Twitter, once again . . .
With a daily assault of social networking communications setting its aim on our time and attention — it’s not a wonder that many of us ask whether adding another diversion to this endless barrage of cell phone conversations, text messages, emails, Facebook chats and Linked-In replies — is both possible or worth it. Or, to ask: To Twitter or not to Twitter — that is the question. Twitter has gotten a very bad initial reputation; it has shaken away some of that, but there are many still who are skeptical about its worth.
Twitter, defined by Wikipedia as, “A free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers.”[1] In Twitter’s About Us section, they say that, “Twitter is a privately funded startup with offices in the SoMA neighborhood of San Francisco, CA. Started as a side project in March 2006, Twitter has grown into a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.”[2]
As of July 2006, there are supposed to be 2.5 billion cell phone users in the world. [3] In the US with so many users phoning, texting and possibly “twittering” there's great potential for either getting users' attention or causing them irritating interruptions to their average day. think it is all how you look at it.
It really depends upon what Seth Godin, Marketing Guru, calls APR, or the need for anticipated, personal or relevant [4] information and how to access it or not as fast as you possibly want or need. Godin says that the desire goes up in a user's mind if there is a strong, positive relationship with the APR for the relevant information.
The good news is that most personal social networking systems have a limited amount of users or followers who actually can interact. The value of that is still to be determined. And it also has to be said that the fame-factor, which goes part and parcel with how many followers you do have, at some point, makes true interaction impossible with your followers. As noted in Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everyone [5],” this popularity or fame-factor means that if you are Oprah or Ashton or Rosie or Cher — it is totally impossible for you to truly interact with anyone everyone who is following you.
Shirky states that at some point, at least where results are concerned, if there are too many people in a group or network, the decision-making process can be slowed so badly that nothing can be done, and in fact even totally halted. It seems that there is a participant critical mass that a group can “hit,” which may actually paralyze a group’s capabilities [6] of moving forward.
Richard Hackman, Harvard University Psychology Department, has studied this very phenomenon and in his research he tells the story of a nonprofit manager who had 40 members on its board. When asked what he thought the board could accomplish, he said, “Nothing.” Implying at the same time that he liked it that way. [7]
In her book, “Rapt — Attention and the Focused Life,” Winifred Gallagher states that “Research now suggests that like consciousness, attention is a term for a complex neurological and behavioral business that seems like more than the sum of its parts.”[8] She goes on to say and prove fairly well that there is no such thing as successful multitasking.Try telling my students that.
“Multitasking exacts a price, and people aren’t as good at it as they think they are. Multitasking not only is inefficient but can also be dangerous, even lethal. Hundreds of thousands of cell-related traffic accidents each year make plain that the car-phone combination is unsafe, potentially deadly, and should be completely illegal. [9]
What’s the point of all of this? We are and have been all a part of a large social networking group, which pulls at our attention, and yes, we are all busy and do things that we probably shouldn’t be when it comes to responding to that pull — like ignoring tweets, emails and invitations to be friends. Time is a precious commodity, and yes it is limited, and attention is also another precious resource that is directly affected by time.
And some believe that time and attention can make or break our ability to be successful. In his recent book, “Outliers — The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell researched success factors and came up with an interesting analytical conclusion. He illustrates over and over again that the very successful people in this world do what they do for more than 10,000 hours before they actually achieve notoriety, fame and expert status. [10] Now, 10,000 hours basically boils down to ten years, depending upon how aggressive you go at it.
With all of that in mind, I ask, do you have the time to add another means of diverting your attention? And/or, do you have the current success level that increasing your marketing scope is unimportant to you? I think, if we looked at it, Ellen was doing her job last night, and then she decided to Tweet that pic, which took time away from her hosting duties. Or did it. Did she fund away to use social media and make it work for her.
I think we all have to ask that of ourselves, and so you need to look further at this. Good luck!
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Bibliography
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[3] The Globalist Syndication
Services (http://www.theglobalist.com/globalicons/syndication/sample.htm)
[4] Permission Marketing, Seth
Godin, Publisher, 20XX, Page XX.
[5] Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky,
Penguin Books, 2008, page 90.
[6] Here Comes Everybody, Clay
Shirky, Penguin Books, 2008, page 27.
[7] “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay
Shirky, Penguin Books, 2008, page 31.
[8] “Rapt, Attention and the
Focused Life,” Winifred Gallagher, The Penguin Press, 2009, page 8.
[9] “Rapt, Attention and the
Focused Life,” Winifred Gallagher, The Penguin Press, 2009, page 153.
[10] Outliers, The Story of
Success, Malcolm Gladwell, Little, Brown Publishers, 2008.
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