Redcatco » twitter

It’s The Phone – Even in Crisis Comms

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:35:55 +0000

Back in June I wrote a post: “Twitter to Replace the Phone?” - suggesting that Twitter isn’t just another marketing channel, but it is a communications channel that may end up as important as the phone. It looks like that has come to pass faster than I had imagined. This post has loitered in drafts, but I’m going to put it out there. On a weekend late last year I watched a disastrous series of events unfold via Twitter and Facebook as Eurostar had a number of failures of their service that left friends trapped and stranded.

Techcrunch was quick to pick up on Eurostar’s lack of use of Twitter, and slam UK agency We Are Social:

“It owns a Twitter account at @little_break, allied to its marketing site Littlebreakbigdifference.com. This was registered and run by “conversation agency” Wearesocial.net. This is an agency which claims to be expert in the use of social media platforms like Twitter to communicate with the public. They appear to be slow to waking up to the crisis.”

Of course those that work in marketing in large businesses will know that there is a big difference between a marketing programs agency, a PR company and a crisis communications specialist. Campaigns-based agencies are rarely tasked with crisis comms, and in this case it would appear that We Are Social were retained around a specific campaign, rather than more general umbrella. Robin has responded on We Are Social’s Blog: A note about today’s Eurostar crisis – Within 24 hours the company had posted a video on YouTube and was tackling their communications.

In this instance, I’m fairly sure people affected weren’t asking for help on social media, and there was a more fundamental failure of communications and systems, but by day two people did want to know what was happening with their travel arrangements and bookings, and were asking on-line.

James Whatley of 1000Heads summed it up well in Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Brand Republic has a good write up on Eurostar’s next steps, which include cancelling their planned 2010 marketing activities, and re-aligning them, given where they now are.

All in all, it’s a pretty sorry tail, on one hand, Eurostar’s handling of the situation, logistically, seems to have left much to be desired, on the other, the focus by some blogs on the social media aspects shows a lack of maturity and understanding of big business. Just over a week on from the event you can see the ride that We Are Social has had.

The big take away is this: While social media might be many things, it is also another communications channel, which means it should be monitored (listened to!) and responded to. And that means not just on a campaigns basis. Also, in times of crisis, it can be a very effective, low effort, way to get information out – especially if you want to reach journalists!

In Search of the Habitat Intern

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:39:12 +0000

It seems an age since posting about Habitat UK’s mis-steps into Twitter. Since that post, Habit have apologised – although not yet on the place where the deed was done: Their @habitatuk twitter account.

One of the big differences between “traditional” media and social media is the almost infinite bandwidth of the later. Whilst mainstream stories come and go at high velocity, with only a fleeting moment in the spot light, in the social media world they linger and roll on, and on… And so it is with the Habitat story. While big media is on to the next story, Twitter users and bloggers of the world are still talking about “Doing a Habitat”.

The latest communications have laid the blame firmly at the foot of a mysterious intern who is ‘no longer associated with Habitat’. Who is this mysterious intern, and how did they get it so wrong? Enter Daren Forsyth (@Daren140), who has been campaigning (search #habitatintern on Twitter and see) to track down and help out the intern concerned, complete with the offer of a replacement internship and some training on using social media. That’s quite an offer, given Darren’s profile on Twitter – over 3,800 followers and growing, and more importantly he’s been a productive member of the community, connecting all manner of initiatives.

It makes more sense for me to let Daren explain the thinking behind #habitatintern, so here he is, caught on camera by my good self yesterday in London:

As I left him, he was awaiting a call from Habit’s PR team. Meanwhile there is still much for Habitat to do to get back on the right foot in the Twitter world. The story continues…

Tweetcamp London – Beyond 140 Characters

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:12:01 +0000

The recent Tweetcamp event was organised by Farhan Rehman (@farhan), Dees Chinniah (@cyberdees), and Jon Bishop (@jonin60seconds), I just ran around with a microphone on the day, and chatted with Farhan before hand! It was far from being another BarCamp. While many familiar faces from the social media space came along, it also reached people who hadn’t been to any sort of unconference before.

The idea that a community can get together and self-organise an event is still a refreshing one, but when Farhan first suggested the idea of Tweetcamp I knew it was going to be something a bit different, pushing at the boundaries between the on-line and off-line world. What was it about? I’ll let Farhan explain:

TweetCamp is about bringing communities together, in real life. It’s about accelerating the conversations that happen on Twitter, in real life. It’s about creating richer, more personal connections… …It’s all about bringing the people together who you know from and through Twitter, into a physical space, and then having some of those great conversations and interactions you would have online, but in real life.

You can get a feel for the day by watching the video I put together:

The process of on-line to off-line bridging is something I pursue in the corporate space. On-line platforms work best with people who have met off-line and interacted face-to-face. Similarly, on-line tools let people sustain relationships when time and distance – from remote working or hectic schedules – would otherwise curtail them. Tweetcamp was an opportunity to experiment with different ways of stimulating discussion and self-organising a very large group (about 150 people or so).

Amy Sample Ward has challenged the team to build on this start at bridging on-line and off-line communities in her thoughtful post. The conversations and activities were very varied. I met someone I knew by swapping a toilet seat for a wonderful water spray – you had to be there. You’ll also hear Ray mentioned in the video. He is a poet and ran a poetry workshop. Inevitably he was ‘dragged’ on to Twitter, where you can now find him as @TheEducatedfool. He was there as part of the BBC poetry initiative, which came up with an innovative live idea for the event, linking Tweetcamp to Glastonbury via Twitter. People tweeted short poems from the event, which were displayed live over there. I told you it wasn’t your usual barcamp!

As well as a wonderful lunch, and Muesli, from sponsors Mymuesli, Addlestones provided a wonderful end to the day with their cider. A big thank you to all of the sponsors. The day wasn’t about the food though, it was about the conversations, which covered topics as diverse as children’s use of the Internet to internal business communications, and a range of other topics between.

There are lots of photos from the day up on Flickr, including these by Adam Tinworth and some from Chris Heuer (who recently ebayed himself) as well as a few I took:

Creating a Bad Social Media Habitat

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:33:09 +0000

The Campaign That Went Oops…

The @habitatuk Twitter account looks all nice and shiny today, but that isn’t how it started out for the UK retailer. Last week an account in their name started spewing messages about their Spring/Summer collection, but tagged with random keywords from Twitter’s trending topics items.

It isn’t a great mental leap to work out that the connection between the Habitat’s new furnishings collection and things like the #iranelection, #iran and #Mousavi is at best tenuous, and at worst a blatant bit of opportunism. Here’s some of the “re-printable bits” from the Twitter stream:

First Break all the Rules

After that it started to turn very ugly. Habitat UK broke almost every rule in the Twitter book.

Don’t abuse hash tags to try and drive traffic. It doesn’t work. This isn’t search engine optimization. It is social media.
Don’t retweet the same thing over and over. People heard you the first time, and they can always see your last tweet. It makes following your Twitter stream very unattractive. How long would you stay with someone at a party if they repeated themselves over and over?
Don’t just jump in. Listen, learn, then join in the conversation. You’re not advertising. You’ve been invited into someone’s web browser. You are just one click away from leaving it.

On Twitter, if no-one is following you, no-one hears you – that spam goes into dead-air. It is why I rate Twitter above email. Twitter has a visible feedback mechanism – people can follow or unfollow. Spamming hash tags is a desperate way to get people who aren’t following you to read your messages. It is the Twitter equivalent of nuisance calling or public vandalism, it isn’t going to make you any friends.

Putting Things Right

Over the weekend, the error of their ways obviously came to the attention of the grown ups at Habitat. They wiped the Tweets and started over, just as if nothing had ever happened. Huge error. The legacy of their mistake is all there to be seen in Twitter search – something that any power Twitter user is aware of: When you delete tweets, they disappear from the Twitter timeline, but they remain, stubbornly, in search results. It’s one of those curiosities of the Twitter platform.

As The NextWeb and the Social Media Today posts point out, deleting the messages and making as if nothing had happened is very much the wrong approach:

Habitat would probably have come out of this a lot better if they had admitted the problem and apologised before moving on. By deleting the tweets and starting afresh they haven’t ‘cleared the air’ with those upset about their actions.

And today it got Habitat on to the front page of the Sky News – “UK Firm’s Mistweetment Of Iran Is PR Disaster”

A spokesman for Habitat told Sky News Online: “This was a mistake and it is important to us that we always listen, take on board observations and welcome constructive criticism. We will do our utmost to ensure any mistakes are never repeated.”

That really isn’t much of a response. @habitatuk only had a few followers when they started spamming. Somewhat ironically the account now has about 1,000, all waiting to see what Habitat will do next.

This is the age of saying sorry, and the Habitat UK Twitter account is the perfect place to do that. Whoever was operating the account has shamed Habitat in front of tens of thousands of people (by spamming some of the most monitored hash tags on Twitter – as well as the account’s own followers).

“You can’t talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into!” — Stephen R. Covey

Mistakes in social media aren’t like mistakes with the traditional press. Putting them right requires a sustained engagement with the community. Dominos Pizza didn’t make a mistake with social media, but they had a couple of employees who did. They recognised where the harm had been done, and engaged in the relevant places to put it right. It would have been better if they had been there beforehand, but regardless, they didn’t do a bad job.

Companies like IBM are reaping the benefits of their employees using platforms like Twitter everyday – Andy Standford-Clark was on Radio Five Live this morning and will be was on the BBC news this evening with his @andy_house project. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is heading towards a million people following him on Twitter. It is possible to make a big impact, but you need to be there to add value and engage with your customers, not to shout 20% discounts at them.

Don’t leave your social media strategy in the hands of an agency that doesn’t have expertise in it. I’ve said what I’m going to say about Social Media Expertise, for now it is a very specialist area. I am seeing more and more activity from Search Engine Optimisation players edging in to social media. SEO is about engaging with machines. Social Media is about engaging with people. They are very different things.

I’ll leave you that cartoon from Jim Anning again…

Twitter to Replace the Phone?

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:40:29 +0000

Who needs telephones? We’ve got Twitter! Phone calls are all good and well, but by the time you’ve looked up the number, dialled it, listened to the ring tone and got through to the person you are trying to reach – or left the inevitable recorded message – you could have made a cup of coffee or had your next million dollar idea. Besides, it is so last-century… There must be a better way to make a restaurant booking.

Twitter might not replace the telephone any time soon, but for lots of things it can be a faster way to communicate. There are times when it is better to have a real time conversation. Hearing someone’s tone of voice, and seeing their face, helps to clarify potential misunderstandings straight away, providing a much better understanding of how the other person is really reacting. There is an emotional richness to a two way conversation which isn’t there in a short piece of text. If you have got into an exchange of more than 3 messages, then it is probably time to pick up the phone – it will be more efficient in the long run.

However, sometimes the message is straight forward, unambiguous and not emotionally loaded. Twitter is great for those sorts of things, very fast and efficient: ”Can I have a table for two at 8pm tonight?”. Less than 140 characters later… I had a dinner reservation.

I booked a table at the Landings Restaurant in Farnborough (@landingsrestaur). The outbound marketing potential of Twitter is constantly pushed, making it easy for forget that it is an inbound communication mechanism too. Popping up a window, typing a user name and message is much faster than scouring through a phone directory (electronic or otherwise) and making a call, so why wouldn’t someone want to communicate with a business that way?

I’m not sure if it is a UK first, it might well be, but I’m sure it won’t be the last such exchange. Businesses need to communicate on their customer’s terms. Twitter is my communications dashboard, and by being there the Landings Restaurant won my business on Friday night. More than that, I found them via my social network too (thank you @andypiper for the tip off – I saw your tweet and followed the restaurant as a result).

Landings Restaurant aren’t alone on twitter of course, there are tweeting bakeries, coffee shops and bridges already, but taking a booking via Twitter is a neat trick. As a business, you need to meet your customers where they are – don’t just wait around expecting them to come to you. If you do, you’ll find that your competitors may have got to them first.

Organisations need to be accessible, there is a big jump from a cold, corporate web page to a person to person conversation. Twitter provides a nice stepping stone in between the two.

The Social Media Expert – Wicked Problems And Failure

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:47:50 +0000

Twitter played host to a passionate discussion about social media experts earlier this week, kicked off by a blog post: 6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Brand Yourself as a Social Media Expert by Dan Schawbel, who describes himself as “the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y” – reading the post I would say he’s wrong on most of the points he makes, but what do I know, I’m just a social media expert.

Suw Charman-Anderson wrote a thoughtful post that provides a narrative on the issues, of which there are many. Picking up from a tweet in Suw’s post:

In the Twitter conversation this morning, @BenjaminEllis said “@Suw It’s hard for the true experts when people with 6 months experience and no results to show for it call themselves experts too.”

Sadly, the social media scene is full of self-proclaimed experts. As opportunists jump on the TwitterLinkedFaceInMySpaceBook bandwagon, much of Twitter and the Blogosphere has become a torrent of misinformation and blatant nonsense, most of it promulgated by “experts” – it is frustrating for those that have been making a living, rather than a noise, with the technologies.

Dan’s post says “When everyone in the world is a social media expert it loses meaning” I agree with the sense, but strictly speaking he’s wrong. When everyone calls themselves a social media expert, including people that clearly aren’t, it causes people to question the credibility of people making the claim. At least it should, and that isn’t a bad thing. It also makes it much harder to find the people who are actually the experts. Suw continues:

I can’t think of any other professional field where is is frowned upon to simply call oneself an expert. Indeed, in every other field I can think of, we actively seek out experts. If you have a bad problem with your drains, you call a drainage expert without even thinking about it. If you want to learn about the nuances of the Bard’s great works, you seek out an expert in Shakespeare. If your MacBook conks out, you take it to an Apple expert.

There’s nothing wrong with being an expert in these fields, so why is it wrong in social media?

Now we get to the troublesome thing about being an expert, and it’s a problem that isn’t specific to social media: How do you know you are an expert? How do you know if someone else is an expert?

You start off knowing, roughly, nothing. You learn something. You learn some more things and you start to feel a bit of an expert. You learn a few more things, and you start to call yourself an expert. You learn a lot more things and you realise that you weren’t an expert before, and you probably still aren’t one now. You learn a huge amount more things, and you aren’t so bothered about calling yourself an expert anymore, but everyone else starts to call you one, so you start to call yourself one too. You’ve earned the right too.

I’m trying to gently say that expertise is generally established by a third party. Traditionally, it was a matter of formal qualifications. However, the academic system struggles to keep pace with technology. It will be a while before we see the first degree course in social media, and even the thought of it causes an uneasy sensation in the pit of my stomach, so don’t get any ideas. Academic qualifications aren’t it then, although there are some highly relevant ones.

I jokingly mentioned the word “pundit” as a substitution in the maligned “social media expert” phase. Strangely it didn’t go down too well! Interestingly through, it is one of the words listed under “expert” in my trusty Mac OS X Thesaurus, and whilst I’m in that reference library, here is a quote from the dictionary definition of expert:

In specific fields, the definition of expert is well established by consensus and therefore it is not necessary for an individual to have a professional or academic qualification for them to be accepted as an expert. In this respect, a shepherd with 50 years of experience tending flocks would be widely recognized as having complete expertise in the use and training of sheep dogs and the care of sheep.

Please note, for the avoidance of doubt, someone who got their first sheep 6 months ago, herded them into a pen once using their dog, and tells lovely stories about herding sheep, is not an expert. Twitter account or no. 30,000 followers or not.

There is still the Naive Consumer Problem: Say I need to buy a skateboard. Shocking as it may be, I know very little about skateboards, other than they have wheels attached to a board, and that you skate with them. After talking with a few people that seem to know about skateboards, I quickly grasp that I may be missing some details. The kind of important details that justify a set of wheels costing slightly more than my first car. Perhaps.

I know just enough to know that I don’t know enough, so I rely on other (independent) people to tell me who the experts are. Usually we really on other experts to tells us who the experts are. The nature of social media makes that process hard. As new entrants scramble for links, mentions, follows, retweets and generally anything that will give them credibility – that much needed “social capital” – objectivity flies out of the window, and everybody calls the person with three months more experience “an expert”. Meanwhile, new tools and best practice move on like an express train, on a day without strikes or leaves on the line.

Social media is such a young space that in some areas there may not be anyone with direct experience or knowledge. This is a new frontier, still under construction in many places. Someone once quipped that “everyone wants an expert, even when there isn’t one to be had” – I remember seeing an ad wanting someone with 5 years experience in a web application. I’d been the product manager from the start of its development, and I didn’t have 5 years experience with it.

BenjaminEllis: @euan When I needed surgery that involved going close to my optic nerves, I was looking for someone who was called an expert in the field.

euan: @BenjaminEllis and I was nearly fitted with a pacemaker I didn’t need by someone who was also called an expert.

The nature of expertise means that experts still make mistakes. Expertise is domain specific too. Social media is a huge and vaguely defined area, covering much of what constitutes the web today. I don’t think many would argue against calling Sir Tim an expert on web matters. However, even he says that we know longer understand the web. An expert knows their bounds.

Incidentally, Gordon Brown has appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help “open up” government data. Great news.

Back to a definition then, since finding a social media expert is starting to have all of the characteristics of a wicked problem. The root of the word expert is ”expertus”, which means to have tried. Trying implies something else: failing. As noted by Charles Cohen at Being-Digital this week, the most valuable lessons come not from success, but from failing.

The advantage of getting into the game early is that you can make mistakes that enable you to learn. That’s one of the reasons that business should get on board now, not later. Another couple of years and you’ll be doing the equivalent of putting animated gifs on your home page in 2003. The fact that I didn’t “get it” when I first saw Sir Tim’s prototype browser didn’t matter… Two years later and I was building web sites. By the time I was designing connectivity and security for on-line banks, making mistakes was no longer an option, for anyone. The web had matured.

I got to know what worked and what didn’t, not because somebody had told me, but because I had done both. There is more to expertise than just experience tough, back to Suw’s post:

A super-user is not the same as an expert – it’s not about knowing how the tools work, how to make a new blog post or set up a new wiki. It’s a much more nuanced job and involves constant learning from sometimes unexpected sources. I never thought I’d end up talking to psychologists about email when I started as a consultant, but understanding why people are wedded to their inbox helps me to understand the problems I will face when trying to introduce them to a wiki. Being an expert in social media means that you are constantly pushing to understand the non-obvious, constantly questioning the assumptions and the so-called common sense explanations for why things happen the way they happen.

I have to confess that I had retreated to calling myself a social media practitioner recently. It was a vague attempt to make the point that I have “walked the talk” as opposed to just talking it. However, “practitioner” isn’t it, as friends have gently pointed out. Mastery is a process, and doing is just the first step. Being an expert means knowing when to break the rules, and eventually helping to making the rules. That only comes from experimentation and experience.

Perhaps the best question to ask the next expert you meet is “tell me about your failures, and what you’ve learnt from them.” The answer will tell you a lot.

Caught by a Spy – Easier Than it Sounds

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:19:14 +0000

If you are a regular Twitter user, you might have noticed that half of the world seems to have become a spy catcher of late. It turns that catching a spy via Twitter is easier than you might think. It also has some consequences for social capital, information security and general communication noise too.

You are a very fortunate individual if you have escaped the torrent of (somewhat spammy) messages from the spy catcher application. It is doing a rather good, and therefore bad, job of turning Twitter into Facebook – or rather the bad old Facebook of a while ago, with the legendary sheep throwing, pirates, vampires and sea of noise generated by that genre of social applications.

Got You! Via Twitter

The success of Spycatcher is a proof point of another unsettling trend: Notice how easily people hand over their username and passwords to a relatively unknown (and potentially untrusted) third party.

There has been a long term problem with twitter third party applications. The first generation of applications required users to enter their username and password on the third party site, where they were stored, so that the 3rd party could get access to the user’s Twitter stream, to do whatever wonderful things it did. It sounds relatively innocuous, but actually it sets a rather bad precedent. It is referred to as an anti-pattern, a commonly bad solution to a problem. It is bad because it teaches people how to be phished.

From Catching Fish to Helping Phishers

Phishers spend their time trying to get users to hand over password details, so that they can gain access to accounts. Twitter has a bad anti-pattern problem, and it knows it, since the Twitter ecosystem trains users to hand over their security details to third parties. To tackle the issue Twitter has added OAuth to the service. It provides a way for third parties to validate users, without storing the username and password. However, this doesn’t solve the whole problem. People are still handing over passwords. So, back to catching those spies…

Increasingly third party Twitter applications are not only logging in to pull down information, but they are actively sending tweets from users accounts (including @ messages and Direct Messages) on behalf of, and in the name of, the user. And why wouldn’t they? If a developer can get away with using a bit of a user’s social capital to promote their application, they probably will. Spycatcher is a particular case in point.

From Bad to Worse

The annoying messages it tweets are one thing, “captured this”, “assassinated that”, they can be blocked. However, over the weekend things took a turn for the worse when I started getting private direct messages from the people I follow asking me to join. Now, either my friends have suddenly all switched to the same writing style, or these were automated DMs. I’ll let you take your pick.

Twitter direct messages are my most trusted communications channel, since only people I have chosen to follow can send me messages (oh that my mobile phone was the same), and the messages generate alerts in near-real-time. So, when people start spamming me via that channel I sit up and take notice. There is another reason too. Because URLs that arrive via that channel are usually from a trusted human, I tend to trust the links. I shouldn’t of course, and neither should you. Combined with anti-patter behaviours, it is all too easy to receive a DM with a link and a “Benjamin, use your Twitter ID to check your security here” – you can see where that heads. If I was being dozy, 5 minutes later all of the people who follow me would be getting the same message. Injecting malware, or carrying out phishing attacks it all too easy. People need to realise that the twitter stream is part of their on-line identity, and to guard security credentials well. It was a little while back that Britney Spears and Barack Obama had their login details compromised.

What to learn?

Don’t hand over your user name and password unless you are 100% sure where they are going, and what will be done with them.
Use different passwords for different services. That way any damage should be limited to one service. If your Twitter password is the same as your on-line banking one, fix that quickly!
Change your passwords every so often. Yes, I’m sounding like the moaning IT guy, but this does make a difference to your security.

I expect to see more and more applications using the social capital of their users to promote them – that has been the model on Facebook, and now it’s coming to Twitter. As for Spymaster, I’m not sure if it should be called spam master rather than spymaster (if you want to play please turn off the notifications I hate having to unfollow people). I’m surprised their hasn’t been a bigger backlash against it.

Perhaps it is a sign of the shifting user. We have reached the “sheep throwing” phase of the social networking platfrom life cycle. It’ll take it as a sign of Twitter entering adolesence already.

Replying Via Twitter

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:07:17 +0000

Today’s Twitter rage prompts me to write about @Replies. The habit of putting an “@” symbol in front of a Twitter message, to ‘direct’ it towards another user – has a curious history. They weren’t part of the original design of Twitter, which started as a micro-blogging platform, not an instant messaging system.

As early users posted updates, they sometimes wanted to indicate that a message was directed at a specific user, or a reply to one of another user’s updates. The idea of @username was quickly adopted as the way of doing that. The @ notation has spread to other social media too – I’ve seen @name in blog comments, forums and even emails. Eventually the concept was incorporated into the Twitter system as a feature, and almost every Twitter client has an “@replies” column or a “reply” button.

Recently Twitter changed ‘replies’ to ‘mentions’ – something you can see reflected on the Twitter web interface. For me that was a retrograde step. Replies and mentions are very different, take these two tweets:

@BenjaminEllis I really don’t think that is the best answer.

Just saw @BenjaminEllis and others on BBC News today.

You can find either of them with a Twitter search, but they are semantically quite different, to my mind at least. I’m interested in the second, but probably need to respond to the first.

Yesterday Twitter went a stage further and removed a key piece of the reply functionality, which has caused an outrage on Twitter (see #fixreplies).

You would generally reply to other people, and it is tempting to think of @replies as just one type of message. They aren’t, and not just because of the mentions versus replies issue. If you take the perspective of someone who is following you, or that you follow, there are two big categories of @ reply:

Replies to them.
Replies to others.

Obviously you are going to be interested in replies to you – you’re on Twitter for the conversation, right? However the case of replies to others is a little more complicated, and understanding why reveals one of the most powerful aspects of Twitter.

If you think of your social graph on twitter (the ‘star’ of people that you follow, and the ‘star’ of people that follow you), together with each of those people’s graphs, you’ll see something startling in the way that conversations happen on Twitter. No-one (unless they follow and are followed by exactly the same people) sees the same conversation. Pardon the crude diagram, but hopefully it helps. Think about the two users at the middle of the stars, and also the two solid dots and circles on the edge for a minute:

Everyone on Twitter sees different things, and conversations swing from people to people. It is a very unique dynamic, and one not really replicated elsewhere. Now, back to @replies. Twitter has traditionally subdivided @replies to others into two types: replies to people that you follow, and @ replies to people that you aren’t following. The reason why becomes apparent when you think about the partially-overlapping social graph each person has (that diagram above).

While it is reasonably obvious that you would want to see @replies to yourself (although you might want to see those in your timeline, or see them seperately), what to do with the others isn’t so obvious.

One argument is that you would want to see all the @ replies of the people you are following. They are part of that person’s conversation after all. This option provides a way to discover other people that you might be interested in following, or finding mutual friends that you didn’t know were on twitter. I’ve had the benefit of both of those experiences, and for me it is part of what makes Twitter a great tool: serendipity is built in.

A second argument is that seeing all of the @replies of the people you follow is going to be far too ‘noisy’ and that the only ones that are meaningful are the @ replies to people that you also follow. This is a nice halfway house, in that you can still follow conversations between your friends (or rather between the different people that you follow), but there are far fewer tweets for you to read, as you don’t get the @replies to others. The downside? Sometimes you only see half of the conversation.

In actuality, you often only see half the conversation anyway. If someone you aren’t following @replies someone that you are following, you wouldn’t normally see that tweet. According to the post on the Twitter Blog the issue of one-sided conversation fragments was their reason for removing a very useful option in Twitter: The @ replies options: Until today, Twitter allowed you to choose which argument you accepted. Via an options setting you could:

See all @replies (ie @replies to you and all @replies sent by people you follow).
See @replies to people that you are following (the second argument above).
See only @replies to yourself.

This allowed a great deal of flexibility, and meant that if you were following a small number of people, you could choose to see all @replies and so gradually find new people to follow. If it all got too noisy, then you could limit what you saw down to the people that you followed, and just join in those conversations. If even that was too much, you could stick to just replies to yourself. A piece of design brilliance – leave the decision in the hands of the user. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

There is a school of thought that @replies are really just a matter between the two users involved, and that allowing people to butt into conversations is somehow wrong. From my perspective I really don’t agree with that. I quite enjoy people butting in from time to time. If the message is that private, then use a Direct Message (“D ” – although with care, one slip of the keyboard by you or the other person and that message is in the public timeline).

The issue of user choice is a tricky one for any product manager or a service designer. If you require users to make too many choices, your offering rapidly becomes hard to use, even confusing. If the choices require expertise that isn’t available to the new user, it is easy for them to get the wrong end of the stick and end up with a poor user experience.

I don’t think the @replies option has been well understood, neither have @replies in general, but I also don’t believe that is a reason to remove it. A simpler tactic (that probably wouldn’t have caused the same level of outrage in the Twitter community) would have been to change the default setting for the @replies option. It’s a neat compromise, since the ‘power users’ can still get to the setting, but those less interested in the technicalities can simply ignore it.

@EV (Twitter CEO) tweeted to say they will reconsider. Hopefully here ends the lesson, for us all. It is interesting to see a user community in action, but may also be an example of where ‘democracy’ and crowd sourcing does and doesn’t fit in with product design. I’ll come back to that one.

He’s a Qik video from a little while ago which explains more, and also shows the options that have been removed:

Twestival (updated)

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:55:53 +0000

It started with a conversation, and is ending in hundreds of events around the world. Tonight I am on BBC ONE talking about Twitter, and hopefully not sounding too much like a geek. I was on the evening news talking about Twitter: Twittering On BBC. People in the UK and all around the world have dedicated much of their daylight time (and midnight oil) into organising what must be one of the largest on-line-to-off-line charity events in recent history. Kudos to Amanda Rose, and to all those who made Twestivals happen around the world. I took a couple of pictures and answered some questions.

Twestival to aims to raise money and awareness for charity: water. It may net more than £1 million pounds before today is out, which is quite something for an on-line community of a tool that wasn’t even heard of a year ago. This is mass collaboration at work, CauseWired style. Thousands of people, amplified by technology, making a difference. A very exciting day. Well done people – with help from Twitter (which just closed its own $35 million round of funding).

As I mentioned in the BBC interview, one of the things I love about twitter is the diversity of the community, “Benjamin Ellis and Grannies.” If you want to read a touching post on that subject, do read Christian Pain’s post (aka @documentally): “My Gran is on Twitter“.

I headed out of London, over to Reading, to join the crowd there and meet some new faces:

Social Decision Making – Shirky JP and Democracy

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:29:50 +0000

This is the second post on Clay Shirky’s talk at LSE, looking at some of the same issues raised, but in the context of decision making and crowd sourced wisdom. I hinted at some of my thoughts in the previous post (Mass Collaboration Snow Joke), and JP has also blogged about it, based on Clay Shirky’s talk at the ICA the day after.

In his post JP shares some thoughts about systems for decision making. The ideas are interesting (and have been debated in other contexts). It is worth remembering that government’s influence on our lives goes far beyond spending from the state wallet. Government sets policy and makes laws too. Thinking about recent anti-terror and surveillance legislation, along with proposals in the Digital Britain report, arguably, policy and law affect our lives the most.

It is possible to build an on-line voting system to provide access to every policy decision, but as Clay noted in his talk, the results aren’t always the utopian ideal we would hope for. Controlling policy directly may not be a good thing. It becomes easy for a well organised minority to ‘out-influence’ a quieter, less galvanised majority. To avoid that problem would require compulsory voting, but do you want people forced to vote on issues they don’t care about or that don’t affect them?

The same issues exist for social decision making tools used in an organisational context. While “Voting” has become popular for making some decisions, generally we don’t run companies as democracies. Why not? Because we (or more specifically the business owners) prize expert decision making. Some of the larger companies I have worked with do have town hall meetings. These are loose approximations to the early Greek ideas of democracy, soliciting feedback and dialogue, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Businesses are, at least notionally, meritocracies. People gain authority based on their ability to make good decisions and to use authority well.

Several times in his talk, Shirky made the point that the democratic franchise grew up based on the ideal of one person one vote – actually one man one vote, but that’s another issue. Democracy requires a strong grip on identity. I must be sure of who you are before you vote, in order to enforce one person one vote. However, the voter’s opinion itself is afforded anonymity. I know who you are, but not how you voted. In the UK, more so than in US culture, most people’s voting intention is an intensely private matter, expressed in an intensely private ballot.

The Internet grew up as a very different type of franchise. Via NFSnet and FIDOnet (and communities like The Well) anonymity was accidentally implicit, if not deliberately and explicitly so. The systems had no way of knowing who someone was, in the sense that we would understand identity management. People frequently used synonyms, and even when they used a ‘real name’, verifying they were actually that person was a non-trivial exercise. As a side note, Twitter has been experiencing the same fun and games recently, with people grabbing Twitter accounts and masquerading as celebrities (from Tony Benn to the Dalai Lama).

Back to votes and opinions for a moment. In the on-line world we often know a lot about what someone thinks. There is anonymity of identity, but not of opinion. A mirror to the democratic franchise. Interestingly, from my own work with Wikis and from other academic studies, I have noticed that sites where people can post completely anonymously get significantly more contributions that those that don’t.

So, how can we make companies more democratic, and how can we make government more participative, in the social media sense? The answers come not from technology, but from understanding the nature of democracy itself. The art of an effective democratic system is to defend factions from each other. Tony Benn, articulates it well in this clip from “Big Ideas That Changed The World”, you might not agree with his views, but his argument is an informative one, if you are new to the concepts:

Incidentally, the video is also a good counter to Shirky’s statement that Democracy started in the UK with the Magna Carta, signed just up the road from where I am sitting right now now, in a a field in Runnymede. Democracy has evolved mechanisms to deal with working at scale. I can exchange a little information with a lot of people, or a lot of information with a few people. Information exchange doesn’t scale to both ends at once. Democracy tackles that problem by the use of elected, professional representatives as intermediaries. A vote is a small piece of information from a lot of people. A consultation process is a lot of information exchanged within a smaller group of people. Familiar mechanisms that tackle the problem.

What came before democracy was tribalism, which JP’s post alludes to with the description of the open source community. Projects are often run by a ‘tribal leader’ and rings of followers creating a social structure supporting them (see Dunbar and other anthropological studies). That structure does not work with anonymity of opinions. Visibility of allegiances is required to allow the structure to sustain itself.

Here is an apparent paradox: Anonymity promotes extremes of views, by taking away the moderating effect of social influence. We are compliant creatures by nature, and social pressure pushes us towards moderate, or normative, views. We adapt our views, based on our perception of other people’s views. It is a socially useful behaviour, since it makes it easier to form coherent groups. Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, author of Herd, gave some great demonstrations of this during their session on social influence at NESTA yesterday, and Mark’s book is probably a good place to study it more.

In designing social decision making systems, one must take account of identity, anonymity and accountability. Systems must also balance the desire to have everyone participate, with the need for informed expert opinion. During the NESTA session, Johnnie Moore made an astute observation about organisational design: business design is about balance the need for efficiency, and the desire for full participation.

These are all thorny issues. In a representational democracy we vote for someone we believe is able to represent us. At least we should. In the workplace this is expressed in the form employee councils and so on. Can we place these things with social software? An old IT/programming adage springs to mind: Don’t mess with something unless you understand why it was that way in the first place. We need to apply new technology, with the benefit of understanding old ideas. Yet another thing to add to the list of important, but non-trivial tasks.

There are usually trade-offs and compromises to be made. No system is perfect. However, experience shows, from systems to products, that it doesn’t take perfection to win. In the early days of Cisco Systems, a group of consulting engineers got in to terrible trouble for having a T-shirt printed that said “Cisco – We suck less”. The positioning goes a little against the grain of modern marketing techniques, but it rings true. As Darwin would have put it, survival of the ones that are the best (least bad) fit for their environment.

Social Media – Do Conversations Scale?

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:21:41 +0000

I should start by explaining how I come at this problem space. By history I am a network guy. I spent most of the 90′s thinking about networks, breaking networks, building networks and alternating between creating the mess and clearing it up as the Internet grew. More recently I’ve buried myself in the human aspects of technology, leading in businesses and studying psychology. My primary interest is in perceptual psychology – how we interact with the world and how that affects cognitive functions like communication.

Social media smashes all of these worlds together in a wonderful way. It can be challenging at times, as most of the people I interact with come from that funny bit in-between the two worlds: the applications. This post draws on a talk I gave at Social Media Camp London, under the tongue-in-cheek title “six-degrees-of-separation-now-3″ – It is also a clarification of the Twitter exchange between myself @timoreilly and @monkchips and subsequent RedMonk Post: “Asymetrical Follow: A Core Web 2.0 Pattern“. Just for good measure, it also includes some thoughts from the film US Now, which I had the chance to see at the RSA this week:

I’m not going to touch on the eGov issues raised in Us Now – that’s a whole other post. I do want to share some thoughts on the way that relationships and communication are modeled in social software, and the blending of “conversational” mediums and broadcast ones.

First, let’s clarify some terms about “relationships” in social media / social software. I’m blogging, you are reading. Great. A blog with no comments is something I used to call a narrowcast model – a bit like TV (broadcast), but with less viewers. Information goes to a select bunch of subscribers. Twitter and a number of other social platforms codify this reader-driver subscription model as “following”. You follow people on twitter, or follow a blog via RSS, which means you choose to receive communication from that person.

In other platforms this type of relationship is referred to as being a ‘fan’. Whilst that term has a lot of baggage, it expresses a specific social communication desire nicely: Let’s say someone is a fan of Stephen Fry (in the traditional sense). They probably want to read all about Stephen Fry’s exploits, see photos, read stories, you get the idea. However, I’m guessing that they would be a little weirded out if Stephen Fry started asking for photos of them, etc…, etc… OK, there’s a whole bunch of issues in there, but just hold this one thought: We have a construct of a ‘fan’ relationship in society, built from the prevalence of broadcast media. It is an asymmetric relationship. Broadcast, like narrowcast, means I consume, but I can not (easily) respond. I listen, but I don’t speak. Or framed differently, you can send to me, but not receive from me. For better or for worse, it is asymmetric.

The standard relationship model in Facebook, Instant messaging systems, and pretty much every collaboration tool out there is that of a ‘friend’. I follow you and you follow me. It is a mutual agreement for bi-directional communication, a symmetric relationship. A ‘friendship’, in social media terms at least, is a mutual ‘follow’. Friends can have conversations – two way communication – in a way that fans (and broadcasters) can not. Facebook introduced fan pages to deal with ‘fans’, and create an asymmetric model. In blogs, the fan model is inherent. Unless you choose to comment on this post, I know nothing about you, aside from some aggregated behavioural data.

OK. Fans. Followers. Friends. Symmetric. Asymmetric. Broadcast. Conversation. A useful vocabulary, even if some of the terms are loaded, and you can walk around sounding like a social media ‘expert’. Let me just say something here:

Broadcast is good!

There, I said it. Depending on your background, you’ll have either shrugged your shoulders, nodded in agreement or screamed at me and immediately unfollowed me on Twitter. The wonderful thing about language: Words are more than words. They have complex mappings on to all sorts of meanings and memories in our minds. Some of those meanings are shared, and some are not. Let’s unpick ‘broadcast’.

If you want to get lots of (hopefully important) data to lots of people, then broadcast is the most efficient way of doing it. That’s why networks – from Television to computing – use broadcast. It is good and efficient. It is also one of the reasons marketers have traditionally loved broadcast. However, broadcast carries an association with asymmetric communication. Shouting as some would have it. If you have read the clue train manifesto (and you should), you’ll know that it’s all about the Conversation, not about shouting or broadcast. The difference comes in the listening – communication with symmetry.

Broadcast is bad?

So, in social media, throwing the ‘B’ word around is bad. For me, it is still just a technical term, and a very efficient form of communication. Anyway, with that, now on to that twitter exchange:

monkchips: symmetrical Follow is a core pattern in social networking, so much so it can cause Scaling Problems for networks not designed for it

timoreilly: RT @monkchips: Asymmetrical Follow is a core pattern in social networking; it can cause Scaling Problems for networks not designed

bmje: @timoreilly @monkchips Asymmetric follow is a hack in social software to enable ‘relationships’ to scale. It is broadcast, not conversation”

timoreilly: @bmje Not so. I follow 400; am followed by 16,000. But I respond to lots of people (like you) who I didn’t know before. Not just broadcast.”

bmje: @timoreilly the wonderful power off twitter and good people – its asymmetry is only partial, due to the power of @’s

A side note, James cites my quote saying:

There are those that would would say their is something “wrong” with Asymmetrical Follow, which I would argue is just a function of the power laws you see in any community. For example, yesterday Benjamin Ellis…

I definitely don’t think I said it was wrong – quite the opposite. It’s a very useful hack for enabling conversations to scale. I’m guessing that Tim also missed what I meant, since his tweet reads like he thought I was accusing him of the ultimate social media sin – “broadcasting” – see above – and having briefly met Tim, it isn’t the answer I’d have expected from him. Of course I could be wrong. The joys of theory of mind and the limitation of 140 characters. On the contrary, Tim is a very active listener. Asymmetric follow is a way of allowing a form of broadcast, and thus allowing scaling, but all is not what it seems.

The conversation demonstrates something quite different. It shows an unusual property of the Twitter platform:- its ‘follow’ function is not really asymmetric. Tim responded to my message, but Tim isn’t ‘following’ me on twitter – which is fine by the way – although I’m sure I’d be happy if he did, I doubt he’d find me very interesting though!

So, how did Tim get my message if he wasn’t following me? Here’s the magic: If you are on Twitter, anyone can ‘@’ you – essentially directing a message towards you, even if you aren’t following them. It is actually quite a complicated hack and in the great traditions of a good hack, you can fiddle with the settings - see this post on the twitter blog - what people see depends on how they have set up Twitter and what client they use to read messages. This partial symmetry is one of the things that causes Twitter to work so well, and it gets around one of the issues that stops conversations from scaling. Twitter has cracked the broadcast problem with a clever filter.

The Broadcast Problem.

That broadcast stuff. I said it was efficient, but that isn’t the whole picture though. Back in the early 90′s I was responsible for looking after a particularly large computer network. Over the course of a month or two, something strange started to happen. The computers got slower. And slower. And slower. It was a mystery. We hadn’t changed the applications on the computers, or done anything else we thought might slow them down.

After digging around, we found the problem. Some of the applications on the network had started to use broadcast messages rather than the usual unicast (directed) messages. This reduced the traffic on the network, since each message was only sent once, rather than individually to each machine. Very efficient. However, because it was broadcast, EVERY machine on the network had to listen to all of those messages to work out if they were relevant or not. That took a reasonable chunk of their processing power. One machine sent a message, several hundred had to receive it. A little bit of processing power consumed a lot of everyone else’s. Now that is asymmetric.

Conversations Don’t Scale (well).

Imagine if everyone you knew sent you every communication they wrote during the course of their day. Your inbox might feel like that sometimes, but it is nothing compared to what it would actually be like. Now imagine that you had to reply to every single one of those messages. I don’t know about you, but I’d break out into a sweat just thinking about it. Imagine if every viewer of a TV program wrote in with a question. Hang on a minute. You don’t have to wait, it already happened “Strictly Message Board: What Happened”. The result: communication melt down. And that wasn’t even with everyone writing in.

Conversations are tricky things. Huge chunks of our brains are dedicated to making conversations work. I’m not even talking about understanding the conversation, just the sequencing of it. Conversations involve “turn-taking“. Turn-taking is one of the basic mechanisms that enables conversations. Try talking to someone and listening to them at the same time. Oh, you know someone like that already? OK. More seriously, I hope you see the issue, our brains aren’t wired that way.

Now, think about a group conversation. That turn-taking is still going on, just like an old mainframe computer switching between multiple tasks, the listening is divided between the group members. Now think about that group getting bigger. What happens to the amount of listening time? Well, the available listening time stays the same, but the number of people who want to talk grows. Everyone has to make do with a smaller slice of the pie. Conversations don’t scale. Really. Unless some of those new members are just listeners, but then we are back to broadcast.

You’re still reading? Deepest respect! Let me stitch some of these threads back together then. Do you remember “Us Now?” – scroll back to the beginning and watch at least the first few seconds if you missed it.

“More people can say more things to more people than ever in history,” Clay Shirky.

I’d not dispute that, but we must remember that it doesn’t extrapolate to everyone can say everything to everyone. Let’s not kill ourselves trying. Technology has cracked the problem of enabling someone to say something to (almost) everyone. However, we are tired of TV and of broadcast marketing.

Now, technology must find a way for everyone to say something to someone, without breaking that ‘someone’ in the process – be they a politician in government, a genius CEO, or an ever so slightly eclectic techno-psychologist. That requires some very clever filtering.

Has social media cracked the problem? I’d say not yet, but I will exit stage left with this thought from Erica Grigg, of Carbon Outreach, who said this to me (via twitter of course):

carbonoutreach: @bmje maybe social media does goodness to scale!?

That it does.

Going Hyper-Local – Location Based Internet

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:33:35 +0000

Over the last year I’ve been playing with a number of location based services. I should explain my fascination, since it is even stranger than you think. Way back when I first encountered communications networks I was gripped by the way they enabled me to reach across geographies. Suddenly I could speak with people all around the world. This was in the days when international phone calls were the reserve of the few, and even speaking to people ‘all around the UK’ was prohibitively expensive. The Internet was a global thing, transcending governments and breaking down national boundaries – and all the challenges that came with that.

New Services

Skip forward three decades and things are evolving in a different direction. Services like Fire Eagle enable a number of applications to understand where you are, and Brightkite (in closed beta – email me for an invite), Dopplr and a swarm of others mean that you can ‘discover’ nearby friends/contacts or even total strangers. Other services like Flickr (best known for its photo sharing – although it now does video too) and even Twitter are location aware.

The Benefits?

How does that help with productivity? The answer is: a lot. Dopplr can reduce travel by enabling you to identify fellow travelers, potentially sharing transport or eliminating trips all together. If I discover that Sharron, from the Paris office, is going to be in London this week that might save me a trip. Brightkite helps me quickly find a local Internet cafe or the hotel where friends are staying. At the other end of the spectrum, finding photos ahead of time on Flickr might save me getting lost, or change my holiday plans!

The Practicalities

Many of these location based services are dependent on access to data on your current location, but constantly typing in where you are can become a drag. However, with more and more devices having built in GPS, reporting your location (we’ll come back to that) and tagging photographs and videos with geographic information is now a relatively simple task. Geo-tagging has become a major geek fad. It is still not as seemless as I’d like on my Nokia N95, but perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. This week I signed up to Pachube (currently in beta), which is a service that enables a device to stream environmental data and share it globally. I was hoping to get some wind data for my home hacking activities, in preparation for homecamp this weekend. No joy so far, but it is still early days.

Near Me

So, we have location based data behind location based services. Lots of data means an opportunity for lots of searching, an opportunity not lost on Google. If you use the latest version of the Google app for the iPhone (or iPod touch), it takes your location into account when it selects search results for you. Google searches have been location aware for a long time, but with more location aware devices, and the marketing fraternity on the case, it is going to a whole new level.

Google maps are an interesting way of discovering things. From a creating a ‘find us’ page with a pin in the map, to searching for local shops, Google’s map functionality has become almost as ubiquitous as their traditional web search engine. Putting your site onto Google Maps is relatively straight forward (give it a try).

Nice as all that is, that isn’t the most exciting thing about location based services. Back to those social networking services. Adding location into the mix provides the opportunity to rekindle local communities, connecting people in neighbourhoods, who might otherwise have never met. At this point, some of you might be perplexed. Meet people in the locality? Your either thinking “but everyone knows everyone anyway” or “but no-one talks to anyone”. There again, you might be comfortably in the middle of the two. It depends where in the country (and in which country) you live. Where I am, the commuter lifestyle and long working hours mean that much of the local sense of community has dwindled away. There is little engagement in local matters. A few brave souls attempt to keep a bit of a fire going, but it is a battle against apathy and that lack of time.

Cue location based services. From Facebook to Brightkite, from blogs to Twitter, local people are rediscovering each other. More than that, they are finding common causes. What is a community after all, if it isn’t a group of people centred about a common purpose? It was during a conversation with Tom Watson MP – Minister for Digital Engagement – last week that I realised the significance of these communities mapping on to geographical political infrastructures: influence. Just as the communities described in Cause Wired were able to organise on-line to create changes in the off-line world on an international level, local groups can affect the local level.

The space is not without its issues (see this post about post code data), with access to data and privacy being major concerns. However, the next few years will be about the Internet becoming an increasingly local phenomenon, rather than a global one. We have local community based blogs and websites, groups on social networking sites and local meet ups and that is all before the new wave of location aware devices are in broad use. We going hyper-local, and it may just be the most disruptive phase of the Internet yet.

Personality Sorters and Social Media – Part I

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:23:58 +0000

Understanding personality types is very useful, not just for self awareness, but also for working in team environments, especially where social software, social media or any form of technology-mediated communication is in play.

This post is for Lobelia and others, in response to her blog post on personality types “personality types, can you be sorted?“. The aim is to provide some background on individual differences and, hopefully, some insight in part II.

Personality type inventories seem to be one of those things that have entered into the popular conciousness – I was surprised at how many people had their MBTI(R) listed in their profiles on Twitter (Update, August 2009: There is now a Facebook application the publishes people’s MBTI as well). However, we are not normally that aware of our own personality type, and rarely have an accurate view of it.

The study of personality pre-dates psychology itself, by a long long way, but first became more academic with Jung’s work (and this is what the popular Myers Briggs MBTI(r) draws from).

There are two major approaches to looking at personality. One looks at the individual as a unique person (the idiographic approach), and is the basis for psychotherapy and self-discovery tools. The second approach (nomothetic) looks at personality across groups and populations, looking for ‘similarities in differences’. More properly, looking at personality traits that can be used to group similar personality types together.

Trait theories of personality are popular in business, since they can identify people suited to particular roles, at least in theory, by making use of psychometric tests – essentially closed questionnaires that aim to produce reliable results – ie valid and repeatable. They are built from a lexical approach, looking at the words we use to describe ourselves/other people’s behaviours and traits. Similar traits are grouped (eg friendly and sociable might be put together) into dimensions of personality. The ones that appear (by the magic of statistics) to be most significant across populations are then labelled as personality factors. These personality dimensions are the basic structure of personality.

Cattell’s16PF(r) model (sixteen personality factor) is probably the most widely used, but I frequently enounter Myers Briggs, with its four bipolar dimensions ( (I)ntrovert/(E)xtrovert, (S)ensation/i(N)tuition, (F)eeling/(T)hinking, (J)udging/(P)erceiving). When people cite results in the Myers Briggs model, they are crushed down into ‘either or’, eg I or E, N or F, resulting in 16 ‘distinct’ personalities. However, these are dimensions, and people (including yourself!) could be anywhere on those scales. My point here is that people don’t fit into neat boxes, these are just constructs to make it easier to digest the subtleties of personality. Even though Cattell used computers to identify his sixteen personality factors, it is a fairly analogue thing, and sometimes the outcomes can be surprising, if not puzzling (as you’ll see in part II).

OK, that’s the hard bit over, apart from one side note. Most of these theories were developed within the English language (an etic approach). Spot a problem? If you are Spanish, Italian, …, you might choose different words, or have different personality groupings in your culture. These could, quite literally, be lost in translation. Because of that, some psychologist have started to work within each language (an emic approach), the most famous of these is Goldberg. We’ll come back to him in a minute, as he’s a useful chap, Internet-wise.

So, what do we know so far? Well, you have your unique personality, and in that there are some key factors which you have in common with other people. The more dominant factors link to personality traits, which in turn lead to behaviours, beliefs and biases. What we are looking at is things that remain fairly consistent over time, and can form patterns across different groups of people. How did we get these personality traits, and what can we do about them?

This is the nature, nurture debate. There have been some biological theories of personality (Eysenck and Gray), with varying degrees of success. One one hand, our central nervous system might account for extroversion/introversion, and there are also theories with regard to the effect of our sensitivity to particular neurotransmitters (dopamine and the like). On the other side, there is evidence from studies of separated twins, that environment is more key – although that isn’t straight forward either, since we are partially responsibly for creating our environment, and everyone’s environment is completely unique to them as an individual.

There are problems on all sides, but it is probably fair to say our biology does not totally determine our personality. However, the heritability of major personality factors is probably around 20-30%. In other words, you can blame your parents for around a third of the nature of your strongest personality attributes (plus a little bonus responsibility for their control of the environment they put you), but the majority is down to your environment and what you did and do with it.

In our early years, personality evolves rapidly, but by the time we reach our 30′s it is fairly stable, although still open to gradual change and major life events. So, by the time someone is established in the work place, they are “who they are” – That means being aware of your own biases and behaviours, and being able to accommodate other people’s, is key to being effective and productive. You are unlikely to change them, and they are unlikely to change you, so best make the most of the situation.

A little self-awareness goes a long way (he says, knowing he has some way to go! I appreciate those that have accommodated me over the years). Now, I said I’d come back to Lewis Goldberg, so I better had do. The 16PF(r) has been popular for a long time in industry. While dealing with 16 different personality factors might be useful, having something simpler and more cross cultural would also be useful too.

Goldberg came up with a five factor model (often called the Big Five) and independently so did Costa and McCrae (the OCEAN model – for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neurotisism). While most personality inventories are closed, commercial products, Goldberg has provided his out to the world. There are pros and cons of this approach. Some would argue there is reason to control access to the tests in order to stop them being misused by the untrained, or cheated on by people trying to reverse engineer answers.

I better come off of the fence for a minute and point out that I am a bit of a fan of the OCEAN/Big five model (they differ in one dimension – openness versus intellect – but may eventually converge with more research). I can grasp the five dimensions in my head, and it is a practical way to understand how to deal with myself and others:

Openness – How will I/this person deal with change. Will help and encouragement be needed, or is it “dive in” time.
Conscientiousness – Will I/they get it done or do I need to flag for follow up and add gentle reminders.
Extroversion – Do I/they need to plan in time away from other people, or is the hustle bustle needed.
Agreeableness – What sort of negotiation is required? Am I being fair.
Neurotisism – This isn’t a bad thing. A neurotic hand glider pilot will live longer! Do I/they need time to think it through?

You can take the Big 5 Personality Test yourself on the out of service web site (not actually out of service, that is just what it is called).

When you think about these dimensions and a team of people working on a wiki or a blog/blog network, you start to get a sense of the dynamics that can take place, and your own part in them. Before part two and some interesting stats from twitter, I’ll leave you with this quote, adapted from Kluckhohn and Murray:

“Every person is in certain respects like all others, like some others and like no other.”

Continued in Personality Sorters and Social Media Part II

Mini-bar Meet Up – Some New Technologies

Benjamin Ellis — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:38:39 +0000

I’m always on the lookout for new technologies that will make businesses, and people, more effective and productive. My latest port of call was the February London BarCamp minibar meet up.

TechCrunch UK‘s Mike Butcher was there to shepherd the evening’s five minute speaker slots along, and ask the questions that make a web business shuffle on the spot, including the especially awkward: “How are you going to make money?”

Margaret Gold presented Vodaphone‘s Betavine developer community. The mobile phone (cell phone, or my favourite: the handy) has taken great leaps forward in functionality since the days of the two and a half tonne grey Motorola brick.

However, it hasn’t contributed much to an increase in productivity since those early days. We are more in touch, through SMS and mobile data connectivity, but widespread productivity applications are few and far between.

I hope we’ll see some new applications through the likes of Betavine, and initiatives like Google’s Android, that ease the burden of developing mobile applications. The mobile phone stands in the special ground between the personal and the business worlds. To date consumer applications have dominated. Enterprises should be developing business applications too, but are hampered by the range of handsets and network functionality.

Vigster.com presented their social network for video games. Despite my games console collection, not an area of interest for me. However it did make me realise how dominant Facebook has become in the social networking space. I found myself wondering how Vigster might compete against a Facebook app, and what the equivalent business social network applications might be.

Xavier Damman gave a demonstration of the upcoming WordPress plugin Commentag. Essentially this enables the tagging, by authors, of comments. It looked very pretty, although I’m not sure if users will go to the extent of tagging their comments, even though it increases discoverability.

Tagging is a powerful information management technique, and the main reason I use TiddlyWiki as a productivity tool. However, the future of tagging is for tags to be computer generated. We aren’t there yet. Folksonomies, that is group-based collaborative tagging, holds out some hope in the mean-time.

The presentation of graffywall piqued my curiosity. Essentially it is a shared infinite canvas. Antonio Lopes took it through its paces. It needed some ambient music to really set it off, and make the whole thing even more surreal. Imagine an infinite space where the whole world can simultaneously draw. Very experimental.

Shared white board applications have been very underused. A big screen and a pen tablet really brings this technology to life, and it a great way to interact with remote workers. I have been inspired to dig out the pen tablet for my Mac.

Nick Haltsted was there, talking about the development of tweetmeme, which will interest Twitter fans. Nick is better known for aggregator fav.or.it (explained on the about fav.or.it page). More on them, and the world of crowd sourcing later. They are hiring, apparently:

An interesting event, supported by BBC Innovation and O’Reilly, with some food for thought and opportunity to meet and greet for the London crowd.

Not So Private Data

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:19:12 +0000

The issue of identity information isn’t as simple as private or public, unshared or shared. In the Internet age, searchablility and discoverability are also factors, as well as the more granular way we can choose to share data. Computers give the illusion that we can control what we share and who we share it with. It is just that, an illusion.

I get a handy example if I google for the excellent and insightful Fred Basset – yes, I did just use google as a verb, please don’t stone me. In the results page I am overwhelmed by information on the cartoon character, rather than the new media expert. Fred is hidden in the camouflage of a mass of other data. Security by obscurity – he’s hidden in plain sight. If I Google for Benjamin Ellis, I account for most of the first page of results – your mileage may vary searching with Google from other countries (just for fun, e-mail the first page of results from where you live!). I’m not working as an SEO consultant for myself, there just seem to be less Benjamin Ellis’s out there, so I can’t hide.

Digital information has a rather free-flowing nature. Its natural tendency is to ‘escape’ from where we put it. Unhappy accidents like the recent HMRC fiasco are a reminder that it has a characteristic that physical property does not: it can be replicated, indefinitely.

If I mark something as ‘private’, to share with my ‘closed’ social network, I am reliant on those friends not making it public – either purposefully or accidentally. For example, if they tweet it on twitter, then it is indexed in Google by default. In the same way, companies rely on employees keeping information confidential. The difference is that data spillage now happens more easily, with our increasing connectedness.

There is an interesting characteristic of digital conversations that take place in social media, and that is a form of digital ‘spill’. The characteristic springs from the mismatch between peoples’ social graphs – your set of friends/contacts and mine may have some common elements, but they also have differences.

If we ‘chat’ between ourselves via the Facebook (using the wall feature) or Twitter, the differences in our social graphs cause shards of the conversation to propagate our beyond the original circle. That can be bad, or it can be good. One of the most interesting things about Twitter is the accidental conversations. It is the closest thing to creating that business haven of innovation, the water cooler conversation. With more and more remote workers, and reliance on external specialists, business will need these tools.

The reality is that Facebook is just describing the real world of social relationships. There is nothing new here. ‘Social graphs’ have existed since humans first started raising children and gathering food together. Now we have a common place word to describe the phenomenon, and tools, like Facebook and Linkedin, that have digitised the information and enabled us to study it as never before.

Data has the rather nasty habit of being permanent, sometimes inconveniently. I recently stumbled upon an email I sent to a mailing list in 1988, which is now a web forum. There is my email, in all of its glory. Thankfully I wasn’t too embarrassing as a teenager, but none-the-less, it is quite a sobering fact that something I wrote twenty years ago is right there, neatly indexed on Google.

The real world of information security, especially around identity, is messy. Tools like Facebook are gradually drawing attention to old issues and creating new ones. In the first few decades of computing, the challenges were in the technology, in the next, I suspect the challenges reside elsewhere.

Having a universal digital identity has efficiency benefits, but it also has big data privacy challenges too. It takes discoverability to a new level, which means that integrity is going to take on a whole new meaning, however good your security is.

Twitter – Trick or Tweet?

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:32:55 +0000

OK, it is well past Halloween, but I’ve only just really started to get to grips with Twitter. Writing about Twitter is fairly binary, either it is going to be old news to you or you will be going ‘what is Twitter?’. If you’ve heard of it, you will either be loving it or hating it – as I said, it seems to be a very binary thing. If you already know what I am talking about, you can just skip to the last paragraph to find out how to follow me and why I am using Twitter.

Twitter lives somewhere between the closed world of Instant Messaging and the open world of blogs. It is a very curious beast. If you want the ten second description, think of it like this: A version of instant messaging where the messages you type go to all of your buddies, and where your buddies can sign in and see all the messages from all of the people they are ‘following’. However using it like an instant messaging client will drive people barking mad. Don’t do that. Twitter is not an IM client, and you miss its power by using it that way.

Messages, or ‘Tweets’ as they are called, are public by default, for example Google will find you. Think about that for a second. Tweets are plain text only, but you can post URLs. Because of the 140 character limit for tweets you might need to make use of a URL shortening service like tinyurl.com to squish them down. For (much) more detail see Caroline’s big juicy twitter guide. There is also some interesting discussion on Twitter use at Marketers Studio, where people have batted some examples around. For fun, watch the world twittering on twittervision: zoom right out and watch for a minute or two. It is quite a strange sensation to watch people answering the Twitter question: “What are you doing?” around the globe. News services are now posting alerts to twitter also, like the BBC, CNET and CNN World.

Some marketing people are getting quite excited about Twitter. I’m a marketing person, but that isn’t why I am excited. I’m curious from a productivity and communication perspective. It could be a gold mine, or at least a silver mine. I’ve been talking with Twitter users for quite a while and last week had the chance to see it in action in a large group context at Web2.0Expo and Interop. I was very impressed – it connects people in a unique way and can save time with all sorts of tricky problems. Like most tools, it can increase productivity or it can ruin it. I remember the early days of email – good. I know today’s email – bad. Twitter can only be understood by using it, so why don’t you follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/redcatco? If you are not already a Twitter user you can sign up – it is very quick and straight forward. I’ll write up what I learn the week before Christmas, that’s about four weeks away.

Redcatco » twitter

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