The Fast Company blog recent posted, Twitterbursts: It’s Not About The Tools; It’s All About The Tools by Marcia Conner of Pistachio Consulting (aka @marciamarcia). I always appreciate getting the history of communication channels, especially when there is a cognitive twist thrown in. In a past life I was a cognitive psychologist who studied how media effects cognition. The series of posts, History of Knowledge Management in Six Parts, took on a similar task which I originally called, Knowledge Management is an Emerging Field with a Long History.

Marcia notes that meaning is bigger than words. The more you know someone, the fewer words you need to convey meaning. In fact, very young children learn meaning before words and often invent their own words before they learn their parent’s language. I was told I had about 50 variations on ugh, each with its own meaning. Parents who pay close attention learn this vocabulary and provide validation to their children that helps with their language acquisition.

The best new tools enhance existing means of communication and this is what Twitter does. As Marcia writes, “You have been microsharing and networking since you first asked to be carried and your toys were made of wood.” What is new with Twitter messages “is how they help us do it (forcing compactness and distributing to portable devices) and who we share with (often previous strangers who share our passions).”

While the best new tools enhance existing means of communication, they also bring new capabilities as Marcia notes. We need to learn how to best use these capabilities. We generally start with the past. The phonetic alphabet first recorded oral poetry before it went on to take advantage of the capabilities text offered (See Eric Havelock’s Origins of Western Literacy). I think we are still discovering what micro-messaging can provide. Marcia writes that it can, “amplify voices and net people-picked answers fast… even update our collaboration capacity; improving our mindfulness by encouraging us to ask ourselves consistently, “Is this something I should share?”

This is all true but I wonder what else is in store. The inventors of the alphabet did not imagine War and Peace or the precise sharing of scientific information through journals. The ability to enhance random access in books took over 1500 years and it appears people did not know they could read in silence for about that long. Now I am not equating Twitter with the invention of the alphabet but the alphabet offers an extreme example of what a new media can bring. I kidded Marcia about her ability to engage in Twitter speak at the Enterprise 2.0 conference but I also admired it as both a skill and an example of how new media can effect the way we think and sharpen our communication abilities.

[A List of Goals and their Measurement Strategies]

(5) Customer Service - Does social media reduce your expenses in customer support? Typically in a forum community members will support other community members. Outsource your customer support to the community. Intuit has done this with their online products, reduced expenses, and increased product innovation by building a customer advisory board.

[Is Measurement A Realistic Goal?]

I was thinking that aiming for measurement goals in social media may be unrealistic because you are really dealing with relationships.  And that the path to success in social media is not through a focus on obtaining sales, but rather a focus on building and maintaining those relationships. The danger of only measuring sales related goals in social media is thatthose goals may drive the wrong strategy for success in social media. I think there's some basis in that argument, in that its difficult to measure the enthusiasm for a brand on the part of customers, or the strength of a relationship. 

One way you can measure a customer's commitment to a brand is through the Net Promoter Score, this is a measurement of the likelihood a customer would recommend a company. It is possible to ask customers their opinion on the whether they would recommend a company or product. Often important community members may not be customers, I think it unlikely that such non-customers would answer a net promoter score survey.

Really this goes back to my caveat about measuring social media goals, the path to success comes through engagement on topics that seemingly have little to do with direct sales, but have a lot to do with building the value a customer perceives provided by a brand. How a company provides customer service, the pace of innovation for product marketing, and operational excellence; these are not direct efforts to sell products, but they are factors that have an influence on the opinion by customers of a brand.  Rather than abandoning measurement goals for sales. I think its important to track such data, but also at the same time keep an eye on indicators for community building. 

[Measuring Participation by Community Members]

Success in increasing community member participation will probably increase if you conduct an outreach strategy or develop a reward system for involvement. Rewards in social media don't have to be monetary (ethics dictate that you don't compensate with hard money, or if you do the person receiving the compensation reveal payment), rewards can take the form of recognition perhaps by ranking participants for their level of involvement or by giving community members a platform for building their brand within the community.

Measuring participation and sentiment levels when combined and balanced with some of the measurement strategies I've outlined above will I believe help a company to achieve success in social media. Part of the reason I think this is from conversations with Richard Binhammer at Dell, Frank Eliason at Comcast, Wendy Harman at the American Red Cross and many other brand social media strategists and online community managers within brands.

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Twitter users who checked their Followers today were treated to an on-again/off-again look at a very nice new interface for managing followers. Here’s a screen shot:

You can toggle between a “List” view which is similar to the old interface, and an “Expanded” view. In the Expanded view, in a single glance, you can see the person’s avatar, screen name, “real” name, location, and, get this, their latest tweet! In either view, there are two drop down menus within each profile. The left-hand menu allows you to follow the person back if you have not already done so. The right-hand has several features, including the ability to send the person a Direct Message (DM), Follow, Block, and a new one, to “Mention” them in a tweet. It’s strange that “Follow” is in both menus which defies conventional wisdom regarding user interface design.

Let’s hope the new design is here to stay. I like it!

Tags: Twitter, Followers, new user interface

Does a Retweet Equal an Endorsement? That’s the question posed on the Old Media New Tricks blog. Would a tweet be interesting if it was untrue? The sender of the retweet is implying at the very least endorsement of its source if not the item itself, and that is one of the things that makes retweets of breaking news so untrustworthy.

The lack of integrity behind the Twitter retweet is well documented, from its marginal value as a measure of influence to its questionable role in the accurate republication of links and other content. Most Twitter identities are not verified, so the source of most tweets cannot be fully verified. The content of those tweets often points to other tweets, or to blogs written by amateurs (non professional journalists.) This lack of provenance is bad enough, but add that the sender of the retweet can (sometimes must) omit or change information, and the questionable quality of the original information, and NO ONE should be surprised that so many retweets are pure garbage.

Yet in a moment of excitement, when a news story breaks, or when an issue is highly emotional, few people think about these things, instead retweeting like mad as if passing on AP wire stories or Wall Street Journal articles that have been compiled by professional journalists and checked by professional fact checkers. Sure the AP and every other major news outlet possess bias, and make mistakes, and fall victim to sensationalism, but there are at least some standards and controls, and there are also corrective actions that can and are taken when something is misreported. On Twitter, the best to hope for is a “my bad.”

I think Jay Rosen is being overly charitable when he says, (quoting Old Media New Tricks, not Jay here) “not to expect open systems like Twitter to behave in the same manner expected of editorial systems.” I like the McLuhanesque idea behind applying the term “open system” to Twitter, but I think it’s Twitter is far too open and uncontrolled, lacking the processes and oversight that other open systems, like the open source software movement, take for granted.

Tags: retweet, Jay Rosen, Twitter, endorsement, open system