No one would have predicted that Twitter was going to be the next big thing, because it wasn’t/isn’t a logical “next step” in the evolution of the internet. Since html-based web pages put text and graphic files together on the same screen, the world wide web has been on a march to swallow all types of media and to embed them in ever-increasing quality (thank you, bandwidth). Twitter is “de-evolutionary”—taking us back to something that is simpler and even more constrained than basic text email.
Did the internet originally simply skip over Twitter (and is now going back to correct this mistake) or has Twitter actually arisen at its proper time and place?
Recently, Marian Salzman (CMO Porter Novelli) led a PepsiCo-sponsored project exploring the use of Twitter to host large-group discussions of cultural trends. Connecting to each other via the hashtag “#peptrends” 250 people from across PepsiCo and Porter Novelli used Twitter to discuss 15 different trend topics. This experiment and the report deserve further discussion, but what really caught my eye and got me thinking were a few of Marian’s brief comments about “Twitter as a medium.”
Twitter is a fascination for me because it works a lot better than it “should.” It’s a lot more interesting than it “should” be. It’s the half-deaf three-legged collie that turns out to be a great hunting dog. [No more hunting metaphors. Promise.] Marian Salzman’s observations about Twitter as a medium draw out the anomaly of Twitter even more for me.
Twitter is a tight-assed, highly constrained little communications medium (or channel) that only allows you a few lines of text. The whole time you’re writing a message you’re acutely aware of the medium. You watch to see how many spaces you have left and whether you are going to be able to say what you want to say before you run out. It’s a medium that starts off by reducing your writing “freedom,” and it challenges your normal writing style. The Twitter message recipient is also very aware of the medium: the message is unnaturally short. It looks and feels “condensed.” Salzman is right. Twitter is a medium that does NOT fade into the background or recede from your awareness.
But Twitter does a neat trick: it somehow flips all of this around! It goes from a medium that feels like it is restricting you, to one that feels like it is helping you. I think this is as true for the sender/author as it is for the recipient/reader. So how does this happen, how does Twitter pull this trick off? The restricted message length is part of it. But it can’t be all of it—otherwise SMS/mobile-text messaging would act like Twitter. But it doesn’t (more on this below). Another factor behind Twitter’s magic is its broadcasting nature—broadcasting to a group of known and unknown people who have selected to follow your Twitter messages. When you send out a mobile text message you’re sending it to one person. Most of the time when you send out a Twitter message you are sending it out to an audience. Let’s take a deeper look at message length and broadcasting and see how they work their magic on both the authors and recipients of Twitter messages.
I. RESTRICTED MESSAGE LENGTH
Twitter messages must be 140 characters/spaces or fewer. I doubt that there’s anything critical or magical about “140”—I suspect Twitter would be exactly where it is if it had chosen a limit of 130 or 150 characters. The creators of Twitter arbitrarily chose a 140 limit to keep it within the 160 SMS text limit (the extra 20 spaces reserved for the user name). Because SMS was used as the early gateway for sending Twitter messages, this text-length restriction was inherited by Twitter.
Regardless of the exact length, “short” is clearly one of the keys to Twitter’s magic and success. Here are three outcomes that I think are encouraged by Twitter’s restricted message length:
We will see that each of these benefits is further multiplied by the broadcasting-to-followers nature of Twitter. Before getting into that, let’s first examine each of these three interrelated benefits.
Restricted message length as smarter writing. This is one of the first surprises for the new Twitter writer: the space restriction is much less onerous and much less of a handicap than expected. I frequently find that after “struggling” a little to get my thought or message into 140 characters or fewer (e.g., by reworking words, phrases, or sentences to be shorter and more efficient), I have a (small) sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. I solved the problem: I figured out how to say it within the space limit! The message is “tight.” It’s efficient. It was worth the effort. Reworking the message to fit it in actually made it better. Thanks, Twitter! Twitter ties my hands behind my back, and I wind up thanking it. Neat trick. And a subtle one.
Compared to text, many traditional, rich broadcast mediums can reinforce the message or clutter it up with extraneous stuff (pictures, sounds, backgrounds, colors…). It’s really, really hard to put extraneous stuff in a Twitter message. You can put in a few unnecessary words or unnecessarily long words—but only if you have the space.
An example of extreme Twitter efficiency. Chevre-Pomegranate Portobellos: stem/oil 4shrooms; stuff w 8T chevre/s+p. Wrap w 4pce prosciutto (opt). 25m @375F/190C. Top w pomegranate. This is a sample tweet from @cookbook whose Twitter bio is “Tiny recipes condensed by @Maureen. Serves 3-4. Delicious ideas from all over the world.”
Restricted message length as smarter reading. If Twitter’s length restriction makes the writer write smarter (e.g., cram more thinking into a shorter space than usual), then it follows that Twitter messages should make for smarter reading for the recipients. We could actually test this proposition by comparing Twitter messages with randomly selected (comparably short) messages from other venues (e.g., blogs, emails, etc.). I am willing to believe that the Twitter messages—on average—will actually convey more meaning, intelligence, and creativity (have a higher bang-for-the-buck impact). My own personal experience in using Twitter to follow a variety of people who Twitter about topics of professional interest to me is that these Twitter messages often have a better/higher signal-to-noise ratio than messages I get through any other medium or channel. Struggling to write intelligent Twitter messages showed me how this intelligence-compression or -distillation process comes about.
Let’s also keep in mind that there are lots of inane and trivially self-centered Twitter messages (e.g., “Bored.” “Wondering what to have for lunch.”). What I’m focusing on here are 1. the Twitter messages that are smart, interesting, useful, and clever, and 2. the fact that there are more messages like this on Twitter than one would expect or predict. If you’re on Twitter and you’re getting a lot of shallow and pointless messages, then you can change that by changing the people you are following. Don’t blame the medium.
Restricted message length as better thinking. The real benefit behind smarter writing and smarter reading is that it encourages “better thinking.” It does this in a variety of different ways. You may have noticed that when you have an idea or thought, the act of putting it in words—especially the act of writing it down—can make you rethink, clarify, and improve your idea (and sometimes a really great idea evaporates when in the act of writing it, we realize it has some serious flaws). Twitter’s condensed writing length seems to maximize this by forcing you to distill your idea down into a real simple, precise statement. Twitter also promotes better thinking—on the part of both the writer and reader—by making you prioritize. If you can’t convey everything you want to convey about an idea or thought, you have to choose to focus your Twitter message on what you think is the core of your idea—its most important elements. This exercise also helps the writer clarify his idea or thought. There is at least one other way that a Twitter message encourages “better thinking” from the recipient: because a Twitter message takes very little time to read, it leaves you with more time to think about the message. Instead of giving you a full paragraph or two of writing, I’m going to give you one quick message and let you have the “rest of the paragraph” to think about it.
The restricted message length, however, is not the only characteristic contributing to Twitter’s surprising value. If it was, then Twitter would probably have become nothing more than a small adjunct to SMS/mobile-text messaging and not a phenomenon in its own right.
Mobile texting and Twitter. When I first encountered Twitter I perceived it be just an internet-based version of the “lazy” and abbreviated SMS mobile-text-messaging service. Mobile text-messaging is especially popular with adolescents and young adults because it allows them to connect with and facilitate their social networks on the go. Mobile text messaging across cellular networks preceeded Twitter and like Twitter is a very restricted text-message space (160 characters or fewer). One of the crucial differences between SMS and Twitter, however, is in the relationship between message sender and receiver: SMS was designed to be a one-to-one message between two users who know each other, while Twitter was designed to broadcast a message from one person to a group of people. The creators of Twitter were originally thinking of Twitter being used to broadcast messages to small, established social groups, but it has easily expanded to include message broadcasting to much larger and less socially organized groups. That—in conjunction with the restricted message length—has helped turn Twitter into something new and powerful on the internet.
II. THE BROADCASTING-TO-FOLLOWERS MINDSET
Before exploring the effects of the broadcasting mindset on the quality of Twitter messages, let’s clearly delineate the four basic types of Twitter messages and their broadcast characteristics:
1. Broadcast Message - a Twitter message from one person to a group. The “group” consists of all of the people who have signed up to receive these messages as well as anyone else who may discover them or their messages via a search of the Twitter database.
2. Personal Message - a Twitter message from one person to one other
My primary focus here is on the standard Tweet—the one-to-many message that goes out from @person-X to all the people who have chosen to follow @person-X. It is the typical one-to-many Twitter broadcast message where I have found the greatest value in Twitter and where Twitter has surprised me the most.
The broadcasting mindset of Twitter seems to work to reinforce (multiply?) the smarter writing, smarter reading, and better thinking effects that accompany Twitter’s restricted message length. How does this work?
Twitter broadcasting as smarter writing/smarter reading. Mobile text messages between two people often occur in the context of an existing, familiar relationship. Twitter messages are broadcast to a larger group and start with a different mindset—more of a public presentation or pronouncement than a private remark between close friends. At the very least, this larger social audience puts more pressure on the writer to write well. We don’t expect our everyday friends to be very judgmental about our idiosyncratic abbreviations, misspellings, grammar violations, and intellectual sloppiness. We don’t feel we have this same freedom, however, when presenting to a group—especially if we don’t really know some of those people (a description that may fit many people’s Twitter followers.) This social/audience effect adds a little more pressure to Twitter message writers to write to higher standards of clarity and acceptability. The flip side of this hypothesis is that better/smarter writing should make for better/smarter reading.
Twitter broadcasting as better thinking. Mobile text messages between two familiar people are also often focused on a specific shared social context or activity (“Running late. Be there in 10 minutes.”). They tend to be “narrow” and “concrete.” Making a valuable, useful, or entertaining observation or comment via Twitter to a group of people is typically a more intellectually challenging task than exchanging greetings or activity updates with a close friend. Broadcasting to followers challenges the writer to offer an observation or idea that is meaningful to an audience—an comment that can stand on its own, not draw upon a specific relationship for its meaning. This takes more, better, or deeper thinking than most social news bulletins or announcements. Writing for a group or audience encourages the writer to put more meaning and value in their message—make the message stand tall on its own.
Twitter broadcasting as living up to your brand promise. Beyond the generally facilitating effects of having an audience, Twitter “Followers” are a special audience that brings an additional “pressure” to produce useful and intelligent messages. I sign up for a Twitter account, pick a name, and create a bio: I create the basis for my Twitter brand. Part of what this branding does is make a promise. @SocialMedia promises to focus on social media. @artcrap promises to focus on art. The brand promise may not come from the name but in the Twitter bio or in the reputation the creator brings to Twitter from his professional or social life on or off the internet. When I send a message out via Twitter, I do so knowing that at least some of the people who have signed up to follow me have done so because of the Twitter “face” I have adopted (i.e., Bio: Social psychologist. Creative roustabout. Insight. Analytics. Culture. Art. Web: http://allenbukoff.com/info). I have picked a spot and raised a bar. I have put “pressure” on myself to deliver smart and worthwhile messages about certain topics. This brand, this mindset, makes me more selective about what I post on Twitter. This makes me think harder and better when writing Twitter messages.
Twitter’s restricted message length, its broadcasting nature, and the brand promise can all work together to raise the intelligence and value of many Twitter messages—both in how they are written and in the meaning and information that can be extracted. The fact that Twitter messages can actually have a very high signal-to-noise ratio or value is contrary to most people’s initial impressions and expectations of Twitter. Most people expect Twitter messages to just be inane and very social-context specific (“Meet you at the bar tonight.” “Doing my nails.” “Late for work.”). They expect Twitter to generate a lot of empty content or noise. But Twitter magic can turn this around.
There is at least one other factor that can dramatically increase the usefulness, value, and intelligence of Twitter messages: linking to online resources.
III. SURROUNDED BY THE INTERNET
Unlike mobile text-messaging, Twitter is embedded in “The Internet.” Most Twitter users are broadcasting Twitter messages from “the web” (an internet connected computer), and most Twitter messages are read on the web (on an internet connected computer). Twittering for many people is now done in and around their other internet-based activities (such as news gathering, blogging, and internet searching). Not surprisingly then, Twitter seems to draw on these activities and the internet context much more than mobile text-messaging does. One way to create a useful and intelligent (or clever) message is to take an internet resource (e.g., a provocative blog post, a professional news item, a new software application or internet tool, etc., etc.), write a “headline” for it, and add a link to it. Specially shortened URL links to a wide variety of internet resources can be found in many Twitter messages. Links to external resources can give a Tweet a greater potential and “intelligence.” But it’s not just the borrowed intelligence of the link. Although one could just put the url by itself in a Twitter post, most people seem to feel compelled to “promote” it with an intelligent summary description—and wind up adding value and intelligence to the message. Even if I don’t click through to the URL’s destination, I usually learn something useful.
Summary. The often useful distinction in communication between medium and content is very blurred in the case of Twitter. The short message length of the medium restricts and challenges the value of the message content. In doing this, however, Twitter can actually prompt writers to cram better, simpler, and more intelligent writing and thinking into a very compact space. Twitter messages can end up having a very high signal-to-noise ratio. Compared to one-on-one social interactions between good friends, the broadcast nature of standard Twitter messages also encourages writers to put more meaning and intellectual value in the message. In adopting a Twitter persona or brand, many people have also challenged themselves to offer worhtwhile messages focusing on certain topics. Linking to internet-based resources and tools within a Twitter message is another way that Twitter can provide intellectual value as a filtering and search service. These are some of the things that help Twitter provide a value and a usefulness that exceeds initial expectations. Twitter is a rare medium.
If you find my attempts to explore and explain Twitter to be tedious, you might find Keith Starky Explains Twitter to be more likeable.
Much of the current discussion of social media as a business tool appears to be focused on its value as a tool for communicating with consumers. We provide a brief summary of this discussion below. We then turn to another business use of social media—especially Twitter—that may be quicker and easier to implement, can provide company-wide value, and may be a better place for companies to begin building their social media competencies.
Social Media and Consumers
The current focus on the use of social media in business is on the use of social media tools to INTERACT with consumers (especially existing and potential customers). Current issues coming to the fore include:
A. Mindset issues. Moving from a broadcast mindset in communications to an interaction mindset—from leading to listening to interaction.
B. Engagement issues. What are the rules and roles for consumer engagement that will most benefit my company?
C. Organizational issues. Social media cuts across a variety of business functions and departments (from marketing to public relations to customer service). How should social media be managed and coordinated? How do we optimize its use while minimizing turf and power struggles?
D. Organizational change. Successfully dealing with the three overlapping sets of issues listed above may require organizational change. Some advocates are even promoting social media as a tool for organizational change.
Using social media as a tool for interacting with/marketing to consumers is where much of the attention on social media is currently focused. If some of the early successes of social media marketing are any indication, its prospects for creating better and stronger businesses are indeed great. Realizing this potential, however, is going to take a lot of work, a lot of experimentation, and a lot of time for most industries, companies, and organizations. Social media services and tools themselves are probably just in the early stages of their development and evolution. When it comes to how social media will transform how businesses and consumers interact, we are probably in for a very long (ten years?) and interesting ride.
Meanwhile, there are other uses of social media in business that have not been getting the attention they deserve. Let’s now turn to one of these.
Social Media and Professional Development
The internet is an amazing resource. It is an amazing source of information, knowledge, and tools for probably nearly every business function, task, group, and profession. If you have a job, a task, or a problem to solve—or want to find ways to do something better—you can often find helpful information somewhere on the internet. The trick is finding 1. good help (i.e., useful information or instructions that directly address the critical parts of your task or problem) 2. efficiently. Having Google at our fingertips certainly beats the old days of trudging to the library to look through the card catalog (or even the early days of Yahoo search). But finding “the information we’re looking for” or need on the internet can still be frustrating—more misses than hits, more noise than signal.
Social media as search engine. Surprisingly, social media can provide some of the benefits that we have looked to search services like Google for. This is especially true of Twitter (once again, there’s something about Twitter…). First of all, Twitter is a streaming collection of what people are thinking, feeling, doing and paying attention to now. Secondly, and more importantly, if you use Twitter to follow some interesting, knowledgeable and provocative professionals in your area of expertise, you’ll get lots of high quality links to interesting new articles, discussions, insights, and media. Suddenly you’re a lot more “plugged in,” suddenly you’re discovering valuable new stuff outside your normal blog subscriptions, RSS feeds, and Google searches. You’ll discover great stuff you didn’t even know you needed. Superior crowd-sourced searching and filtering delivered in incredibly short and efficient messages. From Twitter! Who knew?!
If I was the CEO of a company that was moving into “the social media space” ( wouldn’t that be nearly every company right now—even the ones that have already jumped into consumer communication?), I would encourage all employees to begin using Twitter as a basic part of their job. I would urge them to use Twitter to find and follow professionals they look up to and then to follow their Twitter messages for tips and links to new and better ways to do their jobs, new and better tools to help themselves and the company. I believe this company-wide effort could be initiated with relatively little investment and minimal training—a meeting in each department to kick it off and get people going. I would then monitor Twitter usage and growth in the number of people being followed. I’d ask groups within departments to meet up and share tips, tools, useful apps, lists of worthwhile followers, and case studies of how it’s changed them and their jobs.
I think this would be a great place to start with social media. First teach the whole company how to use Twitter. Learn to follow and listen together. On this foundation I would then begin to build my social media and consumer outreach. I’d look for the best people in each department or group to serve as the company’s public face for that function. We’d have to work hard to figure out how to manage all of this as we evolved our use of social media as a channel for communicating with consumers. Listening to consumers via social media and learning how to be helpful won’t be that big of a challenge, however. Most of that will be pretty natural. Our biggest challenge is going to be learning how to do this in a way that is good for us, for the business, for the company…and resist getting caught up in the things that aren’t. Sorting out the things that will and won’t benefit our business is going to be our long-term challenge.
Summary. In focusing first on implementing social media as a consumer communication channel, many companies may be jumping the gun and overlooking what could be the biggest bang-for-the-buck and the best place to start: using social media as a professional development tool to help everyone in the company get smarter, better and more innovative in their job.
Footnote. Ford Motor Company may be evolving something of a hybrid of the model described above. Scott Monty, the head of social media at Ford, is canvassing and grooming people throughout Ford to play an active role in Ford’s efforts to address consumers via social media. I suspect that other companies who start with consumer-focused social media efforts are also going to find themselves spreading the social media opportunties and responsibilities throughout their organization. This may be one way to back into helping the company use social media as a tool for professional development.
[The following is based on a comment I made in response to B.L.Ochman’s Advertising Age piece, Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet.]
Twitter is a fundamentally mispositioned brand. It has been from the very start. So pointing out—as this article does—that many people/companies are taking the WRONG APPROACH TO TWITTER is too easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Twitter is very poorly understood—by you, me, social media experts and everybody else. Twitter is a much more dynamic, evolving, and complicated phenomenon than it’s apparent operational simplicity would imply (i.e., short text messages, simple user interface, following/hooking up—“there’s nothing new here…so it must be some sort of flukey fad, right?!”). Twitter was and continues to be a surprise even to its creators.
We’re the blind men. Twitter is the elephant.
Here are the most helpful/accurate observations I can offer about Twitter at this time:
This last point is probably why there may not be any really good BIG-PICTURE EXPERTS or guides to the whole Twitter territory at this time. Everything is morphing and changing. To me Twitter feels like a different ride then anything I’ve gone through before on the internet and different than what I am going through with the other budding social media services. Twitter is “social media” but it feels like its in a whole different category than Facebook, blip.fm, or YouTube. So applying my past experience and previously useful internet metaphors seems to have mislead me more than helped me understand and navigate Twitter. I think this is true for a lot of people, but they haven’t figured this out yet (i.e., they grabbed Twitter’s tail and now think its a rope…and are now happy just to treat it as a rope).
Don’t be like me and let Twitter’s surface simplicity initially fool you into thinking that this Twitter thing is something simple to understand. Don’t let Twitter’s dumb-easy operation fool you into thinking that this is something that can be easily mastered…for fun or profit. I got on Twitter a couple of years ago, had my wife follow my text-message updates while I was out of the country on a business trip…and then decided it was all just a dumb social text-messaging service for young people. Mostly forgot about it until the growing attention forced me to go back and take another long hard look…forced me to try to find what it was that was making so many people jump up and down about Twitter. I’m glad I did. There is something really interesting about Twitter and it’s bugging me to figure it out.
At this stage, the best thing I can do and you can do—if you’re interested in Twitter—is jump in, keep looking around, keep playing around, and keep exploring. Then scratch your head and humbly share what you find with your fellow explorers. Bring an open mind. Prepare to be surprised.
Twitter Business Card
I just invented this…twitter address & bio on a small sticky label. Small, short & sweet so it looks and feels like Twitter, no?