A Social Interaction Design (SxD) blog on Web 2.0 & Social Media

It's all words, but some words are more equal than others

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:18:00 +0000

Words. Wrapping up west wing last night (I had left the final episodes of season 7 dangling unseen for months, obtaining, as is the law of desire, more pleasure from anticipation than from the satisfaction itself, though I hope this does not apply to the current election year), I got a real kick from the show's depiction of political campaigns, and messaging in particular. The show's characters, brilliant beyond what is possible in the swift repartee and back-channel corridor correspondence they so effortlessly carry on, day after notable day, in the hallowed halls of the White House, drop political messages as culturally on target as they are tactically on point. Practically inventing policy from the wings of power, they print flights of fancy on poetic updrafts that, as if in winged migration, rise above the current political climate's spin cycle like the bouncy air that escapes a laundromat. Their words lift, and with them, our spirits.

At risk of overburdening the better angels of our nature with the heavy load of worn laundry, however, I'll cut out the preamble and let old Uncle Abe be.

All words are equal but some are more equal than others.

A philosophical moment here, then, on social and conversational media , on what we do with them and how analytical tools can make sense of them. And on the differences in both Kinds of Talk and the markets that are moved by them.

Strategic talk: this kind of talk wants to move the recipient, the listener, the audience, and without sincere concern for what s/he/t/hey *think*, produce a response or action.

Communicative talk: this kind of talk wants to maintain a relationship, create and build understanding, if not agreement. And even if it fails to produce consensus or peace, at least bridge differences and create some common ground upon which might grow a common wealth.

Professional and business needs and interests: are PR, marketing, advertising, branding, sales, and so on, and have an interest in distributing their message as well as in tracking audience follow through.

End users: more often than not, simply want to use the tools without hassle from the salesforce, for the purpose of coordinating daily realities and building and enjoying friendships online

Problem: Arriving at what is the unit of meaning that matters.

Solution: Varies by the profession, business interest, in other words the beholder in whose eyes value takes recognizable shape.

Current conversation and social media analytics still focus on words. Words can be searched. Sentiments cannot be searched. Opinions cannot be searched. Friendships cannot be searched. Influence cannot be searched. And attention cannot be searched. Yet.

Words look the same because the medium flattens speech into text, eliminates genre, idiom, style, and relationship from the form of writing analyzed.

In the case of speech, the utterance, utterer, and meaning uttered do not coincide: what a person says, and means in saying it, offer two distinct acts, and the listener can watch the person talking, or take what he says at "its word." But the speaker is not present for the production of meaning online, and only the words remain. Context, stylistics, intent, and so on can now only be inferred.

Words. We search them and from the results, try to obtain narrative, message, opinion, recommendation, review, conversation, even relationship, expertise, and psychology. We find the patterns we can see, and miss those we do not yet know how to map or model. The use of conversational and social analytics across social media is still focused on words, and the patterns we use rely on a coincidence of word use across all forms of online writing and talk. What we see is often what we want to see, what we can do is what we can think of doing.

The needs of PR
PR is about articulating messages that both define facts and seek to shape opinions. It's a form of impression management in which the burden is placed on the messaging to present the best face, the most appealing story, with the least controversy, and yet in a voice of measured integrity and with as much corporate sincerity as possible.

PR is an art -- the art of practicing strategy and executing tactically in forms that border on the personal. The press release is not so much a statement issued by a company as it is a statement already written about the company. Produced by an inside or outside department or agency, it takes the public's position on the company. This alone makes it interesting, for in taking the position of the consumer, outsider, market or what have you, the press release is highly suggestive: "here's what we would like you to think about us, in words you might find easy to pass along or quote" -- the release heads off controversy and anticipates challenges to the extent that it can, and is already a first cycle in spin.

I say this without judgment -- PR is an interesting form of discourse, and not a simple one. It requires a certain amount of knowledge not only of the company being written about, but about the audience being written to. PR is useless if it doesn't fly. But PR is even more valuable if it is picked up by end users, consumers, and so on, and passed along that way. There's no competing with the power of a message voiced in the first person consumer.

Some of the ways in which PR can benefit from social media and conversation tools like twitter would include:

distribution: how far has the message been distributed?
influencers: by whom?
pickup: with what kind of impact and pickup?
citations: where has it been cited/linked to?
On message quotes: where do we see direct citations, and by whom?
Off message quotes: where do we see topical citations, but reworded (and why? for credibility? or as a challenge to our message?)

Speed and acceleration: how quickly does our message get out? is it rapidly reported and then tails off, or does it accelerate? can we map that distribution path?

Tracking PR through social media:

track messaging
track mentions
track links
track circulation
track comments and commentaries
track reactions (sentiments)
track influencers
track social media pickup

The needs of branding

Branding has to do with the impression a brand makes on its customers (as well as a broader audience). This impression is part image, part message, part feeling, part tone, style, class, taste, and so on. Some brands want to be easy to identify with. Some play hard to get and out of reach. Some brands enjoy broad popularity, others seek to stand at the pinnacle of perceived value... Brands have historically sought out the advertising and branding media that suit their messaging and brand the best. And the internet has not historically been a site of deep value. Rather, it's seen as a medium that flattens out the differences between brands, that reduces margins to zero, laughs at loyalty, and which replaces the market of scarcity with one of surplus. It is hard, brands may feel, to rise above the sheer volume and availability of goods sold through commerce online.�

Might social media offer new possibilities? Audiences that want to show their brand allegiance publicly? Groups that enjoy brand affiliation? Markets that subscribe to a brand and buy with affinity? Consumers able to show their brand identities -- motivated by the social rivalry and mutually reinforcing "desire" that capitalist forces are meant to unleash when more people want the same thing than can �have it?�

Would users make brand announcements in their status or feed updates? Would they place brand decals on their facebook or myspace pages? Create slide shows, animations, videos, and other mashups in which they recontextualize pop culture, friends, and brands into one living and dynamic expression of co-branded personality and style? Or sign up to brand pages on social networking sites, track and subscribe to feeds, event announcements, participate in boards, forums, and so on and so forth?

Branding is about listening, watching, and possibly about leading consumer messaging and uptake -- but with an interest in seeing one's brand embedded in common discourse. So in this sense, yes, a brand wants to track conversations on social media: for the impressions made, for expressions in which it is embedded, for the phrases, images, and other kinds of statements that end users (consumers) add to the brand. For sentiments expressed about the brand, to whom, in front of whom, and so on.... Some brands may want to become conversational -- that is, reduce the separation between themselves and their consumers, and instead welcome and participate in dialog, trust-building interactions, and mutually enlightening exchanges. Not all, in fact most brand will not do this -- it is risky (or seen as risky), it takes control away from brand managers, and it can be seen to reduced brand equity (insofar as equity is "distinction" not provided by the common person)... But many may try, and those to do so first stand to benefit from the novelty of social media branding the most.

Tracking branding through social media:

track impressions
track sentiment
track propagation
track social media mentions
track authentic speech for phrases, expressions
track markets for affinity groups

The needs of market research

track competition
track trends
track culture
track society
track mass media hits
track social media cultures

The needs of sales

track sales
track seo
track propagation
track clickthroughs
track interest
track social media links, feed, profile page mentions
track competition
track reviews
track recommendations
track ratings

The needs of event promotion

track word of mouth
track reach
track influence
track trends
track anticipation
track sentiment
track buzz
track social graph adoption and pickup
track changes over time as event nears

Note: this post is "ongoing"....�

Radian6 and climate change: views of mainstream, blog, and twitter conversations

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:29:00 +0000

Using Radian6 to investigate social media conversations around one of my own personal involuntary preoccupations -- climate change -- I geeked out this afternoon for a while and have these screen shots to share and discuss. What you see above are three topical clouds created by a search across media types over thirty days for the keyword phrase "climate change." (Click it for actual size.) All media (top left) includes blogs and forums, video, images, mainstream online media, and twitter. The top middle shows results from just blogs and forums, and twitter. And the top right window shows results for twitter only.

Below the cloud panes is a topical drill down spanning the same time period: showing results for terms within the "climate change" results. (In other words, a comprehensive survey would require additional searches. Each results in a bucket of results that can then be further filtered and searched.)

I noticed "radiohead" in the twitter view, top right, and clicked it to see posts. (screenshot on left). Cooler heads prevailing, Radiohead had turned down a US promotional gig to spare the air. True or not, I didn't have time to check.

Looking at the results, I clicked the peak on April 21 to see what was up that day. Doh -- earth day. I entered that, and a few other terms, for the screen to the left. (It being earth day every day here in San Francisco, this one had pretty much slipped out through the fissures that crack me up, in my mind, way in the back of my mind.... Ok, honestly, earth day a bit redundant nowadays, isn't it?)

I used the cloud views to find keywords to add to the trend panel. Radiohead didn't register in the trend panel, for example. "Green" is just below "earth day," suggesting that perhaps "Green day" could have taken advantage of some free media coverage (are they still together? I confess I don't recall. Another case of fissure. Fizz-ure... ) Next in prominence on that day were "food," "gas," "action," and "president," which, if I were a writer for The Colbert report, I could have made into a joke, using, perhaps, either "food" or "gas" as the subject of "action" taken against the "president."

Interesting that on Earth day both food and gas were of concern. Food growing or food eating? And seeing as "prices" are just beneath "president," it's possible that food and gas prices may have occurred in Earth day commentary that included administration policies and leadership. Or not. One doesn't want to read between the lines. (Though the lines are pretty close together, and track nicely, so hey, why not?)

As you can see making sense of these verbal trends is not rocket science. Could we have guessed without searching that food and gas prices would come up together? They track with earth day, but to be fair, there was a UN report released that wknd regarding the food crisis. It's possible that they're related. Wouldn't take a poet.

Now what's cool about this tool is that you can read the news sources for any additional key phrases right here. Even view videos. And you can browse a list of influencers (sites and blogs) for the topical profile. Shown here are influencers and a "river of news." Global warming was the biggest hit within "climate change," and shown here are posts that refer to global warming. (Inluencers can be sorted by unique commenters, total comments, enagement (number of comments and length of comment), and topical inbound links.

Now in this view, which focuses on April 20 - 22 (earth day and one day prior and post), there are interesting differences between the topic clouds for mainstream media. Look at the list below. Differences in terms used in the mainstream media, on blogs and twitter, and on twitter alone, are clear. Mainstream media describe a high-level view of the discourse, blogs, commentary on that discourse, and twitter, more personal and actionable conversation.

_____mainstream_____
emissions
issues
america
government
department
public
scientists
national
federal
country
world

_____blogs and twitter_____
save
reduce
live
weather
real
better
information
future
article
action

_____twitter_____
industry
fight
students
right
difference
help
water
citizen
officials
college
sustainability

So far this search has turned up roughly what one would expect of it, and indeed you find what you're looking for when using measurement tools. The benefit of tracking end user conversations such as those on twitter ought to be in the authenticity of twitter talk, and in its speed and immediacy. Radian6, because it updates in real time, can be used to follow these conversations as they happen. That said, it's necessary to supplement twitter talk with blogs and mainstream media, for they provide the narratives, arguments, and semantic map of the conversation space. Topical context is assumed by twitter users (as it is often in chat and IM) -- that context is provided by the slower talk media. At this time, twitter is still very small, and on-topic results for searches on twitter are noisy and fragmented. But for those interested in personal expressions and conversation, and for a read on real-time audience attention and interest levels, there's a lot of potential yet in what twitter can surface.

Note: I did not explore Radian6's tools for influencer results and additional keyword drilldowns in this post.

Radian6 screenshots of twitter influencer topical clouds

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:16:00 +0000

These screenshots are taken from Radian6, social media monitoring application that I've been using for the past couple of days.

This screen shows topical clouds taken from twitter accounts of several social media influencers. Shown here are Tara Hunt (missrogue), Chris Brogan, Adrian Chan (gravity7 -- the parser apparently doesn't like alphanumerical names), dave winer, stowe boyd, michael arrington (techcrunch), chris heuer, jeremiah owyang, and brian solis.

(note I worked myself in there? crafty eh? I'm not really an influencer, of course, so I put myself in there as a proxy control group.)

You'll need to hit each of these and pop them to full size to be able to read them. If you do, you'll probably wonder as I did what, if anything, this tells us. These are cloud views, and could be provided by tweetclouds, but I found it handy to be able to lay them side by side, and to be able to flip each window over and change parameters (eg. date range). And they're updated in real time, so they refresh every few minutes or so.

The value proposition here is that influencers influence while talking, and for those of us on twitter, this means talking in 140 character posts. I had to stare at these for half an hour before I began to see things. (my screensaver kicks in at 30 mins. just kidding). You can click the words to read the posts that included them. I started counting how many were in each (this has to be done manually, so it would be great to see a post number on rollover.)

First of all, the tags include any post from the user as well as posts to or in which the user is @named -- so while Dave Winer showed 124 posts for comcast, not all were from him. Likewise, I noticed that Arrington was the only one "reading" -- but it turned out that the term was used in posts in which other twitter users said they were reading techchrunch (not in fact that they were reading arrington's tweets, but techcrunch articles).

With the influencer value proposition still in mind, I tried to read between the lines, or through the gaps, and what struck me first was that in the combination of words shown for each twitterer, one could make out three kinds of conversation: every self-referential talk (apropo the invitation that still begs participation on twitter.com: "What are you doing?"); exchanges with other twitterers; and references to companies, activities, sites (urls).

From stylistic differences in terms that convey everyday experience, you can make out some of the personality of each twitterer. This is even more clear in the 1 and 3 day views than in the 30 day views (yes, that's thirty days -- more than other twitter search clients). These influencers vary in their personability, enthusiasm, self-disclosure, and vary also in how personal or impersonal they come across. Tara comes across as friendly, Jeremiah as professional, arrington as a journalist, brogan as interested. While I follow these folks daily, I purposely did not read their twitter archives -- so that I'd be reading as much from terms shown as possible.

As you close down the time frame, terms that are surfaced shift to the present. No surprise there. Interestingly, heuer maintains a more regular repertoire (see how his terms are fewer and larger). Most influencer show a fairly flat conversation space -- that is, few words really stand out during the 3 day snapshot view. Solis gets credit for "thanks", which stands out and makes sense given what he does -- PR. Solis gives and gets a lot of gratitude. Tara uses the most expressive and emotive terms, suggesting that she tweets more about how she is feeling. Winer clearly had something up with comcast (the heavy throughput problem), and heuer, solis, jeremiah and myself reference "social media" quite a bit -- if one were pushing social media, we'd be good targets as we speak it already.

Down at the one day level, it's easy to see who addresses other twitterers, and is in (public) conversation with them, and who doesn't. One also gets a sense of the day's topics. Solis' topics change significantly between the one and 3 day view. Heuer's remain for the most part the same -- however, he might not have twittered much during the one day time period, and I didn't check.

In moving now from everyday conversation to topical conversation, we can look again for influence. Influencer, influencer on the wall, who's the most influential of them all? These cloud views don't account for reputation score, or use a conversational index (such as suggested by stowe). They account for numbers of follows/followers, and because there's no metric for page view in twitter, don't account for impact.

So the terms, while shown in the same font size, can't give us comparative topical influence. They more simply show us what these influencers tend to talk about. Because tinyurls are captured only as words, and not parsed, we're not able to see what these users have posted links to. But we can see who does post links. Few of the social media company names, applications (facebook and twitter excepted), or buzzwords appear here. That's not surprising, given that these users maintain their own blogs, belong to a high number of social networks, and are regular face to face contact. Much of what surfaces in the social media space, therefore, might not make it into these conversation clouds verbatim.

(What does surface is often in the tinyurl). However, these are just my interpretations. (For example, stowe, deborahcrooks, and I just had a guitar/singing jam session at my place, but the words "jam" "guitar" "session" etc passed below the radar, or were the subject of direct messages. This begs the question of private and public conversations, and a lot of value is passed through back channels.)

Note that a view of influencers in popular TV, movies, dvd rentals, bands, cars, celebrities, etc, might show very different results. Influencers who don't make regular face to face contact should produce more explicit topical references in their twitter conversations. In fact a quick survey of Lost fans and Lost tweets showed a great deal of detail right after last week's (awesome) episode. Lost fans can use a shorthand, insider references to theories, and so on. Highly coded 140 character conversations take an insider's knowledge to understand. While radian6 did surface "OMG," I'm guessing that some social media analysts might have missed "OMG" as a term of extreme enthusiasm and brand affinity (! -- not to mention WTF!!!).

I skipped over my second observation -- references to other twitterers -- because it's fairly straightforward. It would be cool if these were denoted in the tag clouds by use of color. Speaking of color, it would be cool also if rolling over one word would highlight the same word in other profiles. Widgets don't talk to each other, however.

There's one powerful dimension of this that I've not yet brought up, and that's the real-time updates radian6 provides to each window. I could see using this for clients. In fact by keeping lists of topical or domain influencers, together with their blogs, one could provide a client with intra-day monitoring. Each widget can be exported as a graphic or as xml, and emailed from within the application, with notes. This would be perfect for real-time tracking -- say of events, breaking news, product launches, pr, marketing or advertising campaigns.

It would be great to see this with cross references and relationships (a social graph) built in. One might then get a better sense of the overall conversation space. This approach looked at individual influencers -- a topic approach requires setting up widgets by keywords, and results vary immensely by the correlation of search terms to tweets. I'm sure I've missed quite a lot, but this post is already far too long.

Thanks for your attention!

Just some arbitrarily chosen terms, with number of tweets returned for each (written to, by, or citing that user):

user: techcrunch

yes 10
reading 12

user: chrisbrogan

thanks 22
talking 9

user: missrogue

book 9
awesome 10
whuffie 5

user: davewiner

comcast 124 times
thanks 8

user: jowyang

thanks 6
agree 6

user: briansolis

thanks 6

user: stoweboyd

dinner 5
wine 3
tuning 3
interesting 3

Social Analytics and Understanding the User

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:42:00 +0000

I've been having a fascinating time reading through papers on NextStage Evolution, a company in the business of metrics and online media analysis. And I'm compelled to write briefly on some core methodological principles, primarily because the methodology behind social analytics warrants careful consideration. All of us in this space want to know what the user wants, does, and might likely do. That would be valuable information, and having it would allow us to anticipate and deliver, and engage, with users. Unfortunately, user's don't declare their motives or intentions, and so it is up to analysis to model user interests from user behavior.

I sincerely believe that social media analysis needs to account not only for the user's proximate activities, those being his or her online behavior and actions as trackable by analytical tools (be they within a walled garden social network, on and around blogs, in conversation tools like twitter, or even through social applications and widgets), but also deeper and less available interests. These are the interests that underlie interpersonal interactions, communication, and relationships. And no matter how near or far interactions, communication, or relationships may appear through social media applications, they form the basis of user agency.

Agency is a sociological concept, and it underlies user actions and activities. Agency, to me, involves intentionality and motive, as well as content (information), and is interested (identifies or attaches to an object or subject). User experience is about agency. Interaction design is about agency. And inaction can be about agency, too. Fundamental to the concept of agency is that of self-reflexivity -- that we know what we are doing.

In social situations, activity and interaction are framed. That is, they unfold within a frame, which is to say that they make sense within context, and over a stretch of time. And in social interaction, the frame is often mutually constructed -- two or more people know what they are doing and if asked, would describe the situation they are in with a high level of agreement. Their recognition of the frame would agree even if they are in disagreement with one another.

This contextuality of action, I think, applies to mediated interactions as it does to face to face encounters. The difference is real, but is understood. Some interesting misinterpretations of intent, motive, interest, and so on of course occur online, and indeed can enrich the experience with a touch of play, self-reference, and so on. But as is the case of the comedian who tells a joke about a pope in an airplane telling a story about an ace fighter pilot.... frames can be layered and embedded within one another, and we come out the other end for the most part still making sense.

I bring all of this up because it informs how we read and interpret, and thus also design, anticipate, and model, social media user experiences and social practices. Users provide more than just information and at the same time are less than informing. Our models need to interpret, for example, whether a user has recommended a movie to somebody, in front of a community, to be shared among friends, because she enjoys writing reviews, has a reputable movie blog, is considered (or believes herself to be considered) a movie expert, or believes in the principle of contributing reviews to the common good.

Would we get this from the review itself? Not likely. From envelope information (to whom it's addressed, how messaged, where posted, how delivered)? From comments and their agreement/disagreement? From past movies reviewed? From movie categories covered (e.g. new releases vs film noir). I belabor the point -- it's complex (though do-able). In all cases, however, agency is neither explicit nor stated. ("I hereby submit this movie review to this esteemed blog for the sake of my reputation as a budding film noir critic and blogging habitue".)...

Designing social media to engage users is much simpler than accurately interpreting their actions, for design succeeds as long as users are compelled by their own experience. Users will remain engaged even if the experience is riddled with theft, robbery, and deception. To wit, Vegas. Social interaction designers don't need to know what compels a user, as long as they understand that there is a range of users, and that their system facilitates communication and interaction, as well as an experience of presence which varies user by user, and which leads to social practices in the aggregate. Users work with what is given, on the screen and architecturally, as well as with those others who are present, and participating. Online interactions don't have to be efficient, or even effective, to be rewarding.

But like the anthropologist studying a culture from the outside, or an archaelogist interpreting the meanings of cultural artifacts and found objects, analytical software, as a non-participant, is confronted with a more profound challenge: reverse engineering the artifacts, button presses, posts, comments, ratings, bookmarks and so on left behind by users whose mindfulness or mindlessness would be impossible to measure, and at times difficult to distinguish.

Information about what users do is not available in the information about what users have done.

This is where I tack differently from models based more squarely in data analysis and user activity tacking and measurement. Those methods, and I'm not a qualified statistician, may observe the disaggregated and yet predict in the aggregate, and successfully so, if we are to place any faith whatsoever in the long tail. Metrics may serve purposes of campaign analysis and even management. But engagement (social media marketing) tools would require a communicable messaging and engagement platform. The difference? Agency. Communicable engagement seeks not the acceptance of the user but his or her participation -- it anticipates the significance of agency.

I so strongly believe that social analytics ought to be rooted in an intersubjective framework of action, and not one of information gathering alone, that I'll close with a few quotes from Erving Goffman, master observer of social interactions and mentor in spirit:

"Given a speaker's need to know whether his message has been received, and if so, whether or not it has been passably understood, and given a recipient's need to show that he has received the message and correctly�given these very fundamental requirements of talk as a communication system�we have the essential rationale for the very existence of adjacency pairs, that is, for the organization of talk into two-part exchanges. We have an understanding of why any next utterance after a question is examined for how it might be an answer." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, P. 12

"Note that insofar as participants in an encounter morally commit themselves to keeping conversational channels open and in good working order, whatever binds by virtue of system constraints will bind also by virtue of ritual ones. The satisfaction of ritual constraints safeguards not only feelings but communication, too." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, p. 18

"And just as system constraints will always condition how talk is managed, so, too, will ritual ones. Observe that unlike grammatical constraints, system and ritual ones open up the possibility of corrective action as part of these very constraints. Grammars do not have rules for managing what happens when rules are broken." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk, 21

"Uttered words have utterers; utterances, however, have subjects (implied or explicit), and although these may designate the utterer, there is nothing in the syntax of utterances to require this coincidence." Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk 3

"The rules of conduct which bind the actor and the recipient together are the bindings of society. But many of the acts which are guided by these rules occur infrequently or take a long time for their consummation. Opportunities to affirm the moral order and the society could therefore be rare. It is here that ceremonial rules play their social function, for many of the acts which are guided by these rules last but a brief moment, involve no substantive outlay, and can be performed in every social interaction. Whatever the activity and however profanely instrumental, it can afford many opportunities for minor ceremonies as long as other persons are present. Through these observances, guided by ceremonial obligations and expectations, a constant flow of indulgences is spread through society, with others who are present constantly reminding the individual that he must keep himself together as a well demeaned person and affirm the sacred quality of these others. The gestures which we sometimes call empty are perhaps in fact the fullest things of all." Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual, 91

To put this simply, if it were Prime Suspect (or my favorite, Cracker), vs CSI -- I'd pick Prime Suspect.

The Not Being here of Twitter, and No Being here of Friendfeed

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:36:00 +0000

People are again afoot, around the world, in protest. Protesting against (Iraq, Paris, Haiti), protesting for (China, South Korea, Irvine, CA). Pro-tests by Chinese students at American universities for Chinese pride. Con-tests in Iraq against American "occupiers." Marching, gathering, mobbing, to launch waves of protest, or encircling, rioting, stalking, to counter and disrupt. Protesters united, in expressions of support, or opposition. What binds them is a commonality of purpose, and commonality of identity.

...

Tribal, institutional, chaotic, swelling, faltering, people in numbers large and small, inspired, desperate, at the brink of panic and rising to their feet, humanity in motion propelled forward by the high-pressure flux of frustration that screams between the rock and the hard place, a river of individual intensities brought together by historical necessity and the collective inevitability of a shared insistence that the future not be what it's becoming to so many, suddenly and at once: a void, and elsewhere.

...

Where else but in the river of information and flow of collective consciousnesses does culture form by dint of link and aggregate through disintermediation? Presence that is absence, being there where there is no there there. Feeds fed into rivers and yet each of us stands in his own stream. That curious crowd that can be seen but cannot be seen looking back. The propagation of messages that only rarely circulate and loop, falling into runs and rounds, and which more often than not fade out as a trail does when it's tail is long.

...

Audiences -- the reason we're here, and for why we speak, in front of or alongside, amongst and in between. Gaps are hard to fill online, though they are what our media paper over and interconnect. Echoes in a chamber of webbing, ribbons of time coming undone, discontinuous, cut, deferred, and delayed. The Self, interrupted.

...

Friendfeed, aggregation of disaggregated talk, confuses me. I don't feel in the river, as I do with Twitter. With Twitter, while it flows too strongly and loud, I feel as if I'm standing in the same stream as everyone else. And while I know this is false, it's an illusion that twitter's display successfully maintains. Friendfeed is not all of the river, and not all of those who stand in the river that I know flows through twitter. It remarks to me that my friends have posted, which is impersonal and distant, and though I holler like all others to tweet on twitter, I'd rather hear the hollering than read a report.

...

Crowds do according to how they are moved. Markets make as they are made. Production produces by how it is produced. We live in the communication age. Talk is our production, the communicating self informs. Information is our market. Meaning is the means of our production. Disrupted and disaggregated, we go social to re-mediate our meaning.

...

Bound no longer to the earth, it is up to us to bind with one another.

Sentimetrix... Sentimentrix... Sentimistaken?

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:14:00 +0000

Sentimetrix, which I have to admit I haven't used, makes an interesting claim viz its sentiment algos for social media sentiment analysis. The first para claims that sentiment can be measured semantically. Interesting. That would assign intensity of sentiment to the word. Makes sense, from a text analytical perspective. But misses the critical difference between the two -- the speaker's expressive intentions. Which might be to rant and rave, swoon, or exclaim...

Are some words more enthusiastic than others? Is zeal a property of the speech or the speech act?

Which is more enthusiastic?

a) Last night's Lost rocked
b) Lost last night OMG! WTF!!!

Then there's the matter of for whom... intensity of opinion can involve how it is addressed (and to whom)...

c) OMG did you see Lost last night? Ben rules!

Intensity of sentiment is more than a matter of factual expressions vs opinions.

d) Ben is the new leader

And self-referentiality, using "I" "my" "mine" etc is a valuable qualifier...

e) Ben is my favorite new character

Text analysis may not yet be up to parsing sentiment expressed in conversation, esp in micro-blogging and feed apps. Stylistic variations are huge, and context can be gleaned in many cases only over a series of posts (as noted below also). But the description below mistakenly places sentiment in semantic meanings, and strikes me as a misreading of expressive statements.

http://www.sentimetrix.com/technology/measuring_the_intensity_of_.html

Measuring the Intensity of Opinion the Way People Express It
People express intensity of their opinions in two ways: by choosing words and by either expressing facts or describing actions.

For example, the word "terrific" expresses a stronger positive sentiment than "good". Words, therefore, are a giveaway, although some cases are not as straightforward as others. We believe that once the types of words that can express opinion have been identified, it is possible to assign to each such word a measure of sentiment that an average person would associate with it. We have done exactly this, by taking a large body of texts, giving them to real people to grade, and using a mathematical model to assign to each word, a measure of opinion which would ensure the highest possible similarity between human and machine grading of these and similar texts.

Additionally, expression of facts can also play a role in shaping the opinion of a reader. Or instance, the sentence "The product didn't work" does not express an opinion, but still plays a role in shaping opinion. Likewise, "President Castro underwent dialysis three times yesterday" does not express an opinion, but certainly plays a role in shaping our perception of Mr. Castro's health.

Our technology allows both types of sentiment shaping sentences to be evaluated.

Kraft cheesy singles -- using social apps for branding

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:18:00 +0000

Out with friends last wk from a local social marketing firm and while enjoying the pleasant blend of mojitos and metabolic processes, the topic of branding and advertising on social media bubbled up. A silly and giddy exchange ensued. Agreed that a Kraft page on Facebook is like a box of mac and cheese in the toiletries section, I suggested a Kraft cheesy singles Likeness or dating app. Why not? How about Kraft cheesy singles Likeness questions?

How do you like your singles?

a) cheesy cheesy cheesy!
b) goodness all in one wrapper
c) warm
d) in the bread

Where do you get your singles?

a) at the corner store
b) at the bar
c) one at a time please!
d) in bulk

Where do you keep your singles?
a) stored up for a lonely night
b) in your pantry
c) in my drawers
d) in the bread

and so on...

Facebook users would click through and match with their friends. Krafty or silly, it'd sure be more fun than joining a Kraft Facebook page....

Influencers, Promoters, Inviters and other social media user types

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:00:00 +0000

I happened on a local bookstore going out of business yesterday and raided the psychology section, picking up a number of cardinal texts at $2.98 a pop. One of them was Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, of the Keirsey personality test. Actually, they call it temperament, not personalities. Reading the complete descriptions of what makes up INTFs and ENTPs et al was a real eye-opener, not to mention an entertaining and insightful read.

Character types, modified to account for the effects of social media and related technologies on interaction and communication, and taking into account users' communication styles, relationship preferences, and sense of self and self image, could be a powerful addition to current efforts to architect social analytics and conversation analytics programs.

The state of the art in measuring and making use of social media users and social graphs still centers on relatively straight-forward views of influence, attention, intention, and social capital. While these are more easily measured on closed social networks, a model for analysis of distributed social media tools, including twitter and feed-based apps, is clearly on a lot of people's minds. PR, marketing, advertising, branding, and customer service industries all want in on social media, and whether they stand by the sidelines watching, tracking, and monitoring, or jump into the river of conversation and engage, analytical tools and engagement applications will be essential. Nobody, but nobody, could possibly manage to be in the flow everywhere and at all times.

Traditional mass media approaches to audience metrics may have given us the right questions, and brought us to an appropriate starting point. But social media approaches will be needed now if we're to make proper sense of audience behavior. And here's where character psychologists like Keirsey might be of help.

I have an approach to social interaction design that takes conventional view of user experience and interaction design and extends it to social media users. With an eye to interpersonal dynamics, communication, and social practices, I like to call user behaviors "competencies." Each of us, as users interacts with social media and with others using it according to personal preferences, tastes, and most importantly, perceptions and interpretations. Our social skills online are social competencies. But each of us is different in our uses and, as psychologists would say, our behavior is informed by our psychology.

While this might be looking down the road a couple years, wouldn't an effective social analytics tool, and engagement platform (say, for advertisers and marketers) use not only social metric data but also psychological and personality models? Take the concept of the influencer, for example. As it stands today, an influencer is a well connected, credible, trusted, and active. He or she may also be on topic. That's not currently in the model, but should and probably will be, shortly, as we fold in not only who the person is but what s/he talks about (with credibility). So we might add expert to influencer.

But there are other kinds of user types, too, whose role in conversation can benefit specific marketing, branding, or advertising interests. There's the expert. The inviter. The emcee. The connector. The artist. The follower. And more. Keirsey has 16 types, I've got a similar number, tho based around communication and presencing styles. The inviter, for example, would serve the needs of event promoters. The follower, the needs of PR and news dissemination. The expert validates new products. The emcee gathers together like-minded friends, and would benefit branding or entertainment rollouts.

This is a new medium, and it begs for appropriate analysis. The metrics used in mass media measurement serve the purposes of a medium in which two-way and friend or peer-network constrained interactions don't exist. The future is engagement. Granted, masses of data will have to be mine and modeled. But isn't that what we're good at?

There's consistency in psychology, and applied appropriately and insightfully, durability in behavior and relationships. The noise will subside if we can wise up and if we put users first. If we fail, the doors blow open and a river of spam will inundate the flow. Either way, the mass marketplace is going to enter the stream.

Keirsey temperament overview see:
http://www.simpletone.com/cdi/aharon/types.htm

Climate change and web 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:11:00 +0000

An article on bringing Web 2.0 to bear on climate change caught my eye this sunny and serene Sunday am. It's a short post on Climate Feedback presenting threaded discussion forum for use in managing debate and discussion among those interested in climate change. Conceived as an "argument tree," here's a summary of how it's supposed to work:

The structure requires people to present their comments in one of four categories: issues to be addressed, options for resolving those issues, the pros in favor of various options, and the cons against them. In this way, the debate could become self-organized, making it easier for people to see what�s been said, and whether points have been supported or rebutted.

Mason Inman, for Nature Network

There's no argument with threaded discussion as a means of conducting an exchange. And the tree format shown should work fine as a means of structuring topics. (Keeping users on topic is another, and a separate matter; a community vote or approval system might work as a check on post topicality -- e.g. topical digg.)

But at a more general level, other web 2.0 tools should be able to contribute to climate change conversations. We know already that social activism has benefited from the social web. And fundraising -- to wit, Obama -- along with micro-funding and philanthropy have also made notable headway with the help of web 2.0 sites and tools. In the conversation space, things are a bit murky still. For example, I've got an ongoing interest in sites like change.org, greatnonprofits.org, razoo.com, goodtree.com and others, for their potential in shaping discourse and circulating ideas and sentiments. They offer the hope of shifting cultural dispositions in favor of conservation and ecology-minded consumerism. And insofar as they integrate or contribute to social networking sites, by providing users with green interests and green identities, they help to green affinity groups and cultural trends.

Might there be benefits, too, from twitter and conversation tools? In spreading news and alerting audiences to breaking climate change stories, for example? In shaping sentiment by making green a more visible taste or consumer preference? By demonstrating that green matters to the social media savvy crowd? And most importantly, by illustrating to big media that every week should be green week, every day should be earth day, and that the issue of climate change is not a holiday, special report, or feature, but an ever-present and persistent daily concern?

Of course, the planet's own changing weather may change our reality sooner than we change our mentality. And at the end of the day, green branding may be seen less as a shift in opinion and more as a necessary cultural adaptation. If our practices are a reflection of our views, if what we do is a manifestation of how we talk about it, then talk technologies should indeed have something to offer.

Mining social media

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:04:00 +0000

I had some compelling conversations with Joseph Carrabis of Nextstage Evolution this past week at SNCR's NewComm Forum where I was also formulating what I'll be doing this year as a sr research fellow. Joseph's company has a patented method for predicting or anticipating user behaviors online. As described, the patent sounded quite broad, but with or without patent his approach was interesting.

It's based on a number of user profiles based on information. I'm a relational and communication-oriented person, so I took some friendly issue with his approach. Insofar as the social web is a communication space, and social media facilitate talk -- in varying degrees of speed, depth, persistence, contextuality, and topicality, I can't see how a model can ignore characteristics of communication and interpersonal psychology.

When our interactions are mediated, ambiguities of intent, trust, sincerity, motive and so on seep into online communication. Psychology and personality differentiate user behavior as they do in any social encounter, and people engage and respond according to their tendencies, sensitivities, and blind spots.

A combination of user psychology (developed perhaps in the form of personality types modified to suit communication styles online) and information-centric interests and preferences might make for a powerful tool. And as the glut of information online is intensified by the sudden popularity of talk tools like Twitter as well as feed-based applications, anyone interested in reaching users/consumers by interest, affinity, or taste, will need intelligent engagement tools.

This will be a huge market. And the companies that not only succeed on the analytical side of monitoring, tracking, and measuring user behavior but also on the engagement side of giving marketers, publishers, and advertisers targeted, social graph-informed, and actionable campaign management tools will pull in some serious cash.

The social web is a gold mine. And as was the case during the gold rush, it's the guys selling mining tools that will make a killing.

Of Military and Men, or Influencers in the mass and social media

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:01:00 +0000

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According to a feature-length story in the New York Times this sunday it seems that the military has been using Influencers to get its message out. These are the guys that you see on TV news and talk shows extemporizing on their personal and professional experience to lend unique perspectives and insights to what's happening "on the ground" in Iraq. Some of them speak to military strategy and tactics, appearing on TV, and sometimes in uniform, to guide news anchors and civilian discussants.

Apparently these guys have been courted by the Pentagon for years, and during the Rumsfeld years even provided him with talking points. How to reach the audience and simplify the story for them (us).

The military's been doing Influence marketing-style, but in mass media. (There was no mention of these guys having blogs, and I haven't the time to check.) A couple questions spring to mind: Are we surprised? (probably not.) Could this happen in social media? (probably not.)

Mass media according to the rules of corporate media, which is to say that they are owned by large profit-making concerns. While they are as keen on making the news interesting as the blogosphere, their tendency will be to weave new information into a tight and closed narrative form. They tell stories. We in the blogosphere opinionate, bug, goad, poke and disclose. However, the mass media still believe that their best narrative structure is the story. And when the story itself lacks a clear beginning, middle, and (in this case particular) ending, use of experts and authorities shifts the burden from narrative to narrator.

In this they have the gist of Influence nailed, absolutely. But in that Influence is embedded within official and even ideological, partisan, or agency dogma, its utility as promotional speech is exhausted on behalf of official and biased needs and interests. The influence of (ex) military consultants borrows from the professional role and position. It is not the same kind of influence that social media marketers, for example, use when embedded in messages among cultural influencers. These military experts must be brought into the mass media if they are to have and exercise influence. It's not influence borrowed (as in social media) but influence regenerated. Influence not from self-presentation but from re-presentation.

The common challenge facing those of us in mass media is commerce and maintaining the line between commercial and everyday speech that separates advertising and sales, which are discourses lacking authenticity, and ordinary talk, which do lay claim to authority and credibility. The type of influence used in the case noted by the New York Times, however, is one of "officialdom" and the power of position and normative authority.

If in mass media, influence of position and authority can be better maintained than in social media because mass media are top-down talking head news and reporting, sustained by the credibility invested in the medium and business of journalism and broadcast news. The medium, as well as its mode of distribution, more easily maintain the cycle and engine of legitimation that culminates in the appearance of professional experts on broadcast talk shows and the evening news. This is legitimation by control, by production, and by fabrication. It's expertise subject to the editing room.

Social media seek (in theory and in word, at least) a different kind of influence: peer review and approval. The medium and the form of discourse that it supports are wide open. In fact they can approach forms of conversational talk, even. This is no medium for the accreditation and credibility of the role and position -- it's a medium in which credibility is obtained from the risk and exposure of participation and interaction.

All influencers are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Psychological profiling and forensic analysis -- in social media?

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 15:51:00 +0000

Ever since Fritz Lang's "M," featuring a maniacal performance by Peter Lorre in the role of a marked man (literally - ! ) furtively evading a public stirred by published reports of a child molester on the loose, we've had a dark fascination with the mentality of criminals. They are pursued by cops, private eyes, private citizens, mobs and mobsters, and more recently, forensic professionals. Witch hunts aside, the two most common methods of capturing the criminal are with deductive or inductive reasoning: the analysis of evidence, or psychological insight. The pursuers either read the signs of the crime for the criminal behind it, or figure out where he's likely to strike next based on a grasp of his motives and obsessions.

It would be interesting to apply this to social media analysis... One might use site and user behavior and activity to form a bed of evidence, and accompany that with insights into user psychology, habits, tastes, preferences, and other interests, for predictive purposes. With a solid framework marketers and advertisers might more successfully reach the right consumer at the right time. A multiply-targeted and designed campaign, scripted to appeal according to user interests, and launched into the user activities most likely to reach that consumer, and to provide the greatest benefit to the marketer, would eliminate some of the wasted effort of today's online marketing.

It's worth the thought. After all, it took decades for the film industry to produce the genres we're familiar with today. At this time we're still in the nascent stages of creating genres of social activity online -- and truth be told most of them have been designed and engineered by, well, designers and engineers. Content owners and producers, those in publishing and entertainment for example, have yet to engage broadly in using social media tools not only to promote and distribute but to create and develop their properties. So what we know of social media is a reflection still of what the end user does with them -- unencumbered by scripts or production value, but also perhaps wanting for more compelling experiences and narratives.

It wouldn't be difficult to imagine a marketing industry that takes advantage of the bridging opportunities here. Social media marketing vehicles might emerge that are far more interactive, narrative, engaging, and content-rich than the simple viral and pass-along popups and widgets we're seeing even today. This might be a case of wishful thinking, it's hard to tell. But it's safe to say that we've yet to push the frontiers here.

We may still be in social media's era of silent film. Could it be that we've yet to think of what we'll do with the "talkies?"

The three-fold view of the social media user experience

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:49:00 +0000

Because I have an enormous white paper in the works on this one that I know I won't complete any time soon, I want to appeal to like-minded social web thinkers on this with a short post. I spent much of the winter drafting a grand theory of social media practices, and when it came to exploring the user experience I spent a couple months trying to observe my own use of social media, and observe others, to see I could intuit core principles. I nearly went nuts doing it. Everything I was doing on facebook for a while I was doing as a self-observing participant, that is, I didn't allow myself to "get into" it with friends and colleagues but instead tried to dissociate my actions from my agency in order to be able to reflect on my own motivations and inner dialogue.

I don't know if this has happened to others, but I began developing self-reflexive loops and circuits that accompanied what I was doing. Even silly things like Poke. I wanted to know what Poke was, and what it might be to different people, so I tried being a different user when I poked. Poking to flirt, poking to reply, feeling a poke as an expectation, or as an annoyance, leaving a poke un-repoked to see at what point I felt obliged to poke back, or even to see if I thought my poky friend had noticed that I hadn't poked back.

I was documenting all of this in order to flesh out a psychologically-oriented framework for the user experience. One that would replace straight ahead user "needs" and "goals", which work for user-software interaction design, with a self-reflexive set of user interests -- better suited for user-software-user, or social interaction design. It seemed to me obvious that user intentions, motives, compulsions, obsessions, fantasies, interactions, expectations, anticipations, preoccupations all played a part in the user engagement. That each user would probably have habits and routines of use that were a direct manifestation of his or her sensitivities in different areas of a) sense of self, self-presentation, and self image; b) perceptions of friends, unfamiliars, and audiences; and c) interpersonal communication, relationship handling, and interaction styles.

In short, it seemed that a rewriting of user experience approaches to social media would require a wholistic and integrated, and deeply psychological, approach.

The work is mostly done, in a frightfully intricate and bejungled draft. But it's all in the noggin and there for easy access at all times.

I'd like to share a couple inventions that fell upon me through the process of structuring my experience as an observant participant and participating observer.

The first was that the user experience is structured around three axes: self/self image, other, and relationship. This now seems so clear to me that I don't know why it took so long to see. The user experience of social media is not a direct interaction of user to medium. But rather one that involves the user's self-understanding of his/her own activity, and in which s/he has ideas about how s/he is, looks, and appears to others. The reason is simple: all social media show the user an image or presentation of him/herself. There's a doubling, if you will, of the self, because it's represented.

Then there is the other (user), who's not "there" in presence, but is represented. So any interaction with another user requires interpretation. You could say that we have to interpret what we each mean to each other, and in conversation, in everyday reality. But it's different online and we know it. And interpretation is only possible if we know something about the medium and the other person -- something requiring what I call "interpretive schemata" and which vary incredibly and are contingent on the site, users, activities, content, and much more.

Then there is the relationship, which is a real unfolding of interaction by means of digital recording/capture and re-presentation. So there are similarly numerous variations in the kinds of interactions handled online, and their meaning to users. What they mean to users is in part a reflection of their relationship tendencies. Any psychologist would support that.

The mental image that came to mind for this was a cool discovery. Software designers talk about transparency -- that the software's functionality and UI should be transparent. Ease of use suggests the goal of transparency (that the UI not get in the way or be something the user has to "think about" while using it). But I decided this isn't the case with social media. The visualization was that the screen is three screens. Each ties to the three core axes: self, other, and relation. The three screens are mirror, surface, and window.

Users are in a relationship to themselves, through their self-reflection as mirrored by social media (think facebook profile). Or users are engaged, by means of interpretive schemata, with what's on the screen, as videos, news, search, whatever. And thirdly, users see through the screen, as it provides a direct window onto another user, as in chat, im, email etc (where the "screen UI" really isn't material to the user activity).

That's it. Chan's three-fold view of the social media user experience.

Hashing through twitter hashtags -- a look at structured conversation

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:34:00 +0000

In my ongoing binge to ferret out the social mechanics of twitter third party sites and tools, hashtags deserves attention. It's small, and by all appearances might die on the vine, which would be sad. But if the great culling whose season draws near were to remove hashtags from the social media dna pool, it would be for reasons owing less to the operationaI think and more to fundamental problems with the user experience.

Hashtags make a big demand on the twitterer. They ask that she tag up posts while writing, which requires a) added effort, b) a pause to reflect on meta while composing, c) a sense of the benefit provided to folks who search by tag in the future. (A) and (b) pull the user out of the immediacy of twittering -- not much, but maybe enough to matter.

I remember working with a startup that was into the idea of tagging up chats for better discovery -- of like-minded chatters and of topically-related chats. I thought the idea was great, especially because chats aren't logged, and in theory at least the promise of social web is to connect people around what they talk about (in common). But to get meta from talk requires either automation or a change of user behavior. Either sites and services mine talk for the meta, and build links and suggestions of topics and talkers, or the user declares meta while talking (or just after, as in tagging).

Chat was one problem, twitter is similar. Because twitter is a kind of slow-moving chat. And like all other feed-related sites and tools, twitter I think aims to do more than provide dis-intermediated chat channels. Unless I'm completely mistaken, there are a lot of folks out there who believe that there's value in fast web conversations, call it feeds, micro-blogging, or what have you.

And because it's always hard to structure a conversation and to keep it on topic, not to mention expect users to follow topical threads, the goal of hashtags was to capitalize on what's said *inside* of posts. Their benefit would be to extract topical continuity and consistency from disparate flows (conversations) -- to re-flow if you will, by tag.

The benefit of exposing and surfacing common topical threads from talk accrues primarily to those who come along after the posts have been published. That's the purpose of topical mining, and it's an approach to making the web useful that Google has mastered for pages. But for posts, or conversational turns, the challenge is huge.

Conversation is notoriously poor at providing explicit meta about itself. It's just not how it works or how we talk. We know what we're talking about when we talk, and it involves the person(s) with whom we're talking. We don't declare what we're talking about if it can be already understood. Seo is built on this -- embedding meta in copy and pages for better search results. If you're talking about orchids you're unlikely to speak "flowers" in the same breath. We don't supply meta while talking (Dave Sifry used to describe this as getting meta out of the exhaust).

A lot of social web sites live on the principle of using a small number of active participants to produce content that can be enjoyed by those who come later. The good ones, like Yelp, offload the member-to-member communication from the topical content as much as possible. In Yelp's case, with gestural tokens, a questions page, etc -- to keep the reviews as clean as possible. (Could tweeted reviews work even? They'd devolve into highly subjective recommendations probably.)

Two challenges face hashtags. First is getting the user to tag as an act of talking. Second is that all tags are equal. There's neither vertical hierarchy (tag, subtag, subsubtag) nor modal organization. The latter is interesting, and worth a note, and since I just made it up I need to think out loud here a minute.

Talk is not all equal. Statements of speech can be declarative, performative, can be a form of request or appeal, and so on. Just think of the differences in the kind of utterance that are: invitation, recommendation, flirt, factual declaration, opinion, observation, question, answer. Modal organization of tweets would suggest that in addition to semantic tagging we have statement types: question, recommendation, announcement, link, flirt, and so on. You can see where this goes: Yahoo has Answers, Facebook has social apps, Linkedin has recommendations, Yelp has symbolic tokens, Google has (wait, google doesnt seem to get social. oops), etc etc.

So on hashtags, if you root around, you'll find some totally unorganized examples of this. There are (and oddly or not so oddly enough Germans seem to have gotten into organizing talk -- I lived in Berlin for a year and a half so I've had fun comparing German and English equivalents...). On hashtags there are posts tagged "now," "love" "jokes" -- tags that suggest the modal type of tweet. "Now" is not a topic but leads to conversations about what users are doing. "Love" is as much an expressive identifier (I'm in love, who's in love?) as much as it is a factual identifier. "Jokes" is topical, but it also is an attractor for quips and humor -- and joking is a performative form of speech unto itself if anything is.

When social media work to produce informative content for those who primarily consume, it's because they are a means of production. By analogy to the industrial age, the communication age (our era) uses information technologies as means of production. Communication acts leave behind content. Interaction tools that simultaneously publish to a public, as are all social media, "manufacture" a new form of talk. It's mass media gone social. But we know this already.

Is there a soft or hard threshold, then, for social media tools that ask the user to produce meta while in the act of posting/talking? Believers in the public utility of the social web as a means of democratizing the media and information might say no. Believers in connectivity, communication, and the social utility of social media might say yes. Hashtags sits between the two.

Much of my work involves helping social media companies to engineer interactions and communication for the purpose of producing leftover utility to latecomers and consumers. It's a social engineering challenge -- call it the art of generating unintended utility out of useful socially practices. It's an art because it requires engaging the user's motivation. Incentives (to benefit consumers by writing restaurant reviews) only work for a handful of users. For most, the byproduct of added value has to be in the exhaust -- and the act of participation should be enough in itself to motivate engagement. Users simply have to like using the tools -- for their own reasons (which are many indeed, but that's a whole different story).

Let's quickly take a look at this from a different angle -- social media marketing. Twitter offers the promise of mining and tracking conversations, if not participating in them, with an unprecedented degree of proximity, directness, and immediacy. Twitter search engines and meme trackers currently offer more breadth than hashtags for the simple reason that many more users simply type "movies" than type "#movies." But check "movies" on a site like summize (say you're a social media marketer), and results will include this: "Uncle. I can't work on this paper anymore. Let's go to the movies!." Use hashtags and you'll get better posts, though far fewer, because users have declared their topical selection of "movies." Intent is among the metrics measured by those in social analytics, and you can't get better than hashtags for that.

If only users could be asked to declare their intentions while conversing so that mining companies could extract the gold! No, it seems far more likely that the success stories and serendipitous moments ahead for web 2.0 will be found among those tools that can engineer social interactions such that the meta is an accurate but unintended byproduct of talk and engagement. (Beacon?) We'll have to watch this unfold and keep testing the frontiers. Either way, there's a lot to talk about.

Hashtags

Reputation, Conversational Index, Twitter, and Tweeterboard

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:08:00 +0000

I geeked out on tweeterboard.com last night and found myself getting lost in the conversation metrics the site displays in its box score tab, and which it presumably uses to calculate reputation scores. Their metric's not transparent to me, and if anyone has thoughts on how they calculate reputation, I'd love to hear from you. But I got to thinking about it, and so began mapping a few measurements of my own to see if they made sense.

In doing so, it quickly became apparent that "reputation" is in itself a fuzzy marker. And in the context of conversation and conversation analysis, especially.

For example, reputation speaks of the person, firstly. A person has a reputation. How is it earned? By their identity? By what they say? By who they know? And who knows them? By appearance, or by fact? By integrity, consistency, and other personal attributes. But also by their social status, their contributions, credibility, and effectiveness even.

In terms valuable to social media marketing, reputation might mean influence to some. Authority to others. Credibility and experience. Popularity and social capital. Participation and involvement. Also responsiveness and social value as a hub or connector.

Perhaps reputations are multiple -- reputation for something. For leadership, for success, for matchmaking, for consistency, for connectedness, for influence, for independence.

And if reputation is also to be used for something, that is, leveraged in womm viral campaigns, for example, consumers/users will offer value according to the type of reputation they have.

A social media marketer might want influence in some campaigns, might want to reach experts in another, or reach connectors/inviters for yet another. If the social marketer wanted campaign traction by pushing a branding campaign across the social graph, for example, his or her point of access and entry would suggest that s/he use influencers of a certain type. For popularizing, a user with a reputation for popularity. For credibility, a user with a reputation for integrity and expertise. For event promotion, a user with a reputation for being first to know and for inviting friends. And so on.

Individual influence varies according the communicability of their status in a social graph/social network. I have friends whose restaurant recommendations I would take no questions asked, others who can recommend films, music, or car repair. But they're all different people. Recommendations are personal, and so there's little knowing about a recommender without knowing about his or her relationships.

Which was why this exercise was so interesting: conversations captured on twitter at tweeterboard reveal several of the elements critical to reputation analysis. Granted that without semantic content analysis, they're only structural. Interesting nonetheless, however.

So now, to tweeterboard and this exercise in imagining reputation metrics. First off would be the conventional Friend and Follower count. Should be fine, but there are already potential issues here. (Note: by analogy to serp/seo/sem speak, friends = links; followers/followed should = link polarity.)

Number of followers : should indicate influence by means of popularity. However twitter users add friends as fast as Britney Spears loses them. Friends make a person look like somebody, are a friction-free connection (on twitter), and are a means to being found. In other words not a good enough indicator in and of itself.

Number following : should indicate enagement, and some amount of social context. You follow who you know, and who you find interesting. But here, too, the number is biased. It serves to enhance a user's appearance, and is not an declaration of either interest (level or kind) or attention (listeners are not always listening).

So then qualify influence by number of people with posting frequency (for participation level) and post volume (for engagement).

Number of posts: Post volume and frequency is the currency of measure on a conversation tool. Like money supply and velocity, posts are flow volume and rate of flow. Here again, there is an issue, for when it comes to reputation, all posts are equal but some posts are more equal than others. There are users who produce torrents of tweets, and who clearly enjoy twitter as a kind of group IM/chat. And others who post to make a point. And all points in between. Activity online is not all action, and communication online is often inactive communication (or communicative inaction -- a bug/feature that Facebook has raised to a cultural phenom with its activity, news, and friend feeds and status updates).

Communication becomes action, so say the linguists, when it takes the form of moves: statement - response. Talk is serial by nature, and so conversation usually involves a round of moves, or what we sometimes call "turn taking." The low rate of response and the improbability of responsiveness on a public or semi-public chat tool like twitter is a simple and direct byproduct and symptom of the technology's presence bracketing. Users don't know who's paying attention, not to mention who's listening. If talk were supposed to be a reciprocal exchange of linguistically embedded claims upon speaker and listener leading to understanding, agreement or even consensus, twitter would not be our first choice of talk format!

But that's what makes it so compelling -- clearly "conversation" doesn't even begin to describe what twitter is or does. Social media are about new forms of talk (and new forms of presence). I'm preaching to the choir -- we all get this.

Onward, to more of what Tweeterboard must presumably fold into its fluffy mix of conversational dough (read: currency ;-) ).

The spread: Now this one is fascinating. High spread numbers (e.g. between two twitter users, number posts to @recipient vs number posts received from recipient to @sender) indicate asymmetry. Meaning that these users don't like each other equally? No way to know that, so how about these one user wants more from the other? A negative spread shows that the user sending messages isn't getting equal number of replies. The issue here is that we can't measure the relationship by sent/replied because twitter is imperfect. @name messages may go unheeded because they're missed -- that simple. Message delivery is imperfect on twitter because so many users prefer to @name in public (for valid social reasons, mostly) than direct message (even tho the latter offers a higher delivery guarantee). Posting @name in public accrues visibility and social capital to the sender, not to mention findability. Same for positive spreads.

So perhaps the thing to measure in the spread is the degree of spread (I've seen 0:50). Or the range of spreads in the aggregate. Then a user who has a tight and narrow range of spreads would be a responsive user, an attentive user. A wide and wild range of spreads would be an inconsistent, unresponsive user. This is plausible, tho spam posts would screw this one up and require yet another round of filters (If I receive spam posts I don't want to lose reputation points just because I've not replied to them).

Then there's the difference between @name posts and @name citations. When a tweet begins with @name, it's usually for @name. But if @name is cited within a post, it's possible that the message expresses thanks, recognition, or is a citation, promotion, or other form of social referencing and distribution. I wouldn't have a clue if tweeterboard makes the distinction. The high degree of @name citations on twitter would suggest it that these uses could be used to build soft (tacit) social graphs. (Interesting thought: a Milieu Metric).

Some, and often highly influential twitter users, also show a large number of orphaned post exchanges. These show up as 0:1 or 1:0, and are indicated in the box score as 1 or -1. A very large number of 1's might indicate that other twitterers want to be in this user's audience and circle. But again, it might simply mean the user missed the @name message. Hard to know intent, but absolute number of 1's/-1's would seem to suggest visibility and social capital.

Getting creative, here are few other possibilities that spring to this (now tired) mind.

@name cited (but never sent to @name : this might indicate rubbing elbows, or wanting to appear in the company of @name. Benefit to user posting but not directly communicating to @name would be apparent social capital (what I like to call social media's proclivity not just for appearance but also "apparancy").

@recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @recipient_name citations : this might indicate a tight social clique of users attentive to each other. @name messages get the attention of others and solicit uptake. For example "congrats to @name for whatever" leads to a round of "yeah congrats @name!". Could be used by marketers to suss out active trust circles.
ditto for: @recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @recipient_name replies

@recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @sender_name replies : would raise the former to the level of friendship, e.g. from clique to group. Because in this version the reply is more than a citation, it's reply. Attention is paid not just to the @name cited but to the @sender who posted the citation. Could be used by marketers to suss out active conversationalists.

@recipient_name sent or cited and leading to other @sender_name citations : is somewhat uncommon, but responding to the poster not just the post is a sign of friendly attention and might be a metric of social presence. This is a "great to see you" moment and proffers a measure of relational density. Unless the message is nasty and mean, it's a sign of friendship, for the users are acknowledging each other (from "i follow you to I see you," or to quote Genesis, "Follow you, follow me"; every look wants a look back, and online "I see you" must be stated explicitly, so it's always *already* "I see you and therefore I want to see you seeing me" -- and on twitter, if this is in front of others, all the better!)

Ok, enough for now. I came up with more but you'll have to hire me. (just kidding.)

Damn I love twitter.

gratitude and respect goes to Stowe Boyd for pushing the conversational index long ago, and for reflections on twitter and the flow

Twitter for social marketing? Tweetvolume, Summize, and the Holy Grail

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:41:00 +0000

Checking out some of the innumerable twitter third party apps with an eye to the use of twitter in marketing and branding. If the social media marketers have it right, twitter ought to be an ideal social marketing tool. It's a street-level conversation tool, it's authentic and is used (still) by users for users. Unpolluted so far by commercial messaging, it ought to offer the promise of direct engagement with consumer audiences.

I'm still unsure of how close marketers can get to everyday talk without the serious risk of losing face and credibility. My gut tells me that there's a cultural wall (to wit, Beacon's Faceplant?) or threshold beyond which marketers and advertisers hoping to feed on the Feed risk losing face for their overzealousness.

Branding and marketing campaigns want to preserve some control over their message -- that's only natural. Facebook members want to determine their appearance, too. But the awe inspired in marketing departments at the occasional viral success story still shines, like a beacon of hope, and the grail they seek is none other than the same enlightened redemption any good capitalist dreams of when the light strikes just right.

Can one quest for the grail if it means heralding the masses towards a destination already known? Or is the grail a serendipitous discovery that awaits only those leaders willing to be swept up in the giddy abandon of a gathering mob? Is the allegory I'm reaching for Monty Python or Full Monty? The marketer who leads his people to the grail risks being discovered as the Emperor with no clothes. The marketer who is misled by his people, too, may wind up disrobed before his audience.

If the consumer who feels she can trust a brand as she trusts the naked truth, that is, she's in conversation with a brand and the brand is in conversation with her, then there would be truth in advertising. And that would be a leap (of faith?!).

It strikes me that social media marketing and advertising want to be in "the flow," but from what I have seen of the social media release so far, participation in social media is not yet truly conversational. Twitter would be used for social media releases, for PR, in other words for a form of public "direct" messaging. In the hopes that it is picked up womm-style and passed around at street level.

But twitter and other talk tools are conversational, and there might be fundamental constraints on how easily a non-conversational participant (brand) achieves success if it remains only the author of its messages. Sure, twitter is a faster flow, but it's also a slow chat. And conversations cannot be controlled.

As you can see from the results on TweetVolume comparing Nike, Reebok, Adidas, and Puma, Nike is the clear winner.

A quick comparison of posts on Summize mentioning Nike, Reebok, or Adidas, however, shows more negative twitter commentary on Nike about its labor practices, more earnest complimentary tweets about Reebok, and more fan tweets about Adidas.

What would the social media marketer to get an accurate view of buzz on twitter for his or her brand? At this point, read and click. Sentiment analysis would be tough on twitter because the messages are so short. Conversations would be hard to find because messages and replies are loosely coupled at best, and the density of coupled statements-responses (which would indicate conversational durability) is extremely low on twitter. One could find influencers using current metrics, but to date influencers are measured by activity more than by content or domain expertise -- so finding a mover and shaker in sneakers would require head-banging queries at a minimum.

Anecdotal signs of throughput and pickup for social media marketers, however, could be gleaned from twitter and used to supplement other forms of audience survey, polls, and online market research.

It strikes me, again, that the market for good social analytical tools would be huge. That is, if social media marketing doesn't mind a wee bit of truth.

Related twitter tools and sites:

Twitterverse A cloud view of talk on twitter
Tweetscan Like Summize.com, twitter search

[Resist] [Submit} ... advertising in facebook dialog boxes?

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:43:00 +0000

Here's a bug worth noting, if only for the fun of it. I've always wanted to see a dialog box pick up the cause of users everywhere by offering a choice of "submit" or "resist." Utterly useless of course. Perhaps an idea for a t-shirt.

Well this one must be a bug, because the I had just removed the exact same event successfully with options of "remove" or "do not remove." If this is social media marketing, it earns points for creativity. Whether it would count as user choice, however... Maybe if I opt not to remove and then try again I'll get a different ad in place of the "remove" button? Or is this the only sponsor the event organizer has lined up? If so, and the option is to go to the event or check out the Qbox player, I should take the latter. But will it show up in my activity feed? And if it did would my feed state that I'm going to the event and checking out the Qbox player?

Will users submit to advertising of this form? Methinks they'd rather resist!

Of crowds, power, grass, social theory and social media

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 04:58:00 +0000

Crowds and Power
Table of contents grab from amazon.com

I'm reminded now and again of this book, which describes crowds, audiences, tribes, mobs, assemblies, riots, gangs, and all manner of aggregations of people in the kind of prose that's now a rarity. For those of us in social media interested in the many ways in which our technologies assemble audiences, this Canetti offers serious insights.

He details differences between mobs awaiting, crowds gathering, audiences listening, mobs erupting, riots exploding, queues queueing, and so on... To Canetti, each social assembly captures not only a different force, but embodies (literally!) different affects. They are oriented to an other, or huddled in self-defense. They anticipate in patience, in frustration, or in awe. They worship or hound, condense or flee. They surround a leader, pursue him, or depose him in masses gathered in the public square.

Our media don't do quite the same things, of course, but there are similarities and inspirations aplenty here.

And to go with it, perhaps, the film Grass, a 1925 documentary (intertitled but no voice over -- just music) about Bakhtiari tribes gathering their herds for an annual migration to grasslands. Have you ever seen livestock herded downriver by swimmers?

Grass review, from imdb.com : Fantastic documentary of 1924. This early 20th century geography of today's Iraq was powerful. Watch this and tell me if Cecil B. DeMille didn't take notes before making his The Ten Commandments. Merian C. Cooper, the photographer, later created Cinerama, an idea that probably hatched while filming the remarkable landscapes in this film. Fans of Werner Herzog will find this film to be a treasure, with heartbreaking tales of struggle, complimented by the land around them, never has the human capacity to endure been so evident. The fact that this was made when it was shows not only the will of the subjects, but of the filmmakers themselves.

Groundswell Social Technographics quiz, or Some of the Above

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:45:00 +0000

Take this social technographics quiz and see whether you agree with the results. I can't agree with mine, but that's probably because I found it hard! Several of the questions were for women (I checked male but the quiz isnt gendered), and frankly it's hard for me to answer anything other than "hire a planner" when asked to imagine that I'm a bride getting worked up for the big day.

There weren't any "none of the above" choices, and the questions and multiple choice answers were highly specific. I agree that "self-reporting" what you think you are may be less accurate than a contextualize question (if you were at a party...), but some of these survey questions offered a tough set of responses.

No wonder I came out as a spectator. I think by the criteria used in this survey, creators are those who want to tell everyone about what they did, think, like, no matter who's listening, and even think about it when they're not online. I'd call those addicts!

On a more serious note, the idea of user personalities is hugely compelling. But the way to organize them, IMHO, is around

--how people communicate (do they talk about themselves, do they like to know who they are talking to, do they like to talk about or with, competitively or consensually),

--how they feel (whether they are sensitive to how they feel online, how they think others see them),

--how they relate (do they get the attention of others because people follow them; because they pay attention to their friends and colleagues, or because they are often group/social participants)

Because blogs, talk tools like twitter, profile-based sites, ratings and review services, mobile and location services, rich media content sites, collaborative writing/editing sites, and commerce/trade sites all offer different ways of engaging. Not all of them require the post-centric contributions covered in this technographic profile survey.

It's a provocative little survey though. And I'm sure there will be some good progress made this year in developing psych profiles for social media users. (I'd share mine right now if they were ready -- but they need more work yet.)

Discover Your Groundswell Social Technographics Profile Your Result: Spectator Thanks to you, the Collectors, Critics and Creators have an audience. Because you consume the content others produce, marketers try to influence your Groundswell Social Demographic group by reaching the Creators and Critics. With 48% of the US online population, you Spectators represent the largest Groundswell Social Demographics group. Thanks for keeping socialTNT in business :)
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New slideshow on social media user competencies

noreply@blogger.com (adrian chan) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:51:00 +0000

This slideshow introduces a view of the social media user that emphasizes the sociability, communication, and interaction skills and competencies. In it I make the argument that user experience and interaction designers approach social media with the user's social interests in mind -- and not "needs" and "goals."

I set the user's interest in his or her self image, interest in others, and relational interests. These can be used to build a set of social media competencies, from "telling" about oneself to moderating conversation. Based on social skills but modified to fit the particularities of web and social apps, these competencies might offer a better approach to grasping the user experience than concepts based in a model of user needs.

The big idea here being that social, communicative, and relational "interests" are radically different than the interests based in a cognitive science-based view of the "rational actor." That said, the presentation's light on theory!

A follow-up presentation will look at psychological personalities and propose alternate "personas" for use in social media design.

Downloadable versions of this presentation (keynote, ppt, and pdf), and on slideshare.

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