Zenologue

One of the intriguing things about Twitter is its complexity disguised as apparent simplicity. On the face of things Twitter appears to be little more than a very simple communication system involving the exchange of short (often meaningless) messages, very similar in concept to a text message on a mobile phone. In fact, text messaging was the fundamental inspiration for Twitter in the first place. Under the surface, though, things are more complicated, with properties emerging from Twitter that may not have been foreseen in the beginning.

The Power Of A Few Words

Most tweets can be divided into one of several categories: 

• Mundane items of little interest to anyone with a life
• Attempts to sell get-rich-quick schemes
• Promises of thousands of new followers (none of whom are interested in you)
• Other types of spam
• Political and religious messages

But there are some that are completely different and are of a more advanced or intellectually satisfying nature. It’s this group of tweets that could potentially form the basis for a whole new world…

This small group of tweets has been used to compose poetry, write plays, spread news, warn other users of Internet threats, exchange product reviews, sway public opinion, influence political campaigns, reduce the spread of computer viruses and help people get released from foreign jails. The entire world seemed to grieve as a collective on the day Michael Jackson passed away, straining Twitter to its limits in the process; the list goes on.

All of this from answering the simple question of “What are you doing?”

I’m not sure that Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, envisioned these emergent properties when he unleashed his creation on the world.

Ants Tweet Too

Complex emergent phenomena are usually the result of swarms, or crowds of individuals. Mobs and riots are one example, where the size of the “swarm” reaches a critical mass, resulting in the group suddenly acting in unison, usually in a violent or destructive manner.

Insect colonies are a prime example of swarming behavior, and watching Twitter is sometimes reminiscent of observing the social complexities of an ant colony. Individual ants by themselves are very simple creatures that operate by simple rules. There’s really no room in an ant head for a brain capable of understanding the principles of architecture or the strategies of waging war with enemy invaders. No single ant knows how to construct an entire nest, complete with tunnels, chambers, gardens, kitchens, nurseries etc. Yet, the swarm as a whole accomplishes this task with amazing ease and efficiency. The ant nest and its incredible structure is an emergent property of a swarm of individuals. Furthermore, the structure of an ant colony is not predictable in any way by examining individual ants.

People are quite different to ants, and most of them are somewhat more intelligent than an insect, but Twitter strikes me as a good analogy to an ant colony: Twitter is essentially a simple system with a few easy to understand rules. Yet the behavior of the Twitter system as a whole shows signs (albeit small ones at the moment) of emerging properties that are generated by its millions of users and the different ways those users are putting Twitter to work for them. 

What Are You Doing?

What causes Twitter to exhibit complex behavior from an apparently innocuous question where the answer must be in 140 characters or less?

The answer lies in Twitter’s basic concept – the communication of a text message. Text messaging and Twitter are basically the same. However, there is one major difference, and it’s that difference that makes all the difference in the world; it’s the electric spark that breathes life into the creature that Twitter has become. Text messaging doesn’t exhibit any complex emergent properties as far as I know; it’s a one-to-one messaging system. Twitter, on the other hand, expands and multiplies the influence of the text message into a powerful one-to-many system. This amplifies the message so that millions of people can potentially receive it almost simultaneously.

Let’s return for a moment to our comparison of Twitter users with ants. We can consider the ant’s chemical messaging as analogous to a tweet – “food this way”, “follow this trail”, “defend nest” etc. From this, we can imagine how no ant colony could function properly if ant-tweets were received by only a single ant at a time. Communication in ants, the foundation of their complex behavior, is by necessity a one-to-many system that both distributes and amplifies the message and causes complex behavior to occur. 

One Day Twitter Might Be As Smart As An Ant

Thinking about this further, I’m tempted to go out on a limb and suggest that an ant colony, with the benefit of millions of years of evolution, is way more advanced than Twitter is right now. Twitter, in its current state, is like an ant colony gone mad, where most of the messages are disorganized and obscured by meaningless noise. It’s as though all the ants in the colony are all spouting random messages at the same time in a raucous rabble. If that were to actually happen, the ant colony would probably collapse.

Being optimistic, though, I suspect that the overall signal-to-noise ratio of twitter will grow stronger as time goes by. Already, there are pockets of meaningful information out there. It’s a shame that much of that data is masked and drowned out by announcements of the eating status of millions of household pets or the endless repetition of inspirational quotes. Do ants make “noise” too? I’m sure that not all “ant tweets” are perfectly meaningful in the context of the collective need. If that’s true, how are the less useful or incorrect messages filtered out from the real signal to enable the colony to function as it does? If we can find the answer to that question, maybe we can learn how to apply that principle in “tuning” Twitter, to amplify the signal and quench the noise.

You Will Be Assimilated

As any fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation knows, one of the worst fates is to be assimilated by the Borg, a race of evil cybernetic humanoids organized into a swarm (“the collective”) and operating as a single organism. Assimilation meant being absorbed into the collective and becoming a part of the hive mind, sacrificing one’s individuality in the process. Not a pleasant thought for anyone.

While I doubt our own individuality is in too much danger of being assimilated by the Twitter universe, there are some striking similarities between the Borg and the fetal creature currently we know as Twitter.

For example, take the ability of many unrelated individuals in the network to unite as one, in a concerted effort to solve a problem. This happened recently when Demi Moore alerted her Twitter followers to a woman threatening suicide in San Jose. Within moments, the news spread, the local authorities were alerted, and tragedy was avoided.

Or, consider the Twitter Opera; a collaborative work constructed almost entirely of tweets. I’m not sure how “good” the opera turned out to be, but the main point is that it is a work of art made by otherwise unconnected individuals. The question remains of whether or not it is true art, unless it is somehow an expression of the collective consciousness that created it.

Then there’s the Twitter Psychic Experiment conducted by Professor Richard Wiseman. In the experiment, he asked volunteer Twitter users to try to “remote view” the location he was in and select it from a set of five photographs. In each run of the experiment, the collective decision was incorrect suggesting the remote viewing is not a real phenomenon.

Finally, I think one of the really interesting, and possibly useful, possibilities of something like Twitter is as a problem-solving machine…

Welcome To The Machine

We’ve already seen examples of using the Internet as a means for distributed computing. For example, SETI Online, the computational modeling of protein folding and the human genome project, all of which harness the power of many thousands of computers to process small portions of complex tasks that would take a very long time, even on a single supercomputer.

This caused me to wonder if Twitter could eventually be used as a problem-solving computer using principles similar to that found in the wisdom of crowds. Such problems could be the sort that traditional computing might be unable to solve; problems involving concepts that are difficult to express numerically or in a logical form.

Here is a very simple example (simple in the extreme, but it serves the point). “Do I take an umbrella with me to work today?” The answer depends mainly on how likely it is to rain where I’m going, but also on such factors as how much time I intend to spend outside, how windy it will be, how convenient it is to carry, where am I going, what alternatives there are to an umbrella, and so on. Can the wisdom of a crowd decide the answer to this kind of question intelligently? I think maybe it can, as long as the crowd doesn’t fall prey to anti-productive concepts that might lead to a herd mentality or collective irrational fears or prejudices.

This possibility raises some interesting questions, which others might want to try to answer (maybe through Twitter itself as a sort of meta-question).

How many followers might it take for us to effectively solve a qualitative problem that involves rationalization and reasoning rather than mathematical or logical processes? I’m sure the answer probably depends on the complexity of the problem and many other factors, such as when the question is asked.

Is the time taken to solve a problem directly proportional to the number of followers working on it, or might we see a synergistic, exponential or logarithmic effect? That is, would 10 followers be 10 times more effective than 1 at solving the problem, or 100 times more effective?

Conclusion

Twitter is still very much in its infancy at the moment, barely able to feed itself, let alone talk coherently. But it’s learning at a fast rate, and I don’t think it’s going to be too long before we start to see even more startling and amazing things come out of it that will catch us all by surprise.

As a very basic test, I posted a tweet that asked, “what is the square root of 12,345,678 to four decimal places?” Anyone with a calculator can work that out in a few seconds. Twitter took 28 minutes. Maybe the question wasn’t interesting enough to get an answer immediately, but the point is that it did answer the problem. At least it didn’t give me the answer of ‘42’, in which case I would have been a little concerned…

Is it possible that Twitter, or something like it, could be the future answer to artificial intelligence? Such an AI system would be made up of millions of independently smart nodes, each one autonomous in its own right, yet able to function as a small component of a much larger decision-making system. It would be like an ant colony where the ants are each as smart as people…

Maybe the question Twitter should be asking isn’t, “What Are You Doing?” It ought to be “What Do You Want Me To Do?”

General communication, complex system, emergent property, tweet, twitter

At the risk of giving away my age, I wonder how many readers here remember the famous song by Genesis called “Follow You, Follow Me” from their 1978 album “Then There Were Three”. Of course, Twitter was something birds did in those days, but the title could easily be the theme tune for what we know today as one of the largest social media networking sites on the web.

If you aren’t already using Twitter, or have tried it and wondered what all the fuss is about, you might want to think again. When I first ventured into this strange new world of tweets and followers my first reaction was bewilderment. I simply couldn’t understand why everyone now wanted to text online, as if mobile texting wasn’t enough (blimey, I just realized the word “texting” is now a verb, and wasn’t in my spellchecker). Why, I thought, do all these people need to know that Bob’s cat has fur balls? It seemed like everyone was spreading the totally mundane 140 characters at a time.

But then something good happened – businesses started to get online with Twitter and were actually using it to leverage the market and make money. Best Buy, the major US electronics retailer, used it to spread news of special offers and incentives to major success. Other companies started using it to join in the conversation with their clients.

One of the first things that most people new to Twitter notice is that it’s apparently important to get as many followers as possible, no matter who or where they are. However, having a huge follower list might make someone feel famous in some odd way, but it isn’t necessarily the best thing if you’re trying to promote your business.

By the way, you should probably have a separate Twitter account for your business that is different to your personal stuff – it helps to keep these things apart from each other and prevents your personal tweets from diluting your business message.

So the question you should be asking yourself is “Who should I be following?” and “Who should be following me?” Okay, that’s two questions. Let’s take the second one first.

Who Should Follow Me?

The answer to this one is your target market. It seems so obvious, yet so many people are missing this one completely and not trying to attract the right followers. We are in the photography business, and we ought to have a reasonably good idea of who our target market is. For example, it could be middle-aged moms with good taste and an appreciation for finer things, such as photographic wall décor. It probably isn’t some dude 3000 miles away who likes to paint his toenails purple on a Friday.

But how do we get the right people to follow us?

Firstly, we can’t rely on them simply finding us first and then following us. That would be too easy! Instead, we need to look in the places where they go, specifically for the people and businesses that our target market might follow on Twitter. There’s a good chance, for example, that your local large art gallery has a good following, and that a number of those people will fit your desired market. So, follow the art gallery and then follow the people that are following them. Hopefully, they will reciprocate and follow you back. You can do the same thing for any other organization or people that your target market is naturally drawn to, such as fancy restaurants, upscale beauty salons etc 

Who Should I Follow?

A lot of Twitterers (is that even a word? Maybe it’s “Tweeters”) will simply follow anyone who follows them or just anyone they can find. That’s probably not the best strategy. Instead, start out by following the professional organizations related to your business, such as the PPA, RPS, pro printing labs etc. Follow other professional photographers, marketers and other experts. Follow your local organizations and charities too. Avoid following anyone who could be considered a spammer, especially the ones who only know how to say things like, “Get a million followers in five minutes with no work while you’re asleep.”

Finally, don’t neglect your local market! If you live in a huge city, this next step might not be as easy as for those in smaller towns, but it’s still probably worth a try.

You can use the advanced Twitter search to find people within a specific radius of your zip code (enter it into the “Near this place” field in the form):

You can then take the results and follow the people who interest you as potential clients or links to other potential clients.

Or, you can use TwellowHood, a new directory calling itself the Twitter Yellow Pages. Click on the TwellowHood tab and it brings up an interactive map so that you can click down to your actual town or city:

You will need to log in first with your Twitter username and password, but then you can follow people in your locality with one click each. Very easy and it means you will be following your local community, some of whom will hopefully return the favor 

Conclusion:

I hope that this gives you an idea of what can really be done with Twitter in terms of connecting with the people who matter to you and your business. I’m sure there are many other ways to use Twitter in this fashion, so please feel free to send in any useful comments you might have on this ever-changing and interesting subject.

Marketing Marketing, professional photography, social media networking, twellowhood, twitter

Your web site is, quite obviously, a marketing tool for our photography businesses but, if we’re to have the best chance of engaging our market in this Web 2.0 world, then we need to converse with them and not simply present a highly sanitized, techno-laden, emotionless blurb full of keywords that would send even a search engine to sleep.

The immediacy and spontaneity of blogs make them great for this purpose, as are Facebook and Twitter, if used properly. But, even the content on our main web site should be written more conversationally if we’re to catch and keep our readers’ attention.

Look, No Words!

Photographers are blessed with the ability to communicate in both written and visual media. So why is it that we rely so heavily on our photographs to do the marketing for us? After all, slideshows and flashy presentations might look pretty (to us creative people at least), but how effective are they at engaging the prospective client?

It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and maybe some indeed are. However, photographs by themselves are generally not a conversation – conversation starters perhaps, but not conversations in themselves. They may appeal to the viewer on an emotional level, which is a really great start, but we all too often leave it there, with no further attempt to really talk with them. Think of it like this: would you show a client a photograph in person without saying a single word about it? Do you show your friends your vacation photographs without the anecdotal stories that go along with them? Of course not! Just take a look on Facebook at all the comments that can be spawned from the posting of a single image – this is a conversation that anyone can join, and it’s all free.

Striking and powerful images can be wonderful at starting a conversation, but we had better continue that conversation, or our market will simply leave thinking we hung up on them. This can be as simple as acknowledging a user’s comment, thanking someone for a retweet on Twitter, or answering questions.

What Do You Want To Talk About?

It should be clear by now that there’s a need for us to join in with the spirit of this conversation that’s going on all around us – but what should we talk about? Well, one thing’s certain – it’s really no use talking about ourselves. People who talk about themselves too much at parties are usually the ones left standing about on their own guarding the coat pile.

The ideal subject for this conversation is simple: Our Market. Specifically, how they can benefit from our unique selling points, as long as those points are presented in a way free from business-speak. This must be one of the hardest things to do – the traditional concepts of marketing are so ingrained in us that it’s difficult to break the habit.

There is a conflict between our desire to communicate our message and “advertise” what we do, and the need to engage people on a more human level. We need to find ways to “speak” in plain terms, in a truly conversational style that is honest and from the heart, as it were.

For example, say that one of your unique selling points is that you’re an expert at photographing green cats (not much call for that I know but, hey, this is a hypothetical example).

The copy on your web site should appeal to the emotions that owners of green cats generally experience, and how portraits of their precious green pets can have so much sentimental value to them that the investment in a portrait is well worth it for all the benefits they will enjoy from the photographs. You can work into your conversational talk things like how much more adorable green cats can be, how they make strong bonds with their owners and how great they are to have. How sad would it be to not have a portrait of your beloved green cat after it’s gone from this world? This is much more effective than simply saying, “book your green cat portrait session now!” 

You’re The Voice

You could, of course, blast Facebook with status messages such as “Green cats look cool in black & white” or “When it comes to photographing green cats, we’re not green”. But that looks too much like traditional interruptive advertising or spam.

Instead, you could “listen” to the conversation and find people who are saying things like, “I love my green cat”, “my green cat is my best friend” etc. Then you can reply in a nice way that, yes their green cat is indeed cute and might look beautiful in one of your portraits. You don’t even need to mention that you photograph green cats – if you participate enough and allow people to get to know you, they will learn this information by themselves.

Another way to think of it is to imagine having a face-to-face conversation with a prospective client, perhaps someone you just met who asked about your business. The voice they would hear is distinctly you, and obviously human, with feelings, passion and a sincere concern for their needs and desires.

We can transcribe that conversation and apply it to the web site without making the mistake of over-sanitizing it or using fancy words. Okay, I know the web site is essentially an artificial conversation, but the voice you use can still be real and no less you than the spoken word. Keywords are still important for the search engines, but we should never make them a priority over the quality of our content.

The only job of the web site is lead-generation – to encourage the reader to engage you in person by calling, emailing, asking for more information and to involve you in a real conversation with them that can then lead to a booking and potential sales. In order to accomplish this we need to appeal to their emotions, something we should be able to accomplish considering that photography is inherently an emotional business. 

Conclusion

The introduction of the Web 2.0 has not only made the web more interactive and flashy with dynamic content; it has further enabled the online conversation that’s been there since the web was first invented; the difference now is that the conversation is immediate and becoming the dominant force. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia and a host of other social networking sites are bringing the conversation to a rolling boil that is making traditional web marketing almost obsolete. We need to join in or we risk being left behind as relics of a more primitive time …

This post was based on my personal reaction to chapter 4 of The “Cluetrain Manifesto”, which can be found here:

http://www.cluetrain.com/book/markets.html

This was written in the early 1990’s but reads now like a prediction of much that we now take for granted. A very interesting and thought provoking read indeed. 

Marketing branding, business, facebook, LinkedIn, Marketing, Photography, social media networking, twitter