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intelligence: n. the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge
(this post is a group Twitter experiment – link to similar articles at bottom & share your own experience on Twitter with hashtag #MonTwit)
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can leverage the potential of social networks in order to learn, facilitate innovation and solve problems. I’ve been experimenting with Twitter heavily for the past few months, and would like to share a few basic insights into what I’m discovering.
I started to tackle this a few weeks ago via a comment I posted on @briansolis‘s blog, so I’ll just expand on the main questions I laid out there:
- What is Twitter?
- How do you use it strategically?
Let me just start by saying I understand that Twitter is a communication channel that can be used in a variety of ways. Though there’s no ‘right’ way to use it, there may be ‘more effective’ ways, depending on your goal. This post is just intended to be an overview of ideas that have led me to change my own habits on Twitter, which has increased its value as a resource for me.
1. What is Twitter?
Getting started on Twitter is like walking into a crowded room blindfolded: you know there’s somebody out there, but you’re not quite sure who they are, where they are, or why you should care.
My initial Twitter experience was kind of like this: The 46 Stages of Twitter (here’s the educator’s version)
After digging deeper, I started to see patterns in the way information was traveling, and in the connections between the people I was following. Based on those observations, this is my current opinion:
Twitter is a massive Idea & Information Exchange.
Imagine if the resources you wanted in order to build your knowledge base and hone your thinking skills were available in one “place.” Imagine if there were a better way than a Google search to connect with the people, opinions and ideas you’re interested in – whether these are your customers, your colleagues, or the thought leaders you respect most within a field. Then imagine you could assemble these people into a network around yourself or your company’s brand in order to get a pulse on what’s important to you.
This is the potential of Twitter.
Granted, there is a TON of noise. I’m not suggesting that Twitter is a utopia where it’s possible to get 100% pure relevant content to what you want to know all the time. BUT, there is a tremendous wealth of information and human capital out there that is certainly worth exploring. Businesses are finding it’s useful for interacting with customers and gauging public opinion, educators are collaborating with one another and integrating it into their “personal learning networks (PLNs),” and individuals are using it to find out more about specific interest areas.
I read a piece recently by Howard Rheingold titled Twitter Literacy, in which he said:
Twitter is not a community, but its an ecology in which communities can emerge.
I think that’s a good way to look at it. Twitter consists of literally millions of pieces of info that are streaming all day every day, ranging from the profound to the absurd. At first I tried to organize a way to catch the best information, but that seems impossible. You simply can’t keep up with the content flow and catch everything. Then I started to analyze where the ‘best’ information was coming from, who the people were tweeting it, and who their connections were.
This changed everything for me.
Once you know what you’re looking for, you start to notice that certain people keep popping up in relation to certain information; you start to notice the networks of people they talk to, and you realize that there are thousands of loose, informal communities that are existing within this larger ecology of information.
2. How do you use it strategically?
Twitter’s not just about the information, but about the people creating and circulating the information. The key seems to be a combination of figuring out who to follow and how to engage with the people following you.
At first I thought that the more people I followed, the better chance I had of seeing something ‘good’ pass through my stream. Not the case. Instead, it just increased the amount of noise, while making it very difficult to see who was actually bringing me value.
So I decided to do an overhaul. I asked these two questions:
- Who am I and what information am I trying to get?
- What information am I bringing to the table?
Me: I am a Masters Candidate researching emerging media technology and its impact on society and culture. I’m particularly interested in how people are interacting on Twitter, and how it’s being implemented in business and education. I’d like to get the perspectives of practitioners, thought leaders in the social media sphere, systems theorists, futurists, and researchers in complexity, knowledge management, neuroscience, and human behavior. All I bring to the table is a hopeless curiosity, an analytical mind, and a desire to share my findings with whoever might be interested.
When I framed my purpose in that way, I feel like I woke up.
I think this is the first step in really benefitting from Twitter. Knowing who you are, and who your intended ‘audience’ is. I think this applies both at a personal level (like in my case) or if you’re a business.
For the better part of two weeks, I went through each and every person I followed, evaluating why we were connected and how we were bringing each other value. I scrolled through their tweets, and I asked myself “Am I compelled to click through on any of these?” If the person’s interested weren’t directly related to my research area, the answer was usually no, so I unfollowed.
For everyone else, I organized them into lists. This had absolutely nothing to do with a popularity contest, but was rather a learning experience. By forcing myself to put people into lists, it really made me focus on who each person was, and what their ‘specialty’ was. I combined some lists when they made sense. (I combined my “Social CRM” & “Community Management Strategy” lists in with the “Social Business Design” list.)
[I have a list titled “metacogs” that some people have asked about, so let me give a quick definition. I’m wordsmithing, so you won’t find it in a dictionary. I’m using it as a derivative of the word “metacognition“, which means ‘thinking about thinking’ or ‘awareness of the process of learning,’ and combining it with the ideas of ‘design thinking,’ futures thinking,’ and lateral thinking. Generally, it means “process thinkers.”]
Once I got down to following around 850 people, a few amazing things started to happen.
1. I began to see how the people I follow are connected, and also noticed the basic makeup of the various communities that I had been following all along.
2. Because I realized that many people I was connected to were in fact connected to each other, I was able to start making some tweets specifically geared towards them and their community.
3. I actually began engaging MORE with the people I unfollowed!
This last one really surprised me and has changed my entire opinion about following. I remember having read a post by Guy Kawasaki called How I Tweet, where he said he followed everyone back out of common courtesy. That made me feel like maybe I was being mean for not following everyone back, so I originally followed his advice. But now I see things differently and have come up with my own method that works for me.
Now I’m following people who tweet within a specific topic area most of the time, but I’m engaging with EVERYONE who talks to me. I’m finding a lot of people who I don’t follow (but follow me) will send me an @reply in response to something I tweet, whether as a response to a comment or even to share a related link with me. I’ve been loving this. Because I’m researching under a big umbrella of areas, my tweets cover a broad range that isn’t going to be interesting to everyone all the time. But, when something DOES resonate with a particular person, they have the opportunity to respond to me about it, and a conversation begins.
Then someone else might respond to THAT tweet, and the conversation continues. And it literally feels like a temporary community forms around an idea. Input starts coming in from many different people, with various opinions and perspectives. This goes on for a few tweets, and then without any formal ending, we all just kinda move on.
This is starting to become the way I’m experiencing Twitter.
So what?
Well, now that I see Twitter differently, it’s shaping my user habits. I’m trying to fill each tweet with context and value. If I’m replying to a specific person, and don’t have more to say than “thanks” or “lol” or something short like that, I send it via DM. I try to think about how each public tweet appears to others, and how to structure it as an opportunity for a conversation to start.
In this way, I feel like I’m making my personal tweets more valuable to others, and in return, more people are engaging with me. It’s a positive feedback look, and it’s incredible.
Whether you’re using Twitter for personal use or to serve as the gateway to your brand, I think that approaching it with the above ideas in mind might be useful in deciding what to tweet and how to engage your audience.
I have more thoughts on all of this, but I’d like this to be a start, and to see what everyone else thinks! Thank you to everyone out there for helping shape my experience. Now that I’m seeing what is possible, I’ll be curious to see how we can put more intentionality behind our tweets and interactions. Looking forward to the continued journey with you!
Here’s a little blurb of me discussing these concepts for IdeasProject:
And here are the links to everyone else posting on this topic today. I’ll keep this list updated:
@ekolsky – What I’ve Discovered about Twitter
@mauricioswg – What I’ve discovered about Twitter
@prem_k – What I’ve discovered about Twitter
@MarkTamis – What I’ve discovered about Twitter
@mjayliebs – What I have discovered because of Twitter
emergent by design 
Great post. Mainly leaving a comment so I can subscribe to other people’s comments.
One of the problem with these Twitter-etiquette style posts is the number of people writing them that are networkers (who have no knowledge of or interest in networks) and marketers (who, guess what, have no real understanding of market mechanisms).
Recently, there’s been a spate of relatively high profile Twitter people announcing with great fanfare how they’re cutting down on the number of people they follow. This sounds to me like saying they’re leaving the web and migrating to the AOL walled-garden services of yestermonth. It’s good to see you focus on managing the diversity, the complexity and the quantity as opposed to shutting it down.
My Twitter use has evolved over the months. It sounds like we’ve gone through similar thought processes – I decided to split myself into two on Twitter. I’m @BFchirpy for metacog/hypercog/org dev/rhizomes stuff and @siibo for anything else (including the odd swear word).
This was pretty hard in the first month or so but now feels natural. Interestingly, many people ‘know’ and follow both when they realise.
I’m glad you’re writing stuff like this. There needs to be a counterbalance to the simplistic 7 Steps to Twitter nonsense that’s elsewhere.
Last thing: my new year’s resolutions for Twitter are (a) to get some resolutely offline people into it and (b) to work out how to follow interestingly wrong people. I’ve unfollowed people in the past when they said things I disagreed with (usually because of the way they said it rather than the ‘what’ – Twitter meltdowns) but now need to work out how to tap into dissonant networks. Any suggestions?
Thanks Simon.
Good new year’s resolutions. I’m trying to get people on too, and have tried to write posts that would help lower the barrier to entry for people. (like this one, and the 85+ resources for Educators to Integrate Social Media).
I think it would be helpful to have a way to show others who you follow and why, so I’ve begun to assemble this as a mindmap on mindmeister.com. Just putting it together is bringing me insights. maybe this is a meme worth spreading?
I have a couple of people who I follow who challenge many things I say. Getting put in check like that has built an awareness in the way I structure my posts and my tweets. I’m more careful than ever to not state anything like it’s a cold hard fact, but more as a question or an opinion. Also, I’ve changed my mind about many things I was ‘sure’ of, so I think it’s good to have those devil’s advocates around.
How to tap into dissonant networks? I’m not sure. Maybe just paying closer attention to who leaves comments on your blog and who interacts with you or RTs you on Twitter. It seems like the people that disagree will somehow find you!
I actually bought one of these http://webtrendmap.com/ but I’ve not had a chance to build it yet.
By ‘not had a chance’, of course, I mean ‘too lazy’.
Hmmm. This is going to bug me until I give it a try. If I don’t get something done by New Year’s Day, somebody shoot me.
some very good insights in this post, Venessa, thx.
if you would like to visit a map I have created last year (sept.2008) reflecting on these issues of hyperconnectivity, the map describes the different locations of users in the hyperconnected infoverse: Friendship in hyperconnectivity: http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show_public/10527460
it came out of a fascinating discussion that involved many humans on twine under the same title : Friendship in hyperconnectivity: http://www.twine.com/twine/11h43rww7-2xq/friendship-in-hyperconnectivity-fh
the purpose of these interactions was (and is) the same or very similar as your endeavors here, namely the realization of ever increasing value in the hyperconnected infosphere, whether the particular engine is Twitter or otherwise, it is crystal clear that social intersubjective relations are carving a new manner of orientation for our intelligence both as individuals and as a culture.
my own post on the subject : thriving in hyperconnectivity – http://spacecollective.org/Wildcat/5113/Of-Onions-and-Infocologies-Thriving-in-the-age-of-hyperconnectivity
You are a lot more eloquent than me, Wildcat. I love your post on spacecollective.
Fluid intelligence is sexy!
It sure is….and you posted it on my birthday, how sweet!
Hi Venessa – you’re a breath of fresh air in discussing and sharing your experience and insights for How to Use Twitter to Build Intelligence…..really like the metacognition analogy and the passion shows including the IdeasProject vid so keep up the good work!
thanks Steve!
Twitter is an endless cocktail party.
It successfully entertains, spreads information, and creates connections.
It fails to create a useful way to filter and store content. Like most social media data is treated like a one way street and thus becomes a dumping ground of repetition and archived “noise”. It also distracts me and then I fail to get things done. I end up on the hunt for the person who has already done it, to see if I can ask him/her about it later.
Sometimes, it’s good to close the browser for a couple of hours. :-p
Thanks for writing!
ps the biggest thing I’ve learned about twitter is I have to respect my introverted ways and unfollow people who tweet/retweet tooooo much. Though they may make it into a list for occasional checks.
[Twitter] “fails to create a useful way to filter and store content”
Yup, we have to be the filterers. I forgot to mention in the post, I keep wondering about Dunbar’s number, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number), the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, which he says is around 150, and how that relates to twitter.
i have a private list just titled “My 150″… consisting of the top 150 people I interact with on twitter who bring me value. extremely helpful when it comes to filtering and finding quality content.
give it a shot if you have time, and let me know your experience!
I think Dunbar’s number is more of a conceptual limit for the number of relationships a highly functioning individual can stay on top of and know “everything” about. To me this number seems astronomical. I can’t imagine being up-to-date on everything about 150 people and all the possible inter relationships they would have. If I was connected this heavily with that many I would automatically have a secondary network of at least 3000 that I didn’t know “everything” about.
Today’s multi-networked individual really takes the steam out of keeping the numbers up. If I connect with 2 people very “effectively” and they connect with 120 each, maybe I’ll be better off than trying to max out my personal ability to know others. Also people are involved in 20-25 different networks just by being in a family, let alone a multi-job career, multiple schools, clubs, governments, other groups, etc, etc. Dunbar’s number is relevant to one network ,thus I think it is too narrow to draw big meaning from.
The good numbers in networking all stem around exponential functions. Viral distribution. Just wait till to you write the story that crashes your host because everyone needed to read it in the same hour.
Btw, have you filled the 150 list?
You’re in my top17_tweeps list which only has 6 so far. 🙂
Nice post Venessa. The discussion of following/unfollowing and list management is particularly useful for me.
As someone that supervises a pack of really bright research students, I’m going to be interested to see how you pull your interest into a research project! 🙂
Thanks Tim.
I’m actually just putting together a proposal so I can spend all next term doing this as an independent research study. I have a few online projects I want to flesh out.
The one closest to my heart is this. My investment in this blog and Twitter is pure passion – I’m not profiting from it (in the financial sense, at least), and the thoughts laid out are as transparent as I can be.
My other project that I’m very excited about is a Ning community that I just got off the ground a few months ago, but haven’t had time to really build yet. The New School (where I attend) is made up of several divisions, a Social Research school, Parsons Design school, etc, and there’s no physical or virtual place for students to connect and collaborate. I want to build this Ning community into our hub, and then see what could happen. I think many students (myself included) aren’t operating anywhere near their potential, b/c they don’t have a way to self-organize for projects. I think it could be an amazing way for us to bring the idea people together with the design people who can represent the ideas visually. We’ll see!
The 3rd arm is to put this theory into practice from a business perspective. So I’ll probably be looking to you for advice! There are practically no businesses in my town doing anything with social media, so I’m going to work with a local real estate company, build a blog & Twitter presence, and see what I’m able to do. I got my real estate license a few years ago just because I was curious to know what they know, so essentially what I want to do is funnel the traffic of interested homebuyers for our town to my blog, then send them to the real estate agency to help them, and I’ll simply collect a referral fee for connecting buyers to agents. (I’ve been helping a few people buy/sell homes on the side, but it’s too much work for me, in addition to everything else I’m doing, and that’s not fair to a client. So this makes more sense to me, I’ll maintain the online presence, which is where I seem to exist already.)
So I’ll be looking at this from 3 perspectives: social media in a small niche environment (university students), a regional area (my town, and probably people from NYC who are moving upstate), and the global level (here).
How does that sound?
Responding via email to the gmail address on your Who’s the Architect page…
Hi Venessa,
First of all thx to you and @ekolsky for starting the initiative. I had been thinking about a way to write a post to say Thank You to lots of people I’ve engaged with over the past 9 months, and this was the golden opportunity.
(here it is: http://contactcenterintelligence.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/%E2%80%9Cwhat-i-have-discovered-about-twitter-%E2%80%9D/ )
I have been through the different stages, you have been going through, myself and it keeps being a process of iterations. I’m currently experimenting lists myself too. Not sure where and how it ends.
What I did not mention in my post, but what I do experience as valuable every once a while is “serendipity”. Sometimes it’s like the collective minds of all people I follow (close to 600) or the people who are being followed by the people I follow, seem to have a trending theme (not topic like in many RT’s) and then it all comes together. These are valuable moments for me, because it puts the brain to work and allows me to connect some dots. Most of the time this results in a post or some great idea for my own business. Can’t be more specific that this, but I’m sure you’ve experienced something just like it yourself.
Last but not least: my personal trending topic is “network value”. I experience every day how valuable my (accidental or not) network is. In return I’d like to think I’m valuable to my network too. Personally I judge this by the volume of engagement on twitter and back-channels I use, such as Skype or e-mail, as well as comments I get on posts etc.. For me the “math” is easy: the more I tweet about stuff I’m passionate about, the more I engage with people that tweet stuff I’m passionate about, the more engagement I get in return. And it’s engagement that I learn from. For an individual like you and me, that is all the network value we need.
Businesses though, need to monetize too.. They are trying, as we speak, to find out ways to unlock the network value of their Customers too (by having them influencing peers). Thinking in parallel to my own experience, companies should probably focus more on the value they provide to their networks, not on how they can use or exploit the value of their (Customers’) network.. The thing is, exploited value is easily measured (sales/wom/virals/clicks etc). Provided value is a lot more difficult, if only because one needs to understand what is value provided.. I do think though that the future of Social Business lies in solving this equation. But that’s the theory so far..
what do you think? Will Twitter help us/me solve this?
Thanks Wim. I have the “serendipity” experience daily…I call it “emergence” 😉
As far as businesses monetizing…….. you know, I just think that things are really changing, and it’s not so much about the ‘social media strategy,’ as about the fundamental value of your business.
Do you know what I mean? I think people’s tolerance for crap is going down. If your business offers something that is of true value, it will rise out of the sludge. But if you’re selling something that doesn’t do something positive for someone’s life, eventually it will fail, no matter how brilliant the marketing.
What do you think?
I Agree.. with a twist:
I think marketing should spend much more time on helping Customers create value from their products/services than spreading messages about their products.. Also marketing should be on top of listening to and acting upon Customer feedback and not of conversion rates of again another e-mail marketing bomb..
And, if you want others to also enjoy or see the value your Customers create, you may as well focus your helping hand towards the influencer, or better, the connector amongst your most emergent customers..
let me know what you think!
Venessa, you are simply great.
You are stimulating people to produce ideas and to share them.
Here I posted some opinions of mine about Twitter.
http://bit.ly/8EbZ0e
My post is still evolving, and I hope to be able to improve it over time.
Let’s share_and_evolve, together
Marco ( @mgua on twitter )
Thank you Marco. I found your last point on the post most interesting:
“A lot of the currently most active Twitter users are social media professionals, or marketing people, web 2.0 entrepeneurs, sociologists and communication researchers. In most cases, to me, the opinions are just not enough different to ignite a productive debate. I hope that Twitter user base will broaden involving people from every field of business and culture.”
At first I wanted to disagree, but then I realized that that’s a pretty accurate representation of the people with whom I interact. How do we change this? How do we spread the word of the value that can be found here?
A possibly good strategy is try to adventure in following completely different kind of people. Diversity is needed to provoke new ideas.
If I speak with a buch of system engineers, in a closed group, we end up saying all the same things. There is not enough new-air to breathe.
I am convinced -and I think I can say it quite loud, being an entrepeneur working in different fields in different countries ICT, but also in lingerie, and in wine trade- that diversity is a fundamental need for real progress.
Whatever relevant improvement is sparked up by mating diversities.
Marco ( @mgua on twitter)
As someone who feels like they have just begun to scratch the surface of Twitter, I appreciate you taking the time to provide insight on how one could get the most from this new form of educational media.
Glad it helped, Steve. In the post I didn’t list tools, just insights, but check out this tool. It’s useful for finding interesting people to follow:
http://twiangulate.com/search/
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Interesting and thought provoking post. I’m a Twitter newbie and have approached it initially as a software engineer – if there’s a protocol out there we like to do stuff with it. 🙂
But my behaviour on Twitter has been ’emergent’, I think – I’m learning how it works and using it to build loose, informal networks that every now and again flare up in to a more tightly focussed exchange of short posts / links for a few hours, then go quiet again.
I find Twitter is the main source of pointers to new sites and reading matter these days – my wife’s just started on Twitter and she engages with it in a totally different way. And I use it to promote my own blog – I get quite a bit of traffic that way.
As for my original interest – I’m hoping to do soem interesting stuff combining twitter with one of my other interests – artificial intelligence software – in the new Year.
Will be inteersting to see how it matures! @JoePritchard
I’ve met quite a few people on Twitter doing similar research with AI & collective intelligence.
Check out the tweets & blogs of @plevy, @novaspivack, & @deanpomerleau; might interest you. 🙂
Thanks for those links, Vanessa! Much appreciated!
Vanessa,
As far as I’ve been able to find so far, you have a rare perspective on the problem of social media. For me, it’s captured in your RT yesterday
“.. I’m actually quite connected to consciousness. and i do think that this is becoming a global brain, ”
“global brain” is hard to find in someone who is taking a traditional rigorous approach to the problem. To mean it indicates putting a scientific approach together to being open to memes that are most often used in different contexts.
I’m thinking that it might be useful to describe the path that got me making this comment.
I follow you. As luck would have it, I found a reference to your name in some tweet. For ease of organization in my mind, I tend to put people into two categories Smart and Dumb. To be clear this should not be taken as a judgment in some kind of invidious sense. All it really points to is interesting(2me) and not interesting(2me). But it’s easier for me to call it Smart and Dumb.
Anyone after a very quick read of some of your posts, you went into the Smart bin. If I happen upon a tweet from one of my Smarts, I’ll take a few seconds to click around to see what’s up.
I guess it would be fair to see that I play with twitter looking for Smart. When I find it, I will go through their stream see if they have something that is thought provoking. If it provokes a thought that can be expressed in about 50 chrs, I tweet it. ( Usually I need 70 characters to include something for context.)
So….when you RT “Twitter Q # 3. What do U want to make happen?” that signaled that you and I agreed on something . If someone in my Smart bin, thinks something I said was worth retweeting, maybe I’m on to something.
I don’t want to clog this thread, but just one observation. If I read your post correctly, your approach to twitter changed when you made a clear statement to your self of what you want to do with it. And it was not to make friends or get followers.
You say,
“I’m particularly interested in how people are interacting on Twitter, and how it’s being implemented in business and education.”
My hypothesis is that the under appreciated fact is that until you have a clear goal all the technology in the world is not going to help. But once you have a clear goal the technical issues fade away. You just use whatever tools are at hand to get to wherever you want to get to.
I really do look forward to continuing this convo in various contexts.
Hey Michael,
Thanks for adding me to one of your Smarts, lol.
I don’t know if I have a rare perspective, I just straddle a bunch of worlds, without committing to any of them, so I think that helps me from getting trapped into any one way of thinking.
I keep thinking to myself that I want this blog and my interactions on Twitter to act as a ‘rosetta stone’ of sorts…. I am a highly spiritual person, but also obsessed with technology, so I look at things from many angles.
I practice yoga and meditate, sometimes I go away to an ashram and unplug and just enjoy stillness and silence, but I also am fascinated by transhumanism and the idea of the physical body merging with technology.
To some people this may seem like two extremes, but to me it feels like 2 sides of the same coin. The title of this blog is what I want to be: emergent by design. I want intentionality behind my “evolution,” whatever that means.
I think technology is becoming a path to a spiritual awakening as much as Buddhism is a path.
That’s what I’m *really* exploring here.
“straddle a bunch of worlds, without committing to any of them, so I think that helps me from getting trapped into any one way of thinking. ” Precisely. That’s where I usually find evidence of Smart. My bet is that if you look through history the density of Smart is at the intersection of two well established POVs.
FYI – I’m now retired. After a BA in sociology. 1 year of grad work in demography, I spent the next 35 years running a printing business. Talk about cultural dissonance..
In any case,
I’ve come to believe that the real problem is Boys and the Enlightenment.
What I mean to say is that the arrogance of mind over body is reflected in a public discourse works on “mind is good, body is bad.” With no reflection. it manifests in a gezillion ways. “Smart boys use their minds. Stupid girls have babies.” “White collar and intellect workers are good, blue collar and manual workers are bad.”
Ever since the Pilgrims brought this dna to America we keep trying to get it right. It’s only been since the 70’s in the States that the default superiority of a “manly” approach to the world has been seriously challenged.
The meme reappears in the idea that earning a college certificate is the key to a good life. I believe that meme is responsible for much of what is very, very wrong in the education discourse.
Imagine the reaction if one were to say “academic excellence” is exactly the wrong goal. To my mind “academic excellence” is so embedded because it fits so easily into the “education/industrial complex”. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that individuals have evil motives. Just normal people doing normal business. It’s a similar situation to what we’ve seen play out in the financial world.
The pressing problem for me, is that while business goes on, high school kids keep dropping out every day.
I apologize for drifting into screedish.. but it should give you an idea of what I’m trying to “make happen faster” on twitter. The side benefit is getting some great mental exercise.
Very helpful overall framework, Venessa.
After surviving my initial Twitter immersion (there really are several irritating technical hurdles–like you really must use a third-party ap– to manage your overall Twitter experience), I’m now working with a relatively diverse selection of folks and discovering how different Twitter is for each group. Right now I’m working with a regional intentional community association, a neighborhood empowerment coalition, a local foster care agency, and a PR/Communications consultant.
For one, I’ve begun to think of Twitter networks as collections or configurations of constituencies, rather than “followers,” “customers,” “patrons,” “stakeholders,” or even “kindred souls.” Despite the political overtone, I like the sense that a constituent is a component of a whole, and therefore a constituency is an instance of a whole entity encompassing varying levels of shared interest, intention, engagement. So different Twitter profiles (whether for an individual, a company, or an organization), will have their own unique constituency profiles comprising a natural constituency, extended constituencies, and emerging constituencies.
Oops, I’m starting to run on a bit. For such a simple tool, Twitter really has profound implications for knitting together just the network you’re looking for–with, as you have noted, the emerging understanding of just what you’re looking for…
I like that idea of constituencies. There are just SO many overlapping groups and interactions, it becomes mindboggling to try and figure out how it’s all connected. I think I need to just give up trying for now, until the tools are developed that will just show me.
One thing I like about Twitter is that unlike linkedin, which shows what you’ve done, or facebook, that shows your pictures/hobbies/interests, people’s Twitter profiles usually link to their blogs, which shows how they THINK. to me it’s interesting to connect to other people’s minds, instead of their socially constructed identities.
Thanks to Venessa and everyone who commented!
I’ve been going through some similar processes of learning how engage in Twitter and make it more valuable over the last few months. I feel there is a continuum of focus or attention spans people have when they engage with topics and other people. This continuum ranges from long-term interest in a topic; through point-of-need research over several days or weeks; to real-time interest in a specific event.
I actually find myself in all three positions, depending on the context, but Twitter works in a way that’s geared to real-time more than anything else. Personally I most value the ability to interact with people who are interested in a topic, and to find high-quality up-to-date content related to that topic – and I think there’s great potential to achieve both these objectives using the information in Twitter.
The key, in my opinion, is having better tools to help me locate these people and content sources using Twitter data. I’d appreciate your viewpoint on this, and your thoughts on the critical capabilities such tools must have to be useful. Current tools I’ve seen don’t seem to really cater for this need. You can find me on Twitter @drororbach.
Hi Dror,
I’m in agreement with your thoughts. It seems the big thing that everyone is talking about has to do with authority, credibility, and validity. How can we be sure the information we’re receiving is good/valuable?
It’s hard, when everyone has an opinion and a way to broadcast it. We feel confident we’re getting accurate information from scholarly research publications & from good investigative journalism. But now the line is getting blurry when it comes to ‘experts’…. even though many posts should be treated as op-ed pieces, we tend to trust our peers and networks more than ‘facts.’
Honestly, sometimes I get scared and consider just deleting this whole blog and my Twitter account. I’m truly grateful for all the people who are engaging with me and these ideas here and on Twitter, but I think that ethics play an increasingly important role when people are actually listening to what you say. I try to stay neutral, to present ideas as ideas, as something to ponder, not as ‘truths.’
The thing I have learned (and am learning) from being in this Masters program is that media is EXTREMELY POWERFUL AND INFLUENTIAL. It has the potential for great things, but is equally terrifying. Media manipulates you. It tells a story that you integrate into your perceptions of reality. What are these messages?
These thoughts are informing the metathinking frameworks that I’m writing about – I just think that now more than ever, we need to be extremely aware of what is actually going on, and to learn how to critically analyze the information that’s presented to us.
Great post Venessa, insightful and useful to send to others, so I tip/tweeted it to Techmeme.
Anyone who loves this post, please retweet the Techmeme tip via twitter.com/alvisbrigis or simply copy and paste the following text into your Twitter feed:
Tip @Techmeme – https://emergentbydesign.com/2009/12/21/how-to-use-twitter-to-build-intelligence/ How to Use Twitter to Build Intelligence
______________
Let’s get this on Techmeme!
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Backed by data mining techniques, tweets can become interesting sources of information for marketers. Brand awareness is just one among many things that can be measured in that way.
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I think so much of this total overview (recommended to me by colleague Pierre Levy, we were contributing authors to COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, free online as well as for sale at Amazon) that I have made it a REFERENCE at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog.
If some of you decide to come together and do a quick virtual book, I would be glad to discuss this. This specific contribution above impresses me HUGELY. Harrison Owen (inventor of Open Space Technology) and I lunch regularly, it would be very exciting to attraact a bunch of you to the Washington DC area for an Open Space on Twitter and the World Brain. I am finishing up my latest book, INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability, and I confess I did not have Twitter in Chapter 22 on Technical Intelligence Enablers, am going to have to go back to it and update it.
This is a GREAT contribution–you (the author) are a citizen Intelligence Minuteman. Bravo.
thanks! can i be a Minutewoman? 😉
Just wanted to get an article on the table..”Twitter’s transmitters The magic of 140 characters” Economist http://ilnk.me/181e
I am a 57 year old recovering spy and pioneer in public intelligence, and so I have to ask, is the current fashion to change from minuteman to minutewoman? Of course you can be a minutewoman. I just remember a very publicized case where a CEO was testifying to a Senate Committee and kept referring to the female chair as Madame Chairwoman, and she bit his head off until he realized she wanted to be referred to as Madame Chairman. Sigh….so out of touch (am I).
The book the New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political, is free online, I just got another 1,000 into stock, you’ve earned one as a gift if you wish, just tell me where to send it.
Have thinking about the coincidence of the mega-bucks Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) planning to spend on crowd-sourcing, after spending 40,000 on the Twitter balloon pilot. What kills me is that they will give that money to beltway bandits, 90% of the money will vanish, and the last 10%, maybe, just maybe, right reach people like you.
I just did a short (3 document pages) article for Homeland Security Today in which I spent a few hours looking at the right stuff, and ended up identifying the 63 people qualified and active at the code level in USA (63–only 12 of whom are focused on defensive code), at a time when NSA is planning to spend $12 billion a year that we do not have, on beltway bandit vaporware. Easier to give $10M each to each of the 63, I would think, and leverage them to create multinational open source code endeavors–but that is not how this out of control and very badly informed government works….to my ongoing dismay.
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Hi Venessa,
Have you thought about the differences between communities and networks.
My thinking is that Facebook is better =for community (groups) and Twitter for networks – networks as more open, dynamic and fluid.
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Thanks Venessa for your thoughtful and interesting blogs and articles. I came to http://socialmediamarketingresources.blogspot.com/ because of a business class assignment and read your article “A futurist’s view of the “next big thing” in social media. From there I ended up on another one of your articles about Twitter. I am an unemployed sixty year old. I am taking this opportunity to go back to school and learn as much as I can about computers and software programs. It has been an exciting journey for me. This quarter one of my classes is HTML. I will never be a web designer, but now I have an idea of what is going on behind the scenes. Anyway, the subject of social networking comes up in most of my classes. Unfortunately, my experience with it is to see students looking at pictures on Facebook while the instructor is lecturing. Probably a sign of my age, but I find that rude. And my exposure to Twitter is limited to thinking that if I care what some celebrity is having for lunch, I need to follow them. Guess what, I do not care! So your Twitter article made me realize that I need to keep an open mind and explore social networking more.
One of the problems I have with the social networking is the time it takes out of one’s life. Like you said, there is a lot of noise out there. I also wonder what you think about networking at your job. Is the new trend today allowing people to surf the web and log on to Facebook during work hours? Is that where we are going? And then we also complain because the company may be reading our emails, tweets or whatever. Again, probably just my age, but I think when you are at work you should be working.
Anyway, thanks for giving me more to think about. I think I will try Twitter and I just signed up for your blog announcements. That is a first for me! You know, the future for me is like a huge rollercoaster. Just get in and hold on!
Wendy Starkebaum
thanks for the comment, wendy.
you said – “One of the problems I have with the social networking is the time it takes out of one’s life.”
i don’t think the people that are active on social networks distinguish it as being separate from one’s life. it’s a different form of communication that is being integrated into our culture and society. it’s like saying, writing a letter is taking time out of one’s life, or using the telephone is taking time out of one’s life. i guess it depends on your perspective of what you think life “should” be.
i think there are many risks involved, especially if you have a personality type that fits with online culture, to get completely sucked in and lose balance and forget to engage in a healthy way in physical life. also, things are not always what they appear online. when you’re dealing with text-based communication, there are a lot of sensory inputs missing, and your imagination has to fill in the gaps of context. miscommunication happens.
as far as networking at work….. well, whether it’s in person or online, if you’re interacting with other humans, you’re “social networking.” it needs to be done with intention and purpose at work. the internal network of the workplace should be communicating so everyone understands what’s going on, and i think it’s good to also be tapped into the global network in order to stay up to date on information that affects your business/industry/sector. chatting with friends on facebook…. that’s a different story. maybe it’s fine to pop in for a short mental break…. if the window is opened all day….. probably a distraction. when i have gchat and skype open all day, i pretty much get nothing accomplished. so again, i think it’s balance, and it’s so new, that the rules of how to do it are still being formed.
good luck with your classes!
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