DISQUS

Very interesting stuff, Brian. Here are a couple of thoughts, though:

1. It's possible that Twitter's usage patterns are skewed in relation to other social media sites because of usability issues. Twitter makes it (a) easy to sign up for an account, but (b) hard for many people to grasp how to use the service fruitfully. If those observations are correct, it would be natural to have lots of rapid defectors and little-used accounts.

2. Other comparisons of uptake and usage patterns across media might be useful. E.g. I'll bet it would be interesting to compare the usage power curves of Twitter and cell phones. Everybody, it seems, has a cell phone, but usage of them differs widely.

3. Even without points 1 and 2, it strikes me as a false dichotomy to say that our choices are "conversation" or "broadcast." Plenty of folks on Twitter use it in each of these veins, and even highly conversational folks like myself *also* use it to send and receive broadcast messages at some times.

Very interesting stuff, Brian. Here are a couple of thoughts, though:

1. It's possible that Twitter's usage patterns are skewed in relation to other social media sites because of usability issues. Twitter makes it (a) easy to sign up for an account, but (b) hard for many people to grasp how to use the service fruitfully. If those observations are correct, it would be natural to have lots of rapid defectors and little-used accounts.

2. Other comparisons of uptake and usage patterns across media might be useful. E.g. I'll bet it would be interesting to compare the usage power curves of Twitter and cell phones. Everybody, it seems, has a cell phone, but usage of them differs widely.

3. Even without points 1 and 2, it strikes me as a false dichotomy to say that our choices are "conversation" or "broadcast." Plenty of folks on Twitter use it in each of these veins, and even highly conversational folks like myself *also* use it to send and receive broadcast messages at some times.

Great meeting you as well, Eric -- and I look forward to the next time we get together so we can talk about what you're doing at more length. Cheers!

Curtis @23 -- In general, (at least in my experience) once you get used to using Google Reader, it's much easier to process things that way, especially if you can go through whole folders of item in "List" (rather than "Expanded") view. If you're not already used to it, it pays to make a habit of navigating with the J & K keys -- you can *fly* through the items with just a little practice.

Like Andi @15, I use folders extensively within Google Reader (and Bloglines before that) -- makes it *very* easy, for example, to separate searches about your company from those about your competitors, your own name, technologies you're tracking, etc.

One shortcut: like Nigel said @18, if Firefox knows that Google Reader is your default RSS tool, you don't have to copy-and-paste RSS links -- you just click the RSS link, keep clicking until you get to Google Reader, and assign the feed to a particular folder. Easy-peasy.

@Scott Manley -- You make a very good point. Most of the jobs in the United States are created by small businesses (not even medium-sized), and the SMB sector represents a huge chunk of the economy. Of course, these companies also have different needs, and they can't afford the mondo-sized products / service packages that the big dogs can. In other words, selling to SMBs (which, by the by, has been a specialty of my employer for many years) can be un-sexy, but the value there can be huge.

Going back to my comment @24 above, the size of the client enterprise (expressed in # of employees, revenue, total IT budget, whatever) would be another important dimension to add to the grid.

Good stuff, Chris. Last week I was talking with someone about this very thing, and broached my idea that there's at least one slot between B2B and B2C, which we might call B-to-mass-B. In other words, there are B2B markets that act *more* like B2C markets because of the size of the audience, the complexity of the sales cycle, etc.

Having read the comments here -- especially Kathy @5 and Jodi @20 -- I want to nuance that some more. It's not like a lightswitch with a binary choice between B2B and B2C. (I know you know this, I'm just addressing the oversimplified terms we all sometimes use.) It's more like a polydimensional grid, with many factors including:

--size of purchase (major vs, minor, whether in relative or absolute dollars)
--complexity of options (chocolate bar vs. huge Oracle install)
--speed of delivery (a soda from the machine vs. a tailor-made suit)
--specialized knowledge of buyer (think high-end fly-fishermen, or CIOs)
--number of decision-makers (like Jodi said)
--how the purchase will be amortized in the buyer's budget (capital expenditure vs. operating budget, or one-time buy vs. installment/subscription plan)
-- . . .

Et cetera through many other dimensions I'm sure I'm forgetting.

What made me think of all this in the first place was GE's aircraft-engines business. How long is their list of *potential* clients -- dozens? scores? However many aircraft makers there are in the world who could buy from them, it's not as many steady customers as your average busy greasy-spoon diner has. For that GE business, social media in any outward-facing sense might not make sense, because the issues they face aren't related to awareness: every single potential customer of theirs *on earth* knows that they exist and knows how to get in touch with them.

So, the challenge -- in that case and every other case, based on where your business lives in this polydimensional grid I'm proposing -- is to parse it out: how will I use Technology X to build my business? Technology X could be a white-label social network. It could be geolocation sensors. It could be accounting software. It could (hypothetically) be pencil-and-paper (though I'll bet they've got that one nailed down by now). The list goes on and on, and the savvy business will regard social media tools in light of its own situation and the needs of its customers -- just like it should any other technology.

Wow, maybe I should have just put this on *my* blog and pointed back here. ;)

Have a great weekend, Chris.

Good stuff, Chris. Many thouhts boiling here, but I'll focus on three:

1. In his comment above, Jeffrey mentions his local hardware store. I've written about my local hardware store, and the way that the owner calls me by name and tries to *figure out the problem I'm trying to solve* rather than just *figuring out what he can sell me*. Sometimes this means he points me to Lowe's for something he knows they have in stock that would take him a week to order. (If I'm in there first thing on Saturday, he rightly assumes that I'm trying to knock out a project that day.) The fact that he pays attention to *my* needs means that I keep coming back again and again, even if on certain occasions Lowe's gets my money for a particular project.

2. I think Janelle is off-track in her comment above when she writes, "Wouldn’t it be lovely if social media could help us nurture these local level individual relationships?" It CAN help do this, and not only is it not impossible, it's doable right now. Also, I think she's taking a limited view when she writes, "I just feel that social media is more about broadening your outreach rather than creating local level relationships."

Social media is "about" what you *make* it about, just like any other medium. We can use the telephone to build up customer relations, surprising a customer or prospect by calling them back promptly with information, corrections, etc. . . . or we can phone-spam people with crappy telemarketing that interrupts their dinner hour. These and many more things are possible with a plain ol' telephone; the new, Internet-enabled social media offer even more possibilities.

3. I'm fascinated to think about how cafe-shaped conversations and business practices can be applied to larger enterprises, too. How could a *big* company operate, cell by cell, along cafe-shape lines. The best salespeople have always done this anyway, listening hard to customers and prospects just like Mike at my local hardware store listens to me. How could we use social-media tools to spread this kind of customer TLC across *many* constituencies for a larger business?

Good thoughts, David. We've come to confuse "the modern mass media the way we've known it since WW2" with "the media by which we communicate."

Television sank great old media institutions like The Saturday Evening Post. And so what? We got over it.

Robert -- Your enumerated points are an excellent reminder that the granddaddy (and still heavyweight champion) of the online social media is . . . e-mail.

Good one, Chris. Best of all is when we can stop making the distinction between work and play -- when our job is a form of "serious play" and when our leisure is something that achieves useful ends for ourselves and those around us.

It can't be an accident that so many of the most successful people don't regard their daily work as the least bit of a burden, but rather as an opportunity to experience joy (if not always having "fun" -- most folks will never have fun in a budget meeting) in doing what they love to do.

Good post, Chris, and I see why you pointed me here in our Twitter conversation on "algorithms."

Echoing Steve re "underlying principles" above, I would suggest a distinction here between two types of best practices:

1. Best practices and benchmarking as a rote, Bisquick-recipe method. There's no fundamental rethinking of habits or modus operandi, and therefore there's no struggle and growth for the organization or the individuals within it.

2. REAL best practices, which will have to go by another name since "best practices" has been so corrupted. "Underlying principles" is a good name for it; "algorithms" might be another.

In this version, you look to Toyota NOT because you entertain the fantasy that you'll follow six simple steps and be like them 18 months from now, but because you acknowledge the reality that Toyota is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to its competitors, and that it didn't -- couldn't have -- gotten there by accident. So you look for the underlying principles of operating without waste and overburden; you think hard about AND IMPLEMENT programs to solicit worker suggestions aggressively; you ENACT measures to ENSURE that improvements to processes are implemented every single day.

As I said in my post about "real advice" for companies, version #1 of best practices -- the "tips-'n'-tricks" version is easy but useless. Version #2 implies -- REQUIRES -- actual changes in behavior, and not at some far-off future date, but starting right now. That makes it hard.

Which is why most people run away from it, and why many companies allow themselves to fall prey to version #1 of best practices.

And then they wonder why they never get better.

Good stuff, Chris. This meshes with thoughts I've been having about the social history of communications media. We've always had personal media (private conversations, personal letters, one-to-one phone calls, etc.), and we've always had narrowcast media (town criers, sermons, speeches, etc.). It's only in the past couple-hundred years or so that we've had appreciable mass media, and it was in the 20th century that Big Business learned to harness it.

Social media as we usually conceive of it lends itself to personal and narrowcast media -- your "cafe" conversations. I wonder how much it will evolve to achieve mass-media ends, and how much mass-media users (esp. Home Depot et al., as you say) will evolve to use it at the personal & narrowcast levels.

It's worth thinking about one more element: how Big Business can already tap or enable or promote *many* personal or narrowcast conversations around its offerings, thus achieving scale without trying to force the social media to perform like mass media. (At this point, cue standard references to the Fiskateers program and so on.)

Big questions worth pursuing -- good on yer for continuing to raise them.

Chip, you raise important points here and in your rebuttal article. (Everybody else: if you haven't already, check out Chip's article: http://is.gd/7EhE )

In fact, what you wrote got me thinking about this enough to write a longish post of my own on the subject -- linked to my name here or from the pingback link above. I welcome further thoughts from you, Chris, and anyone else following the conversation either here or on my own post.

Cheers!

Chip, I take your point. Bob's a grown-up and shouldn't be surprised if he gets fired. I think we can all agree that that's the way the business world works, regardless of who actually has the wisest view of what's best for the company.

But bear with me a minute while I play Devil's advocate to what you just said: if I'm Bob, I ought to bring the best of myself to promoting the company's interests, period.

Hopefully, this means I will bring passionate internal advocacy, I'll go to great lengths to explain my point of view and recruit others to it, and so on. The wise employee picks battles carefully, weighs the long-term against the short-term, etc.

But no, I'm not serving the company well if I go along with something that I know to be ignorant or stupid. If a customer asks me a question via e-mail or Twitter instead of the phone or in person, am I supposed to stonewall them? No.

Now, we don't know whether Bob "ignored" the instruction. Maybe he tried to communicate his intent to answer direct questions from the customer base. Maybe there was simple miscommunication between Bob and his boss. (Think of how many times in your own career something has *seemed* clear to both parties in a conversation . . . but they "clearly" understood two different things.) Maybe, maybe, maybe -- we don't have dispositive evidence one way or another here.

My larger Devil's-advocate point is this: assuming you're ready to be fired for doing the right thing, and assuming you're not violating some clearly stated sensible policy (e.g. for regulatory reasons), you should move forward in doing the right thing for the company and its customers.

Shouldn't you?

Maybe I'm just feeling my oats today, or maybe I'm drawing too heavily on many years spent at a progressive company where impasses like this are virtually inconceivable, but I'm having a hard time getting behind the idea that someone passionately devoted to the best interests of the company should submit to the ignorance or timidity of middle-management. But I welcome your response.

I've been reading this thread of comments with interest. I'd like to pick up on Lucretia's analogy -- maybe the most salient one here -- that "when an order is irrational it is a soldier’s duty to question it."

Chris has rightly obscured Bob's real identity, and we're hearing the story from Bob's perspective. So, for example, we don't know whether he's a model employee or a steady source of problems for his managers, whether the organization is generally functional or dysfunctional, whether Bob handled these situations with high or low emotional intelligence, et cetera.

In particular, we DON'T know whether there are liability or regulatory issues attached to his communications -- and this has given many of us (including myself in my earlier comment) the opportunity to stray into unfounded speculation.

For those who, like me in my earlier comment, come down so strongly on Bob's side: IF there are clear liability issues, Bob SHOULD NOT have proceeded as he did, because he might put the company in real-life danger of lawsuits or compliance violations.

Listen, I love social media, I work in it every day, and I'm fortunate to do it for a company that embraces it. But no employee is justified in subjecting a company to that sort of risk, regardless of how ardently he/she/we believe in the magical healing power of social media.

But for those of you counseling obedience above all for Bob: NO. Lucretia's point is completely apt here. If there's NOT a liability issue, and if the manager in the other department is trying to block Bob's efforts out of spite, ignorance, pissiness, or the like, that manager SHOULD be opposed. And especially if Bob continued his social-media efforts by, for example, speaking only when spoken to -- contributing only when customers reached out to him -- there's no way he should suffer for this.

Now, should he / could he have done it better? Could he better communicate the benefits of his actions for the company? From the sound of Chris's story, probably. Should Bob be prepared to pay the piper for disobeying orders? Of course. Any grown-up in the business world ought to be able to trace the connections between cause and effect.

But I reject the notion that Bob must "ethically" go along with stupidity, regardless of where it comes from. The Hitler analogy given above is overblown (and runs afoul of Godwin's Law, anyway), but the moral of the story is clear: people of conviction who have the truth on their side don't just lie down and take it when authority tells them to do something stupid.

My short take: Bob's company fully deserves to lose the current and potential future customers it *will* lose for being so obtuse. I'll read the other comments & weigh in again if I have more to add.

Thanks for sharing this story, Chris. As bad as I feel for Bob, it reminds me to be grateful for working at a company where customer interaction and satisfaction is not simply welcomed, but a major area for sustained investment of $$ and the personal engagement of senior management.

Love this, Chris. It resonates with a GREAT article I just read -- by Geoff Colvin, in Fortune, about "deliberate practice." Here's the link:

http://is.gd/4xYr

Deliberate practitioners (think Tiger Woods) go out of their way to get external, unemotional perspectives on the work they're doing and the effects that it is creating. Then they *design* practice regimes for themselves that will address shortcomings and capitalize on strengths, keeping these non-trench-bound perspectives in mind. Lots more good ideas in this vein in the Colvin article.

(I've opined much more on this -- see the link in my signature here if you're interested.)

You've got a good take here, Shawn. This is one of those issues that may or may not resonate with some of the town elders who make the decisions . . . and it doesn't matter: they have to go ahead and do it anyway. Even if *they* don't care about broadband, it's increasingly seen as a necessity, not a luxury, and especially for the teleworkers who may want to live the small-town life while drawing a big-city salary. (Hel-LO, tax base!)

Interesting points, Chris. Since I have a strong historical bent, I've done some musing about how the social media will come, in time, to be regarded as ordinary -- just like we now regard motion pictures ("talkies," even!), telephones, televisions, etc. as ordinary.

As with these other media, the challenges arise when we're figuring out what to *do* with them. Few people cared about radio when it existed only in the realm of engineers and hard-bitten enthusiasts, but today most of us interact with radio in one form or another without needing to think *about* the medium -- we just use it.

Should you be a glutton for punishment -- ;) -- you can find more of my thoughts along these lines in the link connected to my name here, and in the "Western Union and record labels" post linked from that page.

By the way, I realize now that I made a mistake when I wrote my comment above: I missed the explanatory note at the top saying this post was from Corvida, so I directed my reply to Chris. I think the concept still applies, but I wanted to note the dissonance.

My take: this is as much a human problem -- how we *think* about things -- as it is a technological one.

For instance, you could cut in half the number of people you're following on Twitter. You could limit it only to people you know, or only to those you know well, or only those who regularly trade tweets with you. Everybody else could still get your attention by typing @chrisbrogan anytime, so it's not like you'd be blocking them. But your incoming stream would be a lot more manageable.

In other words, not to point the finger but just as an observation, your experience of Twitter has changed based on actions of your own -- following a lot of people you don't know -- and could presumably be changed back by taking different actions.

When I joined Twitter late last year, more than once I heard that it was good practice (or even mandatory for good etiquette) to follow back everyone who follows you. I quickly discovered that this advice didn't work for me, because I got overwhelmed by the flow of tweets. So now I view my decision to follow as independent from the other person's decision to follow. There's no reason for me to get mad at, say, Merlin Mann for not following me back, and similarly I'm not beholden to follow someone else's tweets just because they're following mine. Indeed, I can be grateful for their attention -- and open in corresponding if they decide to trade tweets with me directly -- without falsely pretending that I share many of their interests.

All that to say this: sometimes I do come across a clear technological need in a tool -- a button or widget or whatever that would make it more useful. But more often I come across the need for me to think through my own practices more carefully.

Scott -- I suggest you DO write on (some of) the same topics - always interesting to get different takes on a single topic, engage in a little back-and-forth, etc.

I like the blog, Chris. Over time, I'd love to see "beats" for the different writers emerge. In other words, I'll know who to look to for thoughts in particular areas. Connected to this, I'm interested to see how the different writers' voices emerge when they're writing in the daddy vein.

I go through the same thing, Chris -- I had thousands of comics when I was a kid, and now my children are reading comics for themselves. In part, I'm prone to pat you and me both on the back for thinking about the issue in the first place, since the biggest problem comes when parents aren't aware at all of what their kids are doing -- what kind of books and comics they're reading, what kind of games they're playing, who their friends are, and so on.

My 10 y.o. daughter loves fantasy stories of all types -- novels, manga, comics, cartoons, etc. She also loves to make up her own stories. I take advantage of this by talking with her about what she likes and doesn't like in the stuff she reads. Recently, at her instigation, I read a bunch of the current Superman/Batman series, which led to several bedtime conversations in which we rated the different storylines and writers. Now we've moved on to discussing her own big idea for a squad of superheroes.

Short version: if a dad can help to ensure that kids get a jolt to the imagination from comics *without* marinating in violence or sexuality that's too much for them, I think that reading comics can be a great thing.