On Mashable, MarketingProfs Editor-in-Chief Ann Handley wrote a guest post about the engaging results of a Twitter survey that she conducted. It was done to find out how “highly involved Twitter users” viewed activities that revolve around the tool, as well as their motivations behind using it. Because of how it was done, the survey cannot be said to be representative of the Twitter population as a whole, so let’s take it with a grain of salt.
A word on methodology: I solicited survey responses from people who follow me (@marketingprofs) on Twitter, where I have about 28,000 followers, and then I asked those followers to retweet the survey link. As far as I could tell, about 116 people retweeted the link to their own network of followers; the sizes of their networks varied greatly.
We didn’t specify that we were looking for any certain profile of user, but the information that came back from the 432 revealed that the majority were fairly involved with Twitter — at least, that’s our interpretation of someone who spends 2 3/4 hours a day interacting there. Maybe those motivated to respond to the survey are more involved with Twitter than those who didn’t. (That’s one possible was to look at it.)
The bottom line is that this is a snapshot, an insight into the minds of users.
Social media, with a stress on first word, means interaction – a lot of give and take. There seems to be a notion that to be a good Twitter netizen, you have to live by its version of the Golden Rule: “Follow others who follow you”. When the respondents were asked whether they agree or not with this statement, though, only 34% of them agreed, with 41.7% disagreeing, and 24.2% who didn’t take a side. The gap is even wider when they were asked whether those they follow should, in fact, follow them back. Only a total of 27.3% agreed while 41.9% thought it wasn’t necessary.
Some people use their large Twitter following for bragging rights, but what do fellow users really think about these bloated figures? Asked whether they would equate having a bigger number of followers to being more intelligent, an overwhelming 81.7% disagreed while a mere 5.6% nodded their heads. The same question, with respect replacing intelligence, resulted in a virtual split, with 45% unconvinced and 39.9% thinking it was a fair assumption.
Going back to being social and Twitter’s use as a communications tool, are users feeling unloved when their tweets get no response? A good 24% admit to feeling some form of disappointment, but a total of 52.7% say it’s not that big of a deal. Good on their EQ.
Finally, in terms of motivations for using Twitter, their reasons are varied. Most say they like it because they learn new things from others, closely followed by using the tool as an up-to-date information source. Many said they simply wanted to be connected with a lot of people, while others use it for lead generation, and lastly, because they fancy having some people follow them and read what they have to say.
It would be interesting if a similar study can be made with a more scientific approach, better sample size, and fairer distribution in the near future. For Twitter-holics out there, do you feel that these results match your own perceptions? Why or why not?
Fellow networked-world thinker, theorist and author Ross Dawson and colleagues carried out research sponsored by IBM about the views of australian executives regarding the use of social networks and social computing in the enterprise.
The report titled “Enterprise Social Network Strategy” was released in November 2008. That seems like forever-ago in today’s world … hardly fresh news, but it had not come to my attention until now, and I think it’s still quite germane given that we’re somewhere in the early stages of a massive shift in the way organizations carry out work and deal with ongoing change.
Here, excerpted from his blog post announcing the release of the report, are some quoted views from the Australian executives.
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Quotes from senior Australian executives in the report include:
“Our trial of social networks is going exceptionally well – there is very positive feedback from employees. They see it as a personal touch that improves their enjoyment of the work environment.”
“What if I have one of my best performers spending an hour a day on Facebook – do I really want to stop them?”
“We’ve pretty much taken the view that most people come to work to do a good job.”
“The whole organisation is about collaboration. So the area of social networks is really critical for us, particularly if we want to provide a seamless service delivery to the client.”
“The credit crunch has been a good thing. In good times it takes organisations a long time to look at new things but in times of difficult business we are more ready to see that we need to consider change. The way we market our products is going to be different.”
“For Gen Y, social networking is much more open than traditional computing. Look at gaming. They have a collective mindset – achieving common goals is more important to them. They either win together or they don’t win. ”
“We don’t have a single employee that is not highly computer literate. Everyone is on Facebook.”
“We are serious about finding ways to engage people. We have to compete for talent.”
“The way products and services are sold in our industry will be vastly different to how it is done today”
“We have an evolving strategy. Fail fast and cheap. We’re finding that’s the best strategy.”
I’ve been working lately on two projects with companies building social networking platforms with a purpose. While some aspects are clearly around technology, features, and the like, there are also the subtle aspects that go into understanding how these sites will be used. In a meeting with one of the clients, we talked about this difficult area of how to ensure that the use of the site aligns with its purpose: will people interact on the topics that we want them to, will the site discourage irrelevant content or social tourists from joining?
The word “social architecture” came into my head (or all of our heads simultaneously, it’s always hard to tell, isn’t it, when an idea emerges from the collective consciousness in a conversation?).
Like a good web 2.0 doo-bie, I tweeted that I was interested in using the term but needed to understand it more. My friend and colleague, Andrew Gent, tweeted back a definition, but then went on to do much more: he researched it, thought about, and has written a wonderful blog post, Social Architecture, that offers the definition that he tweeted back to me:
Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals.
Andrew’s blog details the current use of the term with respect to social media as well as its history in the field of architecture. When I began my own superficial search, the thread I followed was biased toward the design of the interaction of various social media (Sam Huleatt: “To me, social architecture is best thought of as a cross between three elements: interface design, social media functionality and user engagement strategy.”) which didn’t reflect what I needed. Andrew has, I think, hit on the more sociological and social engineering (without the negative connotations of that term) disciplines needed to shape a user’s experience.
While Andrew’s context is the corporate intranet, where it is possibly simpler to design intent and purpose into the environment, my work is currently leading me to social networks in the world, a case where an individual company wants to draw people into a network to expand its field of vision and expertise. No answers yet, but Andrew’s exposition is a terrific start and I thank him very much.
I’m just back from a conference in Vancouver, BC, where Jon Husband just happens to live. I was smart/lucky enough to have announced publicly that Charlie Grantham and I would be in Vancouver for a few days, and Jon was gracious enough to get in touch and suggest we meet (since we never had).
The three of us ended up having breakfast together last Friday, and then Jon was the perfect host, offering us a ride out the airport for our trips home.
Of course, Jon being the champion of Vancouver that he is, the ride took a little extra time (which we had plenty of) as he gave us a mini-tour of the downtown and surrounding area.
I had been in Vancouver before, but not for over 20 years, so it was an eye-opening tour. I’ve always had good feelings about the city (stemming from a wonderful summer in the mid-80’s characterized by many late evening dinners down near the harbor).
But even more important than enjoying Vancouver was enjoying getting to know Jon. We (including Charlie) discovered way more in common than any three older gray-haired guys who had never met before have any right to expect. As Jon described on his own blog last week (“Back to the Future . . . of Work“), we share many intellectual curiosities and probably even more views and values about organization, work, people, and even politics.
So here’s to the value of face to face meetings. In spite of our mutual fascination with what Jon calls “wirearchy,” we also agree wholeheartedly in getting together physically to share a real space, not just a virtual one.
Of course, that f2f meeting never would have taken place without the AppGap blog and our e-newsletter (where I’d announced the Vancouver trip in the first place), so I guess we owe some thanks to Hylton Joliffe and the folks at Intuit too for originally making Jon and me aware of each other.
But the nice part of now having “pressed the flesh” is that I’ll have a whole lot more context from now on as I read Jon’s blog comments. And I suspect we’ll see each other again in the not-too-distant future.
Thanks, Jon, for your hospitality and for your always-stimulating questions about the future of work and of management.
Why did that particular article come to mind ? In the context of McKinsey’s research summary, for two reasons.
The first because the article started out with several paragraphs that took us back to the 50’s and William H. Whyte’s famous “The Organization Man“, noting that basically organizational structures and basic management techniques haven’t changed much since then, whilst juxtaposing that with the increasingly obvious facts that with the Web, web services and tools and mobile devices many (if not most) knowledge workers are continuously connected and ever-more densely interlinked … today we euphemistically call it ‘networked’.
The second because towards the end of the article The New Organisation McKinsey and Mercer (two high-end blue-ribbon management consulting firms) were cited as demonstrating rapidly growing interest in, and awareness of, the emerging new landscape for networked knowledge work.
So … given the arrival and settling into place of what’s called Web 2.0, I think that the McKinsey summary mirrors what many leading thinkers have been saying for some time about the impact of the interactive participative Web on the workplace. It’s useful, as it offers a fairly concise overview of the core issues associated with the shifts in leadership, management and basic organizational effectiveness management; and because it’s McKinsey, it provides an imprimatur of legitimacy to the ongoing discussion of and refinement of strategic and practical implementation issues related to this massive era-defining shift in the way work is perceived, designed and carried out.
To be fair, people at McKinsey have also been paying attention to knowledge work for quite a while now. Anyone remember the name Brooks Manville – closely associated with McKinsey’s knowledge management practice back in the day ?
To help us all understand even more clearly, here’s a video clip explaining McKinsey’s Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.
“Twitter customer service: It’s the hot new thing that all the kids are doing! Salesforce has added a new application to its “app exchange” so that clients who use its Service Cloud product can better wrangle Twitter for customer service purposes. It’ll be available this summer.
With the app, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, clients can monitor Twitter messages that pertain to their company, aggregate the replies and conversations around those messages, and then respond to the inquiries and complaints and whatnot.
Now, I am as enthusiastic about social networking technologies and their ability to connect us with friends and colleagues all over the planet as the next person, but Marc Van Eeckhoudt just sent me the article that includes that chart.
The core message in the article: more and more people are becoming “loners,” and that’s really dangerous for their health. Unfortunately it is not clear from this article whether or not people who rely primarily on electronic means of communication can overcome those health risks.
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