The question “do you deserve your following” might sound a bit odd. After all, if it is a followerbase like on twitter that you have, people have the option to unfollow you once they feel mistreated. Nevertheless it is a good thing to stop and think about how you treat the people that follow you online. Yes, of course there might be real life friends and other contacts represented in your following, but quite often posts on how to deal with your following tend to lean towards “what do you get from it”  side.

Thus I thought it was nice to come across this blogpost, asking how you really treat your followers. It’s a sad thing really, that posts like these have to be made, but I do think they are necessary, even though the answer to what a “good way” to treat them is migth be easy.

The answer I think really is quite simple. Even though I’m not religious I’d like to quote from the Bible for some guidance to basic etiquette:

Do to others as you would have them do to you
Luke 6:31

Yes, this old piece of wisdom still holds value, especially on the web. As Garret points out in his post; you’re not dealing with contacts (or just followers, for that matter) you are dealing with real people. As said;  I think it is a bit sad we have to think about how we should treat other people, but fortunately there are blogposts like these to remind us just a little.

Not just sometimes, but quite often, new media really is that simple. Hold on for just a moment and think about older, every examples of how to deal with people, products or anything else and you will see that even new things might rely on old principles.

Have you ever taken a survey recently, or maybe several surveys? If so you might have wondered about several things. And maybe those things are exactly those things that bother me about surveys. One could have, of course, something against surveys altogether, but they remain a powerful research tool, that is one thing that’s for sure. Even though I’m personally calling for a broader way of doing research, I don’t think we should abandon it.

I do think we should look more into some of the things that come to mind when you look at a survey. These things are often related to a certain tradition that lies in doing survey based research and indeed in a sort of tradition that is created per tracker survey as well. Not changing things for tradition’s sake, is one of the worst things a researcher could do and still this seems to happen all too often. Survey methodology in general is one thing, but a lot of me wondering about survey research is the lack of changes, of innovation.

Tradition

If any objections about wording, questions, long surveys and tradition sound familiar to you, you may have read Jan Hofmeyr’s (Synovate) Research Magazine interview where he comes up with similar notions. He describes in an honest and clear way how tradition seems to hold the Research Industry hostage some times. An excellent example is about brand tracking; surveys in these studies seem to be way too long, which makes response and dropout rates suffer and will of course cost the researcher way too much money. Still companies seem reluctant to step forward and possibly lose half of their income and clients seem to be reluctant because the ever present danger of losing the budget for your department if you seem to be able to spend less this year! Quite a classic way of holding on to traditions for little more than some sort of business continuity reasons.

To these observations I would add that an other reason is often because one likes to compare studies. This, of course, mainly concerns tracker-like studies. Questions can sometimes be added, but clients could be very reluctant to remove any, or even improve the wording because of reasons like “this has been running like this already” or “we want to compare this with 2001”. In these cases, the question of course is whether comparing “bad” data (defective, in the sense that Jan is using it.) with new bad data makes sense at all!

Can we add to survey research?

On other point is the research itself; I mean: come on, survey research? Can’t we come up with some nice additions to that? Well, of course we can, and I believe that we can even strengthen survey based research with additions like these. Still, very little seems under way to do this, even with the “2.0” hype going on like crazy. Now of course I do see the point in no jumping on any bandwagon, but the way clients and others seem to hold to just surveys some times seem to be a bit odd, to say the least. When one looks at comments made by Hofmeyr like

“it’s very hard to get people to change. We’re supposed to be researchers; we’re supposed to care about truth and new knowledge”

and

“Our industry is one of the most conservative you will come across. Look at IT – look how keen they are to throw out the old and adopt the new.”

it’s maybe not that hard to see why a “knowledge” industry seems very reluctant to use any improvements, let alone new ways of doing things.

Being this knowledge based industry I think the ideas, the knowledge, is there, what we have to do now is to use it! This will not happen tomorrow, but if we can come up with a good way of doing “new research” tomorrow, present it next week, clients may follow and demand these things next month, if you catch my drift. I think this is a train we cannot afford to miss or else we might never arrive in the future while others who did “get it” are catching up and do get there in the end. So, of course, proceed with caution, but be sure to catch that mediatrain that will departure very soon or has perhaps left the station already.

I already wrote about the KOPTE model, that defines 5 basic factors that are of influence the success of your social network. I’ve tried to explain what each of the five points means and how this can work in practice. But how does it work in practice? What does it mean if you apply each of those five points to your (Social Network) organisation?

It is nice to see that someone has actually done just that. (Based on a Dutch article I wrote about this model earlier this year.) In the professional case “Working open source”, the five point model I described is used to analyze the open source business model of ZXZW. (An annual festival in “celebration of independent culture”)

Author Barry goes through each of the five points, Knowledge, Original Content, Passion, Time and Environment to describe the organisation of the festival and analyze if there are points where they can improve their organisation.

Have a look at the article here and see for yourself how Barry analyses the festival and applies each of the points to the model of the organisation there. Also, quite interesting is how he touches upon different types of organisational culture and describes how the ZXZW festival fits in this model. I think this is a good example how you can define an organisation in the sense of a specific model to use the advantages of that particular model to analyze and fix certain aspects of your organisation.

Something different, perhaps, than the usual article you’ll find about twitter. I may have a lot to add to any article that’s out there already, but as people have been publishing so many articles in the past two months or so it might be best to let it all just be for a n while.

There are a lot of excellent and less excellent articles out there about how you might use this microblogging tool to your advantage and I’m not going to add to that, for now. Instead I want to talk about a more basic thing and that is the structure underlying the whole tool.

Some time ago I was asked about what I thought was the new thing about twitter. Indeed even before I had joined I have been asking myself the same question. For those of you that know me it might not be a surprise that I thought of it as nothing new, all the elements making up this latest new thing were already present, weren’t they?

Indeed we’ve been chatting quite a lot already in the past ten, maybe twenty or more years or so. New ways of communicating have been introduced and this new tool is somewhat like and IRC chat, an old fashioned chatroom or maybe it’s more like an instant messenger as people keep a list of friends with whom they usually communicate.

And herein lies the “new” part, if you like. After giving the question about what I thought about this tool some thought I could not think of anything else than to respond that it was the broadcast model of the tool. There are friendlists, sure, but there are no chatrooms and if you don’t “lock” your stream of messages everyone, even your non-friends can see and search your tweets. Basically you’re broadcasting your messages, your thoughts to the outside world, and anyone can tune in. Some of these listeners might have chosen to tune in permanently, but in theory everyone can see what you’re broadcasting. This also allows everyone to respond to what you’re saying, and this is the “new” thing.

No longer are your messages confined to either a chatroom or the particular friend you’re talking to, but they are open and can be used by anyone, either to respond or to gather data about just about anything. (Including yourself, obviously!) This is the essence of the word microblog: through it’s open structure it truly acts like a blog: your messages may look like normal chats but they are open to comments, linking and indexing. (Thus providing both an argument against and for locking your account.)

This linking is further extended through a now common practice of repeating some of your tweets. Friends will repeat any messages they find interesting, thus further extending the reach of your messages. (Yes, this is what you’d call “retweeting”.) You might ask; “but you’ve just mentioned that anyone can access “any” message already?”, and indeed this is true, but as searching through them usually only happens when someone is interested in a specific topic, ‘now’, people usually only read the messages they get from friends; from people they follow. Your followers offer a fast track to spread your messages as when they repeat your message themselves they make it directly available to their friends. (Of which you might share a couple, so they will see it twice, yes.)

To structure my thoughts about this I sent an image of how I thought this would best be explained. I know this is not consistent with normal ways of displaying information flows, and it actually doesn’t really show that flow very well, but I think it shows really well the thought behind the whole process.

Like ripples in water your message will spread, sometimes amplified again when someone chooses to repeat it.

This way of representing a sort of sphere of influence that a person or a group has, with people being in multiple groups, thus adding the means of spreading is not entirely new, obviously. And one might even assert that once beyond your own sphere your messages loses part of it’s meaning. Only the meaning readily present in it’s 140 characters is kept and all context is, or might be, lost. Your message holds a particular complex meaning in your sphere, your world, and to others, when repeated, it only holds the ‘face’ value, that what is readily present in the message.

The message might be even reduced to a binary meaning, something is true or not, takes place or not and that meaning is then transmitted throughout the twittersphere. You own direct sphere of influence, on the other hand, is influenced by exactly such messages from beyond it. This of course is particular true for the most narrow sphere; you yourself. Maybe this is the underlying force that drives people to say that Twitter is feeding on itself and hype seems rule rather than exception. This may be true for any type of mass media, but the quick flow and short messages of Twitter are amplifying this in a way that it becomes really visible to even the most ignorant of us. This is not to say this is either good or bad, but it is something we might want to consider nonetheless. (And rest assure, I think we unconsciously do, the question may be: to what extend to we keep this in mind when dealing with (new) media.)