Social Media - Servant of Chaos

The Twitter Paradox for Celebrities

It seems that Twitter is the word on everyone’s lips at the moment. Perhaps, as it mainstreams, it will surf over the barriers that continue to hold sites like Facebook and LinkedIn back from true, widespread, public appeal.

One of the driving forces behind this is the ease with which celebrities can use and connect with their audiences. For while many celebrities use Facebook, they do so furtively and largely away from the prying eyes of the general public. The benefits of connection that we all find in managing our social graphs via Facebook is certainly well-known by celebrities – even if the occasional Paris Hilton privacy leak causes some ripples of concern.

Twitter, however, allows celebrities to simply and effectively extend their personal networks and reach much further – with little downside. They are, after all, already used to acting, behaving and interacting with people on a large scale. Twitter paradoxically, allows them more control than other kinds of media.

By using Twitter, celebrities can ACTUALLY communicate directly with their fans and friends – there are no agents, journalists or PR people involved. For once, a celebrity is able to communicate with their communities in an unmediated and unregulated manner. Stephen Fry is doing this successfully as is MC Hammer. Britney Spears has her own social media team, but also drops into the twitterstream from time to time. John Cleese provides excellent entertainment and diversion and Lance Armstrong is a must-follow for the cyclistas. The Guardian also shares a list of US politicians as well as porn stars who use Twitter.

This fascinates me. Many brands who begin to experiment with social media work from the concept of control outwards – gradually, through participation and experience, finding a comfortable method of managing conversations. Celebrities, however, start from the other end of the spectrum – un-managed conversations, direct discussions with fans and unmediated content.

Interestingly, I have a feeling that the adoption of Twitter by celebrities will actually drive the sort of widespread adoption that will break the mainstream barrier. I love that they “get it” immediately … after all, celebrities, like no other, understand the strange power of connecting with crowds.

But on that note … what is it REALLY like for a celebrity with thousands of followers? Recently, Ian Tait took the following video showing the twitterstream exploding with comment when Google’s Gmail service failed. It really is a torrent.

Gmail Fail on Twitterfall from Iain Tait on Vimeo.

Social Judgement: The Auchterlonie Effect

Social Judgement, Social Media, Storytelling

The playground was a swarm. To my left there are legions of boys running to and fro; to my right whole classes seem to be moving steadily across the playground. In front of me, our shared destination – the canteen – sits alone like a giant weatherboard pimple rising up out of the summer asphalt.

But there is a commotion on the grass on the far side of the building. There is a ring of boys bubbling across the lawn and spilling into the playground. Every now and then, one boy shoots off like a meteor to the far side of the playground. Minutes later, the gravity draws him back into orbit. But it is not one boy who returns – but three or four at a time.

Eventually I relent and go to see what is happening. By now the crowd is two or three deep and I struggle to see who is caught at the centre of the crowd. It is Grant Auchterlonie and he is in my class. After some time and after many of the other boys have left I finally get to see what the fuss is about. And there it is … on his arm. It is the first digital watch that I have ever seen – complete with stopwatch to 1/100th of a second.

I can remember it like it was yesterday. The excitement and buzz in the playground is palpable. But it is not just this story that has stuck with me. There were many other stories created that day.

As I discussed yesterday, influence is not just about the number of people that you have in your social network. There is a much more complex dynamic in effect where your personal store of social capital is used and accrued based on your interactions with those in your network. For example, in this diagram, it is easy for Katie to reach a large number of people. She is at the centre of the network with 1st degree connections to most people. When she chooses to push out into this network, she uses up a unit of accrued social capital. But to reach beyond the 1st degree network to Stan, Katie must go “through” either Ian or Gav. That means that she must use up two units of social capital. Interestingly, Ian and Gav must also use up one unit of social capital in this process as well. So reaching to the 2nd degree network requires not TWO but THREE units of social capital. As you can see, with every ADDITIONAL degree that you move through your network, an exponential amount of social capital is consumed.

BUT one of the most fascinating aspects of this is that the process can also be easily reversed. That is, social capital is ACCRUED when this process is reversed, driven by the power of a personal story. How? This is the Auchterlonie effect in action.

The Auchterlonie Effect

When a remarkable event takes place we play multiple roles. We are observers – watching from a distance. We are participants interacting with the other players. We may be the subject of the event itself (such as the ‘birthday girl/boy’). But as the temporal moment of the event passes, we become STORYTELLERS – crystallising the events in a narrative that involves us, encompasses the range of other participants and provides emotional drive to bring others into the loop of this story. The Auchterlonie Effect is the impetus that drives the ongoing story of YOUR personal engagement with the initial event – and it is, essentially, being able to bask in the reflected credibility of another.

In the playground, I accrued an enormous amount of social capital because I knew the “guy who had the digital watch”. And the people who knew me were able to proudly say that they “knew the guy who knew the guy who had the digital watch”.

How does this work outside the playground?

Say, Katie gets a new iPhone. It is the first in the country. No one has seen one before. And when she comes to coffee morning on Friday, she brings her new treasure along. A crowd gathers. As the person sitting next to her, I am in close proximity to this new device and am able to try it out. I am interested. And while Sue casts her envious eye over the prize, I move to a table nearby where my friend, Stan, is sitting. I relate the story of the iPhone. I explain how my 1st degree friend has a highly desired iPhone and talk to him about the things that I discovered while using it a few minutes ago. I suggest that, if he is interested, that I could get him a closer look at the said, iPhone. Meanwhile, Stan’s young friend, Jules, arrives for his morning ritual of coffee and muesli and listens into my story. Picking up on the vibe and the opportunity, Jules asks to tag along. So together, the three of us return to get a closer glimpse of the iPhone.

In this example, the flow of social capital is reversed. By creating, driving and owning this story, I accrue a unit of social capital from Stan. I also accrue a unit of social capital from Jules, as does Stan. And when I bring this story back to its source (Katie), she accrues THREE units of social capital – that is, she benefits from the network effect of my story. Importantly, the most important element in this whole process is NOT the object – the iPhone – but the STORY. And at the heart of this is a series of SOCIAL JUDGEMENTS that have unlocked value for each and every participant.

Now, multiply this out across the rest of the network and you can see that the power of the story can easily build very quickly. This is what we would commonly call “viral” – as in the case of a “viral video”.

The power of the story

In The Future of Your Brand is Play, I discussed how you can begin to build “infatuations” into your marketing. It is these infatuations which create the conditions for the Auchterlonie Effect. But by understanding this effect, you can help facilitate social judgement – for at every point of connection across the network, each person must make a decision about whether to bring another person into the gravitational pull of the story. When Stan introduced Jules into the story above, he had evaluated the situation and realised that he could accrue a unit of social capital based on his proximity to the story.

The strength of weak ties

Before something DOES “go viral” it needs to spread beyond the echo chamber of 1st degree connections. Without this vital step, a story will just circulate upon itself until it collapses under the collective weight of retelling.

But, you see, social judgement is incredibly tenuous. Often it has only one strand
, as shown here. If the one link breaks, then the story will not spread into adjacent social networks. It is why, as Valdis Krebs suggests, influence needs many connected people to spread – not just the highly connected.

This is precisely why it is difficult to predict when a video or a meme will “go viral”. It can only succeed when the MARGINAL cost of trusting is LESS than the risk of losing a person’s trust – where social capital continues to accumulate towards the centre of the experience.

But understanding the Auchterlonie Effect and the way in which social capital accrues is essential in achieving your marketing outcomes in a social context. By allowing social judgement to be exercised around your brand’s story, you are producing social capital as a by-product. And this can only be a good thing for brands (if they get it right).

Oh, and in case you are wondering – unfortunately, Grant’s claim to fame was fleeting. But even though I later purchased my own digital watch, I still recall the day when his watch made me famous too.

It’s Not a Filter, It’s a Choice

Social Judgement, Social Media

Sometimes the internet feels overwhelming. Each day when I logon to my work email I know that there are going to be dozens of emails requiring some form of attention. Where I can, I scan for the most urgent items and attend to those – responding or perhaps delegating. Emails that require a more considered or detailed response are left open while I research an answer, make calls or pull together my response. Then, of course, there are the daily tasks of working – meetings, phone calls – and the DOING part, which should take up most of the day.

But a proportion of my DOING work revolves around the Internet as well. So I scan blogs and RSS feeds, check various systems for facts, reportage, responses and conversations. There may be a hundred or so blogs and feeds to keep up with.

And after work, with my blog and my reading and my areas of interest, I can easily add another 100-150 RSS feeds and a similar amount of email. Then there is Twitter, which alone generates a substantial amount of email (follower requests, direct messages and so on), as well as well over a thousand messages a day. No wonder I have little time for the interruption of advertising.

But while it can APPEAR overwhelming, I have made very clear choices about how I manage this glut of information. As I began to think about the stages of Twitter Commitment, I realised that there are fundamental building blocks which underpin our use of new social network technologies. Some time ago I thought it looked like this:

View more presentations from Gavin Heaton. (tags: social media)

But this was too simplistic. It was missing the essential human element that drives our interactions – trust. But trust in a social network is dynamic – it constantly shifts, changes shape and transforms itself as the context changes. So rather than “trusting” – we are exercising what I call “social judgement”.

Basically, social judgement allows us to make decisions based not only on our who we trust, but on how much trust we place in certain other individuals. For example, this is how I use Facebook:

If I receive a Friend Request from someone I don’t know personally on Facebook, I look to see who we know in common. I then make a VALUE judgement about HOW judicious (or dare I say, “promiscuous”) each of our mutual friends are in terms of their social networks. Sometimes I look at the first one or two mutual friends – sometimes I evaluate all of the mutual friendships before making a decision. Where I feel that I can trust the web of connections between us, I will confirm friendship.

This is at least partly why influence in social networks is not just about numbers, but about the trust or “social judgement” which lubricates them. It is not necessarily about connecting to the most people, but connecting to the most people who can derive benefit by interacting with you. You see, it is not about YOU creating value for people (by creating content, linking etc), but people FINDING value in what you do create.

HP’s recent research would suggest that friends are more important than followers – and it seems that Julian Cole agrees. However, as Granovetter’s research on the strength of weak ties showed, people are more likely to take action where there is a weak tie connection between parties.

And this means that there is a choice involved. Every time we forward on a link, retweet a message read on Twitter or any other type of social network interaction, we are CHOOSING to act. We are not just using our network of connections to FILTER the noise, we are using it to SHAPE our experience. It is a choice. And understanding this distinction places us in a context where STORYTELLING emerges as vitally important?

To explain this, tomorrow, I will share with you one of the important elements of Social Judgement – the Auchterlonie Principle.

You Can’t Touch Twitter

Digital Strategy, Innovation, Social Media

A couple of months ago I was surprised to see a name appear on my Twitter timeline. It was Stephen Fry. He was, in fact, the first celebrity that I would be interested in following.

Then a short time later, another celebrity name started people buzzing. The questions were asked “is @mchammer the REAL MC Hammer”? And as this appearance on Mike Volpe’s Hubspot TV shows, @MCHammer certainly uses Twitter personally – listening, interacting and promoting his new project, DanceJam.

But as Twitter starts to mainstream and the user base grows, it becomes ever more difficult to manage those who you listen to and interact with – which of course, depends on your stage of Twitter Commitment. If you are starting out, you can learn much from Amber Naslund’s excellent guide. But imagine that you are MC Hammer who has about 125,000 followers and is following over 25,000 people in return. How do you cope with the torrent of digital information that streams past you at an astonishing rate? How do you interact, engage or dare I say it, converse? As Cath points out, Twitter is not a gateway drug – you only get out what you put in – and clearly, MC Hammer is deriving value from Twitter not only as a broadcast tool, but as a way of interacting with people. How does he do it and still see value?

I have a much smaller volume of data, links and followers to contend with – and yet it can appear, at first blush, overwhelming. With around 2700 followers, I also follow-back 2300 or so people – this generates thousands of messages each day. To cope with this, I have an iterative strategy – process->tool+process. This is how it works.

Process

As I have mentioned to Iain McDonald previously, I have what Anne Zelenka calls a bursty process. I work very well with the flat knowledge networks afforded by twitter and other online tools at my disposal and have found a way of making discontinuous productivity work in my favour:

We used to talk about two steps forward and three steps back, and so on, but today it’s more like 50 steps sideways and 2000 steps forward. Networked, social-based opportunities are so explosive today than when we pursue them we’re flung forward at pace.

Tool+process

For sometime I have been using TweetDeck. It provides the functionality that Twitter itself does not yet provide. But I use TweetDeck in a particular way.

The far left column contains the messages from all 2300 people that I follow. It refreshes approximately every four minutes; so as you may imagine it flies by at quite a pace.

The second column is labelled “smart folks”. These are the people that I know and/or whose judgement I trust. These people help filter the twitterstream for me. This column refreshes more slowly.

The third column captures all instances of my twitter handle – servantofchaos. So I see when someone replies to me, or mentions me. It only refreshes every 10-12 minutes.

The fourth column is for direct messages and it refreshes every 15 minutes or so. And additional columns carry particular search terms that are important to my work. They change from time to time, but are an incredibly useful way of monitoring any mention of your product or service.

With my bursty work ethic, I take notice of direct messages as they arrive. This normally works out to be once an hour or so. I quickly also check replies and the smart folks for topics that may be useful or important for me. Once an hour, usually at the top of the hour (or when I need a break from a task), I scan the first column. I look for trending topics and repeated retweets and also scan my search terms. If while scanning I notice that someone asks a question that I can answer, then I do so. Sometimes I retweet a message or respond.

That’s It!

By working in this way, I am able to effectively manage a relatively large network (by my personal standards). I also am able to derive significant value from my interactions with this community. But does this touch what MC Hammer has to deal with? I doubt it. But I hope it helps you @TransformerMan.

How To “Add Value”

Co-creation, Community, Digital Strategy, Smart Bloggers, Social Media

I remember a performance review early in my career. I was looking for constructive feedback, wanting to know where I could improve the way that I worked and what particular steps I could take to gain a promotion or better conditions in the following year. But all my manager could respond with was “add value”. And the further I pushed this topic, the more I realised that he really did not know what he was talking about. He was simply reverting to “corporate speak” to avoid giving me a pay rise.

In the world of marketing, there is also a lot of talk about “adding value”. But what does this mean? What are the practical steps that we can take to deliver this "value" to our clients? How do we work as agencies to transform the experiences of consumers? Both Sean Howard and Paul Isakson point out this great presentation by John V Willshire that takes us down the path of creating and delivering value.

What shape does this take? What can we honestly do to transform the work that we as marketers or agencies do.

John’s approach is to look at both the history and future of communities, by understanding the dynamics by which communities come together. The important aspect of this, for me at least, is that the focus is on the co-creation of context – which means that we need to strategically consider context over placement.

But as the focus of this presentation is about how we engage communities – whether they are business communities (which gravitate towards brands or products) or local (geographic) groups and so on. John suggests that there are four clear areas where we should focus our added value efforts:

Do something that is useful for people
Entertain people
Educate people
Connect people

This presentation positions the brand at the very centre of the consumer experience, but Sean suggests that this misses the true opportunity. Rather than pre-empting Sean’s thinking around this, I will wait to see what he comes up with. But I have a feeling that it centres around two things: passion and social judgement. The anticipation is delicious.

The Future of Advertising, APA, 17/02/09

View more presentations from John v Willshire. (tags: communities social)

Facebook Turns the Other Cheek

Activism, Influence, Rant, Social Media

Yesterday, after writing this post suggesting that Facebook’s changes to the terms of service would adversely impact bloggers and agencies, I joined the People Against the News Terms of Service (TOS) Facebook group. This group, created by Anne Petteroe, gained the ear of the Facebook management, and submitted “Three big questions for Facebook”. These were canvassed from the rapidly growing group membership – which at this point stands at over 60,000 members (and continues to grow).

This group, along with the many blog posts and a burgeoning Twitter stream convinced the Facebook management team to revert to their previous terms of use. The above announcement will appear when you next login to Facebook – giving you the option of joining the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities group – and contributing to the discussion. Interestingly, it has taken a large scale backlash (again) for Facebook to actually listen, notify and begin to engage with the members who are the foundations on which their success is based. There are clear lessons for any business here.

So, what were the three big questions for Facebook? Anne put the following forward to the Facebook management team:

3 Big Questions for Facebook:
To Mr. Zuckerberg and the Facebook Legal Team,
After reviewing and categorizing the responses from the protest group members, please see the following 3 major issues that we would like to see addressed, by you, and resolved through modification of Facebook’s Terms of Service:
1. Advertising and Commercial Rights:
“If the TOS doesn’t mean I give Facebook the rights to use pictures of my family/friends/kids why does it give so many people that impression? Will I wind up seeing pictures of my niece staring at me from a bus stop at some point and be told I shoulda read the fine print?”
~ Rich Griffith
“Let’s say that 10 years down the road, I become famous. Let’s also say that, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s well-intentioned promise, a large multinational corporation buys out Facebook…per these new TOS, my likeness, photographs, etc, could then be used, for all eternity, to hock Sony products in any way they want.”
~ Brian (Coast Guard Academy)
2. Bands, Artists, Photographers, Writers, Filmmakers etc:
“For a [band \ artist \ photographer \ writer \ filmmaker] with a page on Facebook, there may be no privacy settings (i.e., everyone can see your page). What stops Facebook from distributing the [artistic works] posted on Facebook band pages for profit?”
~ Matteo
3. “Share” on Facebook:
“Many bloggers submit their blog content to their profiles via RSS or by third party applications – or even using Notes. In many instances, blog content is licensed under Creative Commons, however, it appears that this content would also fall under the terms of service.”
~ Gavin (Australia)
“[One could argue] in a credible sounding way that your Terms of … lay claim to content provided on a third party site if that site uses a ‘Share on Facebook’ link. Is this true? If so, how do you intend to remedy it?”
~ Jim (Raleigh / Durham, NC)
We are aware that Facebook’s CEO and its other representatives have clarified the company’s intent on the use and ownership of User Content. However, these assurances aside, Mr. Zuckerberg himself has called the legal language in the TOS “overly formal and protective.” Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker has characterized his reply as “the modern version of ‘Ignore the fine print, ma’am, just sign here.’”
Regardless of Facebook’s current intent, the legal language in the Terms of Service must be changed in order to address the above issues. As Facebook is a leader in Social Media, doing so well help to set an industry-wide standard for user content use for other online services providers. Consumers cannot be expected to rest on the assurances of the good intentions of companies without having any kind of enforceable legal recourse. As we all know, corporate strategies adjust, CEO’s change, Boards of Directors shuffle and companies get bought out. We’re just looking for some legal assurances in writing that if and when that happens, we won’t be left in the cold.
~ Facebook Users Against the New Terms of Service – 02/16/2009