Social Media: The Benefits of Twitter
Twitter, as a Web 2.0 app, is often confusing at first glance, because the typical Twitter-user homepage resembles gibberish; an effect that comes from reading only one side of a person having many conversations, interspersed with random thoughts, links and reports of mundane minutia – 140 character microblogging. Even clicking “with others” isn’t much help as the asynchronous nature of the exchanges make these conversations very, very, difficult to follow.
This has led Dave Davison of Thoughts Illustrated, who has great experience in high tech angel investing, to ask of Twitter, “What is the Return On Attention? (ROA)” and ultimately, he came to the conclusion that twittering, unfiltered, is mostly attention-wasting noise. As a consequence, Dave now uses one such (multiplatform) filter, Friendfeed and no longer twitters.
So then, what good is Twitter? Here’s the “Return on Attention” that I’ve found from using Twitter:
Conversation Within An Existing Network:
I kick around ideas, shoot the breeze or just stay in the loop with what is happening with Shloky, John Robb, Michael Tanji, Selil from SWC, Adam Elkus, Charles Cameron and Shane Deichman. Additionally, Chirol, Sean Meade, Curtis of Dreaming5GW, Critt Jarvis and Dan of Tdaxp are alo on Twitter but “tweet” very irregularly.
Note that many of us have actually met in person, some more than once and/or have been interacting online together for years. This is where Twitter is going to yield the most value, given the 140 character limit of the “tweets”; a shared understanding is necessary to maximize the utility of this app.
Network Building:
Adding to the above group, which has clearly defined interests in 4GW, strategy, intel, COIN, futurism and technology, teaching and writing, was relatively easy. Joining us after a time were Fantomplanet, Jeffrey Carr of IntelFusion, Sandbaggerone, Fester of The NewsHoggers and Powerweirdo ( of many sites). The signal to noise ratio in this group is very high – and what noise exists, social chatter, joking, etc. serves psychologically as a positive reinforcer.
Gateway/ Breadcrumb Trail:
When I “follow” someone on Twitter or if they elect to “follow” me, I eventually get around to checking out their website, blog or links with greater scrutiny. This is how I found Jessica Margolin’s Solvation blog, Carr’s IntelFusion and started reading some of the blogs of the hi-tech/Web 2.0 gurus and entrepreneurs who “follow” me but for whom I mostly don’t reciprocate on Twitter because, like Robert Scoble, their combined sheer volume of “tweets” would drown everyone else out. I have excepted David Armano and Scoble; the former, because I have been repeatedly impressed with his command of visual information and he keeps his tweets to a reasonable number and Scoble because, despite his maniacal aspect, he is a “hub” for that entire subculture and occasionally posts up high value links like this.
I pretty much find something interesting every day on Twitter or by somebody who uses Twitter – like this piece on 5GW. It’s a useful app, if you accept the inherent limitations of the platform or if you intend to bring your entire network with you and speed up the conversation.
May 20th, 2008 at 3:49 am
Thanks for the shout! I was very, very skeptical about Twitter at first, but getting a cell phone at the beginning of 08 gave me an appreciation for the terse economy of SMS.
Once I was on twitter, I wound up following some incredibly USEFUL PEOPLE, and it changed my concept of what the site was for. I’m talking about folks who ignored the question "What Are You Doing Now" and instead provide a reliable stream of novel, useful information.
I find myself a lot more hestitant these days to just twitter whatever comes to mind — I’m very aware of the fact I’m participating in a conversation and a network, and I want to add value to that, rather than just….well, twittering away.
May 20th, 2008 at 4:08 am
Hi Justin,
.
I think you have hit it on the head with:
.
"Once I was on twitter, I wound up following some incredibly USEFUL PEOPLE, and it changed my concept of what the site was for. I’m talking about folks who ignored the question "What Are You Doing Now" and instead provide a reliable stream of novel, useful information."
.
That’s probably the future of twitter or of the most followed 5 %. I’m dubious that much can be gained from following more than around 150 active, "high value" twitterers without a filtering and aggregating app to help sort everything out. Following 20,000+ like Scoble or Calacanis ( close to 30k – Good Fucking Lord !! Does that induce epilepsy ??) by watching your computer screen flicker at warp speed is simply nuts.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:09 am
[…] shoulda checked Zen’s feed before writing this post: Social Media: The Benefits of Twitter. He reckons it’s a great little tool, and even mentions Robert Scoble to boot. Should I take […]
May 20th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Haha, there must be something in the air today. Wish I’d checked your feed before posting about ten minutes ago. Makes me wonder if I shouldn’t check out the Twitterbeast. Interesting post, given that I’ve been thinking about it from a different angle for the last couple of hours.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Mark,
Since I still haven’t understood what the value of Twitter is… How is it different from Skype or MSN Messenger? You can send any length message on one of those services. I’m sure I am behind the curve on Twitter, but I just never understood it.
Regards,
TDL
May 20th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
So is Twitter supposed to occupy a space between "private" networks (e-mail, messengers, etc.) & public networks (news, search engines, blogs, etc.)?
Regards,
TDL
May 20th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Thanks Tim -I’ll link shortly and I corrected the comment.
.
Hi Theo,
.
Sorry about the phonecon earlier BTW – I was avalanched both at work and at home for about a week and a half. Normally I don’t drop the ball like that. 🙁
.
In regards to Twitter, while I have Skype set up at home, I’ve yet to use it as anything other than a phone. Twitter definitely is a hybrid culture – part microblogging, part public messaging/chat room. I think it’s useful, for example, within a department or project team, moreso than email and less threatening to the technophobic than using a wiki. Trying to wade in to Twitter solo and connect with random strangers – I don’t see much value there
May 20th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
^^It was a 20-30 minute process for me to make my Twitter into something useful.
I would compare Twitter not to IM services but to an RSS reader like Thunderbird. Until you load it up with some custom feeds that are interesting to you, Thunderbird is both ugly and useless. Once you’ve got it customized, though, it’s amazing.
I wrote out a quick list of my main interests right now, and the sites/blogs I’ve been doing research on. Then I went through and made intuitive guesses about who would probably have a Twitter page.
For instance, for marketing, both Ben Mack and Dave Lakhani did, indeed, have twitter pages. Most of the tech commentators/journalists I follow had twitters, too. So did John Robb and most of the 5GW folks I’ve been reading. Now it’s like gmail — something I check as a daily routine, because there’s a consistent payoff in terms of quality brainfood.
Just like RSS, I’m quick to add new channels and occasionally do huge purges when I evaluate what I’m really interested in, and who is really adding value to my feed. It becomes an organic, ongoing process.
Up next: integrating my gmail, twitter, digg and company Basecamp account onto a single startup page.
May 20th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Hi Justin,
.
Not familiar with Basecamp – what is it ?
May 20th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Mark,
No worries about the call. Thanks for the input, as I was looking at Twitter I was starting to understand it in the same manner you just mentioned it. It is starting to look compelling as an enterprise tool. Lots of partial ideas and data that can be captured and shared.
Regards,
TDL
May 21st, 2008 at 8:54 am
I’m still skeptical of it, mostly because it has thusfar been of little use to me. As I dont use it with my cell and am in a different time zone than most of the people I may want to chat with, my attempts to give it a chance have thusfar failed. Perhaps later.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Good post, Mark. I like the "Return on Attention" concept that Davison wrote about, but I’m amazed that he thinks FriendFeed is less noisy then Twitter. Personally, I’ve found FriendFeed less useful than Twitter. For one, there’s a lot of duplication of posts on FF. For another, the "Alert Thingy" interface takes up too much screen real estate. Also, I like the word discipline that 140 characters puts on smart posters. The key, as you pointed out, is to keep the number of people that you’re following down to a manageable level. I can’t even begin to comprehend how some of these A-listers like Scoble and Arrington can follow so many thousands of people.
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:18 pm
"Something is technically wrong."
–The reason Twitter kinda bores me.
May 24th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Hi Curtis,
.
"Something is technically wrong."
–The reason Twitter kinda bores me."
.
As opposed to such historically error-free platforms like Blogger or Wordspirit? 😉
May 24th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
"Twitter is stressing out" so I can’t view anything but my own posts.
It’s not a bug that can be fixed, like a bad plug-in for Movable Type. It’s a recurring feature.
May 25th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Basecamp is a collaboration platform we’ve been using to keep our business alive — I moved over 1000 miles from my partner, but we’ve managed to keep things running without much turbulence.
It’s a paid service, but it’s never been down and it’s valuable to us. We’ve also got a number of forums, but we’ve found that if consensus isn’t reached in the first few posts, then things devolve into "mere discussion" and the focus gets lost. Basecamp is goal-oriented and keeps us on point.
http://www.basecamphq.com/tour
I always feel cautious advocating solutions like this, because it’s usually just a matter of what worked for us first — it’s not like we rigorously tested all the competition. For instance, we use Expression Engine as the CMS for all our sites, but I’ve got a couple friends who use Squarespace and swear by that. We’re not experts, we just know what works for us.
October 23rd, 2008 at 10:56 pm
[…] gist is that blogs give way to Twitter (Mark, I believe we’ve had this conversation before). My response is that, OK, attention-span, frequency-jacking (as I may once […]