140Char

While I was offline and on holiday, I started thinking about permanence and the ‘half-life’ of content and ideas. Is print a better medium for archiving content, in the event all electronic systems are turned off or destroyed in a catastrophe? Or is the electronic medium far better for simply getting an idea into the world, where it may take on a life of it’s own?

Originally it was a comparison between print and blogging, but reading some recent posts from bloggers listing referrals, I noticed how many were crediting large numbers of referrals from Twitter as a direct result of friends and followers retweeting their messages.

That struck a chord, as I tend to be online between 9am and midnight (sometimes 1 or 2am) so I get to see various timezones conversing - and I wonder how much I miss when I’m sleeping or avoiding microblogging to concentrate on other tasks. Unless I set up RSS feeds for every possible keyword, and constantly trawl through archives, there’s always going to be a huge amount of content that is published when I’m not there to see it - and the same it true for almost everyone using microblogging.

Which is why microblogging is probably the best test of a concept or an idea. Not only do you have to fit the pitch into 140 characters, but for it to reach a significant number of relevant people around the globe it needs to be retweeted by a significant number - easy if you have thousands of followers, but unless you’re in the top few Tweeters, for example, it’s purely down to the strength of your idea.

That’s much different to blogging, as tools like RSS are effective at archiving days or weeks of content which can be scanned fairly quickly and efficiently. And it’s obviously different to the print mechanisms of old.

It’s another benefit of the microformat over the longform for getting quicker feedback and response on an idea - although I’d hesitate to drop an entire simply down to a lack of responses - simple requests for messages I’ve posted have had a response rate of around 8% of my followers within an hour or so, which is pretty damn impressive, but if the idea is relevant to the other 90% it might take a while to reach them!

Note: Thinking about it after finishing this post, there may be the subconcious influence of this post by Dave Cushman, regarding responses on Twitter and Focus Groups vs Communities of Purpose.

A couple of conversations on Twitter had me dreaming up a great Twitter experiment.

1. Organize two very large groups on Twitter and make sure they have very few common links at the outset.
2. Now give one group red shirts and other one blue shirts. Don’t tell the red shirts that the blue shirts exist, or v.v.
3. Then after a while, get some red shirts to follow blue shirts and v.v. - but don’t mention the shirts. You are the only person in the know!
4. Check how many red shirt people start to wear blue shirts, and v.v.

• Network theory suggests that we mimic what other people do, without realizing we are doing it. So red shirt wearers are likely to wear red shirts more and more often. As are blue shirt wearers.

• When we introduce red shirt wearers to blue shirt wearers, they will wear each others’ colors without thinking.

• Network theory also tells us that we are affected by what our friends’ friends do. We don’t need to know our friends’ friend either!

• So if some red shirts start talking to people who wear blue shirts, other red shirts might start wearing blue shirts.

It is fairly alarming that we are so easy to influence. But there are two sides to the coin. It not three!

• We influence back. if you want a tidy room, make it tidy! People who come in will be tidier than if their first look is an untidy room.

• We also have many influences competing for our attention.

I think the key is that we have to budget for competition. How much work do we have to do to win? And what will we do if we come second? Toby Moores, the CEO of Sleepy Dog, budgets one successful commercial idea out of 200. How well do we understand the processes of creativity, innovation and group influence? How can we give kids experience of the give-and-take of creativity, innovation and group decision making?

Any experiments for that?