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Status Updates 02/24/09: Surgery Twittering, Vertical Twittering, Moderated Twittering, Visual Twittering, Re-Tweeting

Not only because a surgery conducted via Twitter made headlines the other day, Twitter is all the buzz (again), and it seem as if almost three years after its now legendary debut at SXSW Interactive, the popular micro-blogging service has reached the second (or third) hype cycle, entering the business and media mainstream as the ultimate narrow- AND broadcast network. Joel Comm, CEO of InfoMedia Inc. and author of Twitter Power, points out: “It's like the old saying: ‘People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.' People who use Twitter as only a broadcast system are missing out on 95% of its benefits.” And further: “It's about staying top of mind. If a brand was to run an ad campaign and it only reached 1,000 people, it wouldn't be doing so well, but a brand can do very well with 1,000 followers on Twitter because of who they are and how conversions can reverberate within the community and outsside the community.”

Consequently, everyone’s writing about Twitter again (on and off Twitter), but the conversation has shifted from a “What is it?” to a “How to” – a sure sign that it will not experience the same slow decline as Second Life.

A new Pew study on “Twitter and Status Updating” discovers that Twitter users tend to be younger and more mobile than the general Internet population. They also consume more news through the Internet and tend to engage in social activities online differently than everyone else. The report further says that the average Twitter user is "overwhelmingly young," although the average age of a Twitter user is slightly higher than most other social networking services. (Twitter's median age is 31, while Facebook's is 26 and MySpace's is 27.) Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even starker among older internet users: 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

Yet these numbers are likely to change, as Ars Technica predicts: “Given another few years, it won't be surprising to see widespread Twitter use spread to older and more general Internet users in the same way text messaging has spread to parents and families. In fact, Twitter often only involves sending an SMS in the first place – maybe some of those parents can keep the momentum going after texting their kids and start sending updates to Twitter while they're at it.”  The Pew study indicates that there will not only be opportunities for vertical twittering geared towards professionals (Yammer) but also for services tailored to certain age groups: Think of a Twitter for seniors to stay in touch with their children and grandchildren as the next killer app. 

And then there is what you could call Moderated Twittering, in other words: attempts to tame the conversation monster for the sake of attracting advertisers. Glam Media monetized its Oscars feed by offering marketers the chance to sponsor a filtered or edited version of the message stream during the awards ceremony. As VentureBeat notes, the ad network’s editors chose which tweets showed up in the stream and purged those that were inappropriate or off-topic, making it safer for brand advertisers. Aveeno sponsored the OscarsTwitter widget; Glam Media says it plans to expand the service, dubbed gWire, to include FriendFeed and Facebook streams for future events.

Other innovative ways of Twittering can be found in the realm of visualization. Elizabeth Baranik, for example, points out how the ASAE Great Ideas Conference used Twitterfountain for a visually richer feed. 

The medium is new, the challenge is old: It’s all about being different. Attention is the currency of any online (and offline) social interaction, and on Twitter, being re-tweeted is “the sincerest form of flattery,” as AlwaysOn puts it (while also provididing some suggestions as to how to achieve that). In the fast new Twitter ergo sum world, the formula goes: The more popular your status updates, the higher your social status.

Top Social Brands 2008

The question which brands are the best at “socializing” with their audiences is often asked, but rarely answered. Now Vitrue, a social media advertising solutions company, has attempted to capture a snapshot by releasing a Top Social Brands of 2008 list. The ranking is based on the Social Media Index (SMI), a measurement system the company launched to help track brands' share of voice on the social web. The Top 100, which range from the iPhone, CNN, and Disney at the top of the list, to Jet Blue, Puma, and Sears at the bottom of the list, were drawn from Vitrue's daily analysis of online conversations about more than 2,000 popular brands in blogs, social networks, microblogging services, and photo and video-sharing sites.

Strikingly missing is the Obama brand, arguably the most social brand in 2008, and there are other shortcomings. Vitrue’s press release states that some powerhouse technology brands were omitted from the list “as they provide the backbone of many social networks. While Google, Facebook and others are top brands, The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.” You could argue, of course, that this distinction is rather arbitrary as the lines between technology and content are somewhat blurry and will continue to dissolve. Just take the iPhone as an example – it provides social technology, per Vitrue’s definition, but also uses it to socialize its own brand. The same applies to Amazon, CNN, the New York Times, and all other brands that constitute either latent or manifest social networks online.

Another pitfall is the narrow focus on volume and the lack of analysis as to what makes brands score higher. A high score may not always be attributed to an effective social web strategy. Brands may simply top the list because their sales have been successful and they are therefore much talked about (or, conversely, everyone’s talking about them because their sales are tanking). There is no metric for measuring if the conversations were largely positive, negative, or highly contested. As one commenter on Vitrue's blog poignantly remarks: “Looking at brands as something capturing share of voice online, without understanding the drivers of said volume, is kind of like looking at shadows on the cave wall and mistaking them for the truth?”

In any case, Vitrue’s list has started an interesting conversation and helped socialize its own brand.

Press Release: Announcing The Vitrue 100

Advertising Age: The Most Social Brands of 2008

The Art of Life in the Age of Digital Reproduction

While not a member of the Net Generation (the 88 million Millennials for whom social networking is a birthright) myself, I have many friends and co-workers who qualify, and I am constantly baffled by their ease and eagerness to narrow- and broadcast their lives through digital media in post-privacy openness. The audience size doesn't matter, it can be narrow or broad, but cast it must be, even if it is often mundane. And yet, it is one of the ironies of such "ego-casting" that the status updates, which become critical life signs, the activity metrics of one's public life, do not begin with "I" but mostly appear in third person on Facebook and Twitter and the likes. This is because all these outlets treat the amateur publisher as a dramatic person per se: "Anthony is happy." – "Tim is working on an economic stimulus plan." – "Sarah loves Tea Leaf Green." When the Net Geners aggregate their social media publishing output into one FriendFeed, the effect becomes fully obvious: here we have the constant flux, the permanent Now as manifest and yet as fragmented as it can be. "It ain't why, why, why, it just is," Van Morrison sang, and another famous Irish artist, James Joyce, based on the concluding free-flow monologue of his Ulysses, would probably agree with the inevitability of "the river of life" as a never-ending "stream of consciousness" that affirms nothing but the fact that one is alive: "Yes."

For the Net Geners, the stories of their lives become more important than the lives lived. It is not the experience itself, it is what they can tweet, blog, Flickr about it. An event has not happened if it is not being shared. The narrative of life is the narrative of life. Life is an ongoing drama that must be dramatized. Engagements announcements via Facebook relationship status changes, travel itineraries via Dopplr, rants via blogs, moods and emotions via Twitter, instant gratification via GPS apps – or all of that cross-posted and mutually amplified across different locations and time zones, onto desktop and handheld. The seamless and fully immersive conversation is an imminent act of self-branding – what you click is what you get.

A few months ago, Emily Gould, who had made herself a name as Digital Demise Cassandra with her exhibitionist account of web exhibitionism in the New York Times Magazine ("Exposed"), wrote a piece for Technology Review in which she sought to contrast new media author Clay Shirky with Walter Benjamin, two brilliant thinkers from different generations: a daunting task because the relationship is "complicated," as both of them would state on their respective Facebook pages. Gould used the bold juxtaposition to depict a fairly pessimistic picture of the Net Geners as a cohort of hyper-connected individuals who are ultimately blogging alone. In her eyes, Shirky is an Internet triumphalist who is far too optimistic about the social web's implications on our social lives: "You get the sense […] that he's somehow managed to avoid walking down any dark alleys, or staring too long at any piles of fetid garbage"

Tellingly, she finds Benjamin's seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in 1936, much more relevant for the assessment of today's "new age of technological reproducibility." Benjamin writes: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. […] One might subsume the eliminated element in the term 'aura' and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." Gould concludes that "Maybe, in the same way that Benjamin says the difference between "follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon" and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing ('Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!'), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on – talking, being introduced to new people by friends – are threatened."

She misses the point though. While Benjamin rightly observed that the mechanical reproduction of a piece of art may lead to the decline of its 'aura,' the mechanisms of the social web propel the exact opposite: they grant a 24/7 continuum of time and space, an ever-lasting, ubiquitous (tele)presence that has perfected our ability to constantly produce 'aura' rather than destroying it. The web has democratized content, and art has made way for the art of life. When the Net Geners spill their beans through digital means, they are all about 'aura:' the allure of a life told in real-time, as a highly interactive application that turns all input instantly into output and renders the actual obsolete in favor of the staged, eventized, and narrated. Someone once said the US went directly from barbary to decadence without civilization. Similarly, one could say that the Net Geners go from experience directly to expression without reflection – it is indeed a read/write web. Context trumps content, and the appeal of social trumps everything.

Is that a negative? Who knows. What's certain is that Twitter, Facebook, and et al have inexorably altered the culture of human interaction. It will take future generations to craft a fair judgment – and ultimately, it may not even matter. In the meantime, it is helpful to assume that "Everything Bad Is Good for You" (Steven B. Johnson). Progress has no rear view mirror, and chances are you have no choice. If you want to have a life in this new "Age of Digital Reproduction," you better get your own social media platform in place.

Inauguration Immersion

It is only consequent that coverage of the eagerly awaited inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States on Tuesday is as crowdsourced, people-powered, and mashed-up as the campaign which got us this (once) improbable President in the first place. And it comes as no surprise that it is CNN, arguably the most innovative player among the big news networks, which is extending the experimental and experiential flair that has been a hallmark of Obamaesque politics 2.0 to the big day itself.

CNN has already demonstrated its ambition to embrace social media with its bold use of Twitter and iReport, the co-opted citizen journalism video site (well, let’s disregard the silly holographs for a moment). As part of its inauguration coverage, CNN will now partner with Microsoft Live Labs to launch a special micro-site called “The Moment” that offers visitors a photosynthed view of the historic event, combining snapshots of citizens with professional footage into an immersive 3D experience: “We’ll take your photos from every angle, combine them with CNN's professional shots, and produce what we hope will be an amazing experience that will be shown live on CNN.” Anyone with a digital camera can participate and take part in recording history. In addition to the Microsoft Photosynth and “The Moment” sites, all of the photos will also be shared via CNN’s iReport.

Photosynth allows a series of two-dimensional pictures to be interpolated into a three-dimensional representation of a moment in time. The more angles and photos, the more complete the rendering. The girth of photos from the inauguration will be particularly well-suited, given that there will be millions of images from thousands of different vantage points.

CNN “The Moment”

Also see this TED Talk with Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Microsoft Live Labs) about Photosynth:

Social Media Predictions for 2009

Alright, now we're in 2009 so this may come a little late. But anyway, the year is still young, so here are the social media predictions for 2009 from the collective expertise of the Junta42 bloggers.

Excerpts: Marketers will get cheap - Twitter will be officially mainstream - Twitter will suffer a backlash - marketers will lack control over content - combining traditional media with electronic media will increase - distributed eventing - news articles with images and video syndicated in RSS feeds - content will be more focused around conversation than messaging - innovative brands will start to provide engaging content that allows them to intertwine the brand rather than push it as the primary selling point - employees across the company will be content creators - more brands will develop a personality or a persona to represent the core values of the company - laid-off journalists will find a home as "content producers" and "content managers" on the corporate side - small business comes out to play - execution is the new strategy! - more "ombudsmen," fewer PR flacks - webinars & live or pre-recorded video events - the big challenge for brands is going to be reaching consumers without appearing to be selling anything - marketing messages will follow a less-advertising, more journalistic approach that offers relevant stories that show impact, offer counsel and demonstrate fairness.

The full list: http://blog.junta42.com/content_marketing_blog/2008/12/42-social-media-and-content-marketing-predictions-for-2009.html

In a nutshell: All are valid, none are too surprising. Brands will increasingly act like media companies. Content is king (again), if it's social, relevant, micro, meaningful, and fast.

Amen.

The Business Leader 2009: Chief Meaning Officer

2009 will be a year of major uncertainty. The doom and gloom of the economic downturn, the deterioration of mass markets, the pervasiveness of the digital lifestyle, a host of explosive political conflicts, and the fragmentation of traditional societal institutions are causing anxiety and propel a new search for simplicity and non-economic value systems.

Consumption-driven wealth and status are being replaced by identity, belonging, and a strong desire to contribute and do something "meaningful" rather than just acquire things. Trust and reputation are no longer enablers for the exchange of goods, services, and information, they are replacing them. Values are the new value. Meaning is succeeding experience and customer satisfaction. "The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It's to make meaning," writes management consultant John Hagel. Out: Bottom-line-pragmatists and financial wizards. In: philosophers and ethicists.

This new cultural climate presents a historic opportunity for brands to transform themselves into arbiters of meaning. Becoming Chief Meaning Officers, business leaders must move beyond simply connecting products and customers with the goal to facilitate transactions – they must now create "meaning" through actions and interactions. When your brand is a vector, your base becomes a movement – that's what we learned from Barack Obama's campaign.

In 2009, we will see more examples of "meaningful marketing" and businesses generating value that goes beyond just meeting consumers' needs. This will imply several profound paradigm shifts: essence instead of luxury, free sharing instead of monetized scarcity, radical transparency instead of brand control, authenticity instead of image, empathy instead of focus groups, conversations instead of messaging, collaboration instead of dissemination. A "meaning surplus" will become imperative: Only brands that give more than they take will be able to create sustained brand loyalty.

Monocle Launches Monocle Weekly: Small Talk, Big Issues

Yes, we live (again) in the "age of conversations." There is something reassuring about listening to smart people having cultured conversations. When I was young, I would listen for hours to music-free radio programming that sounded like black-and-white movies.

Today, Monocle Magazine brought some of that magic back by launching Monocle Weekly, a 30-minute audio podcast. Hosted by editor in chief Tyler Brûlé, the short-form show extends the publication's monthly print content by offering fresh angles on stories in current and past issues, discussions, previews, field reports, and interviews. The light conversations on serious issues are entertaining and informative, and the old-fashioned stereo split of voices evokes the coziness of good old vintage radio.

Highlights of the first issue include FT markets correspondent Rachel Morarjee revealing why 'under the mattress' has become a favorite place to keep your savings (at least in the UK), and philosopher Alain de Botton explaining why happiness will be more important than watching your salary in 2009: "There is no wealth but life, so concentrate on your portfolio of life, and not your portfolio of cash."

Well said. Although this may not be the most effective response to someone who just lost his or her job, the longing for new meaning in private and public life ("why exactly do we work?") will likely be an overarching theme in the forthcoming year. This presents a huge opportunity for brands of all kinds and industries: they are the arbiters of meaning.

Listen yourself: http://monocle.com/The-Monocle-Weekly/ (also available on iTunes)

The State of the Twittersphere (according to HubSpot)

When Twitter made its first big appearance (at SXSW Interactive in 2007), it was a relatively small community of techies and web 2.0 geeks. Now it's mainstream and keeps growing at an explosive rate.

HubSpot, the developer of Twitter Grader, just released its "State of the Twittersphere" report. The report reveals that an estimated 5,000-10,000 new Twitter accounts are opened every day. According to the study, Twitter appears to be most popular in major English-speaking cities. The top 5 Twitter cities are London, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Also, not surprisingly, the Twittersphere has a long tail:

- Only 0.8 percent of all Twitter users have more than 1,000 followers.
- Five percent have more than 250 followers.
- 24 percent (the largest group) have between 11 and 25 followers.
- Three percent of Twitter users have ten or fewer followers.
- 22 percent have five or fewer followers.
- Nine percent of Twitter users follow no one at all.

Other interesting findings:

- Twitter is dominated by newer users: 70 percent of Twitter users joined in 2008.
- There is a strong correlation between the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow.
- The most popular days of the week to tweet are Wednesday and Thursday.

You can download the full report in PDF format and click here to tweet about the report.

design mind in "Motion"

Stay tuned for the upcoming "Motion" issue of frog's design mind magazine (January 12)

A Wiki for Social Media Marketing

In addition to his already pretty comprehensive list of social media marketing programs, Peter Kim, the "de facto curator of social media" as Steve Rubel calls him, has now launched a wiki. Social media power to document social media power, so to speak. Great effort, check it out:

http://wiki.beingpeterkim.com/