Twitter hashtags

What’s a hashtag? On Twitter, it’s a tag preceded by a hash sign (#), and it’s a way to tag “tweets” (posts to Twitter) for aggregation. Amy Gahran has a useful post that explains “How to start a Twitter hashtag.” When you’re social tagging – i.e. trying to create a tag that others will use – it’ll be most useful if you get buyin. Says Amy, “Once you find a good, short, intuitive hashtag, start promoting it right away — to your Twitter followers, on your blog, in your media-sharing accounts (like Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube). Also, if you’re running the event, make sure you promote the event hashtag on the Web site, in e-mailed materials to attendees and media, and everywhere.”

Social media, identity, and civility

In today’s Austin American-Statesman, Michael Barnes says “second generation social media” - referring to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. - “encourage civility, congeniality and respect.”

Increasingly, I’m encountering just that sort of social chemistry at openings, parties and clubs. And this brand of socialilzing often begins with announcements such as “Hey, I follow your tweets!” or “Oh yeah, I know you from Facebook! How did that heart surgery go.”

Yes, indeed - the line between social media and socializing face-to-face seems blurred - because it doesn’t really have to exist. Increasingly people are building positive and productive networks of relationship online that reflect and enhance their offline social networks, and that’s really not new, but it’s new for many people, and we’re getting away from some issues that Barnes addresses, with some inaccuracy, in today’s column:

First-generation social media - e-mail, discussion boards, chat rooms - often spread social poison. The main reasons are obvious: anonymity and pseudonymity. One could “flame” with impunity as long as nobody knew who you really were. Combine that with an inability to ascertain precise emotional tones in digital exchanges, and one could be forgiven for avoiding all chat rooms and keeping e-mail conversations short and to the point.

I say this is inaccurate for a couple of reasons. First of all, the online anonymity/pseudonymity Barnes refers to here was not necessarily the rule. For example, the WELL, a seminal online community that has existed since 1985, has always verified the identity of community members and insisted that they make their real names available (though they also have pseudonyms by which they’re commonly known within the community).

Second, pseudonymous presences can establish clear and persistent identities even where identity isn’t published, and completely civil communities can exist where “real identities” are masked. It is better to require some kind of identity verification, if only clear association with a verifiable email address, to establish at least the possibility of accountability and reference, but you don’t necessarily have to share that with other users. Some have found the ability to create and play with alternative identities in online social spaces very powerful and helpful.

In systems like the WELL, where identity is verified and shared, you still see massive flame wars, just as you see, in physical networks and communities, minor and major arguments and wars. And while I acknowledge that it’s easier to “‘flame’ with impunity” in a context where no one connects your online identity with the identity you and most people think is real - the one you use “in real life” - anonymous flames have little weight. They’re no big deal. Those of us who’ve been online for years have learned to ignore them, just as we ignore traffic noise, smog, billboards (an early version of spam) and other forms of pollution.

All that said, it is interesting to see the effect of mainstreaming on social media, and the concurrent commitment to work out best social practices so that online experiences are most fruitful and productive, and minimally stressful and bothersome. We all have an interest in promoting civility and sane communication. It’s insightful for Barnes to note that this is being reflected in all of our communications and gatherings, online and off. Maybe this Internet thing will lead to a better world, after all?

Protesting too much

Subtle social media gaffe: Matt Yglesias says Third Way’s “domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit.” Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO for American Progress Action Fund (the organization behind Yglesias’ blog), posts an apology. Julian Sanchez calls this a “spectacular act of institutional tone deafness.” On Twitter, Jay Rosen advises social media consultants: “study this Yglesias thing. A cautionary tale for clients.”

The Evolution of the Web

My latest post at Worldchanging is about the future of the web.

All business is moving to the web - not just sales and marketing, but all business processes. Many businesses will drop expensive internal IT in favor of cloud solutions, and they’ll focus more on cultivating internal value networks or knowledge networks. They’ll start thinking more about how to assess the value of intangibles - knowledge transactions - and how to leverage and demonstrate that value. They’ll use social technologies to find efficiencies and control costs, not just for sales. Those of us who do web consulting will be challenged to produce strategy and results for the whole business, not just sales and marketing.

Examples of social media marketing

Peter Kim has compiled a list of social media marketing examples, which he’s been updating with contributions from his readers. As of today, he includes 270 brands. [Link]

Twitter talk

Yesterday (October 14), I gave a breakfast presentation on Twitter to the Association for Women in Technology, speaking at the Austin American-Statesman’s offices, along with Rob Quigley, the Statesman’s resident social media expert, and food writer Addie Broyles. My slides:

Media ecology and authority

At CNN’s iReport.com, a “citizen journalist” calling himself “Johntw” posted a report that Steve Jobs had been rushed to the ER follwoing a heart attack. Word spread to and beyond Digg, across Twitter. Apple stock dropped quickly, a $9 billion loss based on the rumor. Though iReport posts aren’t vetted, the CNN association probably lent credibility to the report. [Link]

The Jobs incident was the second time in a week that mainstream media organizations have been embarrassed by their online citizen journalism arms - sparking debate about the accuracy of reports from these Web sites and showing how it takes only a few minutes for a scurrilous rumor, placed on a site without sufficient editorial checks, to inflict damage.

So what’s the cure? A dozen years ago Bob Anderson and I were talking about the emerging new media ecology and the question of information authority in that context. We figured media literacy should be taught alongside reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. Support critical thinking, not censorship or authoritarian structures for distributing information.

Education isn’t always enough, sometimes you really do need moderators, hopefully with a light touch. The SFGate story linked above says how sexually explicit photos were posted at CBS’mobile phone application site, after which CBS promised “to redouble its efforts to police content.” A moderator had quickly removed the photos. Some might argue that photos should be screened before they’re posted, and some sites would do it that way, but that’s a daunting task, especially where you may have thousands of posts, and it’s not in the spirit of the many-to-many mediasphere. CNN does have moderators for iReport, but they’re not checking facts… “mostly, it is the job of iReport users themselves to weed out erroneous or inappropriate material.” That’s the social media way - the “vetting” is crowdsourced, and the reader must read critically, never assuming that the “news source” is correct. I would argue that’s always been the case, even with the best journalists. I’ve never been close to a news story that wasn’t wrong in some of the particulars, at least from my perspective. And that’s part of the problem - perspectives and interpretations differ. That’s why I left journalism behind – when I was in journalism school, it seemed pretty clear that it would be hard to tell the truth. Only a few gonzo journalists, a la Hunter Thompson, realized they, and their biases, had to be transparent within the reporting…

“Are you conversationally tone-deaf?”

At Conversation Agent, Connie Reece has a good and useful post about conversational skill in online environments. It’s important to emphasize the social in social technology: you can have the best technologies in the world undermined by participants’ lack of social skills; Connie suggests three issues to address in conversation or community management. She focuses on one-way conversation, hijacking, and lack of respect for other viewpoints. These can be detrimental to any conversation, but are especially detrimental online, where conversations can evolve to be complex stews of potentially inconsistent perspectives, and where there’s a lack of visual and audio cues.

What other issues should we consider as part of a “conversation 101″ set of best practices?

Bootstrap Bookmarks

Bijoy Goswami asked me to add social bookmarking blogware to the Bootstrap Austin blog, then write an explanation for the Bootstrap community. Here’s an excerpt:

Brewster Kahle used to talk about the Internet as a huge book that everyone was collaboratively writing, and in that spirit, we adopted early on the metaphor of “bookmarking” to note online addresses we might return to for whatever reason. Bookmarking was crucial to evolving browser navigation, and soon enough we had web sites where we could store bookmarks. A site called del.icio.ous gave us a way to categorize bookmarks with simple tags. Any user of the system could create a personal set of tags - roll your own taxonomy. So why not share tags and bookmarks with others? That’s the concept of social bookmarking, shared sites, navigation, and bottom-up taxonomies or “folksonomies.” Social bookmarking became a popular way to share content, and to “vote” with your feet - using algorithms that rate content by the number of bookmarks and the number of links. This is all part of the evolution of a web-facilitated mediasphere where the line between content producer and content consumer is blurred, and crowds collaborate in making and extending stories and knowledge.

We can facilitate the social bookmarking of our own content by adding “blogware” that makes it easy to bookmark a site at one of the many social bookmarking and collaborative content sites that have appeared.

Ambient Awareness and Social Evolution

Twitter, Facebook, and other evolving social systems feed into our “ambient awareness,” which is, according to Clive Thompson in the New York Times Magazine, “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does - body language, sighs, stray comments - out of the corner of your eye.” Thompson’s written a clueful article about computer-mediated sociality and its impact on self- and other-perception. Read his article, and you’ll “get” Twitter and, beyond that, begin to understand that the social web is transforming communications in a way that oddly restores the kinds of social relationships that existed before we had to “would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor - a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.” Now we have a way to sustain social ties, almost aggressively, and we have another adjustment to make - to a world where privacy is limited and our actions online form a persistent and somewhat inescapable sense of who we are. Thompson concludes on a positive note - we begin to know ourselves better:

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another - quite different - result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site - “What are you doing?” - can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

More on Twitter here:

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang posts how he uses Twitter (my list would be similar, how about yours?).

Owyang (on Twitter, naturally) points to a Business Week article by Shel Israel, “Getting Intimate (with Customers) on Twitter,” which talks about Ricardo Guerrero’s success using Twitter for Dell.

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