IM Roadmap

Nearly Half of Americans Use Facebook; Only 7% Use Twitter [STUDY].

I Want My AJZ – Twitter Media.  the Al Jazeera team has demonstrated something remarkable: used in a particular way, Twitter can be a TV distribution platform, too.

Twitter’s Response to WikiLeaks Subpoena Should Be the Industry Standard | Threat Level | Wired.com.

“… the company successfully challenged the gag order in court, and then told the targets that their data was being requested, giving them time to try and quash the order themselves.”

This news is a few days old, but have been meaning to put this up online.  A recent study, discussed over at Wired, has shown that seven out of every 10 tweets elicit absolutely no reaction in the twitterverse.  From anyone.  Anywhere.  This was written about in other forums as well, and you could imagine the collective gasps from the twitter fan-boys and fan-girls.  “What?  Twitter is ignored?  It can’t be?!  It might be, wait, no, not that, not …. irrelevant?!?!?!?!”  OK – I’m exaggerating.   But you can get the impression from some of the reporting that there is an element of shock and dismay over the low signal-to-noise ratio of content on Twitter.  However, I think there are some important things to consider:

• Just because it wasn’t retweeted doesn’t mean it wasn’t read.

 

• How much of anything is ignored?  Most of it, undoubtedly.  Let’s face it – most things are just noise to most people.  We only pay close attention to our own favorite sports teams.  I’m not an accountant, so I don’t read accounting blogs.   We only listen to politicians we already agree with.  Etc etc.

 

So, the portion of tweets that are read, but not retweeted, is probably higher.  And it’s not clear how much it actually matters.  For example, is retweet frequency correlated with a stickier twitter experience, thus driving more ad revenue?  I think we should be more impressed that almost 1/3 of tweets are retweeted, etc. – that’s an impressive rate of information dissemination.  Could CNN, FOX News, or the BBC similarly claim that 30% of the news you watch you go and tell your friends and family about right afterwards?  Probably not.  I suspect most media outlets would kill for that rate of free retransmission.

Now – think on this. … What would the retweet/forwarding rate would be for an internal enterprise social hub – such as something built with Jive or Yammer.  Better?  Worse?  What information would you, as enterprise management, want to disseminate that way.  What would be the stochastic models for the likely audience penetration?

Something to noodle on.

Cheers,
Eric

PS – video from the Wired article above – illustrating the retweet behavior.  Explanation at the Wired article – but check it out first and see if anything jumps out at you.

Technorati tags:social media, Twitter

I’ve long held that Google’s real business is society’s collective consciousness.  After all, they know what we’re searching for, what we’re buying, the videos we watch, the people we’re looking for, who we’re chatting with*, etc etc…

I like how William Gibson puts it better, though:  “Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products”.

Cheers,
Eric

* though Google was way, way too late to the game with GoogleTalk IMO.  A blunder on their part.

We have another study out, this time from Northwestern University, dispelling some of the common thinking about Twitter.  Conventional wisdom has been that celebrity tweeters can have a disproportionally high impact on the volume and sentiment of trending topics.  NU’s new research shows that celebrities only have an acretive impact on Twitter trends when the subject is something about which they have expertise.  So, Ashton Kutcher is only influential about acting, Hollywood, etc.

If you dig in to their website, Pulse of the Tweeters, you can see live analysis of trending Twitter topics, who the most influential users are, and the general Positive/Negative/Neutral sentiment within that trend.  I had the opportunity to do some work with text mining and sentiment analysis about ten years ago – very interesting stuff. There remained an element of subjectivity and context assumption in the examples of that time.  It would be interesting to see how much the algorithms have improved over the last decade.

Cheers,
Eric

Head-on over to Mashable’s quick update on the new Twitter web UI changes.  Long-story short, the UI is getting incrementally more like Facebook.  For good or bad.  Twitter appears to be trying to drive more traffic to their real-estate, and thus get more eyeballs in front of advertising.  This is consistent with stuff we’re seeing separately with various formerly free mobile Twitter clients now being for purchase only.  Twitter is getting more aggressive about revenue generation, which is good.

NB:  check out the video above too.  Nice use of the visual bird mnemonic.

Cheers,
Eroc