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Social Media

Twitter is an Elephant

June 12, 2009

I give up. Twitter is the proverbial elephant surrounded by blind men. It’s something different to everyone who uses it, and even that seems to change quite quickly as new tools are launched and users find new ways to use Twitter. Is it a mouthpiece for celebrities? Is it a place for brands? Is it a broadcast medium? Is it for conversations?

The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to all of the above, and that probably contributes in large part to the allure of Twitter. People choose to use it for different things and they’re creating new ways to use it all the time.

In addition, what you can use Twitter for is not a completely free choice. To a certain extent, the number of people you follow and that follow you dictate what you are able to do with Twitter.

There is no distribution without followers so can’t necessarily use it to ‘broadcast’ anything, assuming you want to be heard. But, at the same time, it must be impossible to hold a ‘conversation’ with 10,000+ followers whether you want to or not. Of course, I don’t know for sure, because that is not my experience.

I like Andrew McAfee’s approach best. He and his MBA class brainstormed Twitter’s properties a while back and it’s a really good list. Thinking about Twitter’s attributes might provide a more objective method for determining what it can or should be used for.

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Posted on June 12, 2009

Fortune 500 Corporate Blog List

April 16, 2009

There were 76 Fortune 500 companies publishing blogs as of last September. I studied posts from 389 corporate blogs published by those 76 companies for my Masters thesis last Fall and I’ve posted the complete list including URLs to each blog.

There are other sources of corporate blog information, mostly notably the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. Communications/PR firm Burson-Marsteller also conducted their own survey of Fortune 500 blogs last year and I used both to cross-reference my search.

Different studies tend to produce slightly different numbers mainly because they use slightly different criteria to define them. The criteria I used was specific to my study and I posted that too so that my list is transparent.

I’m still debating whether to post more of my thesis on this blog or not, or whether to share it publicly at all. In the meantime, I hope this list helps someone as a starting point for researching Fortune 500 blogs at some point in the future. If it does, let me know.

In addition, if you have any questions about the list, the criteria or anything related to Fortune 500 blogs or my study please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send me an email.

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Posted on April 16, 2009

Buying Relationships on Twitter

April 15, 2009

It turns out the @cnnbrk Twitter account (the most followed account on Twitter) that posts news alerts from CNN.com had nothing to do with CNN. It was created James Cox, known on Twitter as @imajes, who managed to amass 944,000+ followers for @cnnbrk.

Alley Insider is reporting that CNN has now acquired the account although the details are not yet known. This is interesting on a number of levels although it’s a unique case that it might make it hard to draw any firm conclusions.

Firstly, it raises the question of whether Twitter accounts and their followers can be successfully bought and sold. This immediately sets off alarm bells because in principle it’s no different than buying and selling email lists or any other type of data without user permission.

It doesn’t even really matter so much if this is ethically wrong or not as much as the fact that in the long run buying users that never opted-in to receiving your messages is ineffective. They will opt-out (if they’re paying attention in the first place, which might be the bigger problem when buying Twitter followers).

Regardless, it definitely changes the relationship between the account owner and its followers after the fact. This is a theme Dave Winer blogged about recently when speculating about Twitter’s own business model and the potential for a conflict with users’ values.

Buying and selling individual Twitter accounts presents the same risk because it changes existing relationships. Although, a Twitter audience is obviously not captive. It’s easy to hit the ‘unfollow’ button and maybe some @cnnbrk users will.

What makes this situation unique is that I think a lot of followers probably assumed @cnnbrk was created and curated by CNN to start with. In reality, the relationship they thought they had before was false and now that CNN have acquired the account they’ve got what they signed up for in the first place.

Secondly, if Twitter accounts change hands it creates the potential and perhaps the likelihood that the content or the volume of content will change too. Will Twitter relationships withstand this type of change?

I’m not exactly sure how @cnnbrk determined what to post and whether it was manual or automated somehow. Looking at the most recent history it looks like there were no more than a handful of tweets each day and several days where there were none at all.

Again, this case is unique because the content posted on @cnnbrk were snippets of news items published on CNN.com so the Twitter content will be drawn from the same source, it just depends how it’s tweeted.

It probably makes sense for CNN to add links to full articles in tweets in order to drive (and measure) traffic to its site and this would be helpful rather than offensive for users. But, there must be a temptation to increase the frequency of tweets in order to grow traffic since @cnnbrk is now a commercial concern.

We will have to wait and see if any of these changes happen, the effect it has on the follower total, if any, and what any of it even means.

At SES, Guy Kawasaki demonstrated the apparent power of distributing links via Twitter (automatically using Twitterfeed). But on the flip side, @jacobh tweeted that the click-through on NYTimes.com links was less than 1% which makes it hard to generalize any conclusions on raw numbers of Twitter followers at this point.

Have thoughts? I’d love to hear them.

UPDATE: Alley Insider have updated their post and it looks like CNN have been working with James Cox on @cnnbrk for over two years so whatever changed hands was some sort of consulting fee.

Dan Frommer also points out that Twitter’s terms prevent buying and selling Twitter accounts so I guess this was a non-starter unless we see other creative ways to transfer ‘ownership’ of accounts.

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Posted on April 15, 2009

Social Gestures and Blogs

March 31, 2009

This is a follow-up to my post on whether a distributed Follow system could add value to blog subscription feeds by encouraging some of the transparency, closeness and viral capabilities of Twitter and other services that use Follow.

The supporting gestures found in Follow systems create additional forms of expression over and above creating original content. Features like ‘reblog’ (or ‘retweet’) and ‘like’ capture feelings towards pieces of content and publish them as standardized gestures. They seem to drive a lot of virality in services like Twitter and Tumblr because they help spread content through networks of followers like a crowd of people keeping balloons up in the air by tapping them lightly when they pass over head.

In the same way that subscribing has the same end result as following, some social gestures have always been technically available as blogging tools. For example, blockquotes could be viewed as a way to reblog specific paragraphs of another post. However, blockquotes are interpreted as a way to refer to another piece of content. They don’t necessarily transmit any implicit or explicit gesture by themselves. The whole point of a reblog is to share the reblogged portion of the post even if comments are added. They are two completely different gestures, or one is a social gesture and one isn’t.

I think it’s good example of why the words matter because they change what it means to do what is essentially the same thing from a technical perspective. It’s also one of the reasons why subscribing is not the same as following. Perhaps the way to distinguish blockquotes and reblogs is that blockquotes serve the user by helping them make their point, whereas reblogs are more generous and help users promote the original content creator and only by extension themselves.

So far, social gestures have lived inside specific social media services although they can become somewhat distributed through aggregators like FriendFeed. It really includes it’s own gestures but since content is aggregated from other sources, it allows users to apply gestures to content created elsewhere. In some cases, things added to FriendFeed are integrated back into the source system.

Other services like Disqus include ‘reblog’ and ‘like’ gestures for blog content and could provide a template for other services that would collectively result in a distributed social gesture system for the Web. However, similar to the Follow model, I wonder if there is something about the short-form content published via Twitter and Tumblr that makes it more suited to social gestures? After all, Twitter isn’t a micro-blogging platform as much as it is a place, in part because of the supporting social gestures.

As posts become shorter and more real-time, they mimic real-life conversations more closely with Twitter at one end of the scale and blogs at the other. In that sense, social gestures are more like responses to other people than references to content. I also think the ability to retweet or reblog a piece of content in its entirety could be a reason why it’s more more popular for short-form content. Or, perhaps we just put more of ourselves into blog content that we are more protective of it.

If our blogs are where we live and Twitter is a place where we meet to talk. The difference in reblogging in those contexts could be the different between taking something from someone’s home, and just repeating what they said in a bar. So, would social gestures work as well or be as popular for long-form content like blogs as they are for shorter, more conversational content? I’d love to know what you think.

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Posted on March 31, 2009

‘Follow’ For Blogs

March 27, 2009

Following someone on Twitter and subscribing to a feed of blog content are similar actions but they feel completely different. Knowing who follows you in real-time creates an immediacy and closeness that makes Twitter a lot more social than subscribing to a blog feed.

Various friend widgets like MyBlogLog and subscriber stat counters provide this type of information for blogs and have been popular since before Twitter existed. It’s interesting to look back now and realize that they were/are probably popular because we naturally want to create closer, more social experiences.

However, the faces found in friend widgets seem more transient compared to those found in follower lists. Some site visitors may appear because they’re logged in to a friend widget and followed a link to your site without knowing what it was. Others might be pushed out of the widget before they’re seen because there are a limited number of slots. Many may not subscribe to your site so the visitor and subscriber numbers don’t tally.

It is possible to join more permanent ‘communities’ on MyBlogLog but this happens away from the site or content or person around which the community was created. If this information was available on each blog, it might help to create a more social experience like Twitter.

Google Friend Connect works more like this and seems to bring people a little closer together. Member profiles include bio information and the other sites they’ve joined. Members can even communicate with each other in the context of each community which isn’t possible on Twitter. You could argue that @ replies allow everyone to communicate with everyone else which is true but there is no context so it’s a different experience.

However, the relationship between site owners and site members still doesn’t feel as explicit or as close as following. Joining a site community and following someone are two different social gestures.

I’m curious as to whether a distributed Follow system that automatically adds someone to a friend widget when they subscribe to a blog feed would bring people closer together. Would it increase interactions and improve blog communities?

It should make everyone more visible and aid discovery of new people – something that feels particularly rich on Twitter – but how much of that can be attributed to the nature of short, easily scanned and responsive bites of content found on Twitter versus the longer, more isolated posts found on blogs?

Supporting social gestures and communal features like ‘retweet’, ‘@’ and ‘#’ found on Twitter may also play a role. I’ll talk about those in another post.

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Posted on March 27, 2009

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