Perhaps it's because I'm slowly reading "You Are Not A Gadget" By Jaron Lanier, but I'm getting more interested in the changes that society may undergo as a result of social media, and in turn, I'm interested in what is held in common by people who are considered the leaders in and on social media -- people like Brian Solis, and Seth Godin. These two, and certainly a number of others are followed, quoted, and so often cited that one has to look at what they are doing.

So, here's the unofficial and unscientific results to figure out what these folks have in common. It has nothing to do with the profundity of what they say, or the depth of their thinking. What it IS about is the ability to coin soundbytes -- short phrases, preferably less than 140 characters that sound uber intelligent, and brilliant, and perhaps a little witty also.

Note that I'm not saying that folks like Solis and Godin are NOT brilliant. That is a completely different issue, but what works for them is to be quotable, because it makes what they write "viral", regardless of whether there's any meat to hang on the soundbyte bones or not.

On their blogs, it's similar. Many posts are short, concise and sound like there's been a lot of thought and research that has gone on before. At least until one actually thinks about what is being said. Then it's easy to realize that many of the posts (and often the output is prodigious) really suffer from the same problems and superficiality that is commonplace on almost all blogs. No research. No thought, and just a slapdash piece of work designed to "get you" to the blog site.

Are we going further down the trail to a soundbyte society, then? Our other mass media have, and  politicians and other communicators know that to be noticed and heard in mass media, you have to be quotable soundbyte emitters.

Of course, the real concern is whether we will forget, as a society, that one cannot distill everything down to a soundbyte. Will we forget to think?

If you subscribe to one linguistic perspective that language and how we communicate shapes how we think, this might be just around the corner.

We are doing a series of articles on what's in store for customer service in 2011, and since the topics of customer service and social media are so linked, at least in the minds of the pundits, we thought we'd do a similar series on social media. We'll cross post to both blogs for both series.

#1: Twitter Staggers, Trips, and Can Barely Get Up

2011 is the year that the darling of venture capitalists, Twitter, hits the skids. Faced with an inability to develop and implement a revenue generation model that actually works, and another year with limited return on investment, venture capitalists who have invested and own chunks of Twitter become angry and threaten to close the never-ending flow of fool's money.

This isn't helped by continued contraction in North America which shows that account growth is over, although some solace can be found in numbers growth outside the USA. However, observers will finally wise up to the reality of the Twitter situation, which is this:

The number of actual PEOPLE using Twitter is a small fraction of the number of accounts created. We've known that for years, but it's being ignored. Accounts don't spend money, people do, and that's why it will be hard for Twitter to monetize.

People don't REALLY use Twitter to base purchases on, and that will become apparent when ROI on sold ads is clearly not good, although large corporations may not notice or rationalize it as "branding" rather than sales generation.

Most tweets (at recent count from research), about 92% receive NO acknowledgement, reply, or create any measurable or observable response. There is really nobody home. Even among retweets, many people don't read the material linked to (that's an undiscussed phenomenon right now).

It will be recognized that Twitter involves marketers and sales people trying to sell to other marketers and sales people, and that doesn't work.

The lack of useful features that have some relevance to real, live people causes huge problems, particularly if niche type competitors emerge that build in a better feature set without making things complex. Twitter does one thing well, and nothing else. The novelty wears off, and participation drops even further.

Despite all the noise about customer service and Twitter, companies will not put much effort or resources into this in 2011, apart from creating token presences. It doesn't pay. Some recent numbers indicate that only about 1% of users use Twitter for customer service. While it's impossible to tell whether that's accurate, even if it's off by 500% it's still tiny.

But...

...it's always possible Twitter will introduce new features, or something dramatic will happen in 2011. Very doubtful though. So what does the future foretell?

In 2011 Twitter powers-that-be will realize they need to sell the company, lock, stock and tweets, to a company that will either kill it, or run it as is for a few years. The analogy is the various search engines that used to exist and were acquired, left to wither, and then, ultimately closed. If Twitter waits until 2012 or beyond, its value will be much lower, because it will then have a track record of financial failure. Low revenues. Low profits.

How about an IPO? Nowhere are there more fools than in venture capital and stock speculation, and since share prices are based on perception and not actual value/revenue, at least in part, it's always possible.

Off The Wall Twitter Prediction for 2011-2012

Twitter is bought by a Chinese or Indian business entity.

(more social media predictions coming soon. Stay tuned.

Note: I decided to do what so many online publications do, which is to write an article title that is misleading, sensationalized and may not actually have anything to do with the actual comment of the article.

In searching for articles for inclusion in our Psychology of Social Media Library area, I had the fortune, or misfortune to look at the top 200 listings from a Google search using the terms "Psychology of Twitter". I had expected to see a number of articles from people or organizations that had identifiable qualifications in Psychology, or at minimum research methods, and I also expected to see some really interesting hypotheses and data.

But I didn't. What I did see was mention of a few studies, and a few articles where the mentions were repeated over and over again by people who have no background in the topic whatsoever. In some cases the titles of blog posts, while sounding good, provided only a link to one of the other articles. In other cases, the individual(s) writing who cited the same studies clearly had no understanding of how to read research, or how to draw conclusions from research.

I did find ONE person who presented the truth -- that we know little about the Psychology of Twitter, or, for that matter, the Psychology of social media. We have lots of speculation, and even some decent theorizing, but almost nothing based on replicated properly done research.

Bravo. Maybe there's more than one in that set of results. But I doubt it.

What Does This Mean?

Here's some things to jog your own thinking on the topic. Treat them as hypotheses and not absolute truth. Leave a comment if interested. Add to the list.

1. People trying to make decisions about what and how to use social media for business purposes are probably making those decisions based on third and fourth hand information, which is as accurate as would be the case if we played the "broken telephone" or "pass it one" game. Each person passing it one garbles it and/or each person "hearing" it mis-hears.
2. Those passing themselves off as experts in social media are basing this on the ability to self-proclaim, rather than on having a body of verified knowledge. And, yes, this applies to even smart, well known people who are more circumspect -- the Seth Godins and Kawasawki's of the world.
3. Google is an ineffective tool, at this point in time, for finding quality original sources, at least in terms of its general search engine, at least on this topic. (actually try to find where to buy popsicle stick makers in Canada, and you'll see how bad Google search is for other things).
4. Related to the Google issue, is the question of what defines "truth" on the Internet, and guess what? What is POPULAR is what becomes truth. If something is popular, it gets passed around more, despite the fact that popularity does not have any relation to what is true or not in any objective sense. Google, to some degree, used factors that relate to POPULARITY (incoming links) to gauge the importance of a site, and thus makes it worse.
5. Rehashes are the order of the day on blogs and social media. There's very little original thinking going on, and certainly even less critical thinking, or asking of even simple "right" questions. The same research results and thoughts are parroted over and over with little commentary.

Hey, if you comment, engage your brain first. For all our sakes.

I've had a lot more spare time this week than planned, brought down by a bad flu and now a throat infection. So, bored as I wimper to myself in bed (wimpering is just about all the sound I can make), I use my Ipod to check in to social media just to read here and there, and perhaps save some links of interest.

The other day I came across a group of accounts sending identical messages all at the same time. Not retweets. Same messages. They would do one message, then do the next and then do the next in machine gun fashion using the hashtags #socialmedia and #entrepreneur, the result being that there were about 60 of their message to one real message. Their links went to a page/blog which, by the way was also auto generated. Clearly this is an automated process. I posted a message and the only response I got back was from some idiot who implied that there's spam in email too, so?

(If you want to see the extent of it ongoing at this time click here to go watch (who knows when they'll be banned)

Spamming and misuse happens with everything these day, and I'm pretty used to. I get somewhere around 500 spam messages a day, and I survive. In this case they spammer has rendered my viewing of two major hashtag messages almost impossible, unless I get into setting up filters on my ipod. Even so, no doubt they'll be toast soon, although it's a bit surprising why twitter's auto police gull hasn't found this yet). Life is not perfect.

What About Community?

So what happened to community? You know, that thing all the vapid and rabid social media priests tell us is so powerful? You know, like when people share some common interests and recognize that the community belongs to EACH member and EACH member has a responsibility to keep it clean and functional? To stand up FOR the community.

Of course that doesn't happen much on social media all that much, contrary to the mythologies, and as a student of online groups for 15 years now, I can tell you it NEVER happened regularly, but since social media pundits usually have no understand of Internet history, or human behavior let's leave that for the moment.

Not one person objected publicly or suggested helpling out by sending a comlaint to Twitter. That is like having a racing car going round and round in a school zone at 90 miles an hour for several days, while NOBODY bothers to protect the childen, or even mention it to their neighbours.

It doesn't surprise me that this happend on social media. It offends me, but doesn't surprise me. What brings it to the "almost funny" is that it's the very people who have a strong interest in social media that don't demonstrate any sense of community or responsibility to keep it clean.

What Does It All Mean?

Not surprisingly I see this as being part of a consistent set of information that disproves most of the ideas and claims made about social media in terms of interpersonal and social behavior. Here's some things to ponder.

1. One possible reason nobody has commented on the spam mentioned above is that in fact, almost nobody actually reads tweets. Some research suggests that 92% of tweets sent elicit NO reaction (no RT, reply, nothing) whatsoever although it's possible people do read and then move on without actually doing anything. Still, one of the fallacies of Twitter is that there is this MASS of people who can be reached. There just isn't.
2. Maybe people are skimming these tweets and not recognizing them as spam? This could be. I tried that last night lying sleepless in bed, but the way they are set up it's not easy to simply skip over them without knowing what they are. Then, knowing what they are wouldn't someone care enough about the community to say something. It could be the spammer just doesn't know better.
3. Aren't online crowds supposed to self-regulate? Well, supposed to is the operative word. Actually when online groups try to self-regulate, members are lost and it's not the inferior spammer members that usually leave. It's the high quality people who have better things to do with their time or are not absolutely committed to that particular community. Of course, in this case, there is no self-regulation whatsoever. Why?
4. People don't care. That is the answer. People neglect a community because they don't care, whether it's an online community, or a real one is a city core. Why they don't care is always an important question, but there is a bottom line generally, about social media groups: The relationships based only on social media based communication will also result in weak links to both individuals and the group. (there are exceptions to this but let's leave that for another time)
5. Finally, online "communities" are almost always limited to online interaction and felt responsibilities to people within the group and the group will also be limited to the modality of interaction of the community. Fancy way of saying that if you interact in a group of LinkedIn or Twitter, people will express concern for you on those media but they aren't about to cook you up some chicken soup and express mail it to you. The relationships are illusory because they are limited to the media they live in. It doesn't feel that way until you need them. The ties feel much tighter. (I know, there are, once again, exceptions to this, and I'm working to keep some level of simplicity.