You can't delegate community engagement

I did a presentation this week on "community engagement" and was showing some of the tricks used by bloggers and others to monitor online conversations. The talk didn't really focus on the how as much as the why.

One of the first questions I got was:

Should we be hiring someone to keep their eye on this stuff and to alert us when we need to know that there is something in our area of interest being discussed?

My answer was that community engagement isn't something that can be delegated. I know lots of organizations are hiring "community managers" and I couldn't disagree more with this approach. I'm all for hiring social media strategists with an internal focus, but I'm dead-set against making community engagement any one person's responsibility. No one is too important or too unimportant to be above the flow of the conversations.

For example, last week when I was standing in line to get my ticket and check my bag at the Oakland airport I tweeted:

k1v1n Southwest's computers are down. Big mess.

Much to my surprise I got this back from Southwest:

SouthwestAir @k1v1n Sorry about our computer trouble earlier today. Hope your flight went well and that it wasn't too much of an inconvenience.

Southwest gets major points in my book for monitoring tweets and responding so quickly. This is way cool, and I'm guessing puts them in a rather exclusive club. A quick scan of their @replies shows that Southwest isn't just sending boilerplate responses either, they are highly personalized. This is most excellent.

How much better, however, would the reply have been if it was from the system administrator responsible for the system that went down? If they'd taken the time to click once, and see that I was an IT professional. That I might actually have some empathy for someone trying to keep an ancient operating system running under great load. They also assumed that I had a problem-- which I did not. I was early for my flight and had all the time in the world. I simply made an observation that it was a big mess. It didn't impact my travel in the least.

So my point is that it would have been an even better response if it had come from someone directly involved with the issue at hand. Someone who could have commented with direct knowledge about what went wrong. "Hey Kevin, it takes us 15 minutes to get the system rebooted. We have to reboot two or three times a week." And it doesn't have to be a single person either. I would have loved a tweet from the CIO saying, "We're working our butt's off to upgrade our system and hope to have it rolled-out in the next six months." You get the idea.

In my organization I want everyone engaged and talking directly with the community. It's a dangerous precedent to delegate something so important.

@answerme is way cool

@answerme turns Twitter into a Q&A site. You go to atanswerme.com to see the questions, and you answer by entering @answerme @username this is an answer.

Here's how it works:

@answerme is a little tool to help you track questions you ask on Twitter. Imagine Yahoo! Answers lite built on Twitter and you've got a good idea of what we're doin' here.

Innovative uses of Twitter just keep coming. Just what I needed-- something to make me use Twitter even more. Follow @answerme.

Scrabulous World Champion

After seven long months of competition we finally have a Twitterverse Scrabulous World Champion. @hooeyspewer waltzed her way through the World Championship without dropping a single match. She defeated @debcoates 390 to 352 in the final match.

People have asked if we're going to have another World Championship? The answer is most definitely yes. We'll do it a little differently next time, however. I've been consulting many of the competitors for their suggestions, and here is what will be different: 1) single elimination vs double, 2) top-four players seeded, 3) one week time-limit to complete a game (please!), and 4) bribing the Commissioner is permitted. The seedings for the next Championship:

• hooeyspewer
• debcoates
• stopstalkingme
• k1v1n (sorry @jerobins: see #4)

I had no idea when we started this competition last October that it was going to take so long to complete. Regardless it's been lots of fun. So, it's time to start getting ready to do it again. If you want to play you'll need to join the Twitterverse Scrabulous World Championship Series group on Facebook. I'll start building the brackets again next week. So let me know if you want to play.

The seedy side of Scrabulous that I'd totally missed

I'm feeling really stupid, that as the Commissioner of the Twitterverse Scrabulous World Championship Series, that I didn't know that Scrabulous had a secret side. You can imagine my shock when I come to learn that it has this whole other "purpose": How a stuffy board game became became a sleazy internet pickup joint:

Because on its surface, Scrabble is no Twister. Its board is a prosaic, melancholy wash of pallid blues, reds and grays. Opportunities to maneuver are restrictive (no saucy diagonals allowed). And scoring is banal — most letters are worth an underwhelming one point. Most mood-killing of all, the game is slow and it's long — a ten-minute wait between turns isn't uncommon. Combine a fireside game of Scrabble with a bottle of Chianti, and you and your date will be asleep before the first triple-word score.

This monotonous pace, however, is perfect for an online game of smutty Scrabulous. For many players, once the lewd dialogue begins, it supercedes the game itself. Long stretches of time between turns mean ample chance to hone one's dirty talk. "I don't think people really pay attention to the game once the flirting has begun," says Jack, a serious player with an impressive rating of 1,500+. He often seizes upon his opponent's distraction to win the game and further increase his rank. And he appreciates the metronomic rhythm that regulates and compliments the natural back-and-forth of verbal seduction. "The excitement comes from the fact that you have to take turns to flirt: your turn, my turn. You have to wait until the other person has completed their turn before you get in your next line."

I had no idea. My in-game chats have been restricted to things like, "nice play", and "where you been?" I'd been living under the "comfy" assumption that Scrabulous was all about the game. One should never be surprised when it comes to the internets. Live and learn.

Twitter and the newscycle

It was very interesting to watch the news break on television yesterday and to watch the twitter stream. Dennis Howlett at ZDNet noticed the same thing: Benazir Bhutto assassinated: Twitter’s utility

What I have seen today is the convergence of new media forms like Twitter and its add-ons, Seesmic, blogs and traditional TV media providing a powerful example of how important events are going to be reported, dissected, analyzed and ultimately acted upon from here on. Not some time in the future - but now.

Jeremiah Owyang mentioned something very similar on Twitter this morning:

It's pretty amazing how fast news breaks in twitter, this could be THE fastest form of communication around the globe.

I had a similar thought yesterday morning while I watched the news unfold:

Twitter is an amazing place this morning. I've been watching the news all morning but many of the reports I saw here first.

Seems to me that if you are in the information dissemination business you might need to be approaching things differently than assuming Twitter is dangerous. Might be time to formulate your Twitter strategy. Proactive trumps reactive every time.

Twitter must start blocking new accounts

I've seen statements like the following a lot of late. About how we Twitter users are uber-connected, leading-edge, ahead of the curve, the smartest people in the whole world, and on and on: Twitter is dangerous

By the way, if you think Twitter isn’t mainstream enough to matter, think again. It’s currently got almost 700,000 users, many of them influential early adopters. Twitter isn’t going away, and like all tools, it can be used for both good and evil. Balancing Twitter’s dangers and benefits may not be easy, but you’d better start thinking about it today.

That is so true. Place the power of 140 characters in the wrong hands and nations could fall.

Of course, we Twitter users were a lot more influential when there were a lot less of us. All these new people are just diluting the early-adopters' voice, making it no longer the world's most important sounding board. That's why I propose, at a minimum, that no new people be allowed to create accounts from this day forward. Even better, to help preserve that lab rat feel, I propose that anyone who created an account, say after Dec 2, 2006, have their accounts disabled.

Reasons for quitting Twitter

Scott Karp has an interesting post: Why I Stopped Using Twitter. I mostly disagree with him. I think you have to look at it like the blogosphere -- you can't read everything, but if you use feeds, filters, pipes... it's very manageable. It's a social medium and you have to let your network work.

He did have this one thing which caused me to scratch my head a tad:

An example of high noise to signal is the Twitter “half conversation” — where two user are talking to each other directly, but you only follow one of them. So you hear half the conversation, like listening to someone on their cell phone. It’s quasi-voyeuristically interesting sometimes, but mostly it’s just annoying

I'm thinking the half-conversation is one of Twitter's more interesting characteristics. I love seeing half conversations, and trying to decipher what they are about. They are entertaining. If something really peaks my curiosity I'll just click through to see the other half. That's how I found most of the people I now follow. Being that I almost always look at the blogs of those twitterers it's a great way to broaden your thinking and reading list. Half conversations are not an annoyance, they are to be enjoyed.

The strategic importance of Twitter

I've been thinking about Twitter and this piece of the Dave Snowden interview that I posted last week:

You can't create a knowledge sharing culture, but you can increase the interaction between people. You can increase their interdependency, and you can increase the immediacy of the knowledge management request...

I can't begin to explain to people why Twitter works, but the elements are in this Snowden quote. It absolutely leads to greater interdependency, and increases the opportunities for interaction. It functions as a gateway to greater communication. It is anything but trivial, but you'll never understand this unless you dive in.

Just be the ball, be the ball, be the ball. You're not being the ball Danny.

We need to be able to describe Twitter in 140 characters. It wouldn't take too much editing of the Snowden quote to get there.

The impending death of email

It's true you know, email is broken beyond repair. I toasted 8200 emails in my campus inbox today without even looking at them. Tell me what choice I had? I searched the pile for certain topics and individuals, I tried my best to find things that might be important, but let's get serious... There were not enough hours in the day (the year?) for me to even begin to process this sort of load. It's also important to note that almost all of these messages were of the broadcast form. They were not personal. The messages from real people don't stand a chance of being seen in that mess. It's broken, and quite honestly it doesn't bother me. I've moved on to more effective means of communication: IM, Twitter, syndication feeds, Facebook messaging, SMS...

Thomas Hawk has a great read on this topic in reaction to the Slate Magazine article on the death of email:

Sometimes people will give me crap about not returning their emails when I see them in real life. "Dude, I sent you three emails and you never responded."

But that's where the beauty of spam comes in. "You did? Crap! That spam filter never lets anything through. Sorry dude. What's up?"

So I'm curious, how many of you read mailing lists anymore? I'm talking about the old "conversational" variety not the small and discreet workgroup lists? How many of those old lists are coming to you through syndication feeds now? How many of you are finding that a good number of messages that would have previously been in email are now coming through Facebook? How many of you are getting a non-trivial number of work messages through Twitter? How many of your colleagues know that the sure fire way to get to you is through SMS? Have you started to make the move to post-email communication?

Some Twitter moments

I've never been able to adequately explain Twitter to anyone. When I see the inevitable "are you nuts?" look I always say, "It's something you have to do before you can begin to understand it." I've watched others try to explain it with the same lack of success. It's actually quite comical. Twitter, more than any other Web 2.0 application, requires that you be-the-ball before you can even pretend to reach understanding.

So if you don't tweet you may or may not make any sense of what follows. I've had a couple of interesting exchanges on Twitter of late that I thought I would share. The first happened this week when I was at the Defrag conference and listening to a wonderful presentation by K.G. Schneider who blogs at Free Range Librarian. I posted a random tweet and the following conversation ensued. Mind you, I have never met Katie Shehan, and didn't know that we were connected through Twitter, but I have read her Loose Cannon Librarian blog for sometime. The conversation:

k1v1n The speaker, a librarian, just asked: Is anyone here a regular library user? Not a single hand went up. That even surprised me. 04:00 PM November 06, 2007

k1v1n disconnnected data silos with non-usable content? and the topic is? 04:04 PM November 06, 2007

itsjustkate @k1v1n: the speaker is a *great* librarian! 04:22 PM November 06, 2007

k1v1n Satisficing trumps perfection every time. how true is that? 04:23 PM November 06, 2007

k1v1n @itsjustkate: this is the best talk by a librarian that I have EVER heard. Her name is K.G. Schneider. 04:27 PM November 06, 2007

itsjustkate @k1v1n: i know! she's the best! she's a wonderful speaker and her blog is amazing! 04:31 PM November 06

k1v1n @itsjustkate: How did you know? Are you in the room? 04:42 PM November 06, 2007

itsjustkate @k1v1n: nope (i wish!) she's on twitter. :) 04:45 PM November 06, 2007

k1v1n @itsjustkate: that makes me smile. i think there's a blog post here. twitter, for being so simple, is flat amazing sometimes. 04:50 PM November 06, 2007

itsjustkate @k1v1n: it really is. i was just talking to another twitter pal about how much i like twitter for the sense of community & weird connections 04:52 PM November 06, 2007

Last week I had this interesting exchange with simpathique who lives in Belgrade-Serbia:

simpathique @k1v1n hi kevin! sorry,saw now that you follow me! welcome! how's in NC? I am coming to UNC-Ch.Hill, Durham this January.btw used to live there:) dana 01:00 PM October 29

k1v1n @simpathique Welcome! I love it here in NC, and Chapel Hill is as good as it gets. Are you coming to go to school? 12:48 AM October 30, 2007

simpathique @k1v1n oh kevin, i've been alumni of unc in 2003.04 and i turned back to europe after intern at UCSD, crazyu story. Mind to join me at Facebook?the 01:01 AM October 30, 2007

simpathique @k1v1n there are some folks from unc and chapel hill, durham, etc..i've been invited to give a speech and session on sci.Conference, mid January 01:01 AM October 30, 2007

simpathique @k1v1n used to live at Airport dr. and know in fingers (east)Franklin st.:)) hard it is?:) anyway, my ID at FB is [name removed] 1st+last name 01:03 AM October 30, 2007

k1v1n @simpathique would that be the science bloggers conference? I'll be attending that too . If that's the one then we will have a chance to meet.

simpathique yes, i just posted note that bora zivkovic posted today...:)) hahah, small is the world...let me add you at FB 01:12 AM October 30, 2007

Simpathique has since followed up with some Twitter and Facebook messages, and we are finding that we have some common professional interests. She just asked me some really good questions about Second Life. They were such good questions that I think the answer will result in a blog post. I'm looking forward to meeting her face-to-face come January.

I've had more exchanges like these on Twitter than I can count. These were a couple of recent ones that I remembered, and thought they might be interesting to share. I have no idea whether sharing these helps to give some insight to the world that is Twitter, but they were both special to me. If you don't use Twitter you are missing out on some wonderful opportunities to intereact with some very interesting people. Just don't ask me to try to explain it.

Several new interesting Facebook things

Facebook has several new things you might find of interest. First is this beta Grazr Twitter widget that gives you an incredibly nice interface. It's way better than the standard Facebook Twitter application, and it can also be installed on your Netvibes, Pageflakes, and iGoogle pages:

The second item is also a new Twitter capability. You can now update your Facebook status directly from the Twitter client of your choice. application within Facebook. Wouldn't it be nice if Facebook allowed you to update your status from outside of Facebook from the client of your choice: e.g. Twitterific or even MoodBlast? Regardless, only having to update your status in one place is a positive. This is a huge deal as it is the first time that Facebook has allowed you to do something inside Facebook without having to be in Facebook. Progress!!! Before this will work you need to make some changes to enable this through the Twitter application in Facebook.

UPDATE: This has gone through several edits. Originally I had it written the way it reads now. I couldn't get it to work from outside, but it worked just fine from the Twitter application within Facebook. I tried several times. Well, it does indeed actually work. Perhaps there was some lag from so many people trying it out shortly after it was announced? Regardless, this is wonderful. Is this an early sign that Facebook might be willing to open-up?

The next item relates to rumors that there is a Facebook instant messaging application coming late this week. The biggest, and still unconfirmed part of this rumor is that the Facebook client is supposed to talk XMPP. This could be just what we need to bury forever the proprietary chat formats of AOL, MSM, and Yahoo. We desperately need a unified chat protocol, and if Facebook can help make this happen it's a positive. The new client is supposed to work completely in a browser, no client download, and even work outside of Facebook. Besides messaging, it is will have several features to allow you to manage other Facebook communications -- like updating your status. Finally, the application's release was delayed a week for no apparent reason? Could they be rushing to add the rumored Facebook groups before release? Makes total sense to me.

Finally, and this is not new, but I just wondered how many people were aware that there is a very capable XMPP chat application already in Facebook? Yep, there's a sweet GTalk implementation that you could be using right now. Here's a capture of me chatting with myself. Sweet!

Your avatar after death

Nicholas Carr while discussing YouDeparted comes up with a brilliant revenue idea for Second Life: Corpse-generated content.

Second Life, for instance, could offer its members, for a nominal fee, the ability to have their avatars turn into ghosts after they pass away. The ghosts would just randomly float around the virtual world for eternity. They could call the service Third Life.

This is something I hadn't considered when I discussed handling my eventual online departure. If it could be combined with something like this new Twitter API called 1000 Monkeys I think this idea could be a real winner. The way 1000Monkeys works is that it mashes up random tweets to make brand new ones...

Now, how sweet would it be if your Second Life ghost avatar could randomly mash up things that you'd said over your lifetime and talk in-world?

If we had a feed on favs I wouldn't have to do this. I'm so conflicted.

TwitDir top 1000

Wooo hooo! Top 1000 in every TwitDir category. A big thank you to all my new peeps. Next stop - Twitterholic. :)

Twitter and information consumption trends

I was looking at this SlideShare presentation by Twitter's Biz Stone: Social Alchemy and this slide caught my attention.

Yikes! I know Twitter's community is made up of early adopters, and are most definitely ahead of the curve, but 20x? That is huge! That's the future of information consumption on the Web. Kiss your homepage goodbye.

In desperate need of Twitter followers

This is serious! I have dropped out of the top 1000 in the "follower" category on TwitDir.

See that big ugly hole? This has happened in spite of the fact that I have grown my followers by over 25% this past month. This has to be rectified. I will never make the TwitterHolic list this way. It's become an obsesssion with me. Please help me out and follow me. I promise to follow you back.

Twitter blocks and your social network

I've been playing with the new Twitter Blocks tool that allows you to visualize your social network. I don't know exactly how this works just yet, but I have to say that it is eerily cool. Here's a skitch of my Twitter block:

The block starting at the center node and going directly off and up to the left is my workplace node. How it knew this I'm not exactly sure, but that it did tells me this is some good stuff. I hope we'll get some documentation to go with this sometime soon. This is very fun!

Twitter adds people search

It just became much easier to find people on Twitter. From an email from Biz Stone yesterday:

It's new feature season and we're starting with People Search. This new Twitter feature is great for finding more people to follow because it searches profile information such as name location, bio, and url. Come on by and find out if your friends are already Twittering and you just didn't know it! The search field is on the right side of Twitter when you sign in:

I went search crazy looking for old friends, current friends, relatives, known but somewhat anonymous stalkers, and celebrities. Alas, I didn't find a single new person to follow. I suspect this is because most people's bio looks something like mine, "One line -- geez!"

It might be time to add a little richer metadata to our Twitter profiles. YAP, sigh!

Phatic messages and communicating during disasters

I was watching television and using my notebook (the default) the other night when news broke on the Minneapolis bridge collapse. I have a lot of friends and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, and when events like this happen your first thoughts always turn to their well being. I was so wanting to get a tweet from them, but realized that not a single one of them was on Twitter.

Not long into the news coverage they told us that the Minneapolis cellular networks were down. I knew that what they meant to say was that the "voice" network was down. In situations like this the text messaging system becomes the most reliable form of communication. SMS is the Energizer Bunny of communication modalities. Where other technologies fail SMS almost always works. Following Katrina, where power was out, and Internet communications were down for days, where voice networks were congested and basically unusable, SMS messages were getting through just fine. As long as you could keep a charge on your phone you could communicate -- 160 characters at a time.

I've been thinking about phatic messages and Twitter quite a bit over the last few days. Where Twitter is a lot of fun, in my closest work group we have all realized that its use is anything but trivial. I'm starting to think that Twitter has some very significant uses for crisis/disaster communication to large groups (citizens). Checkout what the Los Angeles Fire Department is doing with Twitter. That is very cool! What if Virginia Tech had been using Twitter last April? I know a lot of conversation revolved around the Virginia Tech campus shooting and the lack of a closed SMS notification system. Why do they need their own? What's wrong with public? I know Twitter has varying degrees of reliability, it's new and struggling with growth, but it's better than what they had at Virginia Tech last April which was nothing.

I've come to the conclusion that it is time to start pushing Twitter adoption in my family. Those phatic messages are trivial until such time as you need to know that someone is doing okay. "Eating a breakfast burrito" isn't a trivial message to receive when you're worried about someone's very well being.

Twitter vs Facebook at Publishing 2.0

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has been living a Twitter/Facebook experiment, Web Communication Experiment: First Round Goes To Twitter, and he has declared an early winner:

Twitter is in many ways like Google — just type into a box, hit enter, and get results. Simple, elegant, highly usable. It’s self-evident how to use Twitter, also just like Google.

And yes, I am giving this post a shoutout because he points to a tweet of mine. :)

openID - who is going to make it happen?

I found this Dave Winer gem buried in the most unlikely of articles: What Twitter is

A relatively open identity system. I've said it before, Twitter or something like it, could be the holy grail of open identity. While the engineers of the tech industry have been, imho, looking at the problem the wrong way by trying to glue together the huge namespaces controlled by powerful companies who don't want to give up control. Twitter, with it's ultra-thin user interface, and light feature set, and simple API (more on that in a bit) and the nothing-to-lose attitude of its management, may be the breakthrough. Or it could be Facebook, with it's much larger user base and a management that also likes to roll the dice. The key is lots of users, a growing user base, and an API with no dead-ends.

We so need a major player, a site where everyone goes to play, to be an openID consumer. I'll put my money on Twitter being first, but think that Facebook's adoption would make a bigger impact.