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Influencers, Promoters, Inviters and Other Social Media User Types
I happened on a local bookstore going out of business yesterday and raided the psychology section, picking up a number of cardinal texts at $2.98 a pop. One of them was Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, of the Keirsey personality test. Actually, they call it temperament, not personalities. Reading the complete descriptions of what makes up INTFs and ENTPs et al was a real eye-opener, not to mention an entertaining and insightful read.
Character types, modified to account for the effects of social media and related technologies on interaction and communication, and taking into account users’ communication styles, relationship preferences, and sense of self and self image, could be a powerful addition to current efforts to architect social analytics and conversation analytics programs.
The state of the art in measuring and making use of social media users and social graphs still centers on relatively straight-forward views of influence, attention, intention, and social capital. While these are more easily measured on closed social networks, a model for analysis of distributed social media tools, including feed-based apps, is clearly on a lot of people’s minds. PR, marketing, advertising, branding, and customer service industries all want in on social media, and whether they stand by the sidelines watching, tracking, and monitoring, or jump into the river of conversation and engage, analytical tools and engagement applications will be essential. Nobody, but nobody, could possibly manage to be in the flow everywhere and at all times.
Traditional mass media approaches to audience metrics may have given us the right questions, and brought us to an appropriate starting point. But social media approaches will be needed now if we’re to make proper sense of audience behavior. And here’s where character psychologists like Keirsey might be of help.
I have an approach to social interaction design that takes conventional view of user experience and interaction design and extends it to social media users. With an eye to interpersonal dynamics, communication, and social practices, I like to call user behaviors "competencies." Each of us, as users interacts with social media and with others using it according to personal preferences, tastes, and most importantly, perceptions and interpretations. Our social skills online are social competencies. But each of us is different in our uses and, as psychologists would say, our behavior is informed by our psychology.
While this might be looking down the road a couple years, wouldn’t an effective social analytics tool, and engagement platform (say, for advertisers and marketers) use not only social metric data but also psychological and personality models? Take the concept of the influencer, for example. As it stands today, an influencer is a well connected, credible, trusted, and active. He or she may also be on topic. That’s not currently in the model, but should and probably will be, shortly, as we fold in not only who the person is but what s/he talks about (with credibility). So we might add expert to influencer.
But there are other kinds of user types, too, whose role in conversation can benefit specific marketing, branding, or advertising interests. There’s the expert. The inviter. The emcee. The connector. The artist. The follower. And more. Keirsey has 16 types, I’ve got a similar number, tho based around communication and presencing styles. The inviter, for example, would serve the needs of event promoters. The follower, the needs of PR and news dissemination. The expert validates new products. The emcee gathers together like-minded friends, and would benefit branding or entertainment rollouts.
This is a new medium, and it begs for appropriate analysis. The metrics used in mass media measurement serve the purposes of a medium in which two-way and friend or peer-network constrained interactions don’t exist. The future is engagement. Granted, masses of data will have to be mine and modeled. But isn’t that what we’re good at?
There’s consistency in psychology, and applied appropriately and insightfully, durability in behavior and relationships. The noise will subside if we can wise up and if we put users first. If we fail, the doors blow open and a river of spam will inundate the flow. Either way, the mass marketplace is going to enter the stream.
This post was authored by Adrian Chan who runs a social interaction design firm in San Francisco, California.
With today’s technology it has become effortless to conduct pattern analysis, one must first have an inkling of what pattern to search for or what pattern types to infer.
Your point regarding using the wisdom of psychology is well under way and the method by which page ranking algorithms work is easily modified to work with empathic metrics – i.e. is my community sad / happy / angry / disturbed / curious etc..
With each interaction between humans it is nigh on impossible to detach the emotion with which the interaction is associated – it can be very revealing especially in regard to brand analysis and competitiveness.
Ed,
thanks for your comment. I’d be interested to learn more from those using psych profiles in their algos. I agree with you that mood characteristics, and gestures, can be obtained from posts and comments. It’d be good to modify those with communication interests, to the degree that’s possible. Some of those gestures are self-reflexive, some are a form of soliciting communication, some are indicative but not communicative, others are a form of communicative (attention-seeking) bait. All are signs, for sure, of the user’s interest in engagement or acknowledgment, self-expression and presence, but also projection and solicitation.
In social media the call to action is often a call to interaction. We can take psychological moods, states, and modify them to fit social media user behaviors appropriate to online social practices. The key is to anticipate the transformation of social interaction by media, that is, where interaction is not face to face, and where the burden of meaning production shifts from interaction handling to self and presence handling, requiring more interpretation and involving more projection and transference than in face to face encounters.
Media are a means of production — and social media are a means of production not only of information/content but of self and relationships. More complex from an analysis point of view, but richer, too!
cheers!
adrian
Wonderful article. Whilst a business developer, I have a personal passion for user led design and focus on the experience.
I also have learned over the last little while through people that are close to me that some people have stopped taking psychotropic medicine because their online interaction through social networks give them the necessary proxies and framework to operate in.
Interestingly enough, there is also the opposite – where people loose themselves and their personality becoming dissociative and requiring medicine.
I know some people are being monitored remotely via social networks. Psychologists have never had this opportunity before to study and monitor behaviour so up close.
Humans are masters in excess – it does beckon for some order and measure. Then again, people cannot be but themselves – so what we see online is a reflection of where we are at as humans, individually and in the community.
Hans,
Interesting that some users can wean off psychotropics! Not sure what that says about the medium, but I suppose it does say that the medium can provide a rich psychological and inner experience for some.
I’ve been toying with the concept of a “split self”, and doubled “other.” It goes like this, and is totally unverified or peer reviewed: the screen, acting as a mirror (for it shows the user an externalized representation of himself) is a self on which the user can reflect, and in which he is reflected — but as an Other. So the user has a normal “self image,” which is a matter of inner experience, and an externalized self image, which is a matter of reflection. And in fact some users are primarily engaged with maintaining their profile and self presentation online, motivated perhaps by an interest in projecting or extending who they are, or fascinated by the image of themselves constructed. Online can provide an opportunity to play, wear a mask, and fabricate the self…
The Other is doubled, too, for the reason that she appears online (through conventions of profiles, communication, and other forms of social media representation), but exists also “behind” that appearance. The immediacy of presence in face to face, which we think of as “inter-subjectivity,” is doubled up online — as if there were two versions of the self: the constructed and the real.
Split self and doubled other provide an infinite number of variations on interaction online, for a user can become engaged as self, as reflected self, with the appearance of the Other, or with the real other. In communicating with an Other I might become preoccupied with the Other’s possible interpretation of who I am, or might become fascinated with who she appears to be, or might engage in the difference between who she appears to be and who she is (this fuels much on facebook, where friends are real and dissimulating at the same time).
For relational people, the inflections of meaning and intent also proliferate: who’s saying what, in front of whom, to be heard by whom, why, and so on. This fuels a lot of the engagement on twitter, because it produces such a peculiar public sphere/audience. The normal relation of speaker to listener is reversed on twitter. Rather than speaker addressing audience, audience elects to listen to speaker. But speaker doesnt know if audience is really listening, and listeners don’t know if they’re being addressed.
The permutations on social interactions and practices online are fascinating. I like to say that it’s software that functions when it’s dysfunctional. In fact, when working with social media companies I usually start by looking for the inversions and reversals of everyday interaction — for they are most often the engine of social interaction and growth — they’re where users become fascinated, and in working out how the site/system works, learn how to proceed. And all that “figuring it out” produces communication. Which is, after all, how any means of production manufactures culture.
cheers and thanks!
adrian
It is getting late here in Sydney, but a quick thanks for the response.
They way you expound on Twitter and explain it is interesting.
One last thing:
I would like to say it’s software that functions when it’s dysfunctional.
This is a pet like of humans. If they have it, it is probably the best. If they are part of it, they are the chosen ones (more so in settentrional religion then in eastern).
Arguments about if Facebook is only social, Linkedin for business etc…SHOULD often stands in the way of innovation or good use of something, from language to knifes.
The way things were intended to be used or the reason why they should be used – does not stop people using it in different ways.
If we apply SHOULD, everyone would still be speaking Victorian English. I received a lower grade in English from my teacher because my english was not Anglo, but rather Anglo-American. “I, did not teach you American, this is an English class”. My A became a B. I was still able to make really good use of the language – and actually was inspired to learn more – specfically because I liked THAT pronunciation. Linuist are divided in the group that thinks of terms of “how a language should be spoken” opposed to “how it is spoken”.
Now Renee Zellweiger speaking Texan in the Bridget Jones Diaries would have been inappropriate and not contextual.
Knives can be used to kill and to slice a loaf of bread. How and intent play an important role.
My favourite one is the vinyl record. In the 80’s some ‘really undescent blackfella’s started scratching records. It was an outcry initially – that is not making music – that is destroying music.
Is funny, they are both literally right, music was produced destroying a music production device (vinyl record) to essentially create an entire new culture and music stream. That was not enough though a whole unmusical way of singing was inspired – rap. So rather than singing there was unsinging.
Innovation.
Past: Conference
Contemporary (still new): Unconference
I know from software companies that were going crazy, because people were not using their software as they were supposed to. “After some time we discovered that we do much better following people as they were making ‘inappropriate use’ and discover part of our next innovation and improvement.
Tis a dynamic in life. Got a friend in Perth, Western Australia. He was always kinda struggling with a normal restaurant. Years went by. Then, to save money, he started to make his own bread. People startd asking him if they could buy a loaf to take home. He never opened a restaurant to make a loafs of bread.
Today he owns one of Western Australia’s largest bakeries and is a supplier to the likes of Woolworth’s.
Hm – dysfunction:-)
Hans,
awesome — mother is the necessity of invention, or “of bakeries, knives, and butter.” … life on the cutting edge!