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:
- Smarter writing.
- Smarter reading.
- Better thinking.
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.
- a Tweet - the standard Twitter message (type it in the Twitter box, send it, and it goes out to everyone who’s following your account).
- a Re-tweet - a way to forward a Tweet—you get an interesting or provocative tweet, you send it back out with an “RT” code in front of it and it goes out to everyone who’s following your account. A quick and “exponential” way for a Twitter message to spread throughout the Twitter network. You can sometimes add your own comment to a re-tweeted message if there is any space left over.
2. Personal Message - a Twitter message from one person to one other
- Reply—either through a specific public reply (@name)
- Direct Message or through a private Direct Message (D name)
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.
