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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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I’ve been looking at a few sites offering web design and related services and I find myself puzzled, even a bit alarmed. This is not due to what I found (though in some cases it was) but by what I did not find.

I have seen absolutely no reference to content. Do the sites magically populate themselves? If not, who does it? If the client does, is there no consultative service to advise them on what and how to put the content in or maintaining it? If the client doesn’t handle the content, who does? If the web design company does, who handles the research, the writing, the editing? Have they a background in it? Are they good?

There were no references to social media other than “Follow us on Twitter” and/or something similar for Facebook. If a company is moving to or revamping an online presence, isn’t this a crucial aspect? Where do they get help, direction or advice on this?

I found a few web design/web services companies with URLs that required the www preface. Personally, I never use it anymore. I just type in something like writelife.net. No http. No www. I suspect many people are like me. If so, there are a lot of people going to a “page not found” message when they type in the web company’s address. I can’t believe that builds a lot of confidence in a web design company’s awareness of how the web works.

I also found quite a few companies using dated language. In the world of business, marketing and technology, terminology changes almost daily and if you rely on today’s clichés you become tomorrow’s anachronism. Surely “offering solutions” is at least ten years old. I believe current terminology should be avoided at all costs but I do realize it is often unavoidable. But this puts the onus on you to continually assess your site and see where and how it requires revamping. In the online world, static means death.

None of the above is true of all web design sites. Hopefully, I just stumbled on a few that skewed my perception. It is worrying though. On the other hand, from my perspective, maybe it holds the promise of some work. :-)

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If I understand (not likely) the way Google delivers search results and the way Facebook delivers its feeds, using algorithms to present what it is we’re looking for or what is of most interest to us, then I have a question.

Why not have an option to turn it off?

Why can I not get unfiltered search results? Why can’t I see my Facebook feeds without filtering?

I realize that, unfiltered, much of the practical benefit is lost. But I don’t want to eliminate the algorithms. I want them – they’re hugely useful. I just want to be able to toggle between what the algorithm presents and the unfiltered presentation.

My reason? It’s simple: sometimes I don’t realize I’ve been looking for something until I find it.

To me, some of the most interesting material I come across online is by accident. A word or phrase catches my eye, I ask, “What’s that?” and I’m off on a tangent that is thoroughly rewarding.

I look for many things online and I connect to many people. Without Google, Facebook, Amazon and other companies’ algorithms, I’d be lost forever. But for all the benefit they bring they do it at the cost of the happy accident, if I understand how they work correctly.

Let me emphasize that I want the algorithms. I need them. But I also want the option to see the non-algorithmic version. So why not an on/off option? Why not a way to toggle between the two?

I’m not a programmer but it seems to me it should be simple to do.

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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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I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. So here goes:

1 - No one cares about your brand.

2 – Given number 1, you need to find something people do care about.

3 - No one cares about your company.

4 - Given number 3, you need to represent your company with a human face which means a style, an interest, a tone and hopefully a name – Bob, Mary, Fred, Susan – along with a last name and, somewhere, what their relationship to your company is (CEO, VP Marketing, janitor, whatever).

5 - Don’t post on Twitter, Facebook or your blog too frequently. And don’t post too infrequently. How do you tell? Have people in your company following you and get their opinions. Better yet, ask the people who are following your Twitter feed, Facebook feed, blog feed. People like being asked their opinion. It gives them a sense of involvement.

6 - It’s not only okay to discuss things in your feeds that are unrelated to your company, products and services, it’s probably a good idea. See numbers 1 and 3.

7 - If you are only posting you are wasting your time.

8 - Given number 7, get off your butt and start following and commenting and forwarding other feeds.

9 - Using social media is cheap only if you consider it in dollar terms.

10 - The cost of social media is time. See numbers 5, 6 and 8.

11 - Some social media campaigns have worked (I’ve heard) but these are usually clever, gimmicky campaigns.

12 - The problem with number 11 is that they wear thin fast and, without something substantive behind them, they die (as do you) on the vine.

13 - Do not trust anyone describing him or herself as a social media expert.

14 - There are no social media experts (see number 13). Everyone is making it up as they go along.

15 - Pontificating grandly is the favourite social media pastime. This post is a very good example.

And there they are. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

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Allow me to inebriate some sober numbers … When we talk about Facebook and Twitter, cars and bikes, business and the arts, we are always self-referential. We think a certain way, we use something in a certain way, we believe this may occur in a certain way … and we forget that the world doesn’t always think like us. It’s a cliché, but everybody is different and just because we see something one way or use something in a particular manner, it doesn’t necessarily follow that every one else will.

I was thinking about this when I read the post, 10 Sobering Twitter Statistics. Some people see Twitter as a marketing tool, some as a tool for news, some as way to enhance their real estate business (yes, another marketing view but perhaps also organizational). And there are some who use it for non-commercial reasons and some who just use it for silliness. The tool itself has no inherent purpose beyond what each of us brings to it. For many, there is no purpose.

I was also thinking about statistics and surveys and all the data we collect. Often, maybe more often than not, the information they best provide concerns how much more we need to learn. They highlight what we don’t know. And they are usually interpreted from a particular point of view, at least at street level.

I saw a tweet, followed by a retweet, for that posting titled, 10 Sobering Twitter Statistics. Use of the word “sobering” suggests there is something not very good in these numbers. But I thought, what if there were? What if there were other ways of seeing these? So I’ve put together an alternative — 10 other ways of seeing sobering Twitter stats:

• 94% of Twitter users have under 100 followers (which may suggest quality has more meaning than quantity)

• 90% of tweeting is done by 10% of Twitter users (Which is very much like the real world: 90% don’t call radio stations, 90% don’t write letters to the editor, most don’t speak out at town halls, etc. Also, some people don’t speak because they are listening.)

• 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month (But since we don’t know who they were we have no idea whether they would have brought anything of value to the Twitter streams nor do we know why they didn’t return.)

• 50% of Twitter accounts are inactive (Haven’t tweeted in the past week) (See the previous item)

• 40% of tweets are “pointless babble” (As opposed to … TV? Blogs? The street? Boardrooms? Sounds like it reflects the real world.)

• 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers (Personally, though I have loads of acquaintances, that is about how many really close friends I have. Maybe I’m tweeting for reasons other than to pitch something?)

• 21% of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders (And what would the percentage of domain names as placeholders be? Have these accounts been abandoned? Are they in place to reserve for a future presence as a company stream, a person’s stream, a campaign stream or to prevent others from getting a name that might have an impact on theirs? Do we have any idea? For all we know it could be one obsessive compulsive guy trying over and over to open one account that is “just right.”)

• 11% of Twitter users interact with brands on Twitter (The world, unfortunately, will always have a certain percentage of really stupid people. As I’ve written before, we don’t follow brands. We follow people. If you find a brand with a lot of followers I would hazard a guess that they aren’t interacting with it but with each other.)

• 9% of Twitter users don’t follow anyone at all (Maybe they have lives beyond the Internet? Maybe they have no interest – just took the name because its theirs and they didn’t want someone else to have it? Maybe they haven’t found anyone worth following? Maybe they don’t know how?)

• 3% of followers click on links tweeted (Does this include retweets? More to the point, how many links do we come across in a day – on web pages, in emails, on Facebook and so on? How many of those do we click? Is 3% about average? High? Low?)

And that’s it. Accurate assessments? Probably not. But you never know! But it’s worthwhile questioning the assumptions we bring to topics like these.

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With just about everyone weighing in on the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, I thought I’d add to the noise and toss in my riveting insight (or lack thereof).

First of all, I’ve no idea what it means. But then, no one else does either — there is interesting speculation, however. One of the first notions that was tossed out there on the Internet was that it had less to do with Facebook getting FriendFeed itself and more to do with getting the talent behind it. As one story (PC World) puts it, “… the team behind FriendFeed has quite the impressive collective résumé.” Many of them are former Google employees and worked on things like Gmail and Google Maps. So, yes, I could see why Facebook would want them.

And according to a BBC article, “As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and the company’s four founders will be given senior roles on the social networking site’s engineering and product teams.”

From a user perspective, given how awkward, clunky and user bewildering much of Facebook is, I’m hoping this will be a good thing.

This morning the thinking appears to have shifted from yesterday’s and appears more focused on the challenge this acquisition poses to Google and Twitter. (See that BBC article, for example.) The business-tech world loves nothing more than to see these things in Stanley Cup playoffs terms.

I can, however, see this as an accurate assessment. For example, from that BBC item:

“Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting,” Mr (Robert) Scoble told the BBC.

For me, someone who uses these social networks and the tools but who doesn’t spend much time understanding the technology, only enough to know it works, I’ve always seen these networks this way:

Size: Facebook biggest, Twitter smaller, FriendFeed smallest.

Theoretical usefulness: FriendFeed most, Twitter a bit less, Facebook least.

Practical usefulness: A crapshoot between Facebook and Twitter (for me), FriendFeed least.

Put another way, of them all, it’s FriendFeed I like most, though it’s the one I know the least about. Maybe I just haven’t used it enough to see all its flaws and maybe it does things the others also do, but I’m unaware of them. The problem with FriendFeed, however, is the old retail thing about location, location, location. So far, Facebook keeps winning not because it’s best but because that is where the most users are and most users means most useful (to me).

There are really two things about FriendFeed that I like: 1) the interface, which I find cleaner, easier to read and understand (overall) than either Facebook or Twitter and, 2) it aggregates all my other feeds so, for example, my Flickr photos show up without the need of using Facebook’s incredibly slow and frustrating photos tool or some clunky third party app.

Currently, however, no one knows what the real impact of the acquisition will be. One thought has been it’s the end of FriendFeed. If that’s the case, it brings up an interesting issue, one that hasn’t received much attention that I’m aware of: Data portability, as discussed here. What happens if, for example, Flickr were to end for some reason or other? What happens to your account? Where do your photos go?

Or, what happens if you no longer like Facebook and decide that’s it, I’m going elsewhere (maybe even drop social networks altogether)? What happens to your content? How do you get it, download it to your own computer or some other storage device?

How are you protected from data loss? Or are you protected? That’s a lot of data to just let it go “poof!”

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I’ve been seeing all kinds of stories and posts and tweets and whatever about the alarming revelation that teens don’t use Twitter. (The link is arbitrary – there are loads of stories out there; it’s just one of many.)

The tone of many of these is that this is a bad thing and Twitter is in trouble and something really bad must be in the offing.

What if the reverse is true? What if one of the attractions of Twitter is that teens aren’t on it?

I hate sounding like some old grump doing the, “Kids these days …” routine because it doesn’t reflect how I think or feel. Quite the opposite. But let’s be realistic — much of what teens are interested in is only of interest to other teens, they often have a vocabulary all their own and, being the old grumps we are, it’s of no interest to us. It’s clutter. It’s noise.

Doesn’t that make something like Twitter more attractive if one of their aspects is the absence of this? For an older demographic, doesn’t it make it more useful?

And where did the implicit notion that the only demographic that spends money, the only one worth targeting for marketing purposes, was the teen set? An older demographic is likely to have more money to spend, and likely to spend on higher priced items (because they can). The only possible difference, and I’m not sure this is true, is that they may take more pursuading.

And where did this idea come from that in order to be successful you had to be the biggest, have the most users, reach the most people? Those might be nice things to have (if you know how to leverage such an audience – most don’t), but it’s more than possible to make a good buck being smaller or, put another way, big enough.

I’m not saying these things apply to Twitter. But they are worth taking into account. If Twitter doesn’t attract a teen audience, it’s not the end of the world. In some ways, it may be the best of all worlds.

Put another way, by putting the text of the image above the opposite way, “My kids don’t use Twitter. I shouldn’t have to explain this.”

(By the way … I loved that image. I thought it hilarious. It’s from the Seth Simmonds site.)

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The headline could also read, “You are what you tweet.” If you put something out there on the Internet — it’s out there on the Internet and anyone and everyone can find it and see it. And as far as the world is concerned, it’s who you are.

I bring this up because on one of the Twitter feeds I manage there is a young woman who has interesting, worthwhile tweets. But she also has the usual trivial tweets as most people do. The thing is, she often uses profanity. In fact, she uses it a lot.

I could write a long post about four-letter words and, who knows, maybe one day I will. To be brief, they don’t offend me. Having worked in radio for a while, there is little I haven’t heard. I also use those words myself. Sometimes with frequency.

Still, I often find them annoying, at least in writing. They seem to be wasted words. It’s kind of like, “I get it; you’re upset. Could you please get to the point?”

My real reason for this post, however, is this: when you use those words online, on Twitter and so on, do you ever think about who may see them? There are few people who haven’t heard them and, really, only a small percentage of people who are truly offended by them. I think at worst you would find people like me who find them tiresome and unimaginative.

But there are also people out there who could potentially employ you, or get involved in some way that is beneficial to your career or life generally. Maybe a web designer recommends me to others as a writer. Or maybe I suggest a designer to someone and that designer is you. There are a lot of business people and government people online, especially on Twitter, many of whom have the potential to be of benefit to you – jobs, recommendations, tips and so on.

The thing is, when it comes to this area of human activity — business and related matters — regardless of whether someone is fine with the language or not, there’s a good chance they’ll be a little uneasy with you because when you are working for or with them, to some degree you represent them and their business.

If the person they find in their Twitter stream has a foul mouth, odds are they’ll prefer not to take chances and so avoid you. While you may not need a job or recommendation or anything else right now, one day you will. Increasingly, who you are on the Internet will be the person the world sees you as. Whatever song and dance you do in an interview or in a resume will mean nothing compared to what is in your Twitter stream, on your Facebook pages or on your blog.

If they’re full of profanity, that’s who you will be seen as and, for most people and companies and governments, that’s a no-no because it means bad branding. They’ll avoid you.

How your blogs, Twitter streams, Facebook pages and so on represent you goes beyond potentially naughty photos. It’s all your content, including words. Maybe words more than anything else. Despite images and video and all the other web developments, the Internet is still primarily a text medium.

You probably don’t care about how your friends see you – why should you? They’re your friends, they know who you are. The problem is, your friends aren’t the only people who see you online. Everyone else can too and all they have to go by is what they see and read.

So … who are you online?

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