A couple of weeks ago our 2-year old daughter threw my wife’s phone in the swimming pool. The resulting journey through the Vodacom customer service labyrinth to replace the phone was frustrating, but it also gave me a new level of understanding and empathy for the immense challenges of providing customer service to hundreds of thousands of people.

This is an article about social media, customer support channels, and the principles every company should establish in their culture to serve their customers better. And (spoiler alert!) I do manage to get a new phone for my wife.

”Umm, So, Our Daughter Threw My Phone In The Pool”

What’s most surprising about getting a call about my wife’s phone suddenly finding itself at the bottom of our pool is how completely nonplussed I was about the whole thing. When you become a parent the kinds of things that upset you change significantly. I think I’ve discovered a pattern: if there is no blood involved, there’s really no reason to get upset. So after establishing that there was no blood involved, I proceeded to the next step - trying to replace the phone.

My wife had an LG Generic (or whatever it was called) on one of Vodacom’s cheapest plans, and the thing has been driving her nuts. She’s had her eye on my iPhone for a long time, so I decided to try to upgrade her. The problem is that I’m not eligible for an upgrade until the end of December. And that’s where this journey starts.

My first step was to walk into a Vodacom store to ask for assistance. This is pretty much the extent of the conversation that took place with the support representative:

Me: “Hi. My daughter threw my wife’s phone in the pool, so I’d like to get her an iPhone please.” Rep: “Your contract isn’t due for an upgrade until the end of December.” Me: “I understand that. I’m saying that my wife’s phone is now wet and doesn’t work any more, so I would like to give you more money by going onto a more expensive plan.” Rep: “It’s against policy to do an early upgrade. That’s why you should insure your phone.”

Imagine that conversation with a “Sucks to be you!” look on the representative’s face, and you’d have a really good idea of how it went down.

Having failed with the first point of contact, I took to Twitter:

The response was very quick, asking me to DM my number so that someone could call me. I sent my number, and a representative called me the next morning. I thought this was getting somewhere, and I was already starting to write this post in my head. My headline (“Social media works!”) needed some work, but it was going to be great.

But not so fast”¦ I told my story to the representative, who looked up the account and told me the same story: “Sorry, it’s against policy.” (At least this time someone was sorry about it). I threw out what would become my standard line throughout this process: “You realize I’m trying to give you more money, right?” But no luck. The conversation ended when the rep told me, “I will ask the upgrades department if there is anything we can do.” Translation: “You’ll never hear from us, ever again.”

After not hearing from the “upgrades department” I sent another DM, and got a call from another rep. Same story. Against policy. “You realize I’m trying to give you more money, right?” Sorry, against policy. I then took it to the next level and told the rep that I will be taking my business to MTN, convinced that this statement would trigger some script alarm somewhere and get me a free ticket to a ride up the “escalation path”. Not so much.

Rep: “Oh. Well that’s not good.” Me: “No, it’s not. Anything you want to do about that?” Rep: “Well, this is our policy. Can’t be changed.” Me: “You don’t want to tell someone that I’m about to take my business elsewhere?” Rep: “I’ll make a note in the system.”

At that point I gave up and decided to wait until I am eligible for an upgrade. That decision lasted about 3 days. I decided to give it one last shot, and tweeted Vodacom’s CEO:

And this is where the story gets boring, in a good way. Pieter Uys tweeted me back (in my first language, which means he looked at my profile and thought before responding). 4 hours later I got a call to say we can do the upgrade. End of story. No questions, no statements about policy. I can do the upgrade = happy customer + more money for Vodacom.

Your Call Is Not That Important To Us

Before moving on to the main point of this article I want to tell another quick story. I’ve been banking with ABSA all my life. I’ve also been unhappy with ABSA all my life, but that’s a story for another day. I recently mentioned ABSA on Twitter and linked to this post. The post got retweeted a few times, and then I got this:

That really interested me. Here is a bank (FNB) that monitors what people are saying about their competitors, and joins the conversation in relevant ways. Notice that he wasn’t pushy, he was merely getting in on the joke. I tweeted back:

I said this would be a short story, so I’ll just say this. One week later someone from FNB was sitting with me, filling out forms to transfer all my accounts from ABSA to FNB. They took care of the whole thing, I didn’t have to fill out a single form. All because of a tweet. And I’m pretty sure ABSA doesn’t even know (or care) that they lost another customer.

It’s All About The People

All customer support revolves around people, processes, and tools.

CRM and community tools like Salesforce, Get Satisfaction, and Twitter give support reps the means to communicate with customers. Processes set guidelines for what those interactions should be like. But all of that is useless unless the people doing the support understand and live out the culture of the organization. The ease of establishing that culture also depends a great deal on the support channel used.

Synchronous, 1:1 support like in-store interactions and phone support is expensive and extremely difficult to manage. Unless you’re Zappos and call yourself “a support company that happens to sell shoes”, most companies don’t have a deeply ingrained support culture. So it’s very hard to filter the right processes and culture through to the 1:1 support channels, since they are generally pretty far removed from “management”. They are therefore very rarely empowered to make decisions that might not follow policy, but would be the best thing for the customer (and the company).

I would argue that my early upgrade situation is a good example of this. That representative in the store should have been empowered to ignore policy and upgrade me on the spot. It’s not her fault that she’s not allowed to do that, it’s just the way it is.

On the other hand, asynchronous, 1:many support like live chat, online forums, and social media platforms are much cheaper, and I would argue also easier to manage from a support culture perspective. You’re able to set appropriate guidelines (more on that later), and in general the people who manage those channels have a much more direct path to different resolution scenarios (and therefore more decision-making power).

All this to say that I am not upset any more about my bad experiences in the store and initially on the phone. Because I recognize how incredibly difficult it is to nurture a true culture of customer-centric support. And to find that balance between empowering everyone in the company to break policy when they feel it’s needed, while still having enough process in place so you don’t give away control of your short-term and long-term business strategy.

I don’t have an immediate solution for this, but I want to write about it because I believe it’s a very real problem that a lot of companies are struggling with. Especially now that social media support channels are getting so much adoption.

Lessons In Customer Service

Even though I don’t have the perfect answer, I do want to spend a little time discussing some recommendations I have for better customer service, based on my recent experiences with FNB and Vodacom.

1. Understand what engagement really means

There is no substitute for authenticity. When Pick n Pay asks what I’m going to be doing today, it doesn’t feel like real engagement. Why would I want to tell a supermarket that? When Vodacom sends me the scripted answer “I heard about the problem you experienced”, that tells me they didn’t really take the time to think about the response when sending it (“Well, of course you heard about it, I sent you a tweet!”).

When FNB joins a conversation in a natural way, or when the CEO of Vodacom responds to me by name - that’s engagement. It’s such a simple rule: read, think, respond like a human.

2. Web governance is essential

Web governance “defines decision-making processes for the web, and sets policies and standards for web content, design, and technology””in a way that respects subject-matter expertise” (from Web Governance: Become An Agent of Change). Defining user-centered standards for every touch point with an organization is enormously important to those who want to succeed, and it’s not getting enough attention at all.

One part of web governance that needs more attention in particular is content strategy, which “plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content” (see The Discipline of Content Strategy for more). Among other things it defines the tone and language and underlying principles for talking to customers. Every company should do this before they open their Twitter account or create a Facebook page. (Btw, if you’re in South Africa and need help with stuff like this, talk to Kerry-Anne)

How you talk to your customers makes a huge difference to their experience, and if you don’t define a strategy for it, your community will define you and you’ll have no control over it. That’s not a good place to be.

3. Empower support representatives

I want to come back to this. As mentioned earlier, I recognize how difficult it is to walk the line between empowerment and total loss of control. But I think there are ways to test this out as a strategy without giving the whole house away.

Start with one specific department, call center, or representative. Allow them to make some decisions based on what they feel is right for the customer and the company, and see what happens. If they break some rules/policy, ask them why they did it, and follow up with the customer to see how they felt about the exchange.

This kind of empowerment isn’t a binary switch for the whole organization. Start small, test, and see if it might be possible to build a culture that encourages doing The Right Thing.

All’s Well That Ends Well

My story had a happy ending. But I know there are an enormous amount of customer support stories that don’t end that way. The rise of cheaper, more efficient channels for customer support can make experiences better not just for customers who engage in those channels, but for everyone. We can take the lessons from the asynchronous channels and apply them to the 1:1 interactions.

Be authentic, get in on the joke, and break some rules every once in a while. Because they did that, FNB has a new customer and Vodacom didn’t lose one. I think that makes it worth it.

When I lived in Australia there was an ad for Pizza Hut that ran about 5 times a day for over a month. It featured Dougie the delivery guy — always on time, always courteous, always immaculately dressed. As he hands over the pizza and gets his money, he asks, “So… how’s about a tip?”

The customer thinks for a bit, starts closing the door, and then says: “Work hard; be good to your mother.”

No, you’re right, it’s not a very funny ad. Nevertheless the words have stuck in my head for over a decade now. Because I realise that in life, as in business, these might be the only two non-negotiable rules we all need to adhere to in order to be successful at what we do. Work hard. Be good to your mother.

Work hard

I recently made the mistake of using the hasthag #leadership in a tweet. I immediately got 5 auto-follows, and they all fit the same profile:

• Their bios all had some version of the term “leadership coach” in it.
• They all had more than 20,000 followers, and they followed almost exactly the same number of people themselves. (This is, of course, because they auto-follow everyone who mentions the word “leadership”, and automatically unfollows that person if they don’t follow back in about 3-4 days)
• They all tweet excessively, usually through API’s that generate random “inspirational” quotes every few minutes.

They basically automated their social media presence, and fine, that works for them. But that doesn’t inspire me. Mitch Joel says the following in a brilliant post called Wanting Something:

In the end, the majority of the answer is not about the talent or the ability to pull a thought together, it’s about the commitment. The blank screen does not care… it’s agnostic. If you write, good for you. If you don’t, good for you. That being said, if you keep at it… If you use these platforms to think deeply about what you’re about and why you think your industry is the way it is, then slowly over time you’ll find your groove and your talent will shine.

Sadly, most people want it fast and easy. That’s good news for those who are truly committed to it, because they’re the ones who actually get what they want.

Or, as Dave Duarte says in The Ultimate Social Media Strategy is Not Having One:

Ultimately, social media is not just a set of technologies to be mastered, it is a cultural reality to be engaged with. It promises to expose the corrupt and reveal the extraordinary, and if nothing else it is guaranteed to keep us on our toes. It is chaotic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. So the best social media strategy, then, is not a strategy at all, it is to be purposeful, ethical, and transparent and let our communications and behaviours flow from that.

Those are the people I admire, and the ones I want to follow on Twitter and in life. The ones who show up every day, work hard to get better at what they do, and don’t look for shortcuts.

Be good to your mother

Well, not just your mother, but everyone around you. Be nice. There really is no excuse to be rude to people on Twitter or elsewhere on the web. But of course, you only have to spend 2 minutes reading comments on YouTube to give up the dream of a civil Internet forever.

In a great post on commenters online, Dmitri Fadeyev quotes the following Thomas More passage from Utopia:

Ther’s a rule in the Council that no resolution can be debated on the day that it’s first proposed. All discussion is postponed until the next well-attended meeting. Otherwise someon’s liable to say the first thing that comes into his head, and then start thinking up arguments to justify what he has said, instead of trying to decide what’s best for the community. That type of person is quite prepared to sacrifice the public to his own prestige, just because absurd as it may sound, h’s ashamed to admit that his first idea might have been wrong””when his first idea should have been to think before he spoke.

If only we could follow this rule before we reply/comment, the web would be such a nice neighborhood. Sure, it would probably be less interesting as well. And maybe I’m getting old, but I’d actually prefer nice at this point.

By the way, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticize where it’s appropriate. It just means we should be respectful when we do it. As Mike Monteiro says in Giving Better Design Feedback:

Good feedback is not synonymous with positive feedback. If something isn’t working for you, tell the design team as early as possible. Will they be hurt? Not if they are professionals. A good designer will argue for their solution, and then will know when to let go.

By all means, be respectful, but don’t hold back in order to spare an individual’s feelings. Taking criticism is part of the job description. The sooner they know, the sooner they can explore other paths.

So make this your motto for a week or two, and seek out those who do the same. Who knows, maybe a nice Internet is out there after all.

I like Google+. I like it because it’s clean and well-designed. I like it because it feels fresh - like moving into a new neighborhood after the one you came from got taken over by fake farms and endless profile picture changes. But most of all I like it because it’s quiet.

Since it’s in limited Beta it means it’s still mostly populated by early adopters. So I can interact with brands like Mashable and Smashing Magazine and feel like I’m part of the conversation - something you can’t really do on Twitter and Facebook with mass-brands like that.

This thing is going to be huge

But alas, this will probably not last. Sooner or later the floodgates will open, and before you know it the once pristine Google+ neighborhood will once again get overrun and fall prey to the meaningless graffiti that also transformed Facebook from social network to chaotic metaverse. Rocky Agrawal sums it perfectly in When Google Circles Collide:

[Google+] doesn’t do anything to solve the biggest problem with social networks today: increasing the signal to noise ratio.

So the masses will descend, and we’ll be back to hunting for pockets of information among the endless streams of data. I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

Well, maybe it won’t be such a big deal

I could be wrong. The smart money might actually be on betting that Google+ never even gets enough adoption to become the loud mess that Facebook is today. The reason for that lies in an article that made the rounds a few weeks ago, A Brief History Of The Corporation:

Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.

But as you find and capture most of the wild attention, new pockets of attention become harder to find. Worse, you now have to cannibalize your own previous uses of captive attention. Time for TV must be stolen from magazines and newspapers. Time for specialized entertainment must be stolen from time devoted to generalized entertainment.

What does this mean? Google+ time has to be stolen from Facebook time. And good luck with that, Google. It’s all because we have this stupid thing called limited time:

Each new “well” of attention runs out sooner. Every human mind has been mined to capacity using attention-oil drilling technologies. To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources.

So that’s the real problem for Google. Theirs can’t be an acquisition strategy, because most people who are on a social network are already on Facebook. So it will have to be a migration strategy. As Dare Obasanjo put it:

For Google+ to be successful it means people will need to find enough utility in the site that it takes away from their usage of Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps even replaces one of these sites in their daily routine. So far it isn’t clear why any regular person would do this.

Google+ wants Circles to be the thing that convinces users to switch. They’re betting that enough users will want to share different things with different groups of people that they’re willing to give up their networks and start a new one. I just don’t think that’s a strong enough argument. Coming back to Agrawal’s point: the real problem is how to get better signal out of the noise of social networks. That’s a need that no one has filled yet.

There’s a parallel to the tablet market here. Trying to compete with the iPad is absolutely futile - you will lose. Instead, HP has a very smart strategy with their TouchPad:

HP acknowledged Appl’s dominance in the tablet market, but said Apple wasn’t its target with the TouchPad.

“We think ther’s a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs,” said Kerris. “This market is in it’s infancy and there is plenty of room for both of us to grow.”

They looked for a gap in the market, and they’re working actively to fill it. So it’s certainly not impossible that enough people migrate to Google+ for Metcalfe’s Law to kick in and we start to see some real network utility. But it’s going to be a tough sell unless they find that real gap in the market.

So which one is it?

Which way do I want it go? I’m on the fence. For now I’m enjoying the peace and quiet in the new neighborhood. But that can also get boring pretty quickly. So I want my cake and eat it too. I want Google+ to scale and at the same time figure out how to solve the signal to noise problem in social media. Is that too much to ask?

The Twitter iPhone app is getting a world of criticism right now, and I have to say I agree with most of it (for an excellent overview and analysis of one of the main issues, see Why the Quick Bar is still so offensive). But let’s also give credit where credit is due. As Little Big Details has shown us - sometimes small UI touches can take a user experience from “meh” to “awesome” pretty quickly. And I think the Twitter iPhone app’s implementation of replying to a tweet with multiple users in it does just that.

If you respond to a tweet with two or more usernames in it, you technically need two options: Reply (to reply just to the person who wrote the tweet) or Reply All (to mention everyone that’s mentioned in the tweet). So, two buttons needed, right? Not in the Twitter app. There is just one icon to reply to such a tweet, and the screen you get then looks like this:

The screen automatically selects all users that appear directly after the user who wrote the original tweet. So in essence the reply button gives you three options:

• Just start typing if you want to erase other users from the tweet and just respond to the original user.
• Place you your cursor after the original user if you want to /cc the other users.
• Place your cursor after all users if you want to write a traditional “reply to all” tweet.

This is such a small thing, but I can guarantee the implementation was a deliberate design solution to a specific problem:

How can we reduce the need for a Reply button and a Reply All button while at the same time improving the user experience?

Little details like this should inspire all of us to sweat the details and not go “Ah, that part doesn’t matter, it works fine, right?”

Remember Plaxo? I do too, but up to now I remembered them like I remember MySpace: “That site that used to be popular for something-or-other.” But recently a bunch of people I used to work with moved to Plaxo, and they’re colleagues I respect, so I thought I’d check it out again. You know, one day. But to his credit, Preston’s incessant tweeting about how awesome Plaxo is finally got me off my procrastinating butt to sign up for the thing.

And I am impressed.

I only signed up this morning so this isn’t really a review of the service, but I did want to make a couple of points about the sign-up process and some very effective use of microcopy. UX designer Joshua Porter has written extensively about the value of good microcopy, and so have the folks at Polon. To quote from Joshua’s post:

Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size”¦judge it on its effectiveness.

Below is the first screen in the Plaxo registration flow. I’ve circled the microcopy on the form:

The copy on Date of Birth and Gender are particularly interesting, for two reasons:

1. They’re extraneous fields that you usually don’t see on sign-up forms that are optimized for maximum conversion. More fields usually equal higher drop-off, so this has the potential to be dangerous.
2. In particular, these are fields that people feel a little uneasy about from a privacy perspective. People are especially skeptical about providing Date of Birth.

Plaxo does quite a few things right with this microcopy:

1. Short messages to explain why the fields are required.
2. Plainspoken language that is easy to understand - no legal jargon.
3. The explanation is phrased as a user benefit. They want your date of birth not for some sinister reason, but so that your friends can wish you Happy Birthday. That’s good copy.

I’d love to see some data on the conversion rate of this form with and without the microcopy. Maybe Plaxo can do the user experience community a favor and run an A/B test for us? :)

I also wanted to briefly mention the second screen in the sign-up flow:

We’ve all seen these confirmation screens that tell us we need to confirm our email address. But I haven’t seen an image of what the email looks like on the confirmation screen before. In an age where users are terrified of fraud, this is another small detail that probably has a pretty significant impact on users’ comfort with the Plaxo service. Well done, guys.

But hey, it’s not all good. I spent about 10 minutes trying to set things up and I got pretty overwhelmed with all the information being thrown at me, so I took a break to write this post instead. I hope I’m the only one with that reaction…

Google Buzz is really messing with my brain.  All my other social media activities fit nicely along the private-public continuum we all have to juggle.  But Buzz feels like an invasion of my personal space.  By infiltrating the most private of online communications (email), it’s also daring me to move that privacy line a little bit, and let people in on conversations that they really have no business in being a part of.  One of the few positive reviews I’ve read about Buzz so far is this tweet by my friend G-J:

Good point, but Tweetie for the iPhone already threads Twitter conversations, and I use Twitter lists to keep up with people in my closer network.  So I’m just not sure what to do with it, and that makes my brain hurt.

Privacy and the public persona

This issue, as well as the widely reported privacy gaps in Google Buzz, are just the latest in a growing conversation about privacy on the web.  Facebook’s recent updated privacy settings created quite a stir, and out of all the gazillion blog posts discussing it, none was more insightful than the brilliant Danah Boyd’s article Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms.  It is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic.  In the article she says the following (my emphasis added):

There isn’t some radical shift in norms taking place. What’s changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn’t mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn’t mean that folks who live their lives in public don’t value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.

That last sentence really stuck with me.  It is so true.  Just because people divulge intimate details of their lives online, doesn’t mean everything they do is public.  Joshua Porter recently tweeted the following:

Ain’t that the truth…

But what if I want to maintain my privacy in public?

Another interesting story in this same vein — and a great example of the uncharted waters of online privacy — is that of designer Dustin Curtis.  I’ve been following his blog every since he blogged about the fascinating chain of events following his redesign of the American Airlines website.  That made him a bit of a celebrity in the world of web design, but it turned out to be nothing compared to what happened next.  On the day of the Apple iPad launch, he posted some very real-looking (but very fake) photos of the iPad.  It quickly sent the Internet into a frenzy and got him coverage on Mashable, TechCrunch and The Washington Post, among other places.

The next day he tweeted, simply:

Dustin Curtis: 1, Internet: 0.

Well played, sir.  Well played.  What’s interesting is what happened next, though.  He got a lot of attention from this stunt, and his Twitter follower count exploded.  He created an air of mystery leading a lot of people to wonder who he is.  It even led to a question on Quora with some amusing Chuck Norris-type answers: “Who is Dustin Curtis?”  The post on Quora prompted this tweet from him:

The answer is, of course, pretty straight-forward.  If you create a public and controversial persona, and in doing so amass over 13,000 followers on Twitter, people are going to want to find out more about you.  And, as a recent Times article pointed out:

When you make your private life public, when you seek attention in that broad a manner, you’re inviting not just the cool and the loving, but the angry and aggrieved.

And that is where online privacy get tricky.  We already talked about how public people value there privacy very much.  But at some point, people are going to assume that because you live a lot of your life in public, you have no need to be private, and won’t mind people digging around in your personal life (since there is no personal life any more).  But that’s clearly not the case, as Dustin points out in his tweet.

Facebook as theater

In a similar vein, I have to say that I have become increasingly uncomfortable with public conversations on Facebook.  And by that I mean girls who write “I miss you” on their boyfriends’ walls, people making coffee arrangements on each other’s walls, etc.  Once conversations that should be private are undertaken in a public forum, they become theater — meant for the onlookers more than the participants.  And that’s troubling.

Yes, there are legitimate cases (mostly for the sake humor) to have public conversations on Facebook.  But if you decide to write on someone’s wall and not send an email or a text, you are doing it so that other people can see it.  And that hurts the authenticity of the interaction.

So it’s not just that the lines between what is public and what is private are getting blurred.  It’s also that what is acceptable in the public realm is changing, as proven by those “I have to go to the bathroom” status updates I’m sure we all see occasionally in our news feeds.

Where do we go from here?

There are no universally agreed upon guidelines for what should be public and what should remain private online.  I’m pretty sure there will never be.  But I do believe that where that line is drawn should be a conscious decision by every person who goes online.  You can’t share every detail of your life online and then expect people to leave you alone.  You can’t go on Facebook, not change your privacy settings, and then complain if some of your photos leak out.  On the flipside, you can’t build a blog audience by writing articles that don’t expose your opinions in some way.

But wherever that line is drawn, it is extremely important that there is a point where your life stops being public.  The article Danger online: Perils of revealing every intimate moment puts it this way:

Concerns, though, are growing about the decline of the private self. Many people are questioning the wisdom particularly of blogs in which ordinary people write regular updates about their children and spouses, and they are asking whether we are surrendering our privacy too easily.

Or to put it another way, from another great article on the topic, Party On, but No Tweets:

We are fighting against this whole idea that everything people do has to be constantly chronicled. People think that every thought they have, every experience ”” if it is not captured it is lost.

When you let go of the pressure to chronicle, you are free to enjoy the moment for what it is, without the pressure of getting that picture up on Twitpic.

Don’t get me wrong — I think it is possible to build fantastic communities online by living public lives — both for business and personal purposes.  And I am definitely not going to stop blogging or shut down my Twitter account.  However, more and more I am finding myself agreeing with another sentence buried in that last article: There is something magical about a life less posted.

Something’s been bothering me about Twitter’s version of the Retweet.  A lot has been said about the pros and cons of the feature, but here’s my main problem with it:

You can’t easily see when you’ve been retweeted, and by who.

Twitter Retweets don’t show up in your stream as @ Mentions, so the only way to see when you’ve been retweeted, and by who, is by going to Twitter.com, clicking on “Retweets” in the right nav, and then clicking on the “Your tweets, retweeted” tab.  That’s just too many clicks.  Some iPhone apps like Echofon and Tweetie support the Twitter Retweet, but they don’t show you who retweeted you.

The problem with this is that it reduces Twitter’s sense of community.  I often like communicating with those who retweet me, and this takes away that ability (unless you go through a lot of work on Twitter.com).

There are, of course, other issues with the Twitter Retweet function, like:

• No ability to add your own comments (but this is what the “/via @” syntax is for, so that’s probably ok)
• Diluting the value of retweets because some people use Twitter’s Retweet feature, and others use the traditional “RT @” syntax
• Weird and confusing syntax when someone uses Twitter’s Retweet function to retweet a “RT @” tweet.
• Tweetdeck, Echofon, Tweetie… they all handle Twitter Retweets differently, so it makes for a confusing UI.  For example, if I want to unfollow someone who Retweeted something, I can’t do that from within the tweet-level functions in Tweetdeck.

This might sound like I’m nitpicking, but it’s not my intention.  I applaud Twitter’s initiative to embrace the Retweet function.  And I think ever since Doug Bowman joined the Twitter design team, they have made Twitter.com a lot more useful with some great features.

But I do think this Retweet thing isn’t quite working yet.  I think having Twitter Retweets show up in your @ Mentions would solve a big part of this issue.  So, Doug - can you make that happen please!?

There has been growing discontent with email over the past year or so, but it appears that many people’s hatred for this particular form of communication has now finally started to boil over.  Several articles and blog posts over the past few weeks lamented the death and/or evilness of email in no uncertain terms.  In this post I go into a few highlights from said email hatemail, followed by some thoughts on why we shouldn’t be so fast to close down our email accounts.

The problem with email is…

First, a disclosure.  The excerpts below are just that: excerpts.  While I attempt to keep the context and the original intentions of the authors intact, I encourage you to read all these articles in their entirety.  They’re not only thoughtful and well-written, but they also lay a solid foundation for what I think is a very worthy and much-needed debate.

In the article Why Email No Longer Rules”¦, the Wall Street Journal announces that email is king no more:

But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet””logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

Caught up in Google Wave frenzy, Techcrunch laments the following in Google Wave And The Dawn Of Passive-Aggressive Communication:

Google Wave is not just a service, it is perhaps the most complete example yet of a desire to shift the way we communicate once again.  For many of us, email is simply not cutting it the way that it used to. It’s a sedentary beast in a fast-moving web. It uses old principles for management, and this is leading to overload.

Sticking with Techcrunch, in Relevance Over Time, Nik Cubrilovic argues that email sacrifices relevance in order to present items in a chronological order:

Chronological order needs to be abandoned in favor of relevance. Without relevance, our ability to manage large sets of information is inefficient. The technology for relevance exist today, for eg. spam filters are able to tell us what we definitely don’t want to read. Real world information retrieval and organization is based on relevance, either what somebody else believes is relevant to us, or what we decide is relevant. Newspaper stories are not laid out in the order that events took place and libraries do not catalog their books in the order they were published.

Jeff Atwood, in a post entitled Email: The Variable Reinforcement Machine, explains why he think email kills productivity:

Oh, sure, we delude ourselves into thinking we’re being extra-productive by obsessively checking and responding to our email, but in reality we’re attending too frequently to our own desire for gratification and sabotaging our own productivity in the process.

Why email is essential in business communication

After reading each of these articles, the same question kept coming to mind: How do these authors use email? They certainly don’t use it the same way I do.  Because I simply cannot imagine replacing email with Twitter and Facebook - and even Google Wave.  As far as I can tell, here are the major complaints about email:

1. Email is not real-time enough. I don’t understand this complaint at all.  How is Twitter more real-time than either sitting at your desk with your email client open, or checking your BlackBerry for new messages?  Yes, Google Wave lets you see people type in real-time, but do we really need that?
2. Email is not dynamic enough. I don’t want email to be dynamic.  Email is a way to communicate static thoughts.  Tools like Google Docs, Dropbox, and Versionshelf are there for collaboration.  But email is a linear record of events and discussions, which is essential if we want to preserve any kind of sanity in business communication.
3. Email is chronological, not relevant. This complaint perplexes me the most.  If email isn’t relevant, you may want to write different emails, or just spend a little time setting up a few filters to get rid of Hilton HHonors statements and other useless newsletters.  Chronology brings order.  Even though the most important things might not be at the top of your inbox,  timestamp is an important element in helping us separate the urgent from the important.
4. Email reduces productivity. More than being on Twitter all day reduces productivity?  I’d like to see how productive people are who do business in 140 characters.

In short, I’m just not ready to give up email.  It serves as a very effective To Do list for me.  It allows for accurate and extensive documentation when needed, as well as quick decision-making with a variety of stakeholders.  Long live email.

A common complaint about social networks is that they insulate us by only showing us information we’re already likely to agree with. This solidifies our existing confirmation biases and makes us less likely to see the value of other viewpoints. It’s a legitimate concern, but we only have ourselves to blame. The problem is that if we don’t follow enough people from different types of networks, we’re always going to see the same type of information over and over.  And in this fundamental point also lies the best way to get the biggest benefit from social media.  So stick with me as we discuss some sociology theory, which I promise will lead to some practical implications in the end.

First, a little background on Structural Hole Theory.

Structural Holes Defined

Ronald Burt’s theory of “structural holes’ is an important extension of social network theory, which argues that networks provide two types of benefits: information benefits and control benefits.

• Information benefits refer to who knows about relevant information and how fast they find out about it. Actors with strong networks will generally know more about relevant subjects, and they will also know about it faster. According to Burt (1992), “players with a network optimally structured to provide these benefits enjoy higher rates of return to their investments, because such players know about, and have a hand in, more rewarding opportunities”.
• Control benefits refer to the advantages of being an important player in a well-connected network. In a large network, central players have more bargaining power than other players, which also means that they can, to a large extent, control many of the information flows within the network.

People with a lot of followers on social media have a high degree of Control benefits — they are often extremely influential in their fields, and in unique positions to have control over certain conversations on the web. But being an influencer doesn’t guarantee that you will have strong Information benefits , because you tend to get the same news over and over again if you don’t do a bit of work on expanding your network in a very deliberate way.

Burt’s theory of structural holes aims to enhance both these benefits to their full potential. A structural hole is “a separation between non-redundant contacts” (Burt, 1992). The holes between non-redundant contacts provide opportunities that can enhance both the control benefits and the information benefits of networks. The figure below shows a graphical representation of this definition.

The concept of non-redundant contacts is extremely important, and refers to contacts who give you access to networks you aren’t already part of. Now let’s look at how Mr. Scoble can increase the Information benefits he gets from Twitter.

Optimizing the benefits of networks

There are several ways to optimize structural holes in a network to ensure maximum information benefits:

• The size of the network. The size of a network determines the amount of information that is shared within the network. A person has a much better chance to receive timely, relevant information in a big network than in a small one. The size of the network is, however, not dependant merely on the number of actors in the network, but the number of non-redundant actors. In other words, it’s not just about how many people you follow on Twitter, it’s also who you follow.  Pretty straight-forward, but let’s continue.
• Efficient networks. Efficiency in a network is concerned with maximizing the number of non-redundant contacts in a network in order to maximize the number of structural holes per actor in the network. It is possible to eliminate redundant contacts by linking only with a primary actor in each redundant cluster. This saves time and effort that would normally have been spent on maintaining redundant contacts.  What this basically means is that if you follow people who all follow each other, your network isn’t very efficient and you need to get rid of some people.
• Effective networks. Effectiveness in a network is concerned with “distinguishing primary from secondary contacts in order to focus resources on preserving primary contacts” (Burt, 1992:21). Building an effective network means building relationships with actors that lead to the maximum number of other secondary actors, while still being non-redundant.  This means that if 10 people give you access to the same network of information, only follow the most important one — their voice will be clearer and not drowned out by the others.
• Weak ties. In his 1973 paper entitled “The strength of weak ties”, Mark Granovetter (Granovetter, 1973) developed his theory of weak ties. The theory states that because a person with strong ties in a network more or less knows what the other people in the network know (e.g. in close friendships or a board of directors), the effective spread of information relies on the weak ties between people in separate networks. “Weak ties are essential to the flow of information that integrates otherwise disconnected social clusters into a broader society” (Burt, 1992). This basically means that to get more out of Twitter, you need to figure out where your network is weak, and then follow those people who give you access to additional clusters. Building and maintaining weak ties over large structural holes enhances information benefits and creates even more efficient and effective networks.

So here’s the bottom line: to achieve networks rich in information benefits it is necessary to build large networks with non-redundant contacts and many weak ties over structural holes. Some of these information benefits are:

• More contacts are included in the network, which implies that you have access to a larger volume of information.
• Non-redundant contacts ensure that this vast amount of information is diverse and independent.
• Linking with the primary actor in a cluster implies a connection with the central player in that cluster. This ensures that you will be one of the first people to be informed when new information becomes available.

How to get the most out of social media

If we apply these theories to Twitter and other social media networks, we quickly realize it is not the sheer number of “friends” in your network that count, it is the diversity of the people in your network that is most important. If you only have links to people in your immediate group of friends or colleagues, it will be difficult to get new information, since everyone will pretty much know the same things. This is not to say that you have to start following all those random spammers on Twitter, but it does mean that people with who you have “weak ties” will often provide you with new information and therefore more benefits than your “strong ties”.

So here’s how to make sure you get the most out of social media:

• Identify the information networks you want to have access to (for me, it’s information about user experience design and product management).
• Go through your following list and see where the overlap is — if there is a lot of resharing going on of the same people, follow the person who gets reshared the most.  This will reduce your Twitter stream but still get you the information you need (and faster than before).
• Once you’ve reduced your following list, make your network as large as possible with the “weak ties” who will give you access to all the information you need.

These theories show that we can reduce the number of people we follow while actually getting more Information benefits from social media. We will get new information faster, we will get it only once or twice, and the information we get will be more diverse.

References

Burt, Ronald S. (1992). Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Granovetter, M. S. (1973). “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78: 1360-1380.

With the three recent big stories in Facebookland (the FriendFeed aquisition, real-time search, and now the test launch of Facebook Lite) it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Facebook is going hard after Twitter. (Update 1/16/2010: Facebook just rolled out “via” as their version of Twitter’s “retweet”. That, combined with recent changes to their privacy policy to make the platform more open, are two more clear examples of Facebook’s “Become Twitter” strategy)

What is more difficult to understand is why they are doing it.  Maybe it’s a personal vendetta because of the failed acquisition talks?  I just don’t see the business reason for this.  Here’s why I think Facebook should forget about Twitter and focus on making its own platform great:

Different target markets

It is well known that Twitter skews heavily towards younger tech-savvy users, with the rest of the population finding it hard to see the point.  Facebook, on the other hand, is increasingly being used by an older demographic.  The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over 55.

Why is all this important?  Because regardless of what Facebook wants to be, the demographic that is settling in on the site for the long haul is different from the Twitter user base — and they have totally different needs and behaviors. At this point, Facebook is too established as a brand to be able to force their product onto the target market they want.  And why would they even want to?  They have access to a much larger user base than Twitter.  Which brings me to my next point…

Always compete on your strengths

The mistake that Facebook is making is that it is trying to be Twitter for a user base that does not want Twitter.  Not convinced?  Go to http://www.brandtags.net and look at the brand clouds of word associations that people make with Facebook and Twitter.  For Facebook, you get words like Communication, People, Stalking.  For Twitter, you get words like Pointless, Stupid, Useless.

Now, of course Twitter is none of those things, but it shows the enormous gap in brand perceptions.  Why would you want to move a powerful people connection platform closer to something with a niche market that a majority of people find useless? There are a bunch of other Twitter statistics coming out lately that prove the Twitter niche factor: 5% of users account for 75% of the activity, 60% of US Twitter users abandon the site after a month, and 24% of all tweets are from bots (ok, that last one is irrelevant to this discussion, but still interesting).  And there’s also this interesting conversation on Mashable that clearly shows the differences between Twitter and Facebook usage.

The bottom line is that Twitter is for information sharing, Facebook is for life sharing.  That is what people are using it for — sharing photos, videos, those annoying pokes and quizzes, keeping in touch with friends all over the globe, lurking on profiles of people you used to know way back when.  That is the strength of Facebook, and that is what they should focus their platform on.

So what should Facebook do?

So here is my advice to Facebook: go where your users are.  Understand how they use the site, what their needs and behaviors are.  Go visit them, talk to them, watch them navigate around, understand why they are there in the first place.  And then enhance your platform to fulfill those needs.  Build new ways to feel closer to the people in your life.  Make it easier to share and discuss media.  Build families-only mini-communities.  Who knows what you can come up with if you just understand your users and build a web site for their needs?

Seriously — let Twitter be Twitter, forget about them and don’t force your users into that kind of experience.  Don’t try to be “status updates for everyone.”  Be a platform that lives up to the value proposition on your home page: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”