The title of this post comes from a corporate internal assessment paper reviewing methods of social media. The details are not important, but the perspective is shared widely. Beyond the eager advocates and the digiterati; acceptance or understanding of the Twitter social media tool is slow in many organizations. Some who have a corporate need to listen, speaking here of journalists, are some of the tool’s most eager adopters. Others are not so sure, clinging to notions of control and hopes of engineering in what appears to be chaos.
Many have written about the uses of Twitter during the San Diego fires and the Mumbai atrocity. Since those public examples are not sufficiently compelling, allow me to get personal for a moment and note a few personal narratives – these may help explain my gobsmacked reaction when I first read the phrase that forms this post’s title.
To me, Twitter is fostering some of the most meaningful conversations I’m having these days, and I’m having them with complete strangers – who then become part of my world.
* On 20 January, I spent the morning standing outside in a D.C. street, holding a purple ticket. I sent a message via Twitter regarding the experience in the afternoon, and found myself being interviewed by telephone by a local media outlet within minutes. A local television anchor also picked up on the messages sent by myself and others and promised to follow up. The Purple Ticket of Doom is now legend, and the voices raised (I was but one of tens of thousands) via Twitter and elsewhere led to a necessary review of procedures and security for this historic event.
* A chance conversation about trust agents on the Web led to a business relationship whereupon I hired a virtual assistant who helped me get this page (and my business) together as I stood up Bordeaux & Associates, LLC.
* Another chance conversation with someone working in the intelligence community led to a business lunch with his friend, the CEO of a firm that delivers consulting talent to this community.
* An odd phone call this week, a recorded “robo-call” (questionable political tactic) from Gov. Mike Huckabee, led to my posting a message via Twitter – a bit tongue-in-cheek. Someone who searches Twitter for evidence of this tactic contacted me in minutes, and this morning, Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic posted a piece detailing this development. Calls were reported in Virginia and Washington State – Mr. Ambinder used my Twitter posting in his piece.
* A snippet of a Twitter conversation I was having this morning:
Some Guy in Germany: “Portals are long past obsolescence…if they can’t be cracked open, “remixed”, and “mashed” then info is lost like email”
Me: ” Thinking about portals in terms of hybrid info architectures – central v decentralized. Do they have any use?”
SGG: “depends on def of portal. if info is accessible and self-descriptive in order to allow for new contextual relevance, then sure”
Me: “So new definition of portal may be in order. You’re not assuming a “multi-level” taxonomy will satisfy those info reqs, I assume”
SGG: “dependence on centralization is a hurdle –> reduces possibility for new independent niches of knowledge and expertise to emerge”
Me: “My ref to centralization is decision-making authorities, not information arch. Grand strategy centralized, but learns from enviro”
SGG: “multi-level is focused on satisfying hierarchy reqs; I’m more inclined to focus on horizontal “linking” of data over aggregation” and ” indeed, depends on the larger purpose not the particular tool or architecture…environ is by nature decentralized, as is context”
Me: “Agree on horizontal linking, what is mechanism for discovering and learning patterns?”
SGG: “good question! discovery based on faceted search and emergent info flows, learning patterns depend on perpetual analytics of data”
Me: ” We’re on same page. Context is extremely local and fleeting, and impossibly to *completely” convey. Thinking pattern discovery.”
SGG: “we are definitely on the same page…the work flows of the org chart might not represent the actual or best movement of knowledge”
Whatever you take away from that conversation, it came about from an offhand comment I made to someone else regarding the (perceived?) obsolescence of enterprise portal technology. That comment led to SGG’s first message above. In my practice, I’m developing a strategy for advancing a specific client’s “community of practice” online resource. This, and related, conversations will improve the value delivered to my client, as I test and explore the tenets that underlie my recommendations.
Twitter (and social media overall) is lowering the transaction costs associated with the global conversation. The results, I anticipate, will be remarkably meaningful.
5 Comments
I agree, and have also found many who struggle to understand the value in Twitter. It strikes me that the initial statement – “Twitter Does Not Foster Meaningful Discussion” – may be broken down into two key points, which explain a great deal about why Twitter is in fact so useful!
First, “meaningful” – this does not equal complexity or depth. Some of the most meaningful insights can easily be expressed in 140 characters or less – indeed, forced brevity can enhance the power of a message. It’s entirely possible to have meaningful discussions via Twitter, as your last example shows.
Then “…does not foster..” – in its very brevity, Twitter acts as a filter and channel to more complex and in depth interactions. It most certainly does foster meaningful discussion, in whatever medium best suits – your other examples are great illustrations of this!
Twitter can become a low-bandwidth aggregator, allowing you to easily filter by context that which you wish to pursue and that which you don’t. Here, the real value lies in your interaction with your network – and Twitter enables meaningful interaction with a surprisingly large network.
Therefore I too would thoroughly disagree with that statement – thanks for a valuable post, it’s made me think about this more deeply!
In fairness to the sweepingly general assertion, there is a lot of meaningless crap on Twitter. It would be nice if some combination of technical tools and social norms helped improve the level of discussion on Twitter. That said, I’ve derived a lot of value from discussions on Twitter, and I suspect that those who dismiss it are largely doing so based on uninformed (or under-informed) preconceptions.
Daniel,
Concur – but I believe tools and techniques are evolving nicely. Tweetdeck allows me to follow specific search terms and groupings of people, and being judicious about who I follow helps quite a bit. I discover and get discovered by following 2nd level network contacts on occasion and monitoring a tag cloud that reflects a data aggregation of terms flying across Twitter. Honestly, this combination has greatly increased the signal-to-noise ratio for me.
jb
John,
The specific tools and methods that you use to make sense of the Twitter noise are the kinds of filtering techniques needed to discover the unknown information that could be of value to you. The key is that you, not a sysadmin or the like, has made the substantive decisions about what you want to follow, who you want to engage, and what is important to you. So, Twitter is not meaningful…it’s what we do with it that is.
Regards,
MB
Mark,
Agree to a point – the tool is not meaningful, but using the tool can foster meaningful discussions. Keep in mind that in addition to the tools that I use to decide who to follow and engage are augmented with search and discovery tools to learn what I did not realize I would need to know. I want to be careful we don’t come away from this conversation making the same a priori decisions about what is important to us. The serendipity of being presented with information we didn’t know that we didn’t know is essential to my message here.
Regards,
jb