Umair Haque recently advanced a hypothesis that social media is a bubble, and that when it bursts we will see that we were not brought meaningfully closer together by the growth of social communication.
I don’t want social media to be a bubble, because I like it.
First, let’s define a bubble. We mean an economics-style bubble, like the dot-com bubble or the housing bubble. In this sense, a bubble is “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values”. So lots of new relationships that aren’t worth very much. I think Unmair was saying we’ve been placing undue value on the relationships generated by social media, both from a personal standpoint (these aren’t real friends) and a marketing standpoint (these aren’t very devoted ‘fans’).
Here are the reasons I feel the shiny, soapy dome of social media’s bubble should be left alone.
The flowering of human creativity
“Thin relationships” are not a new phenomena to society. If we rechristen these friends “acquaintances”, you might recognize them better. Aquaintances are certainly not without value.
Clay Shirky’s SXSW keynote touched on the evolutionary impetus to share and to cooperate, calling it “spiteful” not to pass on information when it’s very little effort for you to do so. This is the link economy in action.
It’s easy to share links to interesting content. It’s fun to add to the conversation by commenting on blogs and liking updates. It’s gratifying to contribute content to the collective by taking photos, writing essays (blog posts), illustrating, designing fonts and photoshop brushes, and shooting funny videos. It’s meaningful to lead culture and capture the zeitgeist by giving birth to memes, defining ideas, pushing for human thought development.
The more the merrier
Thin relationships, or “weak connections” make these upper-Maslow interactions possible. You don’t need a high level of investment in someone to trade ideas. Their input is valuable precisely because they come from a different perspective, and aren’t bound by politeness or concern for your ego. I’ve mentioned the findings that novel input from new friends sparks more innovative, creative solutions. The more the merrier.
Marketing soap
From a marketing standpoint, I hate to put the idea out there (there being Google search) that we’re overestimating the worth of social media and it’s practitioners. It could sour corporate decision makers who ponder how much to invest in newfangled media.
This isn’t about protecting our jobs, it’s about making them better. My firm belief is that all marketing, communication, PR, customer service and sales efforts (not to mention internal communications) can be enhanced and made more worthwhile and productive by conversing instead of broadcasting. I don’t think organizations have a choice, because public expectation of brands/services/orgs has changed.
This being a nascent revolution in the mainstream, still, I don’t want to throw the word b-word around. I want to work to show that teaming up with customers to get them what they want is going to succeed.
I’m so into the evolution of language. Ask anybody. I stop hyphenating “email” in like 1977.
As a lover of language, I have a keen appreciation for the nuance and tone of vocabulary. Fluidity of meaning is super, but it has to be totally right.
The word that’s wrinkling my fur is “curate“. You know, that thing you get a Masters in Byzantine art history to do.
“Curate” as a verb for posting links for your buddies has been floating around for a bit. SXSW seems to have really flagellated that horse past all repair, though. See Mike Rhode’s sketchnotes bearing the imperative “Become a curator“.
Scoble started this, and I thank him for bringing the issue to a head. Better we make a decision now than let this linguistic boil fester any longer.
Scoble wants better aggregating tools for when he’s filtering. I’m all for that. I’m sick of taking screenshots of tweets too. But I unhumbly suggest most of what we’re gathering is more “filtered” than “curated”.
Have you read Cult of the Amateur? (God, I need an Amazon affiliate account). It’s about UGC (user-gen content) being the death of expert authority, and all that. I’m not totally down with this book, but the elevation of common man to Curator puts me in mind of this ominous thesis.
Curating is something done by experts. And Scoble, good sir, you may indeed claim that title.
But homo commonis is just a dude with a bunch of interesting (to him) $h1t that he’s gathering up in one place bascially so he can find the links to it later. If he makes industrious use of that $h1tpile by sending it to his tweeps, or his tweeps to it, then we can generously call it “filtering”.
Let’s not drag down the actual profession of curating by overstating link hoarding. It’s pretentious to ascribe more significance to our activities than they warrant with high-falutin’ words.
Zomg, my husband finally got a new iPhone, so we can go GPS crazy! I’ve got an experiment all lined up for us.
In my generalized paranoia over personal #privacy, I thought I’d just run screaming in the other direction and force myself into exposure therapy with some location-aware mobile technology.
2010 is the Year of The Mobile, dontcha know. There’s been a lot of buzz about using the data that’s lying all over the place to make life more interesting, exploiting social networking to have more fun IRL, marketing to people in context, and coming to terms with never, ever being off the grid again.
That all sounds neat, so I fired up the ole’ App Store and downloaded me Where the Flock. This app does one thing: let you and whoever you authorize see where each other are on a Google map.
As I’m not a bar-hopping teenager, the only person whose whereabouts concern me on a regular basis are my husband‘s, so I installed the app and invited him to share. Would he think this coolio idea was convenient or creepy? I was like Hey, if this is too privacy-invasive, we can uninstall, man.
But he totally got it. Just as text messaging was a boon to those who’s lives are too time-sensitive to bear the pleasantries associated with a phone call, now no one has to be bothered answering the question “Are you still at work?”
The app not only shows you where your previously uncharted spouse is, it tells you how fast they’re moving. This is, in theory, so you know if they’re driving, stuck in traffic, ambling along procrastinatorily, or speeding (which I assume is reported instantly to the police. I hope I’m kidding). The practical result I can see of broadcasting my velocity is getting mocked mercilessly for my incredibly slow pace when I’m out for a run.
The Mr. did have a condition for using the app: that our location data was only shared between us. That’s cretainly my preference too, and my assumption. I turned on the app and saw that I had to log in with my Google account. Not to worry, the app assured me, only Google’s servers would have my information. Oh, just those guys, eh?
A little paranoid, I emailed the developers for clarification. I don’t have a Google Profile or use Google Buzz, on purpose style, and I didn’t want to suddenly find out the universe could see me flashing like a neon sign every time they used a Google Map. I’m famously, pointlessly stingy with my personal data where The Goog is concerned.
Troy, the app author, swiftly informed me that the hilariously-acronymed WTF doesn’t, in fact, actually share your location with Google, so we were all set.
While this was happening, I got a nice message from a Twitter followee, welcoming me to followerhood. I clicked through to her website, only to have it tell me exactly where I was located.
Well, that’s a pretty weird WordPress plugin or whatever, I thought, and unnecessary from a mar-com standpoint. There I am though. Little Canadian flag.
Not that I’m drinking the Kool-Aid, but this location pwnage on the day of my long-awaited husband-tracking experiment reinforces to me what I already know but refuse to admit: #privacy is dead, get over it.
I googled that, looking for a reference. Lots of YouTube results. I clicked through. And bloody spying bloody YouTube told me (based on the evening’s clickings) I might like to check out some Daft Punk, or perhaps my current flavourite Gogol Bordello, and maybe a drugged-up kid after the dentist.
Not because I’d watched the high kid video since 1985, but because recently I’d read on CNN that the dad who filmed poor David had retired on the YouTube ad income. “They” don’t admit that they watched me read CNN. “They” say it’s because I like Daft Punk.
Admittedly, I stay logged in to Google all the time. I have to; I’m a GoogleDocs turbo user. That’s how YouTube knows what I was reading on CNN. Now I realize that’s akin to asking Google to stalk me. I might go check out that “Sziget” song, though…
Good thing it’s Earth Hour & I’m blogging by candlelight. I have a powerful urge to go off the grid and go fabricate me a tinfoil helmet.
Early on in the web, the people who made websites were those who were technically inclined and skilled with coding. Once the commercial web was up and running, around the turn of the century (mindblowing, eh?), it became apparent that ecommerce didn’t just need to function – web design was a form of marketing communication, and it turned out the job of designing sites was a graphic design situation. People with an understanding of formal design, communication, and visual persuasion took their rightful place and the UI/UX designer was born. Only now do you see complex coding not in the job description of designers, as employers recognize the distinction between the two skill sets.
I’m reading Tara Hunt‘s The Whuffie Factor, and in it she details the physical extent she went to in order to properly market a startup. She moved to new city—a new country, in fact—and her network and reputation there were small. To forge relationships that could be brought online, Tara went out every single night, sometimes to a few places, to meet people in real life. Socializing, if you will.
I’m doing a series of interviews with filmmakers like Melissa Pierce on fundraising creative projects through social media, and repeatedly the story that unfolds is one of real life relationships going online. Face to face, or at least a mediated one to one, making people’s acquaintance and cooperating to do something mutually beneficial.
The social medium is probably finished being the message, except in terms of impressing customers that you’re meeting them on their terms. It’s time to get down to what social media makes so easy: people meeting, expressing interest in each other’s projects, sharing neat stuff, and helping each other out when we can.
This is why social media can never be put on an agency’s deliverables checklist. It takes time. It takes personal investment. It’s a network buzzing around individuals. It’s social capital (the new kind, not the classic kind) that’s lost when individuals leave organizations.
Trust is why we shouldn’t despair that social media is being ruined by marketing. The positive energy required to build community is self-perpetuating and forces companies to toe the line. No one’s going to build a giant network one friendship at a time only to serve them spam when they come over for dinner.
The gurus who totally get Twitter lists can now give way to the friendly, helpful, interesting, genuine people who intuitively understand that cooperation and friendships are the best way to get where we’re going.
Something unique is happening to stories in the age of participation.
Have you heard the term “convergent media”? How about “transmedia“? Transmedia is “storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have different “entry points” in the story”. It’s a richer experience, an interactive narrative backchannel, that lets you learn and participate in what were once one-way broadcast media: film and tv.
Expect these kinds of experiences to become more common, as tv and film producers explore transmedia in extending and enhancing the worlds they create. The conversation, participation, and deeper understanding fostered by new media in co-production with classic media brings everybody a bigger, better experience of the story.
The Nature of Things One Ocean airs Thursday nights in March on CBC.
Good old CBC. I was listening to a Rewind (where they play radio documentaries from God knows when to fill air time) on the subject of Hutterites. Hutterites, if you’re not Manitoban, are a communal, agrarian, pacifist religious group who live in colonies, raise pigs & sell eggs. What’s so social media about that, you wonder?
Well, I was struck by the doc’s revelation that when Hutterite colonies reach 150 members, they split off into a daughter colony. Upwards of 150 members, and the communities found that factioning and cliques played havoc with their carefully-maintained social system. Some people had to be removed from the equation to keep the peace.
The 150 limit happens to be the much-bandied-in-social media-circles Dunbar Number: the theoretical cognitive limit, determined by the size of our neocortex, to the amount of stable social relationships humans can maintain. Hutterite colonies seem to bear out Dunbar’s idea.
If we’re physically limited by the size of our brains to 150 real relationships, what does this mean for overfriending in social networks? I’m curious about a tipping point that may push people away from social networking. Are we mentally capable of the task of feeding hundreds of relationships?
Weak and strong ties are apples and oranges
We can “beat” the Dunbar limit and get preferential inclusion in people’s groups by being super useful, promoting ourselves as important parts of the network and rising in esteem, pushing less “useful” people into ambiance. Alternatively, we can seek to be so niche that we’re sought out transiently as part of a curated group when our particular expertise matters. That leads to opportunities without the attention demanded by full-time strong ties.
In a study by Leigh Thompson from Kellogg School of Management, it was determined that “open groups”, in which creative brainstorming was carried out with fresh members routinely added to the mix, produced more innovation than “closed groups” with the same members. A greater variety of unique ideas are generated by rotating your connections and expanding outside your 150.
Weak ties, in mathematical sociology, introduce more novel information. This is the value of Twitter.
The mere use of technology allows us to outsource our mental social landscape. A few clicks tells you what mutual friends you have in common with someone. Our brains now have external hard drives. Cognition limits may be circumventable at this juncture in human history.
Language is getting simplified
Dunbar proposed that language may have evolved as a “cheaper” form of social grooming, allowing humans to get on with their lives while still recognizing and reassuring each other of our social importance. Computerized text-based language is even cheaper; we strip out body language, tone of voice, and focused attention (eye contact), and bang off 140 characters to fulfill each other’s phatic needs. This low-cost social recognition may facilitate the growth our social sphere past neocortical limits.
Bruce Lahn, PhD, of the University of Chicago was the lead researcher on two papers in the mid-2000′s that indicated the human brain is still evolving in size and complexity. “Our environment and the skills we need to survive in it are changing faster then we ever imagined. I would expect the human brain, which has done well by us so far, will continue to adapt to those changes,” said the geneticist. The size limitations placed on our social spheres by brain size may dissolve as we adapt to greater connectivity.
If the network fits…
I asked an (actual) friend with almost 1000 Facebook connections if he felt harrassed by the amount of noise & people he’s paying attention to, or is the quality of the attention so dispersed that it’s easy to know stuff about so many people at once. I suspected it was 80/20, that a small percentage (around 200, approximately Dunbar) were doing most of the interaction.
“I was brought up to be social.” he said. “On a daily basis, I probably spend no more than 15 minutes on Facebook. I make it a point to message at least one person a day and reply to all my emails and wall posts. I would consider myself close friends with no more than 60 people on my friends list (and that includes family). I do not feel overwhelmed.”
“I actually purge people I have met if I hit 1000 friends.” His psychological and practical comfort level online hovers around a thousand people, about 6.5 times the Dunbar number.
A sense of overfriending is a function of expectation
Expectations in relationship strength are key to pleasurable social networking. If you regard Facebook as a place to keep in touch with your family and good friends, you’re going to be uncomfortable when your boss friends you.
Social media needs to be designed to explicitly foster strong or weak ties to manage etiquette breaches and social discomfort.
Notwithstanding fads and the network effect that keep people using the platform where their connections already are, niche networks that cater to weak and strong ties, or at least divide them adequately, will exist and be popular simultaneously.
I was really pitying music videos last year. MTV doesn’t run them anymore, focusing instead on the never-ending status update that is teenage reality tv. Spike Jonze is off doing feature length puppeteering, and the golden age of the 4 minute short film known as “the music video” seemed doomed to the scrap heap of audio history with the Sony Walkman, cds, and shopping at actual music stores.
Enter the freakin’ comeback. Lady Gaga and Beyoncé would like you to watch their new video Telephone, please, and rest assured you will, for it is epic. In the age of YouTube, broadband, and “share” buttons, music videos are big again. I first heard of Jonas Åkerlund’s gritty, Tarantinoey, hot gay sexy video on Twitter. The next day, a friend posted it on Facebook. So I clicked through and checked it out on YouTube, where it’s being banner-added copiously on everything even faintly relevant and has, I’m not kidding, 10 million hits in 2 days. So viral*, it’s sickening. Oh, & the song is about mobile technology, for Pete (Cashmore‘s) sake—a rebel yell at the privacy invasion of constant connectedness.
The video itself is also peppered, nay rife, nay fraught with good ole‘ fashion tivo-busting product placements. You must endure a Jennifer Aniston commerical before playback. Team Gaga are nailing every conceivable marketing opportunity, like you might as well do when you‘re getting that many eyeballs.
Kudos, social media, for inserting Gaga & Beyoncé’s single into my life. I don’t even listen to Gaga or Beyoncé. And that is the power of word of mouth through social media.
The other power will unfold as I get massive website hits for including the words “hot gay sexy” in this article. Let’s see if Media Temple can withstand the onslaught.
*Viral quality in direct proportion to ta-ta count.
In researching an illustration project, I made an incredible discovery I now offer to the world. Did you ever notice how much Gerald McBoing-Boing and his concerned family look like an RSS icon? Allow me to demonstrate:
That’s crazy! There’s no way the artists at UPA could have known about RSS back in the 18th century!
Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.
Personally, I think the cattiness mythology is useful to create a suspiciousness between women, and though there ARE jealous, competitive women, the majority of the cattiness (backstabbing and petty jealous talk) I’ve experienced has come from men. Social media has only made my female relationships grow stronger. I’m kind of assembling an army of strong, smart, amazing women from around the globe that enjoy helping one another’s careers grow.
Who will dominate location-based status? The Big Blue Boot stomps Gowalla & Foursquare into ‘roo & d0u¢hebag soup. Illustration available creative commons-style on Flickr for all your bloggy uses.
The best way to look like a superfuturist guru is to predict the demise of the current big thing. Social overload is leading some to wonder if, rather than being the year of ubiquitous social web, 2010 might just be the year social eats itself.
People are muttering about social networks not scaling. Overfriending, social lines blurring, and etiquette confusion are sucking the fun out of Facebook. We know you can only maintain about 150 meaningful connections, and that as networks get bigger they turn from conversations back into broadcasting. Group inertia also keeps us mired where our group already is—no one seems to be asking for one more network to log in to, update, and remake connections on. Google Buzz did not entice my mother-in-law.
I’m not sure it’s the number of friendships we’re trying to maintain, it’s the intrusion of different kinds of relationships into inappropriate spaces. It’s like when your spouse shows up at work and it’s so incongruous to see them there that you act weird in front of your work friends. You know?
“It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”
Web 3.0 (don’t roll your eyes) is gonna be about signal to noise. Connecting everyone was great, but it turns out we don’t like everyone. Filters like lists are weak at this point, whether to limit their adoption (more sharing = more revenue) or because demand hasn’t been great enough. But if Big Social doesn’t want to see a precipitous decline in participation, they need to hire a few usability experts and make it happen.
So Facebook is where my robust profile resides, and where I’m most likely to contribute to conversations. You can have the most holistic relationship with me there. As such, I’m ending up friending people I haven’t met IRL, and Facebook is becoming less of a front-porch-with-a-beer and more of a cordial-nod-at-the-grocery-store experience. I kinda like beer. But I’m scared to say so, because Senior People Are Watching. Socializing just became brand building, ugh. What can we do to get that down-home feeling back? How can I associate with people who like my blog without them seeing me in my jammies?
The smartest thing Facebook could do would be to introduce a secondary request system, “Professional Request”, and scoop LinkedIn. I belong to LinkedIn but don’t use it, in part so as not to replicate effort. Facebook could make LinkedIn utterly irrelevant by allowing users to add professional contacts that would receive limited (or different) profile access – perhaps restricting photos, video, and application activities (Farmville, I’m talking to you), highlighting instead fan pages and status updates. This pared down sharing would become the accepted new norm for professional relationships within Facebook, allowing users to keep their Dunbar 150 in the lifestream loop while still offering aquaintances limited access, including messaging. With etiquette in place to govern this dual stream of relationships, users can feel more confident expanding their personal networks to include people they haven’t met IRL and with whom they still want to engage without sharing baby pictures.
This could extend to what virtually amounts to dual profiles, with separate status updates for personal & professional contacts, and a rich niche for developers to build apps geared towards enhancing professional connections. Facebook could smoothly handle this double stream for sophisticated power users that have both networks to maintain.
Btw I googled “LinkedIn is useless” to find this video. Facebook, if you want to pay me for this awesome idea, I’ll be glad to send you my Pay Pal info.
Despite all the moaning about dying print publications, people are still eager to absorb daily news. What they expect out of the experience has changed, though, according to a new Pew Research Center report. Now people want multi-platform news on demand, customized, and spreadable.
Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. From Understanding the Participatory News Consumer
As part of your marketing efforts, you may be pushing news out to customers, using Facebook or Twitter to reach them. Your own site’s blog is also a key source of news (you have to link to something, unless you’ve mastered the 140-character press release). How can you make sure you’re accomodating the inclinations of today’s newsumer?
Portable: Consider an iPhone app. Creating branded mobile content, on your own or with local partners, can get you in front of your customers when you have something interesting to say. Throwing in a little location-awareness and well-timed news on the go might even turn to sales conversions.
Personalized: Opt-ins allow people to select only the type of news they need, so allow RSS & email updates on specifics (sales, new products, events). Allow gravatars, Twitter & Facebook login so user’s cute little faces can accompany their experience.
Participatory: Remove barriers to interactivity. Let people comment, and for god’s sake don’t make them log in to do so. Integrate Facebook Connect, Tweetmeme, and whatever other social software makes sense for your audience. Quickly sharing and commenting is appreciated (nay, expected) by today’s consumers, and the viral possibilities when you release really nifty news are huge.
Nice to meet you
Thanks for the comments & the kind words. Best place to get my immediate attention is Twitter, but you could also email me.
The more the merrier
