conversations

I began thinking today about social media and all the tools we see. There is something of a digital cornucopia of “stuff”: Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, Twitter apps, aggregators and on and on. New ones pop up everyday.

Accompanying all of these is the hype. There is the marketing from the companies that bring them out, the reviews from the various “spheres” and the conversations we carry on about them, online and off. “You can do this with it.” “You can do that.” “You can also do these things too.”

It all sounds marvelous unless you are hearing from the contrarian perspective in which case the tools and apps are frivolous or any number of other negative descriptives.

What I was wondering about, however, was how we actually use them. Are we using them just because everyone else is and they are the distraction of the month? Are we using them to a productive end? How are we using them … or more to the point, I suppose, why? What, if anything, do we get from them?

I’m also thinking less about the business aspect and more about the general population that uses them. There are a number of ways we use them as far as business goes, some effective, some not so much. But how and why do people use them, that big consumer base that gets talked about so much? I’m sure there are a number of answers to this but I also wonder if they all don’t dovetail into one or two general answers, a theme that shows how those different hows and whys all relate.

Despite all the things that can be done with social media tools, from sending messages to playing games and grabbing weather information quickly, I think all the whys can be summed into a single word: people.

There are supportive words that follow from that one word: connection, communication and information.

Regardless of all the flim flam with video, audio, Flash and games, for people to find the Internet (and social media) to be of any relevance for them, those four words need to be considered essential: people, connection, communication and information.

Even a silly video involves those words since it is pointless without connection to other people which, when that occurs, communicates and even passes along information, at least to the extent that it says something about you. (Just as it says something about those who respond to it.)

Everything else, while amusing and entertaining, is just a passing fancy. In the world of social media, I suspect that if you don’t keep those four words paramount in your mind you run the risk of becoming quickly forgettable.

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I should add that I don’t think I’m saying anything new here or something I haven’t either said or alluded to before. I’m probably repeating myself with this post. But repetition is not a bad thing since it is often through repetition that we best remember.

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Through social media I’ve been following a couple of issues recently. It has lead me to have questions about social media, particularly the conversation aspect. A news story, a blog post or a Facebook page has comment tools or “like” tools and the original item acts as an initiator to a conversation.

I’ve noticed a few things in the ones I’ve been following and it’s possible the nature of the topics has influenced the character of the discussions, but here they are:

The emotional quality of the comments have not been reflected in the real world. While the pro/con aspects seen online (most in favour or most against) may be reflected there, the emphatic nature of the opinions is not. In fact, what has appeared online as something people were raging about was reflected in the real world as calmness and sometimes indifference.

I’ve also seen the negative appear to be much more engaging than the positive. In other words, there appears to be a desire to vent against something, more so than a desire to promote or cheer something. In one case in particular, a Facebook page was created to support something and gained many followers – people who were giving their support. However, though doing this, for the most part they were venting against the reasons for the need of support.

In many ways, it reminded me of talk radio. Having worked in radio, including talk radio, I know that giving people a chance to be against something, to vent, gets listeners much more quickly engaged than the opposite. That’s why there are so many talk radio shows that sound like angry cranks run them: that’s where the audience is, it’s where the money lies.

One of my questions then is this: does what we see via social media reflect how people actually think and feel?

Other questions: If it does reflect how people think and feel, does it do so in a way that distorts it? To what extent can we give it credence? And why are people so eager to rant and less eager to voice what they like? Is that question even valid?

I noticed something else about Facebook pages that I think leads to distortion. A page had been set up to “Say No!” to a particular issue. It grew as such things tend to do. Looking at the wall comments, people were angry and venting and making various statements.

Here is my problem: Seeing the comments, I occasionally wanted to comment, such as saying a fact wasn’t accurate or an argument was illegitimate. I couldn’t do so without joining the page which would add me to their numbers and suggest I supported the position when the opposite was true. So there was little or no debate on this page – it was people telling one another things they wanted to hear.

To some degree, this is a Facebook problem due to wording and how pages are set up but it is more our problem due to how we choose to see and interpret such things. And that leads me back to the questions I have about the legitimacy of what we see as social media conversations.

Is social media simply a handy tool for cathartic venting? Or is there some value to what we see? If so, how do we determine how valuable it is, to what extent does it really reflect the opinions of people and, perhaps more importantly, the emotional commitment we have for issues, artists, products and on and on?

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We all have ideas about what working from home would be like and most of them reflect the upside of it, or at least what we imagine the upside to be. I think most would be roughly accurate so I won’t list them here.

There are a few caveats, however. I always think of three in particular. To tell you the truth, all three can be summed up in one word: people. In no particular order:

Structure

Without the presence of other people, and without a standard office environment, it’s much more difficult to impose discipline on yourself in terms of how you structure your day. Of course, to many this is not a problem. It’s part of their character. They’re naturally organized people.

It’s not the case for everyone, however. If you’re like me, you’re all over the place. You may create structure, follow a discipline and keep to it for quite a while, but eventually it goes out the window … for any of a number of reasons, the main one being it’s not a part of who you are. You need the presence of others, the interaction with others to follow a structure.

No people

And that suggests the second caveat – beware of the absence of other people. We’re social animals (no matter how anti-social you may imagine yourself to be). Without fairly frequent interaction with other people, you just plain get weird. Think Howard Hughes.

People again

Having said the above, the last caveat is people: too much of them, in a sense. Working from home, many people think of you as being always “free.” At first, you may even indulge this because it’s kind of nice being able to take some time out in the day to hang with others. But it quickly sours as you realize you’re not getting work done, or doing it late at night to catch up on the time you lost during the day.

People know you work from home, and they don’t naturally interrupt up you during the day when you’re working, but … It just doesn’t look or feel like a work environment so it somehow doesn’t quite connect. It feels casual and leisurely. It doesn’t feel like work.

It may be that dealing with the first caveat might help with the third on my list. If you can impose a disciple (up at a certain time, at the job at a certain time, dressed a certain way) you may deal with third. The idea of working at home might communicate better to others if you dress with a degree of work formality so when you answer the door, for example, you’re wearing a tie as opposed to pajamas.

As for the second one, that one in the middle about no people, what I do is simply go downtown a few times a week with my computer and work for a few hours in restaurant. After a while, you meet people and have casual conversations. More importantly, it puts you in an environment where there are other people. You don’t feel quite so reclusive.

Not everyone can do this, of course, but if you can it’s worth considering.

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I was interested to find that one of my sites, Piddleville, which has been horribly neglected recently, still accounts for most of the traffic I get. People continue to find it using the long-tail approach – looking for something very particular (a movie, often searched with a particular year associated with the title, like Rio Bravo 1959) and finding it. People don’t land on the same page; they land on a wide variety of pages – it all depends on what they’re specifically looking for.

In a world where we talk about real-time conversations, this intrigued me. What does it mean when people are looking for past-time conversations as well? I suppose you could argue these are not conversations but information that may lead to conversations. I’m not sure that’s the point though.

When we speak of real-time I think we are talking about the topics of the moment, the current conversations. What the main Twitter web page would call “Trending Topics.” But there is a great deal of information, including conversations, that could be called “past-time” (for lack of a better word). In fact, they often inform real-time discussions as reference points and background.

I think what I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t get so consumed by the idea of “real-time” that we forget that other thing, “past-time,” which contains a great deal of what we rely on to maintain those current topics and, sometimes, is interesting in and of itself, regardless of whether it’s the topic of the day. For myself, I often find the most interesting topics or information have nothing to do with what is the subject of the day but something entirely off-topic, even obscure – just because it fascinates me and because I can.

That was actually the whole idea behind Piddleville, a site devoted to movies and my gut responses to them. I had no interest in being another movie site regurgitating the marketing of the day with latest releases and then, after the weekend, announcing box office returns as if they were baseball or hockey standings.

I was actually more interested in what was not current. Initially this was what is usually thought of as classic Hollywood – movies of the thirties and forties and like that. But that was too restrictive as I realized what I was really interested in was almost any film that was not on the current week’s plate of “new movies.”

I struck me that these films that had vanished in time’s vault, even those as recent as a year or two ago, all had the investment of directors, actors, writers, cinematographers, grips and on and on, not to mention the financial investment, that equated to a lot of very hard work by a great deal of people, and was often lost in the hype over the blockbuster of the week.

In other words, why not write a blog about movies that may have been missed but were worth a look? What I ended up with was quite a few old black and white movies, but also quite a few movies that were only a few years old.

I’m surprised by the traffic they generate (nothing huge, mind you) and equally surprised by the comments they often get. For example, you would be amazed by how many people are interested in Rio Bravo!

Past-time.

Real-time is nice but it isn’t everything. And, sometimes, real-time is dependent on past-time. (Actually, you could probably argue that all of our real-time conversations are dependent on past-time. And as the occur, they immediately become part of the stream of past-time.)

Also posted on Piddleville.

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The other day I came across something I wrote three years ago (somewhere around 2000 – 2001). It was rules for writing for the Web. I think I made this list to help get my thoughts straight. The rules are pretty pretentious. (I think I was trying to sound like some great voice of authority – ha!) But I’m putting them here unedited because — well, if you’re a dope you’re a dope, there’s no point trying to hide it.

I find it interesting that I still agree with most of these. Many are things everyone already knows and some are embarrassingly obvious, but for what it’s worth here are my Web writing rules – unedited:

1. It‘s not writing; its Web design, which is holistic. You’re producing words but also strategizing and designing. Know what the goal is and how your words relate to other design elements.

2. Less is more. You don’t write for the Web, you un-write. Editing is everything.

3. People don‘t read – they scan. Lay out your words accordingly. Remember, words are a visual element.

4. Web writing is horizontal, not vertical. Use hyperlinks.

5. The less you sell, the more you sell. Avoid marketing modifiers and product/service claims.

6. Test. Arguments over colours, wording, navigation etc. waste time and money. Testing will shut everyone up. Including you.

7. Use the Web. You can’t write about what you don’t know.

8. Know a little but not a lot. Know enough to write about it but be sufficiently ignorant to ask the right questions.

9. Have conversations outside the Internet environment. Then you’ll know how customers really feel and what they care about.

10. Know what people think and what they‘re interested in. Watch TV. Read the paper. Listen to the radio. Visit lots of Web sites. Get out of the house and talk to people.

11. Don‘t just study commercial sites. Visit personal, hobby and other sites to know where the Internet is going. Business is always a follower; these sites lead because they are wholly customer focused.

12. Whatever you think is true of the Web is probably wrong. These rules are probably wrong. The Web is constantly changing because customers are always changing because people are always changing. So, question everything.

Generally, I don’t like making rules and I certainly make no great claims for these. On the other hand, sometimes it’s worth doing something like this to get a good standing start. It’s a kind of orientation exercise.

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