Closer To The Ideal

danah boyd writes with great honesty about what it felt like when her audience began mocking her via a live, public Twitter stream:

Well, I started out rough, but I was also totally off-kilter. And then, within the first two minutes, I started hearing rumblings. And then laughter. The sounds were completely irrelevant to what I was saying and I was devastated. I immediately knew that I had lost the audience. Rather than getting into flow and becoming an entertainer, I retreated into myself. I basically decided to read the entire speech instead of deliver it. I counted for the time when I could get off stage. I was reading aloud while thinking all sorts of terrible thoughts about myself and my failures. I wasn’t even interested in my talk. All I wanted was to get it over with. I didn’t know what was going on but I kept hearing sounds that made it very clear that something was happening behind me that was the focus of everyone’s attention. The more people rumbled, the worse my headspace got and the worse my talk became. I fed on the response I got from the audience in the worst possible way. Rather than the audience pushing me to become a better speaker, it was pushing me to get worse. I hated the audience. I hated myself. I hated the situation. I wanted off. And so I talked through my talk, finishing greater than 2 minutes ahead of schedule because all I wanted was to be finished. And then I felt guilty so I made shit up for a whole minute and left the stage with 1 minute to spare.

I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. And as Brady went on, he said that it started to get really rude so they pulled it to figure out what to do. But this distracted the audience and explains one set of outbursts that I didn’t understand from the stage. And then they put it back up and people immediately started swearing. More outbursts and laughter. The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.

Yes, I cried. Yes, I left Web2.0 Expo devastated. I hate giving a bad talk but I also felt like I was being laughed at. People tried to smooth it over, to tell me that I was OK, that it wouldn’t matter, that they liked the talk. But no amount of niceness from friends or strangers could make up for the 20 minutes in which I was misinterpreting the audience and berating myself. Nothing the audience could say could make up for what I was thinking about myself while on stage. So I went for a massage. And I spent 90 minutes trying to tell myself that I am a lovable creature. And when that wasn’t working, I told myself to suck it up and deal. I knew that if I could convince myself to look like everything was OK that eventually I would believe it. Or at least that it would all go away.

There are currently 206 comments on that post. Most people seem to feel that forcing the audience to read the Twitter stream (by projecting it onto a screen) served as a terrible distraction which disrupted boyd’s presentation.

I’m hoping this use of technology gets re-thought.

Community sites tend to develop enforcers who limit what is considered acceptable speach on the site. The enforcers tend to be among the most ardent users of the site. These enforcers do 2 things: they keep the site focused on whatever the enforcers consider to be core to the site, and they limit the potential of the site. In this regard, this conversation about what is appropriate, and what is not appropriate, on Stack Overflow, is fascinating to me:

I don’t get it. Why do people ask so simple questions? Boredom? It can’t be lazyness since it would have been easier to find the answer with google then putting it up here. Spam. – Caffeine Mar 1 at 18:15

For some the question is not simple, and he is asking for a detailed explanation about the operator, as you can see by the answer he accepted. – Ólafur Waage Mar 1 at 18:19

@Olafur – the & operator is fairly simple. He doesn’t want a detailed explanation, he wants AN explanation, because he’s been using it without knowing what exactly it does. While I admire his willingness to admit that he doesn’t know it and desire to learn it, it’s still more of a Google question. – Chris Lutz Mar 1 at 18:39

It’s not about wether the answer is simple, but if posting it here means simply copying it from somewhere else. This is redundant. It feels to me, that some people are really using SO to kill spare time. Maybe I’m a bit biased, but I like SO for puzzles and not for chat-like questions. – Caffeine Mar 1 at 18:41

Wouldn’t it be good if you could find an answer for any programming question on SO? The only way this would ever happen is if “simple” questions get asked as well as “puzzle” ones. On that basis, methinks this a valid question. – da5id Mar 1 at 22:41

Apparently 800 people not only read Jesse James Garrett’s blog post that introduced the concept of Ajax, and they went to the trouble of linking to it and tagging the URL, but many of them didn’t tag it with the term “ajax”.

Popular tags get set quickly, but not in stone

It only took 10 users for ‘ontology tags folksonomy’ to sort to the top of the tag list, meaning that even a small group of users can pretty quickly create much of the consensus value around a given link. This is in keeping with the idea of lowest common denominator tagging. However, though this consensus was established quickly, it was not frozen, with the positions among those three words varying, and with tags eventually replacing tagging.

I’ve only found one popular link so far that violates this idea, for the original Adaptive Path piece on Ajax. For this link, the tag ‘ajax’ is overwhelmingly #1, with 1171 occurrences from 2352 taggers. (Second place is ‘javascript’, with a mere 644 tags.) Yet over 800 people, more than a third of the total, tagged it before ‘ajax’ hit the #1 spot — it’s as if you can see Ajax becoming a real term as enough people read the article. The Ajax article may be a one off, or there may be some small but instructive number of links whose consensus view changes slowly, documenting the rise of some new concept.

This is a good example of how assigning meaning to a term, or a word, is a social activity, one that evolves over time. The importance of an article depends on how many people cite it, but people will start citing an article once other people have agreed that the article is important. I’m fairly sure this process of feedback will be found for any word, idea, or article that people have agreed is important, and in fact, the feedback itself is pretty much the same thing as social recognition of importance. (Obviously, for technical terms, only those with the technical skill to follow the conversation can agree or disagree about somethings importance.)

A very interesting conversation about the failures of crowd-sourcing (they are discussing the way images from the Library Of Congress (LOC) were tagged by users of Flickr):

This blog post caught my eye (hattip to george!):
“Lick This”: LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing

The author argues that finding good content in the user-generated comments, tags, and notes is like finding a needle in a haystack. Using an LOC photo, the author explains,

There are 20-30 notes on the photograph and not one contains useful historical information to give context or help us understand the photograph. Most are throw-away jokes or comments, “I love this fabric!” and “Lick this” (referring to the woman’s forehead!). Most of the rest of the notes refer to the woman’s appearance or the composition of the picture. Almost useful is a little nested debate about the authenticity of the photograph–how staged was it?–but the discussion is hard to floow, involving hovering the mouse over each box to see the comment.

The author, Larry Cebula. a Public Historian at Eastern Washington University and Assistant Digital Archivist at the Washington State Digital Archives, argues,

The notes are mostly smart-ass remarks, the comments are empty, the tags are idiosyncratic. The frustrating thing is that there really is some crowdsourced gold withing the flood of junk, such as the transcriptions of hand-lettered signs in the windows of the Brockton Enterprise newspaper office in this photo.

There follows a good discussion in the comments, so go check it out if this subject interests you.

I looked on the comments on some of the images, and I agree that there is a lot of waste. Some photos have 20 or more people who simply posted (on the photo itself) “Cool pix!”

For my part, I am a big believer in the potential of crowd sourcing, but I don’t see many sites capturing that potential. I think crowd sourcing works best when the crowd can be offered some kind of incentive, perhaps with a raffle, or a prize, or something free, or an outright offer of money. Some kind of incentive would, I think, raise the average quality of the responses.

David Griner has a list of problems for businesses to avoid when they start using social media (I assume he’s thinking of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. The only site he mentions, in the past tense, is MySpace). At first, these might sound like clever warnings:

1. Lust: Loving your customers is great, but take it slow.

2. Gluttony: Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

3. Greed: It’s hard to shake hands while you’re reaching for someone’s wallet.

4. Sloth: Always avoid the temptation to “set it and forget it.”

5. Wrath: There are a lot of people out there itching for a punch in the nose, but you’re not the one to give it to them.

6. Envy: Don’t be dissuaded by other people “doing it better than you.”

7. Pride: Stay humble, rock star.

Sadly, the post is devoid of any data suggesting that these bits of advice have the slightest validity. Rather, the advice is hopeful, but fact-free:

In the ribald days of 2006, a business would sign up on MySpace and then start “friending” everyone with a pulse. These days, lusting after fans like that will get you labeled as desperate — or even as a spammer. So keep it in your pants and truly get to know the first people who connect with your brand. In return, they might just love you for life.

I’ve written before of my efforts to help The Second Road with their marketing. We spent a lot of time trying to find a marketing firm that we could hire. We were disappointed by most of the folks we talked to. They were fuzzy. What we wanted was a scientific approach. If, for instance, we spent $100 buying an ad on Facebook, how many people would that bring to our site? What if instead we hired a well known blogger? Everything needs to be tried, using small amounts of money. We wanted research, well-tested solutions, or experiments where success and failure were clearly defined. Instead, we got a lot of mush about things that are difficult to measure, for instance, “We will influence the way opinion shapers think of your site”. Okay, but how to measure that? We could potentially measure how many times the site got mentioned on blogs, but how much of that could be traced back to a particular marketing effort? If there was an uptick in mentions on prominent blogs, was that because of the efforts we’d made over the previous 3 months, or was it because of the new marketing firm we just hired? How to measure?

Susan Payton’s advice was a bit of a shock to me. I was almost offended by her tone of “let’s ignore the facts and do this anyway.” Her argument for social media marketing was wholly faith-based:

I think we need to shift our thinking about marketing results in terms of having absolute control and ability to micromanage the results and just sit back and let it happen. You won’t see results overnight, but if you use social networking sites correctly and participate in the right conversations, you will see a positive change. You will see traffic to your site increase. You will see sales climb. Just relax and let it happen.

Let’s all take a deep breath and let out all those years of being control freaks, of needing to know exactly how everything will pan out. Marketing 2.0 is happening as we speak. There is no precedence set. We are making history with internet marketing and social media. Do you want to go along for the ride or sit this one out and regret it later?

I’m unwilling to have that kind of blind faith in a strategy that has never been tried before and, frankly, I have to question the reasonableness of anyone making such a suggestion. I need some data before walking down that road. Even a few success stories, however much over-hyped, would help to justify this strategy. But where are the great breakthroughs? What company can say “We made friends with our customers on Facebook and results were amazing! Sales doubled!”

I apologize for picking on David Griner. I’m sure he is a nice guy. But his post gives me a good starting point to repeat my concerns about hype regarding “social media marketing.” Griner is apparently in the marketing industry. His blog describes him thus; “David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie & Company. He’s also a contributor to Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com.”

What I feel is missing from some of Griner’s advice, and from the advice I’ve been hearing from other enthusiasts of social media marketing, is a sense of ROI, some concept that maybe the dollars might be better spent elsewhere. Consider this concluding bit from Griner:

Successful social media really is easier than you’d think. If you plan ahead, pace yourself and listen more than you talk, you’ll strike a chord with existing customers and potential fans alike.

Right, but is it cost effective? I’ve no doubt that a company can forge close relationships with a few hundred people on Facebook or Twitter, if it makes enough of an effort to do so. But will those few hundred people actually be worth the effort? I’d like to see a lot more information on this, detailed studies, before I’d trust this approach.

I disagree with this post by Susan Payton:

I think we need to shift our thinking about marketing results in terms of having absolute control and ability to micromanage the results and just sit back and let it happen. You won’t see results overnight, but if you use social networking sites correctly and participate in the right conversations, you will see a positive change. You will see traffic to your site increase. You will see sales climb. Just relax and let it happen.

Let’s all take a deep breath and let out all those years of being control freaks, of needing to know exactly how everything will pan out. Marketing 2.0 is happening as we speak. There is no precedence set. We are making history with internet marketing and social media. Do you want to go along for the ride or sit this one out and regret it later?

I am astonished by the attitude that Payton is expressing. Why are we suppose to have blind faith in social media? Why is it that any normal ad platform has to prove itself to us, but social media gets a free pass? If people are having trouble measuring the results of their social media efforts, maybe that’s because those efforts are worthless and need to be stopped?

One of my current clients has pages on MySpace and Facebook. They occasionally post news bulletins to both of them. They’ve tried to build up a network of friends on both. How much traffic do we see in the referers from either? Generally, we get zero a month, though sometimes we get 3 or 4. Therefore, I am strong advocate of abandoning both platforms. The return on investment is terrible. The time spent on those sites could be better spent elsewhere.

If you can’t measure a result, there is a good chance that you are wasting your money. Therefore, you should not spend money on this kind of media.

Sarah Lacy used LinkedIn to try to help a friends of her get a job. It occurs to her that the depression will be very good for LinkedIn:

In terms of ego and validation, I got the pride of knowing my network could help someone I care about. And not just help someone with something minor– help someone potentially find a new job. In this case she wasn’t laid off but, in an economy like this where hundreds of thousands are, survivor’s guilt runs high. Especially if you’ve been laid off before and viscerally remember that feeling. You want to be able to do something when you hear that kind of news, and LinkedIn offers that, whether it’s an introduction or just writing a recommendation for a laid-off friend. It was one of the first times an interaction with LinkedIn gave me that social media endorphin rush that I more commonly get with Twitter, blogging, Flickr or Facebook.