Posts Tagged ‘social networking’

Seeing the World Through @pogue Colored Glasses

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Pogue Colored Glasses

Imagine if Wikipedia customized answers for you based on your IQ. Now imagine if it customized answers based on your age or a poll of how attractive you were. Turning to social media to mine for data is a double edged sword, in some cases our personal networks are going to give better responses because our friends tastes are more likely to mirror our own than the tastes of the general public. However when it comes to factual information, limiting your search to people in your own circle may specifically exclude the expert opinion. When it comes to matters of opinion we are likely to have answers that support our own position rather than challenge it.

There is nothing inherently wrong in this as long as we understand it is happening. Where we experience problems is when we forget that our social networks represent the people we are connected to and start representing their responses as the world view.

This occurs frequently in David Pogue’s book “The World According to Twitter”. David repeatedly contrasts the Twitter universe to other online communities without making the distinction between Twitter as a whole and the people who follow and respond to him. In a book, largely for entertainment purposes, this is not necessarily a bad thing. As an exercise I leave it to you to imagine what “The World According to Twitter” might have looked like if the same questions had been asked instead by @oprah or @aplusk.

However, @pogue makes a serious mistake when he applies this same rational to a product review. In his coverage of Aardvark, a new IM based service for peer answered questions, he praises the service in the timeliness and accuracy of the responses. Unfortunately the value of the service directly relates to how many of your Facebook friends are already using Aardvark. In David Pogue’s case the answer was 54, in mine a measly 2.

I can ask the same questions of Aardvark and not receive any responses or worse yet I can receive responses that are incorrect without any way to assess the authority of the person who responded. It would be wonderful if we were all intelligent, witty and handsome enough to have great followers like @pogue. Until then I would recommend he, and any other reviewer, borrow someone’s social network and repeat your tests, break free from your ivory tower and see how the service works for us little people.

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Augemented Social Networking

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

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.

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Posted in Internet, Opinion | Comments