Twitter as a Medium: Broadcast or Narrowcast?
There’s a fundamental disconnect, I’m afraid, in Twitter’s two user models. Twitter, no matter what you’re pushing out on it, can be used in two ways: narrowcast or broadcast. You’re either considering yourself to be a broadcaster of information, or you’re a narrowcaster and trying to hit just a few people. I think the main different would be whether your account is public or private, but it’s also in use.
I’m a narrowcasting person—sure, I “broadcast” information, but I usually try to keep specific folks in mind when I tweet. Most of the time, but not all, I ask, “Is this something I would phone a friend about?” The rare “broadcasting” I do is stuff like today, when I’m posting weather updates. Otherwise, my random ramblings of under 140 characters tend to be things that I’d tell my friends.
This is, of course, not the only way to use Twitter. Everyone has these conversations, at some level; but you can truly broadcast as things get aggregated. If a bunch of people tweet about an event—be it an Apple product launch, a weather/natural disaster, or the stock market—it shows up in tools that glean the chaff from Twitter.
We’re seeing the same thing that we saw with blogging—you were either doing it for personal or promotional reasons. To be honest, we’re all on some portion of that spectrum. But where I think feelings get hurt and people get riled up is when people who were sociable and narrowcast go to the broadcast end of the spectrum.
An example: my good friend Mark Traphagen. Mark’s a marketer. He went from the narrowcast model—sending things that he’d call his friends on the telephone about—to far more down the broadcast end of the spectrum. I think a lot of people are turned off by that; me, I quietly unfollowed Mark and then explained it when he emailed me about it. From reading between the tweets, I see that it’s a kerfuffle again today with a bunch of my RMFO friends, many of whom have said, of late, that Twitter has replaced the forum as their primary “hang” place.
And see, that’s the disconnect: we all tell our friends about things, like “Hey, the weather is bad in your area,” or “Yo, traffic is blocked on your drive home.” But when you’ve got this friend who’s calling you all the time to tell you about things that you’re not interested in, eventually, you stop answering the phone every time they call, right? On Twitter, you just stop following them. Sure, some people are going to take offense at that—after all, the following thing is public, and there’s tools like Twitual to show you who is and isn’t following you—and that’s understandable. There’s also different toolsets for reading Twitter, including some with grouping features that let you filter incoming stuff.
The point is this: everyone’s use case is different. I add and remove feeds all the time for my own needs, and the only difference is that I don’t make that list public, whereas Twitter does make that public. Twitter does that, I think, to push people to be more social/narrowcasted with their service. A lot of my friends—and me!—use it this way. But it’s so arrogant to tell Mark, “You’re doing it wrong!”
Again, to quote Rands, you choose who you follow. That’s it. Twitter is totally an opt-in system. If you feel spammed, stop.
[And this is where I again wonder why anyone reads what I tweet if they don't know me. Because, well, I vent and it's craaaaazy.]
HOW DARE YOU!!!!
April 10th, 2009 at 16:06[This is where I hope that I'm reading Michael's sarcasm correctly.
]
April 10th, 2009 at 16:10Yea. I agree. I think people who were reading along with what Mark and I were talking about would see it from a different spectrum than I’m sure Mark or I even meant it. It was more of a dialogue between the two of us regarding the change in his tweets and his use of retweets and “likes”.
April 10th, 2009 at 16:11Well, and Josh, I just see this discussion happening a lot, and I trust Mark enough to let me use him as an “example” of a “switcher” and know that, while it might sting at first, he’ll see the point that I’m making and not be hurt by it long-term.
April 10th, 2009 at 16:25I’m only hurt that no one today called out “Take it to AYOR!” That would’ve brought a tear of fond nostalgia to my day
For the benefit of anyone who reads this who was not part of the RMFO community to which Geof refers above, “AYOR” is the acronym for At Your Own Risk, a “room” on that forum set aside for discussions of controversial topics. When I was active there, moderators would from time-to-time move threads that got heated into AYOR (or the participants would go voluntarily once the cry of “Take it to AYOR!” rang out).
Before I comment on your post, Geof, I want to make clear to all that there was absolutely no rancor between Joshua and me in today’s Twitter discussion. We’ve confirmed that with each other via an exchange of DMs. Even our brief exchange of ALL CAPS SHOUTING was meant tongue in cheek, as we both know better than to do that on the Interwebs.
I think I’m going to write a longer piece on my own blog to explain some of my thinking about how I use and participate in various social web sites. But I do want to interact here with some of your thoughts, Geof.
I think you’ve pegged the source of the static that some of our mutual friends have been experiencing with my transmissions on Twitter: broadcasting vs. narrowcasting. Though such static could come up on almost any social channel of the ‘net, it seems that Twitter has created a channel that is almost uniquely adept at amplifying it, sometimes to painful levels.
The RMFO forum was my introduction to the social web, and obviously it got me hooked. The forum venue worked to keep static to a minimum. Although people came and went, over time a very tight-knit little community developed there, with its own, mostly-unwritten culture and codes. From time to time a noobie would appear who would try to force his/her own way of using the forum, but the community had a pretty high efficiency level at weeding them out. Some times they would “repent” (come into line with the community’s standards)–and some of our most valued members started that way. If not, they were either driven out by the disdain of the community (or our refusal to interact with them), or in a few cases, they might be forcibly banned. So while the forum had its rough times, on the whole it was a pretty peaceful, homogeneous little village. It helped that the village had different “rooms” for different purpose. If you cared little for sports, it was easy to avoid sports conversations by staying out of the sports room.
In my little tale of social web evolution, I’m going to skip blogging; not because I think it unimportant, but because I think it is really a slightly different animal from straight-out social web venues.
So my next infatuation was with Facebook. Facebook was a comfortable branching out from the very comfortable and familiar world of our forum. It was pushing out into a broader world of contacts, but still a fairly controlled environment. You chose your friends, and with the ability now to filter your News Feed by groups you create, you can turn down the signal-to-noise as far as you want.
And then there was Twitter.
Twitter’s genius is also it’s greatest hazard: it’s simplicity. 140 characters, anyone in the world can follow your stream, no filters or channels or rooms. I didn’t get it at first; I already had status updates on FB; why would I want another channel with (only) the same thing. But later I realized the power of this wide-open, deceptively simple medium.
Now I need to shift gears for a moment to my “real life,” because changes there have effected very much my social web presence. Joshua, this will answer your question on Twitter earlier today: “When did you become a marketer?”
For almost four years and up until very recently, I worked for a bookstore that had taken on a David vs. Goliath challenge: to compete online as a David in a niche market against the Goliath of that-store-named-after-a-South-American-river. Over the course of my time there I went from shipping clerk to webmaster. We needed the store to grow fast, but we didn’t have much money to spend on promotion or advertising. It was about that time that I began learning about the awesome potential of so-called viral marketing using the power of the social web. At the encouragement of a wonderful boss who was willing to let me experiment and learn through trying-and-failing-then-trying-again, I was able to play a significant part in taking the store from a little one room brick-and-morter operation on an educational campus to the major player in its niche market. And I did it without spending one penny on traditional advertising. I learned how to develop a small army of people on the web who became evangelists for our store. I just had to care for and feed them in the right ways, and they did all the heavy lifting.
We started that effort through bloggers, but late in my career there we had begun to experiment with Twitter. I quickly grasped the power of Twitter to spread a message farther and faster than blogs ever could. When I found myself suddenly laid off from that job (for reasons I won’t go into here and totally unrelated to my performance of my job), I became determined to never again be at the mercy of a corporation for my means of sustenance. While I do have a new day job, which I love and for which I am very grateful, I wanted to develop an income stream that will supplement that, and that could–if ever needed–become my main income. The skills I had learned, combined with those of some wonderful and creative people I’ve been able to network with and learn from, have convinced me that I can build that security through an online business. And before you get worried for me, I’m not talking about any multi-level marketing or shady spammer type of thing. I’m not prepared to divulge my plan yet, but I do have one and it is developing nicely.
Enter the static. A key part of that plan involves Twitter. And this is the part of it that gets difficult to explain. I tried the shorthand version earlier when Joshua and some of my other close friends on Twitter began prodding me about “why do you retweet (post links to other’s tweets and/or content elsewhere on the web). I just told them that I was using Twitter for “marketing purposes.” Unfortunately, that just added to the confusion. Marketing? But your not selling anything? Where’s the product? How in the world is your constant tweeting and retweeting linked to any kind of marketing scheme? Show me the money!
And that’s the part that’s hard to explain. When I say marketing, I’m not talking about what we’ve all grown up with on TV, radio, and the newspapers. In those mediums, you throw out image and text or audio about your product or service in front of a broad audience, many of whom aren’t at all in the market of what you’re selling. The new marketplace of the Internet is different (although there are plenty out there throwing away a lot of money treating it as if it were the old mediums).
The social web encourages a different approach: instead of pleading with mostly uninterested people to buy your product, you build channels through which those who eagerly want your product will find you and come ready to buy. In this new marketing, our don’t just set up shop, throw up a few ads, and wait and hope that the right people happen to run into them. Instead you first invest in something that has nothing at all to do with whatever you’re planning to sell.You build social networks of people who, over time, come to see you as an enjoyable and trusted source of information. The very retweets and link posts that annoy some of you are becoming “must reads” to an ever-expanding circle of followers with whom I am establishing authority and credibility. NOT the same kind of credibility as I hope I have with some of you, which is based on the things that real friendship has always been based upon. I’m speaking about market credibility. There’s a lot more to it than what I’ve just outlined, and I won’t bore you further. You just will have to trust me; I’m working a plan and I know where I’m going.
Now back to the point of Geof’s post. The difficult thing is that because of the way Twitter works, I have no way of separating my business life there from my personal life there. I know that many of you see Twitter as your living room; the place where you kick back and chat with your close friends. I wouldn’t think of barging uninvited into your living room on one of those cozy evenings and launching into a sales presentation. But on Twitter, that–in a sense–is what some of you experience. A guy whom you used to tell jokes with over a few beers is now blathering in tongues non-stop in your living room. I’m very sorry for that; really I am.
I’d like to propose a couple of possible solutions. The easiest thing would be to just unfollow me. As Geof said above, he’s already done that. I communicated to him by email that I totally understood and there were no hard feelings. And I’ve been saying the same thing to others today. There’s always Facebook, kids!
But as I’m typing this, I’ve come up with another solution. It will involve some extra hassle to me, but you guys are worth it. If you’ve read this far, you must either be a real friend of mine…or there’s nothing good on TV tonight
I’ve just activated a protected account @sagethefool. On that acount I will only accept you as a follower if you are somebody I already know and/or someone with whom I only want to engage in the kind of give-and-take conversation that happens among friends. If that’s the “me” you want to know and interact with on Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/sagethefool and subscribe.
April 10th, 2009 at 19:29Nothing on TV? Mark, it’s /Dollhouse/ night!
April 10th, 2009 at 22:16This has been a useful discussion. Thanks, guys! Mark, while you’ve sort of hinted at something in your penultimate paragraph above, I want to explore it a bit further. For those of us whose know you wholly via online interaction, your transformation, in our eyes, isn’t simply a different use of social media to accomplish entrepreneurial goals; it’s a transformation of Mark, the beer-sharing music-loving seminarian, to TrapperMark, online marketer. It’s not a fair evaluation on our parts; obviously you’re substantially the same person that you were five years ago. But with our online perception of you providing our only sense of your reality, it’s not your online presence that’s changed – it’s you that’s changed.
This is where the cyberspace social medium starts to cause us trouble if it’s not connected to the meatspace. We need the real, physical interaction to truly “flesh out” our knowledge of our online friends. (And yes, I realize that in saying this I’m also saying I really need to spend a week vacationing in HSV and hanging out with Geof.)
April 11th, 2009 at 09:15Hubbs: Damn right you do.
Mark: Thanks for the thoughtful response. I’m curious about your future plans, even though I don’t think they really involve me.
But I think the two account thing is cool. I have a “professional” account as well [that I'm not really doing much with, yet].
April 12th, 2009 at 15:53This discussion has left me with no choice but to introduce you all to my new Twittermid Scheme… err… Marketing Program. I just need your e-mail address, home phone number, political views, shirt size, mother’s Maiden name, copy of W-2’s, your favorite color, the city you were born in, your first pet’s name, your finger print, a retna scan, you’re thoughts on Tony Danza, hair color, eye color, height, weight, are you an organ donor, boxers or briefs, a hair sample, a mouth swab, two forms of ID, a copy of your credit report and three references. What? It’s not like I’m asking for your SSN# or Credit Card!
April 12th, 2009 at 23:44