140Char

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?

Hello, Mr Plod!

Today I received an uninvited email from LinkedIn, and unlike most uninvited emails, it was actually useful. I generally regard LinkedIn as a internet-based protection racket - you get nothing for your money except avoiding a threat that wouldn’t be there without them. But today they may have turned themselves into the neighborhood “bobby” - alert and passing on information that keeps us ahead of the game.

LinkedIn got off its . . .

I have done some digging and it seems that I have received a weekly Digest Email on a Tuesday morning British Summer Time (GMT or near as damn-it). I will continue to get emails if anyone writes directly to me.

The weekly email is extra, and tells me whom of my contacts has updated their profile or asked a question. I am not sure if LinkedIn edits the list. I am not sure if they consolidate the information. Generally, updates are kept for 5 days and are limited to 15 entries. So possibly I will know what happens on every day except Tuesdays and Wednesdays (!) and if you happen to be in the top (?) bottom (?) 15 on the list!

I liked it though. It was nice to see at a glance who is doing what. It is nice to know whether I should take time to log in or not. It is nice to have a reminder that my profile should communicate to people (give some idea who should beat a path to my door). It was nice to have contacts’ questions and though I have a packed day, I thought I had specific expertise or contacts that might be useful and I fired off five pretty comprehensive answers.

So LinkedIn has put in a cheap service that

• Saves me keystrokes
• Acts as an alert
• Reminds me of the game (communicate, don’t dump)
• Lets me show off expertise and gain expertise by phrasing professional material in answer to different queries
• Builds the community by reinforcing my own contacts and prompting me to introduce people to each other

This is a brilliant example of smart social media design.

• Keep it quick
• Keep my attention
• Engage me in an interesting task
• Help me learn
• Welcome my interaction

And how is this related to 140 chars?

The email I received from LinkedIn is an email - nothing more. They could have sent it sooner.

I perceived it as more though. The email has a Twitter-like quality.

So what are the great attributes of Twitter?

Instant, easy, personal - yep those are the obvious surface features.

I also see INFRASTRUCTURE.

• It is Just In Time.

We flick a light switch. We use it when we want and for how long we want. We pay for what we use.

And we don’t have to be too bothered. At Bucks08 Media Camp, we talked about social media being infrastructure. Twitter is definitely infrastructure. Proof? Look at how incensed we get when Twitter fails. It is supposed to be like lights and water!

By sending me an email, LinkedIn transformed itself from the equivalent of generator in my back garden that I have to fuel with diesel from a jerry can to the national grid. A light switch! Quick and easy to use. Ignored when I don’t want it.

I am redundant!

It’s a funny idea that I need to be redundant to get a good service. I suspect marketing guys get this all muddled up! It is a matter of “levels of analysis”. I might come-and-go, but the “flock” or the “crowd” must be there for the system to work, and as I come-and-go as me, marketers still need to talk to me and make me happy and to achieve the crowd effect.

The right metrics though are not “click-through”. The national grid doesn’t try to persuade us to flick our light switches on and off! I did not have to answer any of the questions on LinkedIn. What matters is that somebody answers them! We need to generate a handful of good replies. That is the metric of interest.

I could continue with the grid metaphor but a pub works better. I want someone friendly to be in the pub when I go in. I don’t want to have to be there if somewhere else is more exciting. A nd I don’t want to talk to the same people every time. The pub has to attract just the right number of people to make it likely a good friendly crowd will pitch up so that a good friendly crowd pitches up!

If I switch back to the grid metaphor, the national grid doesn’t care when I switch on and off. But if something happens which will change the pattern of switching one and off across the country, such as the minute’s silence before Princess Diana’s funeral, then the engineers have to quickly re-envision the service. They need to redistribute the load fast because the pattern of need has changed.

The metric we need is a system metric. Can the system respond rapidly to demand at many different points (all unknown in detail) with just the right amount of impact - not too much and not too little! .

It is public.

Well, LinkedIn isn’t. It still runs on the club model - ownership, exclusivity, 1.0. At the moment I have to manage my network. It is akin to keeping candles in every room in case the power goes off. Or akin to having a back-up generator complete with jerry can of diesel.

If the network was fully public, how would I receive questions I am interested in? I don’t know but I bet someone figures that out quite fast.

Ideas?

It allows division of labor.

Flicking on the light switch is easy. Using a wall socket takes a little more thought. Using the fusebox is more complicated but hey, in this apartment at least, you don’t have to re-wire the fuse (been there, done that!). There is some gradation in skill but we get to the point that being a consumer requires little skill.

There is some heavy duty engineering and finance behind the light switch, but as consumers, we don’t need to know much about it to play our part.

It is sophisticated.

The engineering and finance behind infrastructure is heavy-duty. A lot of people who know a lot of deep stuff have to work together and the system is no longer transparent to us, or necessarily to them. The credit crunch tells it all. We need some smart legislators to be able to see ahead and see what is necessary to keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed!

Social media for politicians! Who is seriously onto this issue?

So that is my offering for the first part of this week.

• Through no action of mine, I am getting a useful email from LinkedIn.
• One small, cheap action on their part, seems to me to be a giant leap from a platform in the cost-of-doing-business park to a far more attractive platform like Twitter.
• And the transition helped me think through some of the key factors concerning social media as infrastructure (any more that I haven’t thought of?)

As managers of infrastructure, we will be

• Just-in-time - seen and not heard - doing well when we are invisible and cheap to the consumer
• Thinking about a system in which individual demand affects collective demand, and v.v.
• Managing a system that has capacity points - sizes that allow demand, financing and technology to be in balance
• In the public domain, therefore requiring political input and political output
• Some sort of futuring because both our technology and our needs change

And all of this out of one email from LinkedIn?

Twitter sets a good example. It looks frivolous. Quite often turning on my lights is frivolous.

What else out there could learn from Twitter?

[Well this post could be 140chars for a start!]

We’ve got a new section to highlight and collate all of the best case studies of business and enterprise using microblogging in one place, as well as in individual blog posts. As the list fills up, you’ll be able to see it all, here.

Starting off is an example of customer service on Twitter as David Cushman recently posted.

David tweeted about his problem signing up to Qik on his Nokia N73. He didn’t contact the company directly, and probably would have just given up if left to his own devices. But Jackie Danicki, Director of Marketing at Qik was monitoring what was being said, found the tweet, and also located David’s email address to contact him directly, as well as sending him an SMS with a relevant link. Which led to him posting in praise of the company even before a solution was provided to his problem.

One happy advocate blogging about his experience and sharing his recommendations on and offline before he’s even tried the product!