a couple of very interesting posts on Mashable – on the topic of whether brands belong to Twitter- one post against, and a couple of days later, a rebuttal. The first post first suggests a fee for brands to be part of Twitter, and then says that they should be banned altogether since it would be against the spirit of Twitter. It finally advocates the use of personalities, since people like to talk to people. The second post, while agreeing that spam accounts are generally disliked, states that brands can have personalities too, and gives some great examples, and tips for brands on Twitetiquette.

    I thought these posts and the issue of bloggers being paid to write posts about brands (which surfaces when we are sufficiently bored of doing this guy’s job of finding revenue models for social media) were two sides of the same coin. The issue of trust is being tackled from two sides.

    In the case of brands being on Twitter, the argument is that faceless brands cannot be authentic or transparent like a real person. How can we trust such an entity? In the case of bloggers who are paid to write posts about brands, the argument is that if they are paid for it, how can we trust the veracity of what they’ve written?

    In both the cases, the answer will emerge by itself, in time. If brands use this as a one way communication medium, to just broadcast, without having interesting conversations or adding value for the audience, the crowd will treat it as a broadcaster and move away, unless there is some really awesome content being shared all the while. If bloggers make up stuff about a brand, and transmit it to their readers, the crowd will remember not to trust them the next time.

    A bit more on the topic of brands on Twitter, since its debatable whether the brand should be itself, or have a spokesperson who represents it. Its understood that behind every brand (not including spam accounts) on Twitter, is a human being, even he is one that first configured Twitterfeed to send out ‘auto tweets’. So, I am guessing that what would’ve happened more often than not, is that an individual came on to twitter, discovered how cool it was, and then decided that it was a great place for his organisation/brand to communicate to the outside world, which contains his consumers and potential consumers. A chance for the brand to talk about itself, and hear from consumers what they had to say.

    The individual would already have an equity on Twitter, and would enjoy the trust of those who follow him. Considering how a blogger who writes a paid-for-post (even with disclosure) is almost crucified, it is understandable if he wouldn’t want to mix his own equity with that of the brand’s equity, especially when there is every chance that the organisation may not have a policy on social media, and he wouldn’t be getting paid like the celebrity blogger. Also he doesn’t even know how long he would be with the organisation. Lastly, by mixing a personal account with a brand, the person might be constrained to speak of things in context with what the organisation does.

    Keeping all this in mind, I’d have liked to say that brands belong on Twitter, as brands. After all, we already have people building personal brands. In fact, organisations should perhaps look at multi functional teams which can communicate with consumers on different aspects with authority and domain knowledge, so that over a period of time, they can re-create the credibility they enjoy in the real world, in the digital world too. This post, however, gives some great points on why the logo should be replaced by a public face.

    In summation, though, I’d have to say that as always with any strategy, it’d have to boil down to intent. As this wonderful post correctly says, “The beauty of Twitter is that it is what you make of it, and you can make so many things of it”. What do you think?

    until next time, brands are limitless characters?

    PS. … and in this season of giving, here are 2 good resources I’d like to share with you

    In return, i’d request you to give a few minutes of your time and participate in the Exchange4Media.com & Blogworks.in Blog & Social Media survey.

    Merry Christmas everyone, have a great 2009, and I’ll see you next year . 🙂

  • Connecting people

    It might be time for Nokia to rethink that line, thanks to the following recent launches- Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect, both of which offer data portability across sites which have implemented the services. It got me thinking about online identities. Before we get to that, a bit of introduction.

    Facebook Connect, when implemented on a website allows any user to log in using their Facebook credentials and use that identity to comment etc, and also transmits these activities back to Facebook. FB seems to have focused on popular web services like Digg, Hulu, among others, and a couple of entities that got me interested in the deal – Disqus (soon) and Twitter. It perhaps hopes to use their massive user base, to popularise itself. On the other hand, Google  seems to be have the average blogger in mind, and has tied up with Yahoo, AIM, Open Id and now Twitter to have a common login across websites that have implemented Google Friend Connect. A good comparison can be found here.

    As a blogger, Facebook Connect seems to be a more difficult thing to set up, but implementation in individual blogs will be helped by the plugins (esp on WordPress). I’m wondering whether FB will try to seed this service through the Blog Networks app that’s quite popular there. FB Connect does offer great advantages thanks to the social connect that is brought about by the usage details being transmitted back to Facebook.   So if I had installed FB Connect on this site, and you had used your FB id to login and comment, the fact that you’d commented would be shown on your newsfeed on FB, thereby giving that extra exposure to this site. Although Facebook assures data security and privacy, it does seem a little like opening your FB account to the world, since a lot of profile details will get displayed when you use the FB Connect service. The other question I have is whether these activities become the property of Facebook by virtue of appearing in the newsfeed? (I remember the old controversy on ownership of content uploaded on FB)

    Google Friend Connect seems to be quite easy to set up, and in that sense makes it simpler for a regular blogger to adopt it. The snag is that inspite of the Invite option, I don’t get much additional exposure since the usage information doesn’t get reflected anywhere (not even Orkut). I wonder if Google will have a one click installation of the service in the next version of Blogger. I am also thinking about where Ad Sense will be made to fit into all this.

    And now to the identity part. I blog as manuscrypts, a handle that I have used for more than 5.5 years now. For most of those years, the real me could only be pieced together from various posts I’d written. With the increasing usage of social/business networking services like Facebook and LinkedIn, my real world identity is not exactly a secret now. If i choose to comment on any blog using FB/Google Friend Connect, it has to be using the ‘real identity’, unless I create profiles only for my virtual self. 🙂

    On one hand, a portable identity across the web, and the advantages it offers are tempting, on the other hand I’m not sure whether I want all these networks to be talking to each other – when I comment on a social media site, I wouldn’t want the other users of the site to see my tagged photos on FB.  So far, I’d controlled what information about me goes to a contact, depending on his/her relationship with me. Different amounts of data for different levels of friendship. Yes, my profile is open on FB, but I don’t advertise it outside. That will not be the case if I use FB Connect. More importantly, I don’t want an entity like Google (which invokes paranoia in me) to know everything about me. The sad part is that I dont think an increase in transparency will improve personal integrity, tolerance etc, but that’s a different debate altogether.

    Me? I’ll wait a while before I encourage the use of either service on this site, who knows, maybe a LinkedIn Connect might come about. For now, let me try this app, that adds a twitter identity to my commenting system. 🙂

    until next time, connect 🙂

  • Faces in the crowd

    The thought started with a tweet of mine sometime back- “if some of my twitter friends lived geographically closer, my real social life would rock too :|” At least one blogger and now microblogger seemed to think so too. Why Twitter friends? Because on Facebook, and earlier Orkut, its mostly reunions or keeping in touch with those you already know. They are what i call contextual friends – made by us at some point in time at school, college or at some workplace. Their relevancy decreases with time and space. Yes, that is generalisation, and I do have a way of coldly analysing it. Humour me 🙂

    Blogging and Twitter work in a different way. You guys read this blog because you like the content, or you have to laugh twice a week at how a guy exhibits his lack of writing skills so blatantly to the world. Anyway, the majority of you do not know me from reality. Now increase and decrease the number of characters (people and letters respectively 😉 ) and you get Twitter. So in the case of blogs and twitter, you first get to know people virtually, and if all works well, you perhaps might meet up really. Now, in my case, except for a few meetings (that i can count on one hand) and one blog meet (which reaffirmed that I shouldn’t be attending them) I have kept my anti social record quite clean. 😀

    But the Twitter statement came because I’ve come across at least a couple of people on Twitter, with whom i have vibed splendidly. While it started off in my characteristic guarded manner, over a period of time, I’ve been able to be truly me, and not do anything for acceptability, with them.

    Let me elaborate a bit on this. In reality, we befriend people with whom we have a few things in common. There are some traits of theirs which we don’t particularly like, but since the net takeout is positive, we continue the relationship. Some of us, knowing that others dont like a particular trait, play it down in front of them, to be more acceptable. This is something I’ve grown to hate, and which along with my occasional penchant for “Hey, spade”/switching off, would partially explain the decrease in my real social activities.

    In reality its very difficult to tap people on their back, ask them ‘hey, are you interested in bollywood, F1, spirituality, music….and subscribe to certain views’ and then have sensible discussions, where we can even agree to disagree. I think virtuality makes it easier, but the snag then, is geography. The other snag is that it will push me deeper into the anti social shell, because now I know kindred souls exist, albeit far away.

    until next time, i still agree to a bit of socialism though 🙂