But I have a different perspective, and believe that many brands (and companies) can succeed on Twitter without necessarily engaging in conversations, or being particularly active. Not only that, but I believe the hypothesis that customers necessarily want to be engaged in conversations with brands needs to be challenged, as I don’t think it’s true as a blanket statement.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on this recently, but today I’ll just provide a few different Twitter accounts that appear to be doing very well, in terms of followers, without engaging in conversations (or doing any of the other things most people are recommending they “should” do on Twitter).

@woot:  A quick glance at their Twitter page reveals they typically post once a day (occasionally 2 or 3 times). This post is a link to a daily deal. There is simply no conversation or two-way engagement. They have over 1.6 million followers (#90 overall, between Biz Stone and Penn Gillette), and have been listed 7,000 + times. This makes woot one of the most popular brand accounts on Twitter (out of companies that actually sell stuff).

@zappos: this account is operated by CEO Tony Hsieh, and Zappos is frequently mentioned as one of the leading companies in delivering compelling customer experiences, and engaging in social media. But if you look at his actual activity, there are few signs of conversation to be found. It’s mostly some quotes he finds interesting, a few links, and some seemingly random thoughts. He also doesn’t post that often – less than once a day. He has over 1.7 million followers (#72 overall, between inStyle and Serena Williams), and has been listed almost 10,000 times.

@mashable: Mashable is the online guide to social media. If anyone was to be using Twitter “correctly”, you think it would be them – and this account is run by Pete Cashmore, the CEO. It is popular – @mashable has over 2 million followers (#45 overall, between Pete Wentz and Mandy Moore), and has been listed almost 50,000 times. But again, just look at the activity – a continuous series of links to various articles. More active then the two examples above, yes – but conversational, absolutely not.

You might think I just cherry picked these examples, and that they are the exception to the rule. But I didn’t – there are many more examples where these came from. And as for the rule, well, I think the rule is wrong.

That social media can be used to engage in conversations is absolutely true, and many people and companies are doing that effectively. I don’t dispute that. But somewhere along the way, there seems to have been a near consensus emerge that:

a) two-way conversations is the only way to use Twitter.

b) two-way conversations is what every customer wants on Twitter.

I don’t believe it. The fact that so many people seem to be interested in so many accounts that do the exact opposite is rather telling on this front. And as more and more people engage on Twitter (and other platforms), and create more and more connections, with the potential for more and more messages, I truly believe we’re going to see more and more people realize that “conversations” isn’t what it’s all about.

My first issue is with the word now. From my perspective, the customer has always been in control – the fate of companies providing products and services in a capitalist economy is ultimately determined by what customers choose to buy. In turn, the analysis shifts towards social media somehow giving customers slightly more control than they had before – a small, but important, distinction.

The typical argument is that as customers have connected with each other through platforms like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, the opinions they share amongst themselves have increased in importance, while the typical “broadcast marketing” approaches have decreased in effectiveness. While I do believe there is some truth to this, there is another way to look at what’s happening.

For starters, if customers only wanted to hear each other’s opinions, they could do so without engaging companies at all – either in somewhat self-organizing fashion through Facebook and Twitter, or “neutral” services like Yelp. But many, many customers are also opting to directly connect with companies – liking, following, lurking in communities, etc. – through these very same platforms. In doing so, many are effectively asking companies to engage with them.

Second, being “in control” takes time and effort. I would argue that many customers may want to “take control” in relation to certain product and service decisions, for many others they are happy to be passive recipients of messages (and offers) from their preferred brands. For example, the #2 reason given for becoming a Facebook fan (based on a survey earlier this year) was to receive coupons. And while I don’t have time to go into it here, one of the consistent findings from my research is that customers like being “broadcast” to on social media more than many people think.

On a related point, I believe that many customers are being overwhelmed by all the brand-related conversations taking place. For example, many brands on Twitter now commonly send 30+ messages a day, responding to specific people. Many consider this to be engaging. But if you follow (say) 30 such brands, that’s over 900 messages a day – most of which will be of absolutely no interest to you. Perhaps the method will persist for many more years, but perhaps not.

Finally (at least for today), as “word of mouth” marketing has moved online, and more and more data is generated, it’s becoming ever easier for brands to monitor exactly what people are saying, thinking and feeling about various things. I personally believe that all this information points towards a world where many brands can be far more “in control” than they’ve ever been before.

Tying it all together, I’ve taken to asking what someone like Don Draper – the lead character on Mad Men – would think about the rise of social media if he was ported into 2010. Would he look at all the new tools and behaviors and say “wow, I can’t control anything here!” Or would he say “wow, I can influence, monitor and control things more than ever before!”

My sense is that it would be the latter – and many companies would be well served by taking a similar line of thinking. After all, to be in control implies having power; it is commonly said that knowledge is power; and all this information is giving companies more knowledge than ever before.

I’m currently reading Jaron Lanier’s manifesto called “you are not a gadget”. While I find myself nodding along with some parts, and occasionally shaking my head at others, my most common reaction to each chapter is that I’ll need several months of quiet reflection to even form a coherent opinion (which, based on what I think I’ve read, is part of the point of his book). It is unquestionably the most thought provoking body of text that I have read this year – and I hope to respond to various parts of it, if and when thoughts hit me, over the coming months.

The part I’ve been thinking about most today is “The transition” section, within the “what will money be?” chapter (page 106). The general idea is to allow people to earn from their “bits” of contributions, such as photos, music, or articles. It’s posed in response to his (very valid) concerned that society is losing its way as the value of “bits” people contribute trends towards zero in the marketplace, and all the rewards (if any) go to the people that aggregate them. If this continues, there will be fewer and fewer bits to aggregate, of worse and worse quality, in a continuous downward spiral that could have disastrous long-term consequences. He explains the consequences, and proposes a few ideas on how to avoid them – but you can read about those in the book.

Why I find this, (and Jaron’s book in general) so interesting is that it’s challenging the new orthodoxy of “the wisdom of mobs”, working in conjunction with powerful algorithms, is superior to the judgment and intelligence of individuals. At first glance, one my primary research areas – prosumer-driven innovation, or customer co-creation – we seem to be right in his line of fire. But as I’ve studied it over the years, my thinking on the subject lines up directly with Jaron more often than not (I think).

This research area was born out of the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. As the sub-title of the book is “how mass collaboration changes everything”, the idea is often viewed as synonymous with the “wisdom of crowds”. But I’ve went to great lengths over the years to explain how this common interpretation of this is often misguided. It’s often not about a “crowd” collaborating in any meaningful way; instead, it’s about finding the few uniquely qualified minds within the crowd that are both willing and able to make an important contribution. While not a prosumerism example per se, the first story in the book – GoldCorp – is a great example of this. Rob McEwen didn’t enable mass collaboration. He opened up the data about his property in hopes of finding those few people in the world that might know the best way to find the gold. That’s a very big difference.

Such contest models have their own problems built into them, as Lanier references regularly in his book. But at least they point towards some sort of financial compensation for the people that have the best “bits” to contribute, and have very little to do with the problem associated with the “wisdom of mobs.” This indicates a very different set of opportunities, and potential problems. The key challenge, then, is to adapt the model to instances where it’s not a “winner takes all” contest – one where a larger number of people can be rewarded for contributing “bits” to the creation of a new product or service.

I’ve been hypothesizing about this, and waiting for signs that it’s happening, for many years. While much of my research focus has recently been on marketing (which also puts me on the bad side of much of what Lanier talks about), my academic background is in economics – and I have a strong belief that financial compensation for contributors and creators is absolutely vital to the long-term success any prosumer-driven models. But examples of it actually working have been few and far between. That is why I’ve taken a relatively keen interest in Quirky – which I just recently discovered.

Quirky is a platform for social production, founded by Ben Kaufman. The core idea is fairly simple. If you have an idea for a new product, you can submit it to the site (for $99 – which presumably provides a decent “filter” for idea submissions). Each week, a winner is selected (through some combination of community votes and design team input). It then moves into the “influence” phase, where the community can weigh in on everything from specific product design to the logo representing it. Once this phase is completed, it’s handed over to Quirky’s industrial designers and mechanical engineers to create a 3D render. Next up is the pre-sell phase, where a minimum number of purchase commitments must be made before the company invests in moving it into production. If that threshold is met, it then moves into production – hopefully allowing many of the people to cash in.

Why I say “many” is that Quirky currently allocates 30% of revenue from direct sales, and 10% from indirect sales, to the community. What exactly the allocation will be is hard to say (and the company is likely still figuring out the best way to do it), but some “ingredients” include submitting the winning idea (or name, logo, etc.), making insightful comments, voting, rating, and committing to pre-sales. All of this activity is rolled up into an “influence percentage”, which is used to distribute the money. The rest goes to the company itself, which as I referenced above does a lot of the heavy lifting in actually turning an idea into a market-ready product.

Now whether Quirky itself will succeed, I (nor anyone, in my opinion) can really say. I think the biggest challenge comes in terms of scale. As one might expect, the examples provided on the site (to show how much money can be made) typically involve two key assumptions – lots of products are sold, and your individual influencer percentage is high. The end result is lots of money for your effort. Obviously not everyone’s influencer percentage can be high. As (hopefully, for the company) more and more people engage, each individual’s potential influencer percentage might decline further still (in relation to effort applied). If the percentages are small, the potential rewards are low – and thus much of the incentive to engage evaporates.

But at minimum, it’s an interesting idea, and I believe such experiments are critically important to the evolution of web enabled, and prosumer driven, business models. Someday, someone is going to figure it out. And what I find most intriguing is that, at its core, Quirky appears to be trying to find a way to reward individuals for their “bits” of contribution – which I think is absolutely key to making this web-enabled world work, and appears to be something that Lanier might approve of. But the process by which they are figuring out how to do it, which will likely involve layering some sort of algorithm on top of what looks like a “winner takes all” competition platform, seems to be tie directly to approaches he typically disproves of (or not – I’m sure there’s many nuances in the book I’ll have to re-read to capture).

So I’ll personally wait and see – and perhaps even engage in the community to get a real feel for how it works, and whether my own mind is uniquely qualified enough to add value anywhere. But in the end, I’m hoping both Lanier and Kaufman are right – there are ways to reward people for the bits they contribute, and this can be done within the context of a social production model.

The reason I believe this is fairly simple. When I think of the word “control”, I immediately think of the word “power”. When I think of “power”, I think of “knowledge” (as in the latter is the former). When I think of “knowledge”, I think of “information”. And when I think through what social media enables, from a marketing perspective, time and again I see better information, more knowledge, and more power. In turn, that looks like more control to me – rather than less.

I have more thoughts on this, but wanted to stop there and see if anyone believes this “customer is in control” argument, in relation to social media, might be wrong. And if you want to hear a few more of thoughts on these (and related) marketing subjects, check out my webinar on Tuesday.

While Twitter is a stand-alone company, the value of the service is heavily dependent on the large ecosystem of developers innovating on top of their API. Like Twitter itself, most of these developers took a “build the customer base first, worry about business models later” approach. “Later” is now here. As  everyone involved starts scrambling to try to make money, everyone almost invariably stumbles onto the word “advertising” as the solution. But no one’s quite sure how big the advertising pie will be, and Twitter itself needs to grab a pretty big piece of it. This is going to make it tricky to hold the ecosystem together.

While there were many signs of this coming through 2009, two particularly big ones popped up late in the year. The first was changes taking place with StockTwits, which described itself as “real investors providing real ideas in real time“, and had grown to become one of the most popular Twitter applications. As a TechCrunch article in September explained, StockTwits was evolving to create an entire back end independent of Twitter itself – “Yes, StockTwits is slowly breaking away from the service that inspired its name.” In turn, it would be reasonable for Twitter to think that an important partner might become a competitor, and others might follow.

The second was that Twitter itself was (finally) starting to innovate on top of their own platform. “Lists”, which were launched as a “great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts“, was one such example. Instead of just enabling people to share information, the company seemed to be making baby steps towards making it easier to sort through. If they continued down that path, it could eventually put them in direct competition with services like TweetDeck.

I was reminded of this when reading the recent Economist article called “Up for promotion – Twitter decides to sell advertising.” In paragraph seven, the issues I was pointing towards in #2 are made clear – it opens with the sentence “A few of these may compete with offerings from developers.” It mentions how people at Chirp (Twitter’s first developer conference) were a little upset about Twitter’s purchase of Atebits (the maker of Tweeties), and that “makers of rival programs complain that Twitter is now competing with them.” A developer is quoted saying that “the way they have done this is scary” – and many would argue he has a right to be scared. A New York Times article on the same subject hit on the same themes and arguments.

However, as #1 pointed to, Twitter needs to be a little scared itself, as developers might just shift their attention away from the platform (particularly if they feel threatened), perhaps taking current users, and ideas for new innovations, with them. More to the point, they need to make strategic choices about what should be created on the platform, and what should be left to the ecosystem – a message Twitter’s CEO is clearly sending to developers now. With quotes like “(there are also) features built for Twitter that maybe only exist in client applications, and we’re going to build them in because they should be there“, it’s pretty clear some nifty innovators are going to be put out of business by the platform they innovated on top of, as Twitter tries to find find the appropriate balance.

Such challenges are not new in the competitive collaborative platform space. Companies like YouTube and Ning have had similar issues pop up now and again, and we expect to see such tensions arise far more in the future. How exactly it will play out is anybody’s guess. But as more and more companies move to platform-driven models to derive competitive advantage, what happens here is worth paying attention to.

One of the more important lessons may end up being that the owner of a given platform (or, say, community) that has a clear business model from the outset, and allows ecosystem partners to innovate around it, instead of plugging holes in the core offering, is more likely to build a sustainable ecosystem model. In addition to the quotes above, Fred Wilson, a long-time Twitter Board Member, had a recent blog post that highlights the need for Twitter to (belatedly) move in this direction. In the future, companies that, you know, already make money, might be in a better position to create competitive collaborative platform strategies than those starting from scratch.

On the flip side, perhaps a “winner takes all” model will take hold here – where the best innovators are acquired (maintaining the incentive for developers to engage) and integrated into the main platform, and the rest wither away and die. We see more and more of this type of rewards distribution popping up all over the web, and while it may not seem “fair” to everyone, I think it’s a definite possibility. I don’t know – but with pressure on to find a business model that validates all the venture capital money that has flowed in, I have a feeling Twitter will soon find out.

Either way, there’s actually another interesting lesson in here worth repeating. Many people are expressing “surprise” and “shock” at these latest Twitter developments. They shouldn’t be. Everyone knew Twitter had to eventually find a business model, and little signs have been popping up to point in this direction for quite some time. If you looked carefully at what Twitter (and key partners) were doing, and thought about the challenges they were facing, you didn’t have to wait for the CEO to tell you this was coming.

To provide some context, one of the big research projects we’re working on in our Marketing program is called The incredibly shrinking marcom expense line. The basic idea is that by enabling, among other things, ambient intimacy, social media is pointing towards a future where marketers can shrink their marcom costs, while at least maintaining current levels of impact. Facebook fan pages, twitter, online communities, and newer services like Yelp all play a hand in this.

In the Nokia presentation, slide 28 starts out by outlining three different ways to optimize your presence in the ecosystem – SEO, SEM, and SMO (search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media optimization). It then quickly points out that less than 30% of this is “bought media” – the SEM part. 70% of engagement comes from the other two – 40% SEO, 30% SMO. The first is what they call “own media”; the second is “earned media”.

I really like this idea of “earned media” – and how it’s distinguished from the paid part of ecosystem presence strategies in particular. As referenced earlier, I disagree with the blanket statement that “earned media” is all about conversations – in my mind, it’s all about earning the right to be within an individual person’s ambient network, which is based on offering them what they want (which may or may not be conversations). But the visual presented on slide 39 – where “bought media” shrinks, and “earned media” dramatically increases in the future – is the right message.

Once people start thinking this way, I believe my explanation of why “nothing is holding social network advertising back” becomes clearer. The conversation about approaches to marketing has long been dominated by a spend-centric point of view (i.e. if you don’t spend much on social media, it must not matter). In this world of “earned media”, marcom spend can indeed be low – and many things have no direct costs associated with them. But, the impact can be great – if you earn the right to make the proper connections.

Given the questions I’ve received about it, that I’ve worked with Don Tapscott et al on a number of things around “growing up digital”, and just general parental concern, I’ve spent a lot of time watching (and helping) my daughter use  it, and thinking about how it might impact how she learns. In general, I think it’s an extremely positive thing – and while much of the stuff I mention below might seem rather simple and obvious (particularly to other iPhone users), I believe they are worthy of discussion – and might point towards how education itself should change in the future.

Obviously, part of the story is that she is going to grow up in a digital world – and being comfortable with technology is going to help in that regard. But that’s not the first thing I focus on. What I tend to hear from skeptics is that they don’t want their kids “playing virtual games” – they’d rather have them building their skills and imagination with real world stuff- building blocks, puzzles, etc. My response is that obviously I want my daughter doing that too – but I find that the touch-screen interface on the iPhone actually helps her in this regard.

The most obvious example of this is what she’s chosen as her favorite app – ShapeBuilder. When I downloaded it however many months ago, she was at a point where she was good at basic puzzles (i.e. put the circle in the circle, etc.), but was having trouble with the harder ones (i.e. trying to get six contoured pieces into place to create something). And of course, since each puzzle costs a fair bit of money, she had relatively limited selection. Shapebuilder has many puzzles, and cost a buck or two – but that is only part of the story here.

She took to Shapebuilder like a duck to water. On the right hand side of the screen, there is an outline of an image, “broken” up into the many pieces that compose it. On the left are the pieces. Importantly, none of them rotate – they just need to be slid into place- which makes it a tad easier than real-world equivalents. And it doesn’t appear she has to get them in exactly the right place – get them close, and they “pop” in (and stay there – also important). When all the pieces get in their proper places, the outline instantly transforms into a “real” picture of something (say, a cow), and the word for it appears (and is said). She can then go onto the next one – and there are many of them.

In turn, I see it as a middle step between the basic “real” puzzles, and the slightly harder ones – she learns important parts of puzzle building I can now see her apply to real ones, in a game she finds very entertaining, with tons of variety, that cost me next to nothing, and doesn’t require clean-up (score!).

That’s just one example, but I think it’s an important one. Here’s her other favorite “games” (and if anyone would like to recommend some new ones, I’m all ears):

First Words Deluxe. Shares some similar properties with ShapeBuilder, but for words. She picks a category, and at the top there is a word, with boxes for each letter (with the actual letter shaded in behind). The letters to make the word – i.e. ” p p y u p” for puppy are below. Each time she touches one, the game says the letter, and when she slides it close to the right spot it stays there. Once the word is formed, the game spells out the word, then says it, an there’s a bit of animation around an image associated with it. In my mind, that has to help her learn words – and to spell. Think it was $1.99, which I’m considering a good investment.

The Toddler Teasers series. I’ve just downloaded a few more of these, but she’s been playing the “shapes” one for awhile. A bunch of shapes appear on the screen, the game says (and has written down) something like “touch the star”. If she touches the wrong one, it vanishes. When she gets it right, the game cheers, the shape flies around, and you go onto the next one. Every 4 or so, she earns a “sticker”, she can put on her sticker page. Again, I think it’s fair to say this helps her learn shapes and words in a fun way (though I didn’t think so at first. After a while, she was always getting them wrong. But then I realized it wasn’t random – she was always picking the right one last. Then one day I noticed when she picks which color to use for play-doh, she does it through a process of elimination – i.e. “not blue! not green! not pink! YELLLLLOWWWW! – and she does the same on the game). $0.99 each I think.

Memory Pro (free). Very simple – classic game of memory. 12 tiles (in the small version), 6 animals, match them up. Again, hard to see how playing this many times can’t help with improving memory and matching skills – and it’s a clear case of where not having the “set-up” time helps (she’ll play this more than the equivalent using “real” matching tiles, which she’s also getting much better at… because of the game, in my opinion).

Five monkeys. One of her favorite songs (I’ve probably sang it to her 500 times by now), but on the iPhone. I find this cool because it has three variations of the song (country, rock, and pop) to help show different musical styles; she has control of it (the monkeys only fall off the bed when she touches them); and there are a variety of other ways she can interact with it (stop/ go button, making the cat run out of the room, etc.). Again, it doesn’t mean I don’t sing it to her anymore – but it seems like a nice addition to that.

Sneezies Light. So it actually took her awhile to learn to stick to her own page, and I’d downloaded this to test and she “stole it”. Less obvious educational value, but I do think there’s some there. The basic idea is there’s a bunch of little critters on the screen. Touch one, it sneezes and blows up – and if the sneeze touches another critter, it does the same, etc. Goal is to make as many disappear as possible. She loves it – and the cause and effect, coupled with learning some patience around waiting for them to get close together, seems useful.

There are more, but I’ll end it there today. In short, I’m amazed when I watch my daughter use the iPhone, and really think it’s helping her learn many important things – particularly as the touch screen interface lies somewhere between the real and “traditional” virtual worlds. In total, I think I’ve invested about $10 in all the apps for her combined – or less than almost any single toy out there. And as she grows, I see so much more potential – such as downloading stories to be read in a language I can’t personally speak, but we want her to learn. Every time I look at that device, I think of different ways it could improve her education in a variety of ways.

And of course, partially since I can’t yet be 100% confident that she won’t “accidently” hit the phone button and call some of daddy’s colleagues, I’m close to her – watching, helping, talking about what she’s doing – the entire time, which most parents would agree is what matters the most.

Groupon.com – a web 2.0 version of collective buying power, where local merchants offer up special deals so long as enough people sign up for them- wasn’t what the founders originally envisioned. They launched a site called “The Point”, where groups of people could form around specific causes and drive social change. Many of the people that came to the site seemed more interested in getting group discounts on products and services. Seeing the opportunity, Groupon was launched, and from a dead start in August the company now has a top-2000 rating on Alexa, is expanding rapidly, and reports to already be profitable. In short, the future is bright.

City Streets was a online version of the classic Monopoly game that Hasbro developed as a marketing tool. It absolutely exploded in popularity – 1.5 million registered players by November 2009, and 1.5 billion page views, made it the 12th most popular massively multi player online game on the web. Amazingly, it did so without incurring any direct marketing costs, and benefited from – among other things – some very engaged prosumers helping them co-create value. However, the future here isn’t so bright – Hasbro shut it down.You can read why, from their perspective, on the site.

Now obviously the two stories come from very different starting points – notably, one company was launching an entirely new business, while the other had a legacy business model to consider. But it’s fair to say that, we believe, this difference is not enough to explain a way the different responses. In both cases, a surprising new business opportunity emerged that the company didn’t originally envision, as the customers led the company towards the type of experience they wanted. In both cases, signs were everywhere that a lot of money could be made (in Hasbro’s case, the multi-billion dollar online game business is kind of flashing in the background here). But in only one case did something good come from it.

That’s a shame. Without getting into all the reasons why, it’s important to remember that when you ask your customers to dance, let them lead – because they might just teach you an interesting new routine that many of their friends enjoying doing as well.

The first clue that something is off comes from the chart they provided. True, when asked whom do you trust as a credible source of information about a company, friends / peers dropped from 45% to 25% (from 2008 to 2010). However, trust in other sources – TV news, radio news, and newspapers – dropped by almost the exact same proportion, from almost the exact same base (i.e. newspapers appear to have dropped from 46% to 26%, for example). The article gets around to mentioning this, but not until the main message they are trying to send has been established.

This indicates two things to me. One, the article deliberately chose to focus on the one part of the story that seemed most provocative – always suspicious. Two, that the question being used does not appear particularly good at distinguishing trust levels between different channels, in terms of marketing. Setting the 2010 data to the side, there is a lot of data out there indicating that tells a very different story than the 2008 baseline (and interpretation) presented. Commenter Kevin pointed towards one such study, from Nielsen, that showed 90% of online customers either completely or somewhat trusted recommendations from people they know. The importance of “recommend to a friend” has been well established, and validated, for many years. But I’ll come back to that in a minute.

A second clue was the interpretation of the quote provided by Richard Edelman himself – that “the lesson for marketers is consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it.” That type of message could be viewed as great news for people in the advertising business, who can tell clients they need to spend money everywhere to get a message through (cha-ching!). I don’t buy it. My main interpretation of the chart is that it’s very, very likely that many, many customers indicated they didn’t trust any source, in relation to the given question. Hitting these people with messages from many sources they deem uncredible, and expecting that to turn into a message that they trust, is a bit of a stretch.

A third clue is that the chart provided is primarily focused on news sources (i.e. it’s “radio news”, not “radio”), while the discussion is primarily marketing focused. I think there’s a major disconnect there, which ties into some of the discussion above.

I then thought a bit about how I would respond to the given question – and I realized I’d probably fall in the “not trusting any source” camp. But it’s not because I don’t trust opinions and recommendations from friends and peers – it’s because the question is too generic, and notably I don’t really associate it with marketing and purchasing decisions. The reason is simple – while I may know a fair number of people, most of them are fairly busy. If I want “information on a company”  – a very generic request – that I pick out of thin air, I can’t exactly expect them to have it. It’s also likely that what they know, or could find, would come from the company itself (directly or indirectly). In my opinion, the link between this question, and what marketers should be thinking about, is relatively weak.

This led me to a couple more thoughts that I think need to be taken into account here – from a marketing perspective.

First, let’s start from a different question – Who knows you the best? - and provide the same list of options. I would bet my retirement fund on friends / peers winning this contest, and that if someone chose “radio” it’s unlikely you’d let them in your house. I’d also be willing to assert, with a high degree of confidence, that there are many situations where people trust messages, and recommendations, from this group of people over ads on TV, radio, and newspapers – even though this article would have you think differently. I know that seems like a very simple and obvious point, but it seems like it needs to be made here.

Second, take a context specific approach – and think about a question that more closely ties to influence in relation to marketing, or a specific purchasing decision. For example, “who do you trust to help pick a movie?”, or “who do you trust to help you find new fashions?”. It’s very likely that for any question that ties to personal taste, style, etc., the influence of peer recommendations is important. In other words, I many not trust them as a source of information “on a company” , but I will trust them as a source of information for a specific product or service, in a specific context, in relation to me.

Third, such questions need to account for different platforms that are emerging to influence purchasing decisions – particularly the ones that consolidate numerous different opinions (think Flikster, Yelp, etc.). I might not trust any single individual on there (and thus claim not to trust them in response to a generic question), but I may trust their collective opinion if the sample size is large enough, or even a specific individual’s opinion if (say) their reputation score is high enough. Very hard to tease out of a survey – but very important.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Overall, I think there are quite a few issues with what this article presents, and how it is interpreted. Did I miss any big ones – or do you think I’m wrong?

In other words, the company takes a mixture of structured and unstructured data (including 150,000 + stories a day), applies an algorithm to it, and comes up with a single score that ranks the potential of each start-up they look at (40,000 and counting).

I have no clue how good it actually is right now (if anyone could let me know that would be great), but at minimum I think it’s a very cool idea. And I’m particularly intrigued by the idea that such an approach could be applied within a big enterprise to assess the potential of various ongoing projects.

Think about it: companies have (or should have) far more structured data about their own employees than YouNoodle has on start-ups; the unstructured data on the web is open to them as well. Now imagine if a company was using all the collaborative platform tools that are potentially at their disposal in order to know what people are working on, have worked on, how they’re connected together, etc. Might there be a way to take all of that information, and use it to come up with a per-project “YouNoodle Score”? And if there was, could you imagine how valuable that might be?

So at a high level, the major difference between the two is simple. The core of Yelp’s competitive advantage is it’s community of contributors; the core of Milo’s competitive advantage is driven by it’s inventory data. Both, of course, help people find products or services to purchase in their local area. My question to wikinomics readers is simple – given the option, which of the two would you prefer to own – and why? I’ve got a few of my own ideas on this, but would like to hear what other people think first…

There are a lot of reasons for this success – but the one I want to focus on today is around the strategic use of purchasing thresholds. Like Woot.com, Groupon.com applies a maximum threshold to create urgency for customers – buy now before it’s too late! But the more interesting thing Groupon does is use minimum thresholds - the offer is only valid if enough people sign up.

There are two things that make this interesting. The first, and more obvious, ties to viral marketing. It’s typically hard for a company to “make” a marketing message, or sales offer, go viral. But by putting a minimum threshold on the offer (i.e. only valid if 50 people sign up), Groupon creates a natural incentive for interested customers to promote the offer through Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, and other channels.

The second ties to the ability to test price discrimination strategies. In these early days, Groupon members represent new customers for most merchants using the platform. In a typical case, if a company wants to test offering a discount to draw in new customers, they do so rather blindly. If (say) only 2 people take you up on the offer, it probably wasn’t worth the effort – let alone the cost if you have to communicate the message through traditional media channels. The minimum threshold gets around this – merchants can select whatever price / quantity combination makes sense for them, and walk away (without paying a penny) if the threshold isn’t met.

There are many other interesting aspects of the Groupon story I’ve been following in our research (you can read about a couple of other companies I’ve been watching closely here), as well as interesting challenges and opportunities the company will soon have to deal with. Given that Groupon has been so successful in using the Web 2.0 to create business around collective buying (while hardly being the first to have tried), they are definitely worth paying attention to.

The first answer I usually get is in relation to Twitter itself. It tends to go something like “Well duh, if you’ve only got 140 characters to create a message in, a service to shorten URLs helps save you space.”

But wouldn’t something like a hyperlink be better for that? Think about it – most people know what hyperlinks are (and if you don’t, click on that underlined thing to both experience one and read about it). Anyone that’s ever written on a blog knows exactly how easy they are to create – press that little button that looks like the link in a chain, put in the URL, press a button and the text on the screen (usually) turns blue with a line under it. And if my math is correct, that process takes up exactly zero characters. So aren’t URL shorteners a step backwards in terms of saving space?

This question has bounced around in my head for awhile. I was reminded of it when I read the TechCrunch article about Bit.ly getting Fu.kd (yup, I was right – zero characters). Everyone’s getting in the game. The winner will be the one with the most unified view of all the data behind the links. But the question still nibbles in my mind – isn’t there a way to get all this data, and send all these tweets and other messages, using some kind of hyperlink?

I’m assuming that I’m just missing something here. What is it exactly? Something around data transmission? Certain technology interfaces?

This is obviously another indicator of popularity – the more lists you are on, the more popular you probably are. In turn, one would guess that in most cases there is a high correlation between how many followers an account has, and how many lists they are on. While I don’t have the numbers to back it up, overall I think this is generally true. But I found one particularly interesting anomaly that I wanted to highlight.

The bio for @Agent_M is “editor for Marvel.com. Writer, blogger, loves tacos, tattoos, comics…”. The bio for @Marvel is “the official Twitter for Marvel Comics, Movies, Games and More.” So one account is thoughts from a Marvel editor, while the other is generally content from Marvel itself. Here are the relevant follower and list numbers (as of last week):

@Agent_M: 1.4 million followers, 1,234 lists

@Marvel: 43,000 followers, 1,467 lists

So if you look at straight follower counts, @Agent_M (the editor) is roughly 30 times more popular than @Marvel – an interesting story unto itself. But if you look at the number of times listed, @Marvel is actually a bit more popular. Looking at it another way, divide lists Marvel is on by total followers you get 3.4%; for Agent_M you get 0.1%.

That’s a huge difference. The question I have for Wikinomics readers is why is that – and what does it mean?

Alice.com is a relatively new start-up that might represent a step in that direction. Originally profiled in June by TechCrunch, the company is hoping to do to “home essentials” shopping what the likes of Amazon (et al) have done to books, clothing, shoes and electronics. The basic value proposition is buying through the site instead of trudging to the store. And they try to add value by “tracking” what you are running low on and sending reminders, as well as finding coupons and deals. Here’s a quote from the CEO summarizing what they’re trying to do:

“We have been extremely pleased with the reception that the Alice.com platform has received in the marketplace from both consumers and manufacturers alike. Direct to consumer sales by manufacturers is a growing trend online, and the Alice.com platform is helping the CPG industry open up a direct channel to its mainstream consumer. It’s a win-win that brings great value to the end consumer, and critical consumer relationships and insights to the manufacturer.” - Brian Wiegand, CEO.

The company has now secured a second round of financing, which they hope to use to bring companies like P&G on board. The big question I have is whether, if they succeed, this development will help consumer brands or hurt them.

The reason is simple. While such intermediaries might help the manufacturers fight back against private label goods (and the retailers behind them) in the short-term, in the long-term such sites might actually increase commoditization pressures. If customers become hooked on coupons and deals, margins could easily be challenged – and with the site offering to crawl the web and automatically apply discounts, this could turn into a real issue. They also take a page out of Progressive Insurance’s book, and provide real-time price comparisons across a variety of sites – which should also drive down prices. And if they use ranking and ratings from other customers (akin to what Amazon does), it may  be even more difficult to differentiate yourself among (say) the 86 different types of bathroom paper on offer.

But on the other side, there is the potential to capture a lot more margin here – if Alice.com’s business model works. Right now, Alice.com takes no retail margin whatsoever – which is how they can claim to be a “direct channel”. Instead, they plan to support their entire business through advertising – ads on the site, and a variety of ways to provide samples and coupons. If it works I could see how that would be a boon for retailers- but trying to support an entire logistics infrastructure (warehousing, all the e-commerce, and free shipping) based on ad revenue alone might not add up.

But if it works, it could truly be a “game changer” – representing a new type of intermediary in retail, stripping out an enormous and costly infrastructure while supporting itself through advertising and some sort of data ownership (while allowing a lot more data to flow directly to the manufacturer). This will be particularly true if we ever get to the magical place where the “refrigerator (etc.) talks to your PC” – allowing for real monitoring of when certain products get low.

So it will be an interesting one to watch – particularly from the perspective of the CPGs themselves. One wonders if one of the ways to fight back against pricing and commoditization pressures here is having one company – say P&G – provide certain customers with all their household needs, providing some form of additional value that goes beyond simply saving money.

I continue to follow Motley Fool closely, and wanted to point readers towards a recent interview (on Forbes) with co-founder Tom Gardner. There are three particular elements I believe should be interesting to Wikinomics readers – their community approach to developing investment ideas (which started in 1994), the meritocratic approach to their Caps community (as opposed to a democracy or “pure” wisdom of crowds), and the importance of transparency.

The first comes in response to the third question, which was focused on what distinguishes them from their competitors. Key quote:

“…we brought that subject to the Internet in 1994 and we did so by basically saying, “We want to hear your ideas. We want to talk together. We want to learn together.” And we’ve ended up attracting a lot of very bright minds to The Motley Fool.”

The meritocratic approach is described in detail on the second page. There’s interesting comments riddled throughout his response, including the fact that not only does the bottom 25% have no influence on rankings, they thought of making them a negative indicator before deciding that was too mean. But the key quote for me was:

“The difference for CAPS is it’s actually wisdom in the crowds because it’s a meritocracy. It’s not one person, one vote. We’re weighting it toward the better players. So the system can’t really be gamed. And what I’ve learned is that top quintile is very much worth studying. I mean, our five-star stocks have dramatically outperformed the market. One-star stocks have dramatically lost to the market. And so I take the five-star rating on our CAPS system quite seriously.”

Finally, the issue of transparency comes up towards the end of the second page. Key quote:

“So, transparency, even if we didn’t believe in it, the very nature of having an open community, which must be a shock to Wall Street system, the idea that your customers can talk to each other, and you actually want them to do so. It’s, we can’t hide, and we don’t want to hide.”

There are many other interesting tidbits riddled throughout the interview, so I strongly recommend Wikinomics readers take a look – particularly if they have an interest in investing.

However, this approach is far from perfect. One of the major reasons is that the increased transparency helps bring out “the truth” a little bit, but there are many things that people opt not to share openly about themselves. And it got me thinking whether the job search process could learn a little something from what’s happening with the online dating scene – because there are a lot of interesting similarities.

Sites like Match.com were / are roughly the equivalent of Monster.com. Sites like Facebook, one can argue, are to Match.com what LinkedIn is to Monster.com – lots of people can use it to find / filter potential dates through their network of acquaintances (which is often seen as a superior method). But there is also a very successful site called eHarmony – where users answer hundreds of different questions, and based on these responses are matched up with people that are most likely to be similar.

The closest thing I’ve experienced to this in job searches is various tests and psychological profiles I’ve filled out when applying for various jobs – from trying to become a cashier at a large retail chain in my youth right through to more recent times. But in each case, this was a very one-way process – and I had a general idea of which types of responses the company was looking for.

So what if you took that to the next level – and tweaked it a bit. Imagine one central site, where every worker answered a detailed questionairre about themselves. But instead of having companies be able to peruse the results, let’s say each worker also provided details on where they’d worked in the past, in which roles, and how their experience was. And maybe you throw in companies defining (in detail, but “secretly”) which attributes they believed were most important for filling a certain role. Couldn’t all that information be combined to create a reasonably accurate prediction of which person was best suited for which role?

Now (of course) I’m not the first person to think of this by any stretch of the imagination. A quick search of “eHarmony job search” points me to a 2008 mashable article about a company called realmatch, which appears to be trying to do something like this. Other posts from 2008 point towards upstarts like itzbig, climber, and jobfox attempting to do the same thing. But none of them (according to Alexa) are anywhere near Monster.com in terms of traffic rankings (though JobFox does seem to be showing steady growth).

Now I haven’t actually tried any of these, but my sense from looking at each one is that one big piece of information is missing. Each seems to follow the model of companies saying what they want, and individuals filling out surveys to indicate what they’re looking for. I imagine a lot of people fill out these surveys trying to predict exactly what the companies are saying they want – focusing on opportunity rather than accuracy.

In turn, I personally believe the critical piece of missing information is a feedback from other people that have, or are, working for the company (in the same, or similar type, roles). This would help “balance the playing field” here – and by having a more “realistic” explanation of what’s required / what type of people are suited, individual applicants would have an increased incentive to tell the truth.

Of course the nuts and bolts of making it work would be hard – particularly since incredible scale would likely be required. But my hunch is that job matching sites are going to continue to evolve, on a lagged time line, in somewhat similar fashion to the online dating platforms. And the company that figures out how to best adapt the eHarmony model may well be the one that figures out how to bring in that additional data set.

If you look at the last few years, one of the most important developments is that various social media tools are allowing brands to connect with customers directly, for free – and that many customers want them to do just that. Unlike traditional mediums, brands can know exactly who they are connecting with, and as pervasive personal identity continues to evolve this will only become more true. It’s ever easier to measure impact directly. Toss in the benefits of location-based information, the evolution of the intention economy (where customers directly express what they want, allowing brands – and others – to respond), pay-for-performance campaigns, the ease at which messages go viral, the proliferation of ways to make customer connections, and the benefits of having “prosumers” do everything from provide information to each other make commercials on the cheap – to me, it all looks like it’s pointing to a structural decline in ad spend.

But that doesn’t necessarily meaning that the impact of advertising will diminish anytime soon. If anything, I expect that it will probably increase - but companies, on aggregate, won’t have to pay as much for it. That’s a winning combination. But there is a counteracting trend as well – tied to the end of the Pepsi statement of “doesn’t get caught up in trying to make everyone like it.” As all these tools evolve, transparency increases – and the truth matters ever more. If a company is not good at what they do, they will likely be in more trouble than ever – but if they are good at what they do, they’ll be better off then ever before. Because in most cases, you can’t make people say they like it – they either like it or they don’t.

One particularly interesting area to watch on this will be in relation to private label goods in retail stores. As the recession took hold, there was the predictable increase in demand for cheaper, private label goods – and in fairness many of them have been rapidly increasing in quality as well. While I can’t find the link, it was this challenge that was featured in an Economist article about P&G about a month ago, as they sought to counteract the private label trend.

One part of this was revisiting selling directly over the Internet – a now “old” strategy that I also think will become “new” again for many manufacturers that have avoided it up until now. But if you look at their use of Innocentive (improved efficiency AND innovation for their R&D), and perhaps a structural decline in advertising spend, there’s a reasonable case to be made that much of the price advantage that private label goods have can be eroded. And from my experience, and I think this isn’t just an advertising-brainwashed brain speaking, most branded products remain superior to their private label counterparts. So long as that is true, social media (et all) should help that message get out – much cheaper than before. And for a company that spends over $3.5 billion a year on advertising while banking about $11 billion in profit annually, that (again) could be a great thing…

For those that may not recall, Clay came up with a pretty cool angle in relation to the Architecture of Participation (you can read a “lightly edited” transcript of a speech describing it here). The underlying argument was that just like gin was the critical technology of the industrial revolution (the transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden people needed to get drunk to cope), the sitcom was the critical technology of the 20th century (the increase in free time was so sudden people filled it with TV shows).

From that base, he went on to explain that we’re now waking up from this collective bender, and the “cognitive surplus” wasted on watching television can be put to better uses in a new Architecture of Participation. So, as the argument goes, if you wonder where people find the time to make an edit on Wikipedia, it’s probably from taking it away from all that time wasted watching Gilligan et al. In this argument, doing “something” – no matter how trivial it may sound (see: LOLcats) – is better than doing “nothing”.

So the question I’ve been struggling with is how the use of social media is playing into this cognitive surplus argument. While social media is often seen as synonymous with the age of participation, as I’ve argued before (see here and here), in many cases people are using as a new medium to passively absorb content – often in bite sized pieces. While a few people get busy contributing, co-creating, etc., I believe many more don’t. And one might argue that when it comes to the passive absorption of content, social media actually represents a step backwards in human development – we get smaller and smaller bits faster and faster, at the expense of bigger experiences that take more time to develop and absorb.

Now perhaps this is just part of a still evolving process that remains in its early days – over time we’ll all figure out how to “better” deploy or cognitive surplus away from activities that waste time. But perhaps many of us won’t – and the reality is that many (and perhaps most) people don’t want to use their cognitive surplus for more valuable activities.

I often think about this around 9 pm each night. You see, I get up around 6 am to start my day. The bulk of daylight hours are spent at work (and commuting back and forth), and then the bulk of the remainder is spent with my daughter. Once she’s asleep, the last thing I generally want to do is participate in anything. I’ve been up and active for 15 hours, I’m tired, and I just want to relax – watch TV, read something, whatever.

Now I’m lucky in that throughout the day, I have the opportunity to engage with social media in a variety of different ways – one of the perks of the type of job that I have. So I can blog, tweet, comment, offer up ideas, and all kinds of stuff like that. But I know many people who work in jobs that don’t allow that – not because the workplace rules are too rigid, but because the demands of their jobs keep them acutely focused on the task at hand. Teachers, doctors, nurses, accountants, senior executives, small business owners, carpenters, etc.  They don’t have a lot of free time throughout the day (noting that many do use social media as part of their job in one way or another, which I’m excluding from the “cognitive surplus” discussion) and they have similar demands on their time at home. If I ask them if they’d like to co-create something at the end of their long day, they might just punch me in the face.

These people do use social media during their “down time” though. But as I informally survey them, a lot of the activity is closer to the passive, “wasting time” side of the fence that’s not that dissimilar from watching TV. But instead of fully developed stories and plot lines, it’s often sifting through a collection of short messages, silly games, and the like. And it leaves me wondering whether how many of us use or “cognitive surplus” is really going to change, and if so whether it will end up being for the better. Really not sure.

While we haven’t had time to get into much of the analysis yet, I think we’ll have a lot to work with – the popularity of different team accounts do vary widely.  Using simple follower counts as a starting point (we’re working on a “fan score” to index these I’ll talk about another time, but the basic idea is to account for the fact small market teams should naturally have a smaller audience), here’s the raw statistics on a 29 team sample (Golden State was excluded do to lack of use) as of August 12th:

• Average number of followers: 49,877
• Median number of followers: 7,871
• Lowest number of followers: 2,921
• Highest number of followers: 782,019 (has since grown to 875,510 and counting)

Those that remember being in stats 101 may note that the massive difference between the average and the median implies a skewed distribution – which is absolutely the case here. Of the 29 teams in the sample, 27 of them had less than 20,300 followers. The top two had 431,920 and 782,109 – or twenty to forty times more than the third place team. That seems like a difference with exploring.

These top two teams are… The L.A Lakers and The Orlando Magic. Notably, these are the two teams that made the NBA finals. Thus, we conclude that being active on Twitter means your team will win . Just kidding of course – but this is going to be an interesting thing to dig into. While intuitively it makes sense that the more successful teams will be more popular (etc.), it’s hard to fathom there would be a 20 to 40 fold difference that stemmed from simply making the finals. Did perhaps the NBA start marketing the teams Twitter accounts for the first time during the finals? Don’t know – yet. But hope to figure it out.

The reason we need to figure it out, of course, is that while “being good at what you do will lead to more Twitter followers” is an important point, what we really want to isolate is the effect of how different teams use their accounts to acquire more followers, deepen customer engagement, etc. To find clues into where to look, we started looking for teams who’s Twitter follower counts (either the straight number, or adjusted for franchise value) seemed to stick out as possible anomalies.

Overall, if you look at the list it is pretty predictable – successful teams (and those in bigger markets) tend to have more followers, unsuccessful ones (and those in smaller markets) less followers. For example, after LA and Orlando, the next three are Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston (all in the 17,000 to 20,000 range) – Lebron, big market, last year’s champ / big market. But the next team is the first one that sticks out a bit – the Phoenix Suns. They didn’t make the playoffs, the market isn’t THAT big, and they have the 6th most followers. That is one account definitely worth exploring. But on the “good” side of things, the team that REALLY stands out is the LA Clippers. To put it mildly, they’re not known for having great fan support, the team has been bad for quite a long time (and some say cursed), they have one of the lowest franchise values in the league… they’re by far the worst team that’s in the top-10 of Twitter followers. Interesting.

Then there’s the bottom of the list, and I’m sad to report that the biggest anomaly is easy to find – my hometown Toronto Raptors. Of the 29 teams examined in the sample, they have the absolute fewest followers – which doesn’t really make sense due to market size, popularity, etc. As noted in the last post, their official account is a peculiar one – Raptors_web_guy – who’s bio is “Coding HTML, Creatin’ Graphics, Cutting Videos all with my finger on the pulse in Raptors Nation.” Let’s just say it doesn’t appear the team is into this twitter thing – even though their best player is all over it – and it shows.

So that’s just a sprinkling of some of the top line numbers and what’s starting to stick out – over time we’ll be digging into how the different accounts are used, types of messages sent, how they’re integrated into the team’s overall web presence, whether or not players are involved or not, what other companies can learn, etc. If you have any thoughts on this – or what we should be digging into – please let me know (here, at my website, @denisbhancock, etc.).

In turn, I’m happy to report that I think I’ve found a new topic that will really annoy some of those people . Regular readers of this blog (and my site) may recall I’ve been spending a fair bit of time researching how organizations are using Twitter – and if you watch closely you’ll probably also see that I’m an NBA fan. In turn, much like the Sports Guy, I’ve become incredibly fascinated by how twitter (and social media) is changing the experience of NBA fans. And I’ve convinced myself that not only is it an interesting story unto itself, but it can provide valuable insights for organizations of all different stripes trying to figure out their social media strategies.

The primary reason for this is related to the structure of the NBA. At the top you have the league itself, which has worked very hard for many years to portray a certain image to fans. In general, if they couldn’t control it, they didn’t like it. Let’s call that corporate headquarters. Then you have 30 different franchises that comprise the league. Let’s call them, er, the franchises. While bound by certain rules and guidelines holding the league together, each differs in terms of identity, underlying philosophy, market size, success metrics, etc. Sometimes this is most directly tied to the owner (see: BlogMaverick). Other times it’s tied more to the coach (say, Phil Jackson or Mike D’Antoni).

Then you have the players – a.k.a. “the workers” – who are probably the most interesting group for this analysis. They are high profile and wealthy people, and many might argue that a sense of “self-entitlement” comes with their status. But the wrinkle is that most of them are also members of the Net Generation – that pesky group of young workers that critics often blanket with the “self entitlement” stigma as well. So you’ve got a group of people that grew up in the generation where “everyone got a trophy for showing up”, but they were the ones who were actually winning the big trophies – call it self-entitlement squared. And of course, surrounding this league are all the various media properties that bring the NBA experience to fans.

While the Internet has been slowly changing all kinds of things with how the NBA engages with fans, in many ways Twitter has been a bomb that’s gone off – things are changing pretty dramatically, and pretty quickly. And like we’ve seen with many organizations, it’s been mostly driven from the bottom-up: a whole bunch of enthusiastic Net Geners jumping into the fray, with good and bad consequences for themselves, their teams, the league, and the supporting ecosystem.

The aspects of the “good” story tend to be obvious – it’s very cool for a fan to be able to follow, say, The_Real_Shaq or ChrisBosh. In turn, Twitter can enable a deeper connection between fans and players, which (hopefully) leads to things like increased ticket and merchandise sales. But bad stories about how NBA players use Twitter are popping up with remarkable frequency.

For example, Kevin Love tweeted about his coach not coming back next season. Sounds kind of innocent, except for the fact it hadn’t been made public yet – a.k.a. he gave away a company secret. His reaction was (more or less) this is a new world and teams just have to get used to it – but most would argue that employees need to use better discretion. And NBA journalists around the world likely weeped in unison – if players break the stories, what exactly are they going to do?

T.J. Ford didn’t exactly give away a company secret, but the organization he represents (and society in general) may feel that he said to much when the start of an infamous tweet noted – and I’m not joking – that he was going to “takin a dump.” I believe it’s what the kids call TMI.

J.R. Smith jumped on the twitter – and many of his tweets constantly used “K’s” instead of “C’s”. Bad spelling might be a forgivable offense – but the realization that this letter switch is commonly used to to represent affiliation with the Bloods street gang probably isn’t. He’s since pulled the plug on the account.

Then there are the greyer areas. When Charlie V tweeted during halftime of a game, his coach got angry – and told him never to do it again, because he needs to be focused on the task at hand. When Shaq did kind of the same thing (in a joking fashion), his coach said he didn’t care – so long as he was putting up good stats. One argument is that this is just a difference in coaching philosophies; another is that players fulfilling their potential (say, Shaq) get privileges that others (say, Charlie V) don’t. Companies that struggle with how and when to accept their employees engaging with social media during “work hours” know the challenges of dealing with such situations all too well. Does using Twitter at 2 pm mean they’re not focusing on their job? Or might they be using it in a way that actually helps the company generate sales (or team connect with fans)? Can you have different rules for different people?

Then you can dig into what the various teams are doing. If you check out the Laker’s page, they actively promote a number of different accounts you can follow – including @Lakers, @JeanieBuss (EVP), @LakersReporter, and your choice of five players (I assume they watch the account of Ron Artest closely for obvious reasons). If you go to the Orlando Magic page, you can follow more people – including TV hosts, radio hosts, the unofficial Magic Girl, even the Magic Dancers – but not a single player is listed. The latter case is like how a lot of companies work – the workers work (players play), and the support staff does PR / marketing.

Other teams – like my hometown Raptors – are on Twitter, but don’t really seem into it. Their “official” Twitter account link from their home page is to @Raptors_web_guy, who’s bio starts with “coding HTML”, and the account hasn’t been updated this week. Which is kind of odd, since Raptor’s star Chris Bosh is all over Twitter. It’s also notable that the Raptors_Web_Guy has <3,000 followers, while the Orlando Magic’s main account has 426,000. Already working on a metric to accurately gauge which teams are more effective at using Twitter while accounting for things like market size.

And of course, there is also the main NBA account as well. And all the traditional media coverage sites around it. And all the new-ish NBA information sites that are connecting through it. And all the ways twitter connects with various other social media platforms.

Anyways, the detailed research is to follow – but you get the idea. There’s a whole lot going on, many different teams are doing many different things, and I believe the high profile of the NBA coupled with the way it is structured indicates there’s a lot that other companies can learn from them. If you have an interesting stories to share on this front, send them my way (here, or @denisbhancock)– and of course any new research ideas that would involve we doing what many employers would view as a “waste of time” are welcome. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it…

I started looking at Yahoo! Answers quite awhile ago because it’s a type of prosumer platform – people ask questions, and the community provides the answers. Sadly, most of the answers are terrible – and the only time people I know find value from it is when they’re looking for a laugh. Why this might be is a subject for another time. Today I want to focus on how terrible answers from the platform are bubbling up to the top of Google Search.

The last time I was reminded of this was when I googled “average baby size”. It seemed like a straightforward request for some factual information. But the top link was from Yahoo Answers. The “best answer” highlighted at the top (as chosen by voters, with a grand total of one vote) noted that the average was 6 to 8 pounds, which is quite a large range. Other answers, of which there were 5 (each with zero votes), included a variety of guesses in the same range, and a very helpful Coco who answered “Don’t know, but all the babies I’ve seen ranged from 5 to 8 pounds”, and helpfully listed his or her source (worked at group home for teen mothers).

It’s something that’s very hard for me to reconcile – how does the world’s best search engine cull through the 13,800,000 sites that have some information on this topic, and provide a top link to a site that not only fails to provide a good answer, but doesn’t appear to have very much activity related to it (i.e. the grand total of 1 vote placed on the answers)? Are that many people linking to it?

For a more humorous example, you can google “how to defuse a bomb”. Yahoo Answers is again #1 for me, and like in the previous example the question has been declared “resolved”. Which seems odd, given the best answer (as chosen by voters, with a grand total of two votes) is “Why do you have a bomb?”. At least I’ve heard a hypothesis behind this one – the site pops up on a number of “check out these funny answers” type sites, which might lead to a lot of traffic.

But still, it seems very odd. I’m curious to know if someone can explain how these sites are getting to #1 in the face of both common sense and the fact so few people have bothered to vote on the Yahoo answers. And I continue to be convinced that there must be a better way to search for things waiting in the wings so long as results like this keep popping up.

The reason is simple – there is an extraordinary network of bright people following the preparations of players for the draft. Many of them share information regularly. Over time, you start to see a general consensus emerge through all the collaboration taking place – which is highlighted by the striking similarity of many mock drafts. And lo and behold, when I watched the draft it was remarkable how similar the results were to most people’s projections.

Not only that, but the little “surprises” weren’t really scouting stories, at least early on. When Rubio dropped to #5, many fans knew exactly why (contract buyout questions and what teams he’d happily play for in particular). And perhaps there still might be a case that a great scouting staff can locate a good player late in the draft, as San Antonio was once known to do – but I’m not convinced this is the case anymore. I’ve noticed over the last few seasons that many of the players that were noted as the late round “sleepers”, and turned out to be just that, were pegged by many, many mock drafts in advance.

So frankly, that’s what I might do if I was an owner right now caught in a cash crunch – fire most of my scouting staff, and redirect the money to making sure I have a great GM. Long suffering Clippers and Timberwolves fans, among others, will tell you the importance of having a uniquely qualified mind in that spot…

As I was reading the post, it got me thinking about twitter (as has been happening a lot lately) – and the implications that it might have on various collaborative efforts within society. Many, many people scale their Twitter network well beyond the 150 person threshold, and many of them seem to be extremely active. This would seem to cause potential  problems at both the individual level (the brain getting distracted and the quality of the output suffering) and at the project level (if too many people in a network are responding to an ‘idea’, it could easily become a mess of distracting noise). One area we believe that this is playing out a bit is in relation to comments on blogs. Hypothesis: the quantity and quality of comments on blogs are dropping because of the time being allocated to tweeting and other such activities. The jury is out on whether this a good or bad thing.

This then brought me back to some earlier thinking I’d been doing about how Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point theories might apply to Twitter (original post here, and the next step here), which makes sense given a lot of his theories were grounded in Dunbar’s work. The basic idea was that the way different people behave on Twitter might be analogous to the connector, maven, and salesmen definitions – and now I’m wondering whether each of these groups must be thought of differently in terms of things like Dunbar numbers.

I tried various different ways to classify people within the three categories, and while I by no means think that I’ve figured it out, what I came up with at the time (after making some adjustments based on some excellent comments) was that if you RT a lot, you are probably functioning mostly as a connector; if you @ reply a lot, you are probably functioning most as a salesman; and if you link to your own posts a lot, you’re primarily functioning as a maven. And depending on what your “function” is, it would seem easy to hypothesize that your “group size limits” are different.

The easiest comparison here is probably connectors and mavens. Connectors are primarily sharing the information of others – thus one would think that those that do it well can handle a very, very high dunbar number as the “effort per contribution” is relatively low. Mavens, on the other hand, are information specialists trying to come up with the new ideas and insights. I would think that their appropriate dunbar number would in turn be relatively low – and if it gets high their contributions suffer at both the individual and project level. Salespeople (which I used @ replies for, in terms of responding to particular problems / questions) would fall somewhere in the middle.

I could speculate a lot more on this, but as I think about it what continues to nag at me is a bigger question – does Dunbar’s number and the supporting arguments need to be modified due to the emergence of tools like Twitter, Facebook, etc.? After all, it was originally based on a limitation argument that was relative to the neocortext size, which in turn limits group size, and tied to studies of non-human primates and groups that have emerged over hundreds of thousands of years, mostly in pre-industrial villages and settlements in less developed countries.

We’ve now undergone a sudden and dramatic change in how easy groups can be formed and maintained – and I’m not so sure they need nearly as much social grooming as was required thousands, or even ten years ago. Dunbar’s work stated that only groups under intense survival pressure could ever sustain themselves at the 150 mark, and had to be physically close. Is that still true – or do we need to totally re-think our notions of groups and collaborative efforts thanks to the new technologies that allow them to emerge and maintain themselves over time without that much “grooming”?

The underlying idea here is simple. The vast majority of us cannot create good / entertaining content, no matter what we may believe. Just because millions upon millions of people create blog posts, videos, and tweets on a daily basis doesn’t mean they’re interesting to many people, or even being viewed. And while the rise of social media has led to an abundance of new content, every abundance creates a new scarcity.

In this case, what I think is becoming ever-more scarce is easy to identify – time. I think we’re crossing a major tipping point where people engage with many of these social media tools, get quickly overwhelmed by it all (knowingly or not), and fall back onto select few sites and people who provide the best content people are looking for in the proper context – and it has how these sites and people leverage social media that will be critically important to determining it’s future.

What got me thinking about this again today is Mark Cuban’s most recent post- Who Cares What People Write? To quote the first paragraph:

In this day and age of blogs, aggregation sites, personal recommendation sites, link publishing, twitter and more, its not unusual to get a news alert email, or to wake up and google a person, place or thing and find hundreds of references originated in just the past 24 hours. Does it matter ? Could something be published hundreds, if not thousands of times on the net and be read by no one ? Fewer than 100 people ?  Fewer than 100 people that you care about ? The answer is yes.

What Mark goes onto talk about hits at the point I’m talking about, using terminology most commonly associated with belly buttons in a way that only he can quite pull off. He classifies three types of people on the web: “professional outties”, “amateur outties”, and “innies”. The professional outties are the major sites that are trying to (and have a reasonable chance of succeeding at to some degree) make money off publishing content read by a large group of people they build a relationship with. Amateur outties are the people popping up all over social media trying to be discovered – wherever there is a platform, they will search it out and try to speak on it. The “innies” are the passive consumers of content (whom are assumed to be the VAST majority, which I agree with), that read, watch, and listen to content online.

Mark argues that this “innie” group generally ignore the “amateur outties”, only paying attention to the professionals – but the “amateur outties” are the ones creating the most volume on social media, which is what most companies and people talking about the social media space are paying attention to. Hence, the disconnect.

While I agree with a lot of his argument that this amateur group is receiving a disproportionate amount of attention, there is some additional nuance that needs to be considered. For example, sites like Digg and Reddit represent the “aggregated wisdom” of what he might consider “amateur outties” – and while their individual voices may not be heard, their collective choices are, on very popular sites. Such sites are distinctly changing media consumption patterns for many people, pulling them away from the “professional outties”. I know from my own experience monitoring traffic on a variety of sites that many of the readers that are “sourced” from such sites don’t stay very long, and are difficult to build a relationship with – which makes sense. They have decided to let the “wisdom of the crowds” (augmented by reputation, etc.) select the best content for them, and if another site publishes something of interest they expect the crowd will find it for them. This is an important change.

The second is that relative ease at which an amateur can become a “professional”. While it is much harder than many people think to start a new site an build an audience, it is clearly much easier than it was a decade ago. Why this is important is that people can fall into a trap that says “all” amateur outties aren’t important, because whenever one does become important they are just reclassified as a professional. And of course, there are plenty of cases where enough amateur outties jumped on an issue that it did become an important driver of the viral distribution of information.

So I’m sort of arguing out both sides of my mouth right now, because I guess I’m trying to make two points. On one hand, I agree with the notion that we pay a little too much attention to the sheer volume of content being created, and not enough to what people are actually paying attention to – which often comes from “professional” sources. On the other, this argument can go to far as well, and it’s important to pay attention to what the amateurs are creating as well – particularly when they’re working as a group OR might be quickly turning into professionals themselves.