Tag: Social networking

Categories
Web Misc

The Problem with Instant News, starring Osama bin Laden

Do you know how many tweets have gone out about Osama bin Laden since his death, roughly 30 hours ago?

I’m going to go ahead and peg that number close to 100 million. Why? Because Twitter counted an average of 3440 tweets mentioning Osama per second for nearly 2 hours straight (source). That’s over 24 million on its own.

Everyone is a News Agency

Networks like Twitter (and Facebook, and YouTube, and Tumblr) are a great way for content to spread. Add to that their ubiquity, along with the growing popularity of smartphones and near-constant internet access. In short: it’s never been easier to share a message with twenty-thousand of your closest friends.

A few corollaries here:

  • News spreads quickly online. Instantly, even.
  • Rumours spread just as easily.
  • Bigger news will get more people talking.

When you have all three of these, like Osama, the volume of messages increases exponentially. Partly because so many people care so much about the topic, but also largely due to the economics of scale: the more messages, the more likely some information is false, which causes more messages due to debate, vilification, etc.

Add all this together, and we have tens of millions of people all anxious to share the latest news with their network. And that’s great!

But it’s also really annoying, because we’re all doing it at the same time.

“Latest” and “News” are Ambiguous

The morning after Osama’s death, it probably seemed like breaking news to a lot of people. That was at least twelve hours after the fact, though, so much of the internet had already been talking about it for (digital) ages. Then there’s everyone that found out around lunchtime, or later that evening, along with everyone that won’t find out until later this week.

The problem is that everyone wants to tell someone the second they find out. So they post it! This creates a mess of duplicate information. Social networks, blogs, IM, email; all of them are suddenly and perpetually inundated with a constant stream of updates. All saying the same thing.

Not only is it boring seeing the same few links everywhere you look, but this overdose of useless information also drowns out whatever you were hoping to find from your network in the first place.

Traditional News Outlets are Getting it Right

The key difference between the big players and everyone else is that organizations like CNN can control their updates. This is a refreshing change from the masses. Compare a single voice — providing timely information and only repeating itself when warranted — to the voices of everyone else around you, all yelling the same thing at the same time.

Which would you rather listen to?

This is a rare circumstance where I feel the old-fashioned news networks are nailing it, and us hipsters with our Twitters have a lot to learn.

What can we take away from this for next time?

Categories
Web Technology

All I Want for Christmas is a Mute Button

…for Twitter.

Look, it’s not you. I like reading your updates, I always open your links, and I care about your coffee habits and your drive in this morning (I really do). But sometimes I just wish I could turn down the volume of messages that are flooding my stream, you know? Not all of them — I’m not saying I need a button to keep me away from Twitter — I just need some way to selectively parse out the noise.

How Things are Now

Suppose there’s a high-profile basketball game on, and I don’t really care for basketball. What do I do when a quarter of the tweets coming down the pipe are from passionate basketball fans? Well, I have three lame options:

  1. I can do nothing, and put up with the fact that one in four tweets I read will be nothing but a nuisance.
  2. I can unfollow everyone that talks about basketball, then follow them back later, and hope I don’t forget anyone.
  3. I can turn off Twitter.

Which of those solutions is best? Well, they all kind of suck. Doing nothing is the most annoying of the bunch. How useful is Twitter when the noise-to-signal is that high? Not very. I don’t want to have to work to see those tweets.

Number two would solve my problem somewhat elegantly, if I could script it and if those that tweeted about basketball were consistent. But of course they rarely are: sometimes their tweets will be about basketball, and sometimes they’ll be about incredible statistics. Ideally, I want to keep the awesome videos and lose the stuff about point-guards.

Our third option requires the least effort. Which do you think I choose most often?

How Things Could Be

I want mute options. Lots of them. I want to be able to mute people I follow, I want to be able to mute by hashtag, and even by keyword. I want to be able to toggle mutes as I please, mute for specific amounts of time, and save my common mutes in a mute-friendly screen. For muture mutings.

Let’s get back to our basketball example. If I know some blogger I adore is a Cavs fan, I want to be able to mute him for a couple of hours when the Heat roll into town. Furthermore, I want to mute a few keywords, so that I don’t get hassled by anything containing the words “Lebron James”. And maybe also a few tags; #miamiheat, #basketball, that sort of thing. Basically, I want to define a few basic conditions to filter my stream so that it has more meaning to me.

How We can Get There

While it would be great to see Twitter implement this functionality, who knows what their priorities are like. The good news is that third-party clients can handle this themselves. And how hard can it really be? Before displaying a tweet, check it against a few simple conditions. I could probably hack that together myself. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s already a client out there that allows me this privilege (is there?).

(And if not, maybe there will be soon? Please?)

Categories
Web Misc

Be Your Own Ambassador

These days, your identity on the web can be quite broad. You might have a blog, you almost certainly have a Facebook account, you’ve probably at least heard of Twitter and LinkedIn, and at the very least, you watch YouTube videos and read other people’s blogs. To make things seem even more spread out, many interactions in these spaces tend to be very short — and I don’t just mean Twitter, I bet your comments on Facebook and several other social tools are usually a few hundred characters or less.

With such a wide set of places to leave your mark, and these interactions tending to be shorter and shorter, it’s easy to make a lot of them and its easy to make them without thinking too hard. Lately I’ve been trying to put more thought into comments I leave on people’s blogs and tweets that I’ve whipped up on the spot, and the other day I realized something: Every tweet, every status update, every forum post, and every comment I leave online, anywhere, is an opportunity to make a good first impression.

Pause and consider that for a moment. Every time you submit any content online, someone else is meeting you for the first time. Sometimes it might really only be one person, but often it’s dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. Now imagine meeting this many new people in person rather than through a screen. Would you still just blurt out a quick statement without thinking? What kind of first impression would that leave?

Think of this from a branding point of view. Every time you write a quick, pointless statement online, you’re wasting a chance to properly introduce yourself to a handful of new people. Why not seize every opportunity to make a strong first impression — something people will remember?

Some tips for making those first impressions count:

When you post on a blog or forum, link your name to something. There are plenty of options: your blog, your twitter, your shared items in Google Reader, anything you have that says more about you. If I like what you have to say, I’m going to want to know where I can go to listen to more of you.

Please (please, please, please!) don’t just write “great post!” when you comment on someone’s blog. That doesn’t tell me anything about you. Mention why the post is great: what do you like about it? Do you have a similar experience to share? Does it remind you of something funny/stupid/unique? If you’re going to take the time to leave a comment, leave something worth reading — or better yet, something worth re-reading.

Along the same lines, when commenting on something in Facebook, don’t just say “lol” or “epic!”. That’s what the Like button is for. If you’re going to comment on someone’s status, add a bit of personality. You never know who might gain value from your reply, and something heartfelt and sincere could really make the original poster’s day.

Try to be helpful. This doesn’t just apply to question-answer sites like Stack Overflow; people are asking for help all the time, using every tool available to them. This includes the obvious ones like Twitter and most forums, but the same goes for blogs and Facebook/MySpace/Yammer. You probably know all kinds of things that others don’t — share that knowledge!

Be personal. Remember that you’re interacting with one or more human beings. Don’t spam us to death (I’m looking at you, LinkedIn “power users” and Twitter “experts”) and try to talk like you would talk to someone you’re meeting at a park or grocery store. Be humble and respectful, and don’t just talk about yourself.

Proofread before hitting submit. Those typos and basic grammatical mistakes that ruin otherwise great resumés can also sabotage thoughtful comments. Don’t let easily-correctable errors distract me from what you have to say.

Finally, practice makes perfect. This post isn’t meant to scare anyone away from online interactions. Make lots of them; just remember that each and every one is a chance for you to show the world how great you are.

Categories
Customer Experience Web Misc

How to Promote a Mall in the Year 2010

There’s a mall near my apartment called Billings Bridge. It’s a pretty nice place with a nice variety of stores, and up until about six months ago that’s all I would have had to say about it. But six months ago I started following their marketing director on Twitter, and since then I’ve come to the conclusion that Billings Bridge is a great case study for how to promote a mall in the year 2010. Here’s a look at some of the awesome things they’ve done since I started noticing them in December 2009:

Give-aways just in time for Christmas.

I found Billings Bridge on Twitter after reading the tenth or eleventh tweet about how they were giving away extra products they had lying around to their Facebook fans and Twitter followers. I know first-hand how awesome it was for them to do this, because I won an iPod Touch. On December 23rd. (That’s two days before Christmas.) So for the next three weeks, whenever anyone asked my girlfriend (now fiancée) what I got her for Christmas, she’d have this great story about how because Billings Bridge is super-generous and using modern communication channels that are easy to follow, they gave this to me so that I could give it to her.

There are probably about fifty other stories like this, plus all those tweets, and now at least one blog post. Word of mouth sells.

$50 for every 50 fans.

I don’t know when they started doing this or when they’re planning to stop, but every time Billings Bridge gets fifty new fans “likes” on Facebook, they give a $50 gift-certificate to one of their.. likers? (What do you call people that like things now? I miss fans.) This is brilliant because the sooner they get another fifty “likes”, the sooner they’ll give away another gift-certificate. This means that they have a steady stream of excited new mall-enthusiasts, in a very powerful social networking environment, constantly trying to get their friends and acquaintances to pay attention to that mall that gives stuff away. Motivate people to say something nice in a conduit for viral messages, and you’re going to get a lot of attention for your brand. Textbook smart marketing.

Sex and the City month.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of tweets about various fun things Billings Bridge is doing related to that new Sex and the City movie that’s coming out soon — things like that trip-for-four to NYC that they’re raffling off at the end of May. This is a fantastic topic to promote around, because it’s a movie that glorifies shopping. It allows them to catch interest through the popularity of a trendy, upcoming film, and convert on that interest because the film is about shopping. People that like to shop probably like the movie, so bringing them into the mall is obviously a good idea. Simple. Genius.

This is how every mall should run promotions. I’m sick of billboards and radio advertisements — I ignore them. If you want my interest, meet me halfway and spend time where I spend time. Give me incentives to pay attention to you, and better yet, incentives for me to get other people to pay attention as well. Try new things with new tools, and create a feedback loop so that I can tell you what works and what doesn’t. It’s working for Billings Bridge.

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Oh, and did I mention that they’re giving away an iPad when they hit 2010 “likes” on Facebook? Because they’re about halfway there, and if you could “like” them too, and then tell a few friends, that would get us both a bit closer…