A Networked World

Those Aussies

They are SUCH kidders. Aussie firm sells Twitter followers

Australian media marketing firm uSocial is offering a new paid service allowing organisations to buy Twitter followers to aid their marketing campaigns.

According to the firm, a single Twitter follower could be worth $0.10 a month. It is selling followers in various packages, starting at 1,000 for $87, which is delivered in seven days, and going all the way up to 100,000 followers at a cost of $3,479, delivered over a year.

USocial says it profiles Twitter users to ensure a good fit with their clients, then suggests they follow the Twitter feed of that client – the user then decides whether to follow or not.

OR

These guys need to lay off the brainstorming and get back on the meds.

Is Social Media Diluting the Message?

Paul Chin is another beautiful example of competely misunderstanding the internet. Get this Is Social Media Diluting the Message?

Is the prevalence and abundance of social media -- especially micro-blogs such as the ubiquitous Twitter -- devaluing the message? Are important business-oriented messages being diluted by all the vacuous ramblings around it? Has the focus shifted away from a desire to transmit an important message through an effective medium to conjuring up any message as an excuse for using the medium?

Paul, Paul, wake up, smell the coffee.

The internet does NOT exist to promote and support business activity, it really really doesn't. eCommerce, business development, sales pitches, all that stuff is just a nuisance except for those few, VERY few occasions when we want those interactions. It was ever thus. In the words of Doc searls, "there is no demand for messages", none. And those who think the net should exist for the benefit of business are totally out of touch.

Although social media tools hold a lot of potential and have many useful professional applications when used properly, I’m seeing more and more business users jump on board for the novelty of it. They have no clear, professional goal for tweeting; they just know they want to do it.

"when used properly" ack, give me a break. Read my piece yesterday, you have said the truth, "they just know they want to do it", you just aren't listening to what you are saying.

As a result, many so-called professional tweets end up having as much relevance to the owner’s business and industry as a thirteen-year-old girl’s “C U @ recess” SMS during history class. I’ve seen business owners post their lunch and dinner plans on Twitter, brag about their weekend itinerary, or raise a question as to how the television show Lost is going to end.

Yes, exactly. Its what makes these people human, it is part of showing that they shqare the same psychological and emotional space as their hoped-for customers. THAT's marketing on the net.

On not getting Twitter

My colleague Shelby Wright (not her real name) just unloaded this email on me in response to Time magazine putting twitter on its front page.

I get it but  ...  I don't get it  ...  ie Twitter . This has made me deeply unpopular in certain digitally inclined circles

My first line of defence for  being openly cynical of Twitter is to hide behind  William Blake
" The art of being wise is  the art of knowing what to overlook "

The point here is

I have NO interest in knowing if someone is picking their nose with their left or right hand and what they had for breakfast

Moving on

I have some very fundamental concerns if the sum total of peoples relationship with the world around them is  solely governed by 140 characters or less - whether it be twitter or text messaging

And Shelby is not alone in decrying the triviality and mind-numbing insignificance of a lot of Twitter content. I wont even argue that the people I follow such as Tim O'Reilly or Euan Semple or OCR Report etc are useful, informative and mercifully brief in their pointers to good material. Its irrelevant because its the wrong question.

What we need to be asking is "what about Twitter and txt is so very attractive to us about these tools?" They fail entirely in the multimedia, all singing all dancing broadband world of opportunity yet they take off like rockets.

I have a theory about why this is so, my wife Linda who is a speech/language pathology lecturer and linguistics specialist has a theory about why so many people like us (excessively verbal opinionated extroverts with huge vocabularies and masses of information to backup those opinions) are so inclined to get pissed off by trivial stuff like txt and Twitter.

Mine first.

These tools match perfectly the way we acquire and share information.

Outside the prolixity of bloggers there is a universe of human utterance that is short, inconsequential and completely essential to maintianing relationships and sharing crucial information about status, leadership, consensus etc. I'd give good odds that the average length of these utterances is 140 characters.

But this is nothing new. For a generation we have been listening to news headline bulletins that are effectively Tweets to us from the world. The BC does its World News in a minute bulletin many times a day. Here's one

• The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he will not walk away from his job, he responded to mounting pressure on him by bringing forward a reshuffle of his top team. 174 characters
  
• At the same time there have been more high profile resignations from Mr Brown's government, among them was the transport secretary Geoff Hoon. Five cabinet ministers have quit this week with one publicly calling for he prime minister to step down. 247 characters
• President Obama has visited the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald during his visit to Germany. The US president described the camp as the ultimate rebuke to the people who would deny the holocaust. He said such views were baseless ignorant and hateful. 260 characters
• At least 35 people have been killed in a suicide attack on a packed mosque in the north west of Pakistan. Many others were injured. It happened in a remote village in the upper Dir district 190 characters

Take out the necessary glosses like "The British Prime Minister " and "The US president" and you see what I mean.

Then there are elevator pitches, comedian's one-liners, wisecracks, repartee, gossip (OK, maybe not that one) rumours, an endless supply of short, pithy material slipped off the tongue and into the brain with speed economy and great effect.

These information tokens are vitally important to us and when we find new ways to exchange them we dive in boots and all. Hence the usually unexpected success of Twitter, txt, even email. We can object all we like but when something works we are fools to reject it.

Now Linda's theory about why some people get so seriously uppity about this stuff.

Its about status and communication modes. We have been taught, especially the oldies, that there is a palpable difference between spoken and written communication.

There's a formal and structural difference, a difference of context, intent, the whole shebang. And for those of us who are good at both, the ability to switch is a matter of pride but its also a shibboleth; a matter of distinction and pride. And its entirely artificial.

We are now using, in a very public sphere, language forms that have been much more intimate and others are responding in kind. That is feeding acceptance and attracting more users and so we go exponential; because it satisfies important emotional and communication needs that are encoded into the dna.

What this technolgy is doing is breaking down the distinctions which can also be sources of power, and those of us who benefited from the previous status quo get antsy about it.
 
Perfect example. Linda talks about how she is a descriptive linguist, interested only in the evolution of language and how it manages relationships, conveys meaning, yadda yadda. Right up till something someone says gets right up her grammatical or semantic nose, at which time she becomes a prescriptive linguist and is due for a serve from the husband about hypocrisy, inconsistency, more yadda yadda. To which the reply is usually along the lines of "tough, get used to it"

On the seriously plus side, I think tools like txt and twitter are possibly enabling us to use the same kinds of communication that have helped bind us into couples, families and communities over very short ranges, ie intimate voice distances, to apply those capabilities over much wider ranges. The ability to bind over great swathes of the world may very well undermine hyperlocal tribalism just as Chelsea fans have to cope with "their" team being made up of 22 players from 18 countries speaking 4 languages and cheering them on anyway.

This post will be automatically Twittered. Because its a good idea.

/2c

More on RSSContact

I've been driving Chris Jordan and co at RSSContact nuts because I set up an account and then for 3 days couldn't login, even though Chris and the folks could. BTW, they also do RSSCalendar

However, this morning its copacetic and I finally managed to set up my online RSS Business Card which is fine and dandy. You can even add the details as a VCard to Outlook. I've got Chris' feed as well.

So far, so good. Now I have some contact details and a calendar, all being generated on RSS feeds.