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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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“… It’s nice to know that if I do post about my dogs or something, it’s not a total faux pas.”

That is from a comment left yesterday by Tzaddi, from ThriveWire, to my post I wonder what she’ll say? And I thought, yes. Dogs are a great example of what I’m trying to get at.

From the perspective of career, from the position of being a business or part of one, you would not think that tweets and status updates and blog posts about your dog would be appropriate and, strictly speaking, they are not. But …

As I tried to suggest yesterday, the seemingly trivial and inconsequential are a part of what humanizes what you put online because, online, life is no different than life offline and people aren’t any different either. The primary connection you make with people online is not what you put online, it is you.

And it is them.

Let’s go back to the dog and an example. I do occasional work with a guy and his company from Michigan, the Detroit area I believe. We met (online) through a mutual acquaintance about some potential writing work. He was looking for a writer. I was the writer he went with. Why?

The truth is, he could have gone with any writer. It’s not like we are in short supply. And no matter how big an ego I might have there is no getting around the fact that lots of people can write, lots of people can write as well as I do and many of those people can probably write better than I do. I am good but the reality of the world is that as good as you may be, there is always someone better. So why pick me?

Because, at a certain point, how good you are isn’t an issue. How comfortable someone feels working with you is. In this case, there was some sense of ease because someone he knew, the friend who introduced us, had given me a thumbs up. But what sealed the deal, in my opinion, was my dog.

We communicate primarily via email, though occasionally by phone. In our first phone contact, I had to apologize because my dog had started barking at something.

“You have a dog? What kind?”

He had a dog too. Since that call, almost all our communications make references, however briefly, to our dogs. Through the dogs he was able to get some sense, verbally by phone and in text via email, of who I was. And as minute as it may be, it was some degree of comfort. The way we communicate, about our dogs, gave him some sense of me as someone he could work with.

Walking with my dog in the park twice a day, I meet people and talk with them. They are people who would walk by me and that I would walk past with, at best, a nod of acknowledgement except … we have dogs. So we stop. Our dogs sniff each other. And we talk about our dogs and get to know each other. Because of my dog, I have friends I would not otherwise have.

Dogs are simply an example of the seemingly inconsequential elements of a life that opens doors, dismisses barriers and allows for people to communicate with ease. Another example? How about Star Trek? You wouldn’t believe the number of people I’ve gotten to know simply because we both like Star Trek.

Dogs and Star Trek. They have nothing to do with the work I do. But they do facilitate the relationships necessary to allow for the work.

So every so often I tweet, update and post about my dog, about Star Trek, and about a million every day mundane, banal, trivial things because it is who I am and being who you are is what lets people in. Taken to excess, yes, it definitely shuts down all those doors. But excluding it means they never open in the first place.

It may be digital but social media is about people and people don’t change. You have to have the skills to do the work but it’s who you are that gets you the work.

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We need to stop thinking in terms of technology and social media and think in terms of people. All communication is not functional, practical, purposeful. A lot of it is inconsequential but inconsequential communication is important: sometimes the act of communicating is more important than what is communicated. (Yes, I’ve said this before.)

We see tweets and status updates like, “This latte is crap!” which is something you might say to someone as you head down the hall to a meeting, or in the boardroom before the meeting starts. Or, late Friday, “Now the weekend begins! Hurray!” Does anyone need to see that?

Well, yes. They do. They don’t need to see a constant barrage of it, but every so often they need to see it in order to know that there is a real person behind those tweets and updates and that person thinks and feels kind of the way we do. We may not agree that the latte isn’t so great — we might like the latte — but the way it’s communicated might be funny, or passionate, or … well, something.

Think of it this way: You are walking down the street. You see a panhandler, a guy you see almost every day. You cross the street to avoid him because you know what’s coming: “Spare change?”

It’s not that you don’t care about homelessness. It’s not that you don’t care about the guy. It is about the fact that it is relentless. It is unchanging. It’s essentially a sales pitch, a request, and everything that is unwavering in its refrain becomes tedious — especially if its a sales pitch.

What about those people who want to introduce you to the Bible? You might be more open to a least listen to them except you know, whenever you see them, it’s always going to be the same thing. So you avoid them.

I can’t remember what movie it was but in some film, a romantic comedy, one of the characters, when asked about his relationship, says of his wife of many years, “Every morning I wake up and think, ‘I wonder what she’ll say today?’”

That’s what makes us interesting. That is why the trivial is important. Because sometimes the trivial isn’t so trivial, and sometimes it’s trivial but kind of neat, and sometimes it’s trivial but, “So what?” he or she said it and you love the way that person says things (or tweets, or updates).

Sometimes the content of a communication is the act of communicating itself, and nothing more. Even so, that kind of communication is often the most important. With apologies to Peter Gabriel:

Some of it is just transcendental,
Some of it is just really dumb.
But I, I love it when you sing to me.

(This post was prompted after reading Tzaddi’s post, Do you have time for coffee? over at the ThriveWire site. One other thing … I changed my post’s title after posting. Not a “best practices” thing to do, but so it goes.)

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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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I saw some tweets to a post, The Trouble With Twitter (Melissa Hart, The Chronicle review), and something occurred to me. The essay is another of the many Twitter critiques that, personally, I’m finding a bit tiresome. After reading it, I thought that what it amounted to was, “I don’t want to change.”

That’s fine. No one needs to. At the same time, those who do want to are free to do so.

In some ways the essay is critical of the 140 character length imposed by Twitter and almost seems to confuse a headline with a story or, as I’ve put it before, a postcard with a letter. It doesn’t quite get to that point, however. The essay seems to be more focused on the time element involved with Twitter and the idea that it takes time to fact check, absorb and understand, and then write the story. And I agree. However …

In the case of the Twitter streams I follow, that’s what happens. Tweets are more about: “This has happened,” and “Something appears to be developing here,” and “Trying to confirm a report …”

In other words, they are often about the progression of the story, not the end piece. They are about keeping followers involved in the development of a story. And eventually, when all is said and done, the story itself – a link to the full piece.

What is often overlooked in all the pro and con debates about tools like Twitter is the responsibility of a reader. It’s not just the journalist, or blogger, or whoever is doing the tweeting that has a responsibility. Readers have a responsibility to question what they are reading and consider its merits and to understand its intent, meaning and so on. If a story is unconfirmed, it is unconfirmed. That means it could be true but could just as easily be false. And anyone who has done any reading at all of news stories knows that what you read today can very easily change tomorrow because journalism has to wade through facts, PR spin and rumour to find out what exactly is true and many stories are ongoing.

The essay mentioned above is entirely from a particular journalist’s perspective. It is about how she wants to research, understand and present a story, and that doesn’t include a desire to keep readers informed of her progress as she does this. Again, that’s fine if that’s how you like to do things.

The problem, however, is that as a reader, I don’t want to wait.

I don’t want to wait till all is said and done and everything can be put in context before I find out what is or has been happening in my world. It is happening now and I want some information, even if incomplete, about what is going on. I want to know it’s being investigated. I want a heads-up that a complete assessment is in the works and headed my way.

And I understand that, as a reader, I have a responsibility to give a tweet or post the appropriate credence and to see it for what it is.

Journalism is a two-way street. I know that. Give me some credit for being able to assess and judge the merits of something.

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Ghost twittering is one of the popular topics these days and the question is out there: is it okay to ghost your tweets? To that I’d like to answer with an unequivocal, “Yes and no.”

Ghost twittering is the Twitter world’s version of ghost writing. It means someone other than you is writing your tweets for you and often as you, which is what really irritates a lot of people.

While I don’t like the idea, I think ghost twittering is okay under certain conditions. If you are on Twitter as a company or other organization, it’s not only okay to have several people tweet on the account but probably expected. It’s another thing, however, when the account is personalized. When it’s perceived to be an individual, like a John Smith, it becomes a bit dodgy.

If you are perceived as being an individual, you can still have someone ghost the tweets if they are labeled as such (although, strictly speaking, I don’t think they’re really “ghosted”). As mentioned, though, it’s a bit dodgy.

Hiring someone or several people to tweet for you but not identifying them as such, as some celebrities are accused of doing, is not okay. It’s dishonest. It’s also stupid because, if it gets out that you are doing this, your credibility is shot. And I suspect you won’t have a sense for what people are saying in your name, which can really sink you in the septic tank.

There is also another problem with ghost tweeting, one quite apart from the ethics of the practice. It’s simply this: too damn many tweets. This is compounded if others are tweeting for you and you are tweeting yourself. It’s clutter. Noise. There is no editorial control, no discretion practiced in what is worth tweeting and what isn’t.

For me, the biggest single reason for unfollowing someone is too many tweets. In fact, that is the only reason so far that has prompted me to unfollow anyone.

Twitter certainly doesn’t need more noise.

Getting back to ghost twittering, however … I understand that not everyone is going to find it something they take to easily. I understand that some people feel they are too busy to do it. And I understand that some people don’t feel comfortable with writing (”tweeting”). Yet all the while, with the buzz around Twitter, they feel they have to be on it. Fine – have someone do it for you. But if the account is personalized as you, have the tweets done in the third person. (”John in Wash DC today. Wonder if he’ll chat with Prez?”) Be clear that it is not you tweeting but your “team.”

Pretending you are tweeting when you are not is simply dishonest.

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When I look at Twitter, I notice that of the people I follow, most “tweet” once or twice a day but a few “tweet” many times during the day. In fact, there are so many tweets I don’t look at them because there are so many. On the Web, I see the same person’s thumbnail running down the page – maybe 5 to 15 of them. So I end up scanning and looking for the thumbnail that stands out simply because it’s different. It stands alone.

Granted, I don’t use Twitter a lot, and I don’t offer myself as an example of the typical user. But I suspect my use does, to some extent, reflect how most react to many “tweets.” At a certain point, you ignore them because of the frequency.

My suggestion, though it’s almost contrary to the way Twitter gets used and it’s ostensible intention, is to think twice before tweeting. At least if you tweet frequently. Do you really need to tweet what you are about to tweet? Too many may mean your followers start ignoring you. (It would be interesting to see some data on this. Is this just a feeling I have that doesn’t reflect how people respond to frequency, or am I on the mark?)

(I can’t believe I’m using a word like tweet over and over with a straight face.)

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