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It’s good to repeat yourself. By default I think we believe to repeat ourselves is a bad thing. However, if we’re trying to communicate it’s through repetition that it gets across. The trick is to do this without becoming redundant  — in other words, knowing when enough is enough.

The other trick is to repeat ourselves but not in exactly the same way. While this post’s headline may not be the best example, it is an example of sorts. Put a better, more lengthy way, we might answer a question with, “Repetition is good. When we say something once only, it is easy for its essence to be lost in all the other communication that goes on between people. Thus, to say it two or three times helps to break through the clutter and make it more memorable. The lesson, then, is that it is good to repeat ourselves.”

Okay. That may be a bit too long, too wordy and too tedious but I think you get the idea.

Repetition is one of the ways we remember. Why do football teams in practice run the same play over and over? It’s to work out the weaknesses, get everyone on the same page and also to ensure every knows it, learns it and understands what to do almost without thinking when the play is called in a game situation.

I went off on this topic after reading Why Twitter was inevitable? over on Julien Smith’s blog. He begins by talking about recalling things he had forgotten about radio culture, such as the necessity to, “… constantly repeat the thing we’re talking about …”

I worked in radio as well, years ago. It was in commercial radio. I remember coming up with my own rule about ads which was, if you’re forced to choose between creativity and frequency, always go with frequency.

Ideally, you wouldn’t have to make this choice. You could have a creative ad plus frequency – meaning it got played a lot, hopefully throughout the day, particularly at the high listening periods (morning and drive). One of the reasons you hear and remember those awful local car dealership ads is because they forego creativity (well, maybe they think their ads are creative) and go with frequency – ads that are run a lot, often concentrated toward the end of the week and weekends when it was assumed anyone buying a car might be out shopping for one.

The theory was simple and, I think, true: an ad heard once would not be remembered, no matter how good it was. There is simply too much noise to break through. Our minds recall the things we hear, see and do frequently.

Repetition is how we learn and that is because it is how we remember. That is what makes repetition a good thing. It requires some skill to avoid becoming obvious and annoying but the bottom line remains: it’s good to repeat yourself.

Roll credits …

I went off on this topic by reading an interview with Julien Smith over on Mark Dykeman’s blog (Broadcasting Brain). That lead me to Julien’s blog and the post I referred to above.

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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.

***

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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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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I’m not sure whether I should thank David Campbell or curse him. A week or so late I came across his post Literacy and have been preoccupied by the topic ever since. Here’s what I put on Twitter and it encapsulates what my thinking has been:

If you are not literate, you cede control over your life to those who are. If that’s not an argument for literacy, I don’t know what is.

I don’t think people are really aware of how much of their every day life depends on what is written. Contracts, for one. If you can’t read, you have to trust someone else to explain what is in it. Laws, electoral platforms and so on – same thing. If the world is inclined to move toward something like video, how do you know what to say and shoot next on that video podcast without a script? Movies and TV use storyboards but what are they if not language?

Letters are signs. Letters in a certain sequence are words, which are signs.

Except for the hardware, everything on our computers is language: the text content we read but also all the coding we usually don’t see. That’s why they refer to programming “languages.”

There are manuals. Business plans. Emails. Licenses. And there is the proverbial “fine print.”

No, we don’t read all these things. But depending on our lives, there are times they become vitally important and it is necessary to understand exactly what is meant. (Lawyers spend their lives niggling over the meaning of laws and a simple phrase, depending on the wording, can change lives.)

And of course, there is written fiction and journalism.

If you are not literate and literate to a certain level, you are not independent. You have to cross your fingers and hope that what someone else is telling you the words mean is what they actually mean. You are dependent.

If people need a reason to learn to read, I think it should be explained to them how much control over their own lives they give up by not being able to read.

My one question regarding Canada’s literacy rates (between provinces) is to what degree are they affected by worker migration? Would provinces like BC and Alberta appear to be performing better on the literacy front due to literate workers from out of province moving to them? And would NB appear worse due to losing skilled workers to other provinces thus making the degree of illiteracy higher? I’m sure, to a degree, it must though I don’t think it would sufficiently to erase the embarrassing rate we have.

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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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Every month or few months a study pops up that reveals that teens don’t use Twitter. Actually, they do. They just don’t make up the huge base some expected and are not the group fueling Twitter growth. The New York Times had a pretty good article on this (Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens) and there are others, most noting a certain surprise with this unexpected information.

I think this is a good example of how we create and buy into orthodoxies without ever really questioning them or, more importantly, revisiting them and seeing if they are still valid (assuming they were in the first place).

A few years ago in discussing font sizes, Jakob Nielsen noted that today’s young person is tomorrow’s older person and that not taking an older demographic into account and not being aware of how demographics change over time (because we age), is a dangerous stance.

The “conventional wisdom” that young people were necessary to technology may have been somewhat true but that “early adopter” demographic of the time this idea came about has since aged, becoming an older demographic. Teens now are a different group of teens. And an older demographic, while perhaps not dominated by early adopters, is not idle. They may come into the game late but they do eventually come in — if only because younger people join the ranks of older people. And late in the game is often when the game is most critical, where the most is on the line.

Also, when we speak in these general terms I think we tend to polarize: a young demographic means teens and an older demographic means retirees. We don’t really see the huge group between the extremes or how demographic groups overlap and blend.

We often get so caught up in predicting and projecting and imagining where things are going that we fail to see where they are and, relying on our various theories of how these things work, fail to see how they are actually evolving. Theories are nice, and sometimes on the money, but sometimes they deflect us from seeing things as they are or as they are becoming or as they may go. They can become shortcuts around actually thinking.

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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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