Category Archives: Technology

There is no “perfect” tweet

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Earlier today on Twitter, the brilliant (and comical) Faris Yakob tweeted about a piece from Marketing Chap titled “Why blueprints for the perfect tweet are perfectly absurd”. Even before reading the article, I was in complete agreement, but found his jovial commentary enlightening.

The notion that there is a formula for how to make a perfect tweet epitomizes the thinking that defined the age of push-marketing, where messages were sent to customers regardless of who they were. While today’s marketing departments can geo-target messages, there still is no objectively perfect tweet for your audience, because your audience is not homogenous. The “perfect” tweet will connect you and your audience, and in fact, the best tweet often comes from your audience TO you.

Marketing Chap’s post was commenting on PR Daily, who released a graphic earlier in an article titled “A blueprint for the perfect tweet”. They claimed that the perfect tweet should include:

1. Message:
- Call to action: Tell readers what you want them to do.
- Hashtags: Include one or two to increase your reach among people who don’t follow you.
- Tone: Use your own voice, but in a professional way.
- Format: Use a mix of headlines, questions and statistics to drive clicks and retweets.
2. Link:
- Shortened URLs: Bit.ly links earn the most retweets.
3. Blank space:
- Leave room for at least 20 characters at the end of your tweet so retweeters can add comments.

As Marketing Chap eloquently points out: “This is a style of tweet for pushing a message, pure and simple, and I am firmly in the camp that says that social media is not at its best when it is merely foisting content on followers.” He goes on to explore the Twitter account of the author and finds that this individual (Gerry Moran) indeed follows his own guidelines, but that does not make any of the tweets “perfect”. Marketing Chap’s comment mid-way through the piece identifies perhaps the most direct issue with the type of tweeting Moran prescribes:

“To my mind, the key word in the term ‘social media’ is ‘social,’ and the sort of tweets Mr. Moran advocates are decidedly asocial. What I mean to say is, there is no social interaction whatsoever. The @SAPNorthAmerica account is really just a cleverly packaged RSS feed hosted on a social media platform.”

He instead suggests the following guidelines, acknowledging that he doesn’t enjoy being prescriptive in general:

  • Be generous. Besides being a splendid way to learn, being generous with other chaps’ content is an unbeatable way to cement a connection.
  • Be unpredictable. If one tweets about the same thing again and again then why should a chap bother to stay tuned?
  • Be interesting. Tweets that are humorous, clever or memorable will get chaps to pay attention to the next tweet and the tweet after that.

When we look at some recently well-received tweets, many of them include few of the above elements, but much more closely follow Marketing Chaps’ guidelines. Example 1: Audi’s tweet during the Superbowl:
Screen Shot 2013-04-06 at 2.05.10 PM

Example 2: Rowan Singh asking “what to do if your child is being eaten by a camel?”
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Both of these examples received a number of responses and spread far beyond the original poster, which may or may not have been their goal.

Which brings me to the conclusion: The perfect tweet is one that achieves your goal. As with most things in life, making intentional decisions most often leads to your desired outcome. So, when wondering “what should I tweet?”, ask yourself “Who am I communicating with?” and “What do I want them to get from this tweet?” I bet it will yield much more success than arbitrary links and hashtags.

Infatuation with Social

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If you have ever watched someone learn how to play drums, you often observe three phases. The first phase, immersion, involves them learning the basic sticking patterns, developing a sense of rhythm, and becoming comfortable with the drum set. The second stage, infatuation, happens when they learn more advanced techniques like playing a fill, and then proceed to use those techniques everywhere they can, even when inappropriate, such as playing drum fills for whole measures in the middle of a song. Finally, they reach the third stage, intention, where they have enough mastery of their craft to know when and how to use the tools at their disposal. They know when to hold back, and they know when to let it rip.

Right now, we are in infatuated with the social web.

In the early days, with email, forums, and instant message clients, we were just getting our toes wet in how the Internet would allow us to connect, communicate, and share with others. Then came sites like Myspace and Facebook, encouraging people to put all sorts of information about them in one place; what movies they like, what books they read, who their friends are, what plants they grow on Farmville, who they are playing on Words with Friends, etc. etc. Users ate it up. We could now post about anything we wanted in any form. We were sharing images, video clips, restaurant recommendations, checking each other in to places, and posting every meal we consumed. This new freedom to share anything at anytime was intoxicating, and it has been for the past few years. But slowly, some people are coming around, and the honeymoon stage of “everything, all the time” is coming to a close.

Recently, danah boyd shared a Huffington Post article that quoted her saying that Facebook is “the teenage version of email” – a label that would make anyone cringe. This article highlighted how teens had lost passion with using the site and were turning to places that specialized in the types of sharing practices they wanted, sites like Tumblr and Twitter. This resonates with the immersion-infatuation-intention cycle as people are slowly realizing that there are places that do many of the same things Facebook does, in a better way and without an inflated set of unnecessary or undesirable features. Instagram is a great example of that, as it capitalized on how people wanted to share images of what they were doing right in that moment from their mobile devices.

I sincerely hope that this shift away from Facebook is the beginning of a larger trend, indicating that we, as a society, are moving away from infatuation with social technologies and beginning to be more purposeful about our use. Only when we are intentional about what we are doing will we be able to build a smarter, better Internet.

Edit: After posting this, Nathan Jurgenson and I had a short back of forth to clarify an aspect of this that I have not covered – balancing users’ desires with corporate desires (or limitations/constructions of the technologies themselves). I’ve posted the tweets below, but do want to acknowledge that technology use (especially social technologies) are often technologically-determined (that is, limited or framed in terms of what a technology allows one to do) and socially-constructed (that is, people often do with a technology what others do with that technology and develop norms and practices as a group). A great example of this is how students post their course schedules on Instagram. Perhaps not what the founders expected, but it is a great way to communicate a certain type of information with a specific audience. As always, thanks Nathan for keeping me sharp.

A Brief Reflection on Digital Dualism

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Note: Cross-posted at Cyborgology

It feels like every time I’m at a gathering of social researchers, within 15 minutes of being there I’ll hear the words “digital world” and “real world” being used to discuss interactions that take place in a technologically-mediated context versus actions that take place in non-technologically-mediated context.

The sound of this always makes me cringe, because assuming that somehow the “digital world” is separated from the real world makes it seem as though every time anyone uses Google Maps they are quite lucky the fake Google world that exists in the digital realm somehow maps quite impressively onto the “real” one that the person is moving through. If the speaker seems receptive enough, I will often ask them, quite playfully, “what isn’t real about the digital world?” This often gets them to clarify their language, and I assume that little harm is done. Often people don’t mean to separate mediated interactions from “real” ones, they just shortchange their audience by using limited language. But it is often that limiting of language that is problematic, as it shifts the discussion to reductionist terms that may not fully address the concept or experiences at hand. It is also the reason that I hope more people can come to terms with the notion of “augmented reality.”

I’m not going to re-define the term “augmented reality”, as you can read an excellent post by Nathan Jurgenson that encapsulates the discussion here, but I want to share a story from a recent gathering of social researchers that helps illustrate why “augmented reality” is a better explanation for the way many people are interacting with and through technology.

*I do want to acknowledge that there are a wide variety of experiences that people have with technology, and in some cases their experience in mediated environments, such as forums, chat rooms, MMORPGS, etc can be completely detached from the lived experience they are perceived to have by members of physical space around them. However, I want to use the following example to explain augmented reality in practice, and how it often can account for the link between mediated (by technology) and unmediated interactions.*

I was at a recent gathering of social researchers discussing what the future could hold for social technologies in a number of situations, such as education, health, political uprisings, and so on. We were discussing education and young individuals using technology, when one member of the group mentioned that s/he had read a recent and compelling study that social network use was making individuals less social and even lonely. While s/he couldn’t remember the particulars of the study, s/he found the evidence quite compelling and wondered what we thought about these side effects. There was a pause in the group, and so I offered her the following explanation (roughly paraphrased):

“Perhaps it is not the technology that is making them less social, but the technology is making them more aware of the actions of others. Let’s say, as an example, I go out to the park with my friends for a picnic. While there, I take photos of the picnic with and post these to Instagram, which then posts them to Facebook. Another friend takes pictures with her DSLR and posts those photos to Facebook as well. Our other friends there do not take pictures, but they post status updates and tag me in them. So while I may be out doing one activity in the physical world, I (and those around me) have created a large set of digital artifacts of this experience, which you observe through Facebook. In this scenario, instead of just hearing about my picnic from me, you see multiple sets of images and Facebook statuses about this experience. So while you know that I only did one thing, it feels like I was doing many things because the mediated interactions (comments, likes, and so on) on the digital artifacts extend and amplify my physical experience into an augmented one.”

The individual who had proposed the “less social” idea slowly nodded at this, responding, “so instead of you going to the park and telling me about it, you go to the park, and everyone I know tells me about it, right? Which means although only one thing ‘happened,’ there were a large number of interactions, both mediated and not, that resulted.”

Fortunately, the discussion that followed as a result of this example led the group to have a productive conversation about areas that more research should be done to understand the variety of experiences that social technologies facilitate. While that conversation will be saved for another time, I was glad to see the group embrace the idea that mediated interactions often not only support, but frequently amplify, physical interactions to create an augmented reality that persists the interaction to a greater extent that was previously possible.

If we, as a research community, want to continue to make progress in understanding the role that technology can play in our lives, it is imperative that we recognize and explore the various ways in which technology facilitates our interactions. Some things do happen in physical spaces, and some things are contained to digital spaces, but many experiences have both a physical and digital component, and have relevance only in that intersection.

TED Tuesday #10 – Why work doesn’t happen at work

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While being sick and bedridden would drive most people to watch their favorite movies or catch up on the latest TV series on HULU, I most often find myself watching TED talks. As today is one of those days where I’m stuck at home, I wanted to share a great talk by Jason Fried about “Why work doesn’t happen at work.”

Fried’s talk hits home with an idea that many people can probably relate to; there are far too many distractions at work to allow real work to get done. As Fried puts it, “the door to the office is like a CusinArt, shredding your day into a million bits.” He points out that time spent on Facebook and Twitter today are the equivalent of the 15 minute smoking breaks in the 50s, and that it isn’t these distractions that are causing problems at work. Rather, the problems are M&Ms: managers and meetings.

The real distractions at work come from how your day gets fragmented into face-to-face interactions that remove you from your working environment. While this can seem productive at first, work, like sleep, happens in stages, where you have to progress through the early ones to get through the deep ones. If you are interrupted in those early stages, you don’t make it to the deeper, more productive ones. Fried’s talk is quite provocative, and he ultimately suggests a few strategies to make workplaces better.

Check out the full post for 16 minutes of great quotations like: “You can hide instant messages; you can’t hide your manager.”

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What does it mean to be an educated person in the 21st century?

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I am constantly looking around for research that investigates the role of technology in learning, and the recent snowfall in Seattle has allowed me to hide in my room and spend lots of time doing just that. In my search, I came across the Economist Intelligence Unit’s joint report with the New Media Consortium titled “The future of higher education: how technology will shape learning.” This document was a great read, covering a wide survey of higher education administrators as well as industry professionals, all interested in the convergence of education and technology. The report itself is a 32 page document, with the first half allocated to survey analysis and the second half serving as an appendix with results displayed in graphs.

In my opinion, this white paper is a fantastic compliment to the New Media Literacies white paper that was authored by Henry Jenkins, Ravi Purushatma, Katherine Clinton, Margaret Weigel, and Alice J. Robinson earlier this year. While the NML paper has a micro focus, examining what skills are necessary in a mediated society and media education, the EIU/NMC paper focuses on how technology itself is affecting the course of education, reconstructing disciplinary boundaries, and allowing for innovation in and out of the classroom. I would highly suggest reading the NML paper if you haven’t yet, especially in tandem to this.

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