Social Media Vistas

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a long essay equivalent on Sarah Perez's* note on the need for Social Media mavens to get out more!



So - two axes - the amount of time you are actually connected to Social Media, from the occasional dip in to the always-on, always there mode - and the other axis is level of active contribution, from total observation to active participant.

Hypothesis - if 90% of all social media users are the very occasional users, they probably fit into the bottom left box.

Those who are always on (I think mobile-heads and/or those who predominantly work from a desk are in this category) but are usually in observe mode are - in my view - what Leisa Reichelt calls being "ambiently intimate". These people are linked to all sorts of social media, drawing them back to their (online) clients in realtime. Those who just dip in occasionally ( the laptop brigade? ), get what they want to, leave their comments and go again - are what I've called "Twitternuts" - a medium that has low persistence and easy input suits them well, as do RSS readers and services like Techmeme. These two groups constitute the 9% who participate and contribute some of the time - but their use of social media requires very different functionality.

And then there are the 1% that are always on, always there, always talking. These are the people with 20,000 followers on Twitter, 5,000 friends on Facebook. For them, Friendfeed and such are a godsend - they capture every conversation, every comment, and store it into perpetuity. Sometimes, observing that these people seem to be "on" 24/7, I suspect they are actually bots (the first turing machines?) - or at least operate in relays?

What Sarah wanted to know was, because she was not as...obsessed...as these high priest mavens, was she in some way less faithful to the cause? :

.......when the weekend rolls around, I crave distraction. I want to trade the glow of my laptop screen for fresh air and sunshine and new activities…offline activities. Activities where Twitterberry may be there for me, but I don’t need to check it as obsessively as one would check Twhirl. This “taking a break” has become more and more of a trend as of late, leading me to wonder if I’m suffering from social media burnout or whether I’m secretly just a luddite who has somehow mastered the tools of an early adopter.

Nope - as my master-chart shows, Sarah is just part of the other 99% of the population who understand that in all things, moderation is best. After all, that is the wisdom of the crowd

(A thought arises about how social media can help get you laid, but the actual..... )

As an aside - and maybe its just me - but I do get tired of seeing the same people saying the same things on every piece of social media. Is there a case for an "Anti Techmeme" where the "top 100" are automatically blocked?

* Sarah was riffing off a post by Colin Walker, but her link love seems to have crashed his blog so I can't read it- and I won't add to his server load now!

Update - finally read his piece, starts off seemingly as a standard paean to Friendfeed / poo on Twitter tribal thingy, but then the second half gets much more philosophical and interesting. This quote resonated with most, because it agreed with this post ;-):

Yes, we appear to have an echo chamber but this is an unintentional circumstance and not entirely the fault of those involved. With FriendFeed likes exposing items to a wider audience via the friend of a friend system the scope exists for a far greater number to get involved but the percentage of those that do is small. Out of Scoble’s thousands of followers you only ever see the same names cropping up as getting involved in the conversation and the same names dominate the FriendZone charts of FriendFeed users. This is not because of any elitist exclusion policy but because of a lack of involvement by others outside of the usual suspects.

I think that's because those same names do nearly all the talking - as I noted above - but, if you care to cut them out, as I have done - using Twitter followings by the way - you will find a great set of discussions going on underneath!