In The Dirty Little Secret Of The Twitter Elite Mitch Joel writes, “Just because they’re following you on Twitter, it does not mean that they are paying attention to you. ” His conclusion, in the form of a rhetorical question,
The bigger question is this: how much longer can we continue to use the words “Social Media” if every day, the majority of the power users are doing everything they can to filter out and aggregate their personal preferences – essentially rendering them less social?
Stating a conclusion as a rhetorical question certainly shows a lack of commitment to a position, and that is a good thing. Mitch’s point that social media platforms are being used for marketing is not incorrect, what he fails to remember is that these platforms still have, at their very core, a set of one to one connections.
It is very true that Ashton and Oprah can not possibly have a personal relationship to each and every follower, however it is entirely possible that the Ashton and Oprah brands could. This is accomplished via what I will call Augmented Social Networking, and it is still in its infancy. As corporate marketing progresses from a mass media, print and broadcast mode, through intermediate steps, email and finally into social networking the tools that it uses to manage its customer relationship have similarly grown to adapt to the capabilities of social networks. At the very bottom end are the tools like CoTweet currently available to allow companies to share the responsibilities of managing a single Twitter account. At the top end of that spectrum would be a tool like Toucan that allows the integration of Twitter with a customer relationship management platform like Salesforce.
Whether its intelligent agents working in conjunction with existing systems or office assistants using simple tools, Augmented Social Networking allows companies and individuals to establish many meaningful one-to-one personal relationships in place of the former one-to-many relationships. So, in response to the rhetorical question above, social networks will reject power users who do not establish personal relationships. While, for the time being, it may seem productive to have a one-way conversation over a social network, over time those that follow this paradigm are doomed to be filtered themselves.
Tags: cotweet, salesforce, social networking, twitter