DISQUS

Interesting. This reminds me of the old arguments in academic circles about the meaning/importance/significance of journal citations. Lots and lots of discussion about whether or not a simple rule like "more are better" has real significance. At least in that sphere of activity the size of the community makes a difference, given that different academic and research specialties have varying sizes, which impacts the generation and cultivation of journal article citations. So it is with number of Twitter followers, with different "communities" having different sizes. As with academic specialties, in Twitter there are many "small ponds" and fewer "big fish." I fear, though, that attempting to ascribe too much meaning and significance to these numbers will create a byzantine structure of statistics and gaming opportunities that will ultimately detract from Twitter's value. Perhaps before that happens, though, Twitter will have gone the way of Technorati and the Dodo.

I'm not sure I agree with the statement "Twitter, Facebook, even the biggest social network, MySpace, which was built as a place to market to young people, has been destroyed by the attempts to commandeer them by marketers." I know plenty of people who still use these tools all the time for communicating with friends and colleagues.

Maybe what you should have written instead was something like "Twitter, Facebook, even the biggest social network, MySpace, which was built as a place to market to young people, has been destroyed as a marketing vehicle by the attempts to commandeer them by marketers. Friends and colleagues, though, still get plenty of use out of them for genuine communication."

This really made me feel uncomfortable, like the treatment of old people in the original Seinfeld comedy series. I know this is supposed to be viewed as funny, wry, quirky commentary on "common people" but count me out. But then, I already use a Microsoft operating system so maybe I'm not the target audience?

Jacob, thanks for the post. My first question is, what about the little guys? Do you have to be a big retailer to use these tools? What if you are a single-store-owner in a place like Old Town Alexandria Virginia? Would it make sense for a local retailer to use such tools on his or her own? Or would it be necessary to bring in a PR or marketing firm to help? Seems to me that the division of labor you see at a large retailer would be just as much of a challenge for a small retailer.

So some feathers were ruffled. You guys (and gals) should be congratulated for trying something different.

I wouldn't recommend ignoring the a-listers just yet. True, a lot of their dealings are with fellow "echo chamber" tech-savvy folks, but a lot of the followers of a-listers are people wanting to learn about technology. Many folks seek out "who are the best people to follow in order to learn about technology" and that's one of the main reasons that Scoble et al gain audience share. Of course you need to focus efforts at reaching non-tech-savvy folks as well but a-listers are just part of the mix.

Excellent commentary. I've sort of felt this analysis myself, even though my own blog is much more obscure.

But aside from traffic, linking, sources being social sites, or whatever, what I'm beginning to suspect is that interest groups -- some people call them "communities" -- have absolute sizes and intensity levels that drive their interaction frequency, and this interaction can occur through an increasing variety of means, not just via linking, phone calls, IMs, tweets, or whatever.

I'm sure network analysts have a more technical term for this phenomenon, which is that, for any given type of social event, the participants will choose a method of interaction that is available, easy to use, and appropriate to the participants and rge occasion. Linking is a behavior that takes effort. Why engage in it when you can just jump into FriendFeed or Twitter and connect?

One thing to watch out for, though, is to assume geeks and non-geeks behave similarly. Another issue is that, by focusing too much on interacting with like-minded groups, our ideas and thoughts won't "leak out" to others who might also be interested in benefiting.

Excellent post. Very practical ideas. Ultimately I'd like to get some of the dollars these scrapers make off selling ads linked to my stuff but I know how likely that is to happen. (I wrote about this topic as well in http://www.ddmcd.com/different.html.)

The term "social" by itself is a problem since it implies external and non-work types of relationships, even though many "social" applications are primarily professional- or task-oriented in ways that are very supportive of enterprise interests. For a list of "social" applications that are relevant to large organizations, see this page on my blog, which is based on a presentation I give to large consulting organizations and government agencies:

http://www.ddmcd.com/reading-list/

Dennis D. McDonald
Alexandria, Virginia
http://www.ddmcd.com

If I understand you correctly, one of the things you are saying is that if you use someone's "official" list of tags for tagging your content, and you depend on a retrieval infrastructure built around that list for accessing objects tagged using that list, then you run the risk of having your retrieved set filtered through the content tagging decisions made by those controlling the tag set. End result: echo chamber.

Wasn't free form tagging (e.g., "folksonomy") supposed to have prevented this isolation from occurring?

I love slide 17!

Studies like this are meaningless. Even if they are recealing the truth (which I believe they are) the music distribution corporations will still spread FUD about downloading because they want to have legislatively legalized control over the distribution channels.

Sounds like a lot of opportunities to sell advertising. Not sure I like that.

here's a commentary:

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/blog/DennisMcDo...

This is really interesting and seems to point out that such efforts need to be managed. Is anyone surprised at that? It also reminds me of what happens whenever a volunteer effort among geographically distributed individuals needs to be coordinated. Usually a small core of individuals emerges who take it upon themselves to shoulder the burden of leadership and coordination. With today's systems, though, the numbers of people and decisions can be increased by orders of magntude, and this increases the likleihood of people veering off in the wrong direction; this in turn increases the need for oversight and management.

I've noticed that the "dogpile" effect is more prevalent in blog communities where authors tend to refer to each other by their first names under the assumption that all readers -- even those of us "on the edges" -- will know who they are.

Matthew-
Thanks for pointing this terrific article out. I'm sending it to friends in the newspaper business. I also think it is interesting how much of what Doc says here is relevant to any public facing organization, not just newspapers.
-Dennis

It's not just what they do with it it's how long they keep it. See this post of mine from 2005 when I was considering gmail: http://www.ddmcd.com/managing-technology/google.... I wonder if Google retention policies (which I assumed then were perpetual) have changed since then?

I agree with the comment that the folks who say "comments are dead" and turn theirs off usually are folks with large names or audiences already. When I hit one of their blogs and can't leave a comment my reactions are (a) they don't really care about my comments because I don't already know them and (b) they are like an old fashioned static web site that is set to "broadcast only."

Matthew - By coincidence I had a similar thought when I started to think about the deal Elsevier and Google Scholar are doing; the Elsevier data could provide a powerful networking infrastructure given the importance of citation behavior in scholarly publishing.
- Dennis