It has the effect of aggregating conversation within twitter, by threading posts around the search phrase or keyword. This strikes me as a potential game-changer for twitter, for several reasons.

We currently hold "conversations" on twitter with followers. We have to search to find non-followers around topics. But there are barriers to bringing them into the conversation. Results are past results, and we have to follow/be followed back before conversation becomes possible.

So conversations tend to happen between people who follow each other. If they are topical, they tend not to mention the topic. And this makes them less easy to find in search. Twitter addressed this recently. If there has been conversation between users (using @replies), it is now visible with the "show conversation" link.

But there are limitations to the usefulness of the "show conversation" implementation:

• to engage in that conversation would require that we follow and are followed back
• "conversations" are often off topic, or get off topic quickly
• the focus is on the people @replying to each other, not on keywords

"Show conversations" doesn’t really capture conversations, but captures an exchange between users who have @replied each other. Only the first tweet in the exchange has to contain the search keyword.

Twitter certainly realizes that it needs to searchable. But it also realizes that search results are limited to our use of search words and phrases. And limited by the fact that we have only 140 characters at our disposal. If twitter went after conversationality, it could do so only by aggregating the conversation around an exchange between users who follow one another — not around topics.

The following-follower model that has made twitter so incredibly viral has been a constraint on conversations. Each of us has only a small window through with to see what a small number of people are talking about. And only a limited means of capturing and sustaining conversation with people around a topic.

The theoretical description of this problem is this: tweets are only loosely coupled. They are loosely coupled between users, and loosely coupled by topic:

• Tweets are not coupled to each other unless they include an @reply or D message. The latter doesn’t count for public conversations. @replies only count if our account settings are to set generously (there are three settings).
• Tweets tend not to sustain topics because they must be so short, because we tend to initiate and then drop and change what we tweet about, and because the twitterverse serves the purpose of talking about and creating news. In news, we are more likely to pass something along than to engage in discussion.

Twitter was designed in such a way to prohibit conversations. Not intentionally, of course, but symptomatically. Conversations require a kind of coupling between statements and responses, and people in conversation, that twitter makes incredibly hard to achieve.

In all of Hitchcock’s films, we the audience witness some aspect of the crime. And because Hitchcock was a master of camerawork, and used his camera to let the audience in as a witness, we’re usually in on something that one or more characters don’t know. Jimmy Stewart’s neighbor leaving his apartment in Rear Window, as Jimmy reaches for something he has dropped. The killer’s shadow on the shower curtain in Psycho. A vertiginous zoom in on Kim Novack’s curled hair — an audience reveal that winds up the plot’s second, and formal spiral in the mystery Vertigo.

Hitchcock’s films were as riveting as they were not only for his splendid choices in casting his lead actress, but for his singular talent at subordinating characters to formal puzzles and logics. He is credited as being the first to involve the audience in solving, or "creating," the film. He was notorious, too, for glossing over his actors’ needs and for attending instead to the visual narration of the particular puzzle at hand. It mattered more to him the direction in which his actors were looking than capturing their motivation.

Hitchcock knew that a mystery thriller could become endlessly suspenseful if actions were not simply as they appeared, but were instead motivated by another, for another, or on behalf of another. This allowed him to continuously shift the "guilt" and "suspicion" from character to character. We in the audience had the job of figuring out who was who, and who was who to whom.

The solution to the puzzle, and to the crime, always came out when relationships among the characters could be resolved.

Action is more interesting when it is a matter of interpersonal motive and relationship, rather than the accomplishment of the task itself completed by the action. It’s a pity there are few good imitators of Hitchcock. (Although there are some; and social films like Crash, Amor es Perros, Red, White, Blue, Babel, and others in which relationships form out of coincidence and chance in a way capture the state of social fragmentation endemic to contemporary society.)

We in social media can learn from Hitchcock. We can learn to ask not "What did the user do" but "For whom was it done." Was it done for his/her own self-image and repute? Was it done for the attention of another? To solicit reciprocal interest of another? To gain notice by a group, club, or circle of peers? To obtain status in front of an audience, or to receive the validation of peers?

I wonder what kinds of social media Hitchcock would design, if he were in our industry. How might he use his "camera" to show the audience something that was off screen to the actors involved in a situation or social interaction. What kinds of relationships he might put people in if he were designing social games. And how he might reveal clues and thread his plot points. Whether the audience might be involved in passing that thread through the warp and woof of a networked social fabric. And how interesting and engaging some of his creations would be, designed not around Who said something but For whom was it said?

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

This has brought up a few interesting principles of late. I want to share them just because I find them interesting.

The first is that there’s an asymmetry between the interest which motivates the user who "acts" (creates, posts, etc) and the user who responds. Not all systems are built around a coupled statement-response model of communication, of course.

But there’s an intrinsic interest in response for a lot of users and use cases in twitter and other conversational tools. If I ask a question on twitter, I am motivated by my question, which is something I want an answer to now. The person who is asked (who sees) the question has no interest at all. His or her interest can be piqued and aroused — but is not the same as mine.

The act of answering may more likely be the motivation, and not the content of the question. Question and answer systems are difficult because they involve satisfying two users, the asker and the answerer. If these user experiences are satisfied in real-time, then the interaction itself handles the experience. If they are satisfied out of synch, then each user has to produce his/her own interest: one in the act of asking, one in the act of answering.

This asymmetry extends to other aspects of communication in social media. Take, for example the case of sharing.

Because users are different, and have different personalities:

• Some who share do so because they want to share with (someone).
• Others share because they want to show to (others).
• Some share to exchange for (something).

These are different experiences and are met with different technologies or have different technical solutions.

For example, the user who shares with someone probably posts the photo in order to send it along. Sharing is the act; The photo is the symbol. This user wouldn’t post this particular photo if it weren’t for the person or people s/he was thinking of.

But take a person who finds something online, and book marks it because it is interesting, but has no person in mind to share it with. Later, this person decides either that the thing is interesting enough that others would find it interesting, and shares it. Or s/he thinks of a person who might enjoy it also, and shares it. Sharing in this case has come afterwards. It is a second act, it adds value to this person’s user experience, but wasn’t the original motive or interest.

The user in our first case, on the other hand, wanted to communicate from the beginning. Communicating was the primary act, and was the motive and interest.

These are just two simple examples of how the activity involved in sharing stuff online can be broken down into two acts: one of saving the thing; one of sharing the thing. And that these are different, depending on whether they are governed by the act of saving or the act of communicating.

In the first case the action carries the content. Communication leads.in the second the content precedes the act. Communication follows.

These distinctions may seem trivial but they’re not. They have significant implications for:

• how the system scales
• who finds it useful (and who finds it a waste of time)
• what content is produced as a leave behind
• how personal or public it is in tone
• how easily it can be organized and structured, and so on

Social problems can have only social solutions.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

The second law of social interaction design is that the functionality of social media is contingent on social practices that use them. Notice that there’s a double contingency there. Social media functionality is contingent on use by users; use by users is contingent on the technologies required for use to be possible. This double contingency means that social tools are inseparable from the users, and the use by users inseparable from the tools. It is not a matter of which comes first, or of how technologies structure interactions, for interactions shape technologies. And as all of us in the "beta" community know, social media design is iterative because it constantly observes its own use.

What this means is that social practices absorb and assume the burden of structuring interaction, and of organizing and coordinating activity where tools make that a possibility. The less that is "designed," the more that is handled by people. Chat, and in some ways Twitter, are among the least designed of social media tools. It is conversation, talk, and communication that organize them.

Asking of a social media tool not what it does, but what it is capable of, is an empowering shift of attitude. It gets closer to the grail of social media design, which is, in the context of mediated interactions, What are people capable of? In the real world, audiences are assembled for all manner of reasons and purposes, and their behaviors are as diverse as those of mobs, gangs, queues, gatherings, marches, protests, and so on.

Audience sizes do not scale linearly, groups becoming audiences becoming crowds becoming masses. Purposes may organize the disposition, expectations, the duration, activity, and even spatial orientation of real-world assemblies. In all cases, one can ask What are the people capable of, and get a different answer. They are capable of waiting, of rushing, of dispersing, coalescing, rampaging, blocking, in silence or with sound and fury. By asking What are the people capable of, we recognize that there is some kind of order and organization, in space and time, and often without the barest of architecture or other bounding.

Because the communities built around social media are for the most part asynchronous, they are framed in time, over time, as much as they are by tools themselves. Audiences exist because users return. For every established online community or user base there are many individual users making a regular practice or habit of use.

This gives us our first corollary, which is that social practices emerge out of aggregate individual user practices. There is no "one" social practice, but several, and experienced by each user uniquely. On tools like Twitter, for example, these practices include various kinds of talk and messaging. They include announcing one’s location, one’s feelings, one’s activities, and one’s plans. Practices that require two or more users include brief rounds (or conversations), replies, retweets, and a variety of types of commenting.

Commenting, in contrast with conversation, is not reciprocal. On Twitter we find people referencing a user who has followed them; referencing a user who has mentioned him/her; referencing individuals, auto-replies, and topics by referencing individuals. These comments may solicit responses, but do not directly respond to those in question. Other social practices include fights, marketing offers, event invitations, application invites, and more. Combined, they represent the growing set of practices to which Twitter is suited, from a core set on out to those at the margins.

We have seen already that the use value of social media is not simply one of utility. Given that each user brings his or her own set of values, and ways of valuing experiences on social media, we have the corollary that social practices need not have any utility. The users engaged in an observable practice may each have their own reasons, and thus reasons for use, hence making it impossible to ascribe one use value to the practice.

This may contradict those who believe that there are in fact collective uses of social media. But if those exist, they exist only in theory — they don’t correspond to user experiences and thus can only be argued on the basis of some other system of measure. Are social media democratizing, or are they subject to crowd psychology? Are they informing, or are they given to gossip and opinion? These are perspectives, beliefs, debates, and controversies, and while of course interesting, lay no claim to user centric design principles or insights. The social practices seen on social media are just that, and any "business" or application of social practices to market opportunities is epiphenomenal to the forms of talk it is based on.

This leads us to a third corollary, that social practices are emergent. In chaos theory terms, emergent phenomena are auto-poetic. That is, they "write" themselves. They are the product of forces that, in observing themselves, reproduce themselves without any particular genetic design, external guidance, or intrinsic goal. To the social media designer, this creates a problem. For the best a designer can do is supply architecture that, when populated, is most likely to result in anticipated or desired social practices.

There are no direct steering mechanisms available in social interaction design; only the educated and informed use of features, design elements, and other design choices intended to enable and extend commonly occurring practices. Here, again, the designer is best equipped who also grasps the psychology of users and the phenomena that occur when they are introduced to one another. This explains the widespread use of best practices in web design and architecture, as well as the sudden and surprising successes of the small few who innovate well.

A fourth corollary of the law of social practices creates a real challenge for social media design: users engage in a practice when they feel like it. This could belong to the law of user centricity, but it has implications for social practices. Face to face social encounters bind participants in time and space, and again through interaction and communication handling and negotiation. There is no binding of users in time and space on social media. It must be handled entirely by actions and communication. Actions are what the user does; communication is what the user says. (Note that in social media, communication can be performed by means of writing, recording and uploading video, audio, getting on webcam, and more.)

It’s for the lack of binding in time and space that we call social media discontinuous, de-coupled, disaggregated, dis-embedded, and so on. The binding that does happen is not an event, as it is in face-to-face situations. It has no situation, and no duration in time. Rather, it is a sustained commitment taken unilaterally by individual users which can produce the effect, and thus the experience, of bound and mutually-framed experience. Being next to one another is possible, in a way, but being with is not. This thwarts the possibility of individuals sharing in each other’s "stream of consciousness" — which is to say the emotional and empathic coupling of activity and presence that makes us seek out social interaction to begin with.

We’re now at our last corollary of design by social practice, and it embraces the previous one: the more open and simple the social tool, the more uses it has for more users. And you may have guessed it already, but this one also presents a design challenge. For while open-ness in structure and design may engender a greater number of uses, too many uses may render the tool useless. Like the blog, Twitter exhibits design simplicity in the extreme. Any user can write whatever s/he wants, whenever s/he wants, and from wherever s/he wants. But unlike the blog, audience members have no control at all over what they read.

The asymmetry of experience returns — and now the creative flexibility of the application results in undifferentiated talk and messaging for the consumer. The user interest satisfied in reading and following Twitter is undirected and unstructured. The experience of the reading user depends entirely on whatever happens to have been posted by whomever happened to have posted it, that the user is following. This kind of arbitrariness and randomness of news and messages would be death in any other medium. The 140 character limit survives as a necessary constraint on the noise level — even though it can contribute nothing to raising the signal level.

We have covered just two laws of social interaction design. Our next, communication, will get at the interaction type that drives status culture and talk-based applications. Can talk be designed?

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

Twitter and its kin are unstructured. I’ve come up with the proposition that when structure is under-determined in site/system architecture, social practices handle the organization of experience. The burden of structure is shifted from architecture to interaction handling.

Different types of talk are well documented. Erving Goffman’s symbolic interaction has made huge contributions to our understanding of forms of talk as "framed" encounters. Framing happens in time, in positioning of actors, in turn-taking, "keying" and "footing" changes related to statements and what they mean. But facework is critical to his analyses. Not to mention use of body language, eye contact, tone of voice and so on.

What are the possibilities of open systems of talk? I’ve begun thinking about this from the perspective of multiple personality types and frankly it’s getting ugly. How does a socializer relate to a pundit? What kind of twitter activity attracts a harmnonizer? Does an inviter look for retweets? It’s simple with a single user model, but more realistic if we can account for the different kinds of user personalities and what they are competent and interesting at doing online.

Since social practices emerge on social media without any directed guidance and only through the undirected participation of users who each have their own reasons for doing what they do, the challenge of designing for emergent practices is a tough nut indeed. Where is the threshold for the emergence of a particular practice? And what’s the upper limit for an open tool’s population — the limit point beyond which it drowns in its own unstructured noise?

I was thinking last night about some cool things to do on twitter, for example. But which I haven’t seen. There are four ways to contextualize a tweet: the accountname, pic, @name, and hashtag (#). The rest is the tweet statement itself. So I know a tweet from /bbcnews is news. Or it could be indicated #worldnews. Or the pic could be the bbc logo.

Given these limited means of contextualizing a tweet — that is, providing cues to the reader as how to read it — there is still a lot that one could do.

Eg.

–Use an #clickmypic as a clue. Create a user pic that is legible only in orig size (viewed on profile page). Embed a message or clue in the pic. Tweets could then be created that were:

• trivia pursuit questions: the pic is the category
• save the planet: the pic is a question, e.g. what’s your contribution this wk? Response is whatever small thing you’re doing this wk to save the planet
• coupons/discounts — viewable only if you expand the pic size
• movie character — the reply should be the movie the tweeted movie quote comes from:

–A #tagyourit game. Self explanatory

–#onethingyoudontknowabout me. ditto

–#soundtrack (what i’m listening to)

–#flixsterquiz (never-ending flixster movie quiz question)

There could be tons of these small twitter games, with @naming for pass along. I’d like to see a brand try something like this out. It seems to me that the creative possibilities for open or unstructured talk tools are huge — all that’s needed is the creative, and a simple-enough or familiar enough game structure to make it fairly obvious how to play. (The game rules supply structure, tweets become the game’s "moves".)

To return briefly my problem of personality types, and whether we can find personality in tweets, and twitter (and status update) use practices that correlate with personality types, I think the answer is yes. But it’s neither foolproof nor straightforward. We update and tweet on whim and fancy, mood, and conversationally. Those are practices that fall outside of personality type-casting. I’ve managed to find strong consistencies in how a lot of people update:

• people who tend to describe feelings, moods, or activities (Self-oriented)
• people who solicit a response, address someone else, frequently @name (Other-oriented)
• people who multiply @name, who tweet events they’re at, who they’re with (Relationship/activity-oriented)

I’ve found some fairly consistent example of updates and messages that include:

• identifying with something a person is into (Self is attributed a pastime, goal)
• identifying with a value, cause, political theme (Self is associated with a value) 
• identifying with a group, practice, or status sign (Self is attributed desired status)
• positioning and location (indirectly soliciting contact and making Self available)
• third person comment (Self is reflected upon, "judged" or joked about)
• event-specific (what Self is doing)
• mood or feeling (how Self is feeling)
• etc

These and other kinds of status updates and messages seem consistent with the user’s personality type. Now, theoretically, a functioning social system would reveal that personality types that go well together can actually be seen forming networks. Those who like activity should be found with those who are active. Those who identify with attributes of others should be found with those others. Those who em-cee should be seen mentioning those people they find interesting (em-cees can spot the rockstars, tend to talk about them more than their own Selves). And so on. Many many natural couplings and sets of users whose personalities should produce emergent social practices.

I’m very interested in doing this in collaboration with psychologists and have started doing so. Interestingly, social media tends to be a field for social psychologists — and this is more a matter of personality (even clinical) psychologists. Social psych takes on status, social hierarchy, roles and positions — the kinds of things that are common to community. My approach here is to find personality-based combinations and their practices, which is a different tack (is also more user-experience based).

That’s what’s on my mind. Designing and building successful social media tools, applications, and uses around open systems and especially talk-based systems is creating more challenges for design methodology than did the web-based social networks. I think it can be done, but it’s going to be a lot more sociological and psychological than most design approaches are used to.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

Anyways, in this essay he compared two views of the Self: the Self that is discovered and known through some kind of religious quest and search. And the Self that is created, invented, through free will, action, choice (and so on).

It occurred to me that a similar bifurcation exists in social media. We have a lot of discovery engines and techniques. Techniques once used to find related documents and data, but now often used to find compatible or similar people. This is an approach that ascribes attributes and qualities to the identity (person, user). They might be interests, demographic data, age, gender, location, even social graph/friend relations. It’s an approach used ultimately to help us find people we might like. Based on the idea that when two things are alike, their shared likeness might lead to further relationships.

But there’s an interesting flaw in the logic. That two things are alike might be liked by one person is fine. But that the two people who like those things might like each other, makes a leap of faith. It rests on the idea that the relationship between two things can be extended to the two people who relate to those things in like ways. We don’t know that this is an extensible logic or idea. Do similar people automatically like each other? Really? If so, aren’t the similarities that would make us compatible, make us friends and friendly, just as likely to be something other than what interests us — our style or personality?

I’m reminded of the logic of dating sites — that a match is a basis for meeting. Anyone who’s tried online dating knows that the first meeting is where chemistry either seals the affair, or dissolves the whole run up into an awkward and disappointing mess.

The logic of long tail can work on objects and things because they are stable. Attributes used to describe them are values that can be shared. They belong to each thing (a movie is documentary) because the two things each share that attribute. The more attributes in common, the more alike they are (these movies are documentaries about penguins).

But is the approach extensible? Do we like each other because we share attributes?

There’s another approach taken in social media — the social graph. This version uses Granovetter’s weak link theory and suggests that the friend of a friend is the most important relationship — because it can introduce us to people who are not one, but two or thee degrees away. We get access to people who aren’t our friends but are closely linked. It’s assumed that trust is extensible from the first degree (I trust you) to the second (I trust someone you know). Not the most convincing idea, but good enough to make friend recommendations.

But in each case, we have only a system of things and attributes.

Human relationships aren’t build on similarity or identity of attributes. They’re a result of interaction, of understanding, of the things we do that move us and by which we move one another.

Our industry needs a richer understanding of the creative acts and the productive aspects of social media use. Of what is required, and what happens, when a connection becomes meaningful to the people connected through what they do, not have in common, with each other. We need to think more about drama. about stories, about conversations and pastimes. About the things and people we anticipate, expect, and wait for. About what time is like, and times are like, online — short and long times, ongoing times, choppy and interrupted times, rhythmic times and times that are over. About how all the dynamics of interaction are transformed but somehow retained and adapted to the way things work online.

Yes, discovery can be produced by searching among common attributes. But the really productive stuff comes out of social practices. Social media may be a means of production. But we are still the production of means.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

That said, we recognize that social media are highly psychological. The reasons that motivate any given user may be rational, or not, may be task or goal-oriented, or may be a reflection of distraction, compulsion, or even "addiction." The fact that social media use involves psychological interests has a couple implications for designers, builders, and users. First, it means that we cannot know the reasons for a user’s use, or by extension, the reasons that an application is used. Second, we cannot even assume that a user knows those reasons. I like to say that to know what a social media application does, turn it off. We will soon know why and how we use an application by what we miss.

This leads us to a corollary of the first law: the value of social media is specific to the user. Ask any user why he or she uses it and you will get an answer specific to that individual. Reasons for use are not generic, and are not generalizable. The social media application is individuated by its users — that is, it accrues uses and reasons for use as it accrues users. Furthermore, ask any user what he or she uses it for, and you will get uses specific to that user. The value of social media is a combination of how a user uses it, and what reasons s/he can provide for using it. Value is in the eyes of the beholder. It is subjective, individual, and non-generalizable. We cannot ascribe one value to a social media application, and should approach any claims about an application’s value with caution. (They are likely to reflect the value perceived by that person, given the context and interests of his or her use of it.)

A second corollary obtains from the first law: users use social media based on existing and past experiences with other media. Users do not invent uses for social media wholesale, but rather use new applications to extend their current habits and uses of other media. A user who chats will likely use Twitter differently from a user who blogs. A user who uses IM will likely use Twitter differently than a user who is a Facebook addict. And so on. Research is not required to prove the claim that we blog, update, comment, post, upload, review, rate, recommend, IM, chat, email, and tweet very differently. I’m not likely to suddenly start commenting in all caps on Youtube tomorrow, any more than a heavy chatter is to suddenly switch to Twitter for conversation. Each of us is a bundle of habits and repetitions. And we use social media according to how we can each see them fitting into what we tend to do.

A third corollary follows, and it is that we cannot know what the user is doing and experiencing. The web as biased in favor of the affirmative, meaning, it captures action but not inaction. Clicks are recorded, but not reading. We know only when a user does something, and that something is captured as an affirmation. There are no "contradictory" or "negative" acts counted online. An act of opposition would look the same to the web server as a an act of affirmation. All actions are, in communication theory terms, a "yes." The inability to know what user’s experience confounds all media, but it is complicated online by the fact that we can track and measure some things. And we focus mightily on them. In the case of Twitter and in the culture of status updating, however, we have no means by which to know what and how much is being read. It takes a retweet, a comment, or a reply to publicize and manifest the reader’s attention to a message. This is, of course, why we count our followers. Their number is a substitute for attention and visibility, meaning relevance and acknowledgment. Each and every tweet solicits a response, and in its loneliness is one of the small moments of irrelevance we suffer through daily in our contract with social media. There is no way of showing others that we are paying attention without making it obvious — by saying so.

A fourth corollary follows, and we have suggested it already: to show that s/he is paying attention, the user must act. Communication is not just the performance of a statement; that would just be expression. Communication occurs when that statement is accepted or rejected. This "yes or no" response is what transforms expression into communication, what makes of it an action system. Designers know of actions. But in communication, the action is on either the message or its author. It is this possibility, that we can respond to what is said or to who said it, that implicates relationships in social media. And the ambiguity of which was intended that can often subsist in social media use fuels the engine for further participation.

Social media professionals can do no better than to keep the first law in mind. And to bear in mind, also, that users are different. For designers, this should mean occasionally forgoing standards or conventions for something else. Tools designed for writing and publishing online, for example, need not be the basis for fast messaging and lifestreaming. Page layouts common to text-oriented applications will miss out on users who watch and see (some desktop Twitter apps now emphasize visualizing the stream of users over and instead of their posts). For marketers, it is unlikely that top influencers are the ones to reach on Twitter — other kinds of users are more motivated to retweet and promote. And for inventors, solving some of the big problems, such as awareness and attention, or addressing use cases that involve under-served user types, can offer compelling opportunities.

The law of user centricity tells us that we cannot know what we might do, nor can we know what can be done. But that in all cases we should ask, what is it capable of? We will address this in the second law.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

But added to historical tradition is another obvious but rarely noted reason for social media’s ongoing durability. It’s in social media’s DNA: that social media collapse the distance between production and consumption.

Unlike traditional (mass) media and in contrast to past modes of production and manufacture, including information production, social media co-locate the means of production with means of consumption. Video is recorded, edited, posted, and viewed on the same platform. Opinions, news, and stories are told, shared, commented on the same platform. Music is made, distributed, branded, and listened to, on the same platform. This conflation of means of production with means of consumption not only presents a threat to mass media (and one which mass media will respond to by co-opting the social), it promises opportunities for those who can see them.

All commerce involves some amount of marketing, whether it’s based on brand identity, "real" utility and value, pricing, or whatever else comprises a marketing message and campaign. Social media disrupt marketing by eliminating much of the distance between the marketing/sales/branding medium and its audience. In social media they are one and the same: the audience does the branding and marketing, through communication, and often without the brand’s direct intervention or participation. Distribution by means of communication among friends and colleagues (social media users) is not only natural and organic (non-commercial), it reproduces itself without any help from commerce required. In other words, it’s self-referential and non-commercial.

This might cause palpitations for those who make a living by imagining, imaging, wrapping, crafting, and distributing brand and marketing campaigns, but it shouldn’t. Conventional branding requires that value be created away from an audience, to then be introduced to an audience, resulting in (hopefully) consumer interest, desire, and spending. The distance between the brand and audience not only allows those on the brand side to finesse their presentation, it allows them to control its release. Traditional means of course are print, television, radio, and outdoors advertising. Lifestyle, affiliative, demographic and other types of market segmentation and targeting serve the purposes of campaign management. The whole process relies on a separation of brand from its audience, and time during which to conduct, refine, and steer the campaign.

Social media disrupts all of this with the sheer immediacy and proximity provided by its tools — tools that serve the needs of talking and communing. "Word of mouth marketing" is a fancy way of saying "we let it go and our fingers are crossed." Control over the marketing or brand message is but a residual inclination to stay one step ahead of the market, to use the distance between traditional media and their audiences to steer outcomes in a company’s favor. But control is precisely what is sacrificed in a medium that conflates means of production and consumption; a medium we sometimes call an "echo chamber" because there’s no telling where the noise is coming from.

Future and successful marketing campaigns that leverage social media will benefit the startup and social technology space by extending what’s been designed for daily use into soft commercial use. The budgets, while trimmed, are there. It would behoove social media companies to consider the ways in which soft commerce may play along. Just as mass media should entertain new forms of conversational and social marketing, from new types of creative, to compelling serial "talkies": brand stories, interactives, games, and other new forms of what I’ll call "participatory branding."

Social media are notorious for giving rise to unintended social practices, and those of us who design and build social applications should not for a minute think that we know everything that can be done with them. Any more than television manufacturers would be expected to develop the TV programs shown on them. Current market conditions make this a perfect time for creatives to get inventive, and for social media companies to reflect on where they will fit in.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

While UPS seemed to be tracking conversations as well as we consumers track UPS, conversational marketing and monitoring is still in its infancy. The great difficulty of tuning your tools to the tone of conversation (I like Radian6 and Visible Technologies), the challenge of reading the sentiment and gist from between lines kerned 140 characters wide (Twitter), not to mention spotting influencers and mapping their networks, all suggest that this is a job for specialists. Thankfully, the particular skill involved comes naturally to all of us: it’s conversation.

According to Debbie, UPS tracks about four topics over time, with other short-term issues identified as they come up. Her company has established goals and objectives that include an interest in learning from its customers, identifying pain points, and reputation topics, all with the interest of refining corporate and brand messaging. Writ large, they are "using monitoring to learn about the topics that matter to the brand," and are tracking how their brand is being talked about, to "learn how to better provide information to customers."

Several things struck me about UPS. Clearly, the team gets the importance of listening. And in fact Debbie’s collaboration with customer service resources was testament to that (all important) insight. UPS, too, is making creative use of internal "driver" blogs, and extending the relationship between its truck drivers and auto-racing drivers (UPS is a NASCAR sponsor, though I suspect their track vehicle of choice is not a van, and operates with its doors closed) with racy first-person narratives. So it has both an internal and public commitment to the medium. It clearly gets the value of watching conversations for customer complaints, and is engaged in ways of addressing and redressing, dare I say re-packaging, customer dissatisfaction.

What I liked the most about the UPS approach was that it emphasized the importance of listening. So much social media marketing still emphasizes the talking. Brands are used to packaging their messages, and deliver them to audiences at great expense. So no, it’s not surprising that in social media monitoring they hope to track results. But by viewing the medium as yet another distribution network, they risk missing its greatest strengths.

Which is in part why I still firmly believe that this whole social media marketing thing is still in its infancy. Taking UPS as a springboard for some creative whiteboarding (!), then, here’s what I would do if I were the guy with the marker.

Start from the customer’s perspective — it’s his/her conversation, after all, and his/her social medium. Advertisers are not as of yet welcome at the table.

Listen to the customer — what is s/he saying, about what, to whom, and why. Read between the lines, and stick with it. Tools cannot do this, but they can be essential to narrowing down the conversation space, identifying influencers, and mapping the terms and keywords, plus gestures, of the conversation itself.

Join the conversation — it may be that there is a best person for this within a company, for in fact tone, style, personality and delivery rule here. Conversational talk is not at all like branding, brand messaging, or brand presentation.

Join the conversation, really — many examples of social media marketing today more closely resemble "adjoining conversations," not joined conversations. That could be a catchphrase, in fact, if it weren’t negative: "ad-joining conversational marketing." Be with, not alongside, your customers; let monitoring be a means of eavesdropping that serves the purpose of getting aligned, but don’t stay on the sidelines.

Contribute — social media marketing should be designed around talking, not marketing: talk addressed to people who are talking (new school), not messaging in front of audiences that are looking (old school).

Structure the conversation — here’s where it gets interesting, and where we’re going to do some of that whiteboarding. Online conversations are highly unstructured, even informal. The media used tend to flatten out the tonality, sentiment, and delivery of messaging, and outside of social networking sites, the forms of speech users adopt are, well, relatively formless.

What do I mean by this? Well, there are many different kinds of linguistic claims, or statements. Questions, requests, instructions, promises, and so on — we can recognize them without having to think about it. Social media help users reach audiences of unknown members, and thus users will flatten out statements to appeal to greater numbers of people, while upsetting the fewest number of people. The conversations are generally informal and unstructured: not easily used.

So how about this: design a conversational marketing program around themes, topics, and formats that are natural and familiar, but which you can use and extend. These become brand conversation containers. They will contain messaging points, marketing claims, calls to action (interaction too!), and so on. They can use familiar social media genres, or adapted mass media and cultural forms (invitations, birthdays, top tens, gifts, quizzes, etc).

Let’s whiteboard an idea for UPS:

Care packages. The idea here leverages the brand messenger par excellance for UPS: quite literally, the brand driver. The goal is to get conversation going around the brand. The vehicle: use social media to solicit donations to Thanksgiving care packages. Use twitter to solicit Thanksgiving greetings and wishes. Users (customers) donate stuff, or sponsor stuff, to be delivered, with messages, to the elderly at the driver’s discretion.

UPS demonstrates that it cares, and gets its customers involved by packaging *their* care. (Why not have customers vote on care package designs contributed by the public, and composed of the tweeted messages. Maybe even localize the messaging…) The brand shows that it cares that its customers care, and wants to be the vehicle of appreciation and concern. Drivers post gratitudes to a company blog. Comments are collected. Branding and service become a mutual win-win.

Gas Think Tank. This is totally off the top of my head, so here goes tapping the thinking cap for a gas tank meter. UPS gets transparent with its customers about the high cost of gas, and the company’s role in climate change, by sharing gross gas expenditures and carbon output on a blog, let’s call it "the UPS think tank." There, it solicits ideas and contributions from customers about how to reduce its carbon "tire mark," offering to fund investment in ways to green the brown van. These might include sponsored online causes, use of twitter hashtags, perhaps even sponsorship of a commuter or car-sharing site where UPS drivers offer to carshare to work if customers do the same.

Conversational marketing can be much more interesting than just watching the brief and fleeting messages posted to social media that directly reference your brand. We’re really just at the tip of the iceberg. The brands that show success will be those that can shift from talking about themselves to talking to their customers. I honestly believe that if brands structure their efforts to create conversational brand extensions, there will be a flourishing of new and compelling creativity in social media campaigns. These can be cost-effective, engaging, and learning moments.

During times like these, we should all consider how to step up, save money, and do some good.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

But there’s still time for many to make it work. If I were at a VC firm, or heading up a startup today, I’d look more closely now than ever at product and service differentiation. If you have now built the application, done the engineering, and established a user base, now is time to focus on social interaction design. Don’t stop at technology design. And while you might be compelled to integrate the features that are quickly becoming standard among social web applications, don’t stop there either. Think further and harder about your designing your social interactions. Your equity is in your users and how they use your product - that’s the utility, personal and social, that you should leverage to distinguish yourself and capitalize on success.

Here are just a few thoughts and tips that I’ve gleaned from working with startups and from analyzing the sites I’ve used:

Users have Personalities
All users are not alike. And this is more important among social media users than in any other kind of designed product. Those users that get the most out of your site or application are the ones that will attract further growth.

In social media, for example, users have different ways of talking and communicating. They have different relationships to other users, and to audiences in general. Different ways of using and consuming information. And different perceptions of social trends. (I’m oversimplifying to keep this short.)

Personality types
Here are some personality types — you will recognize which would use your site, and for what:

Self-talkers: these are users who are comfortable talking about themselves in front of an online audience (including but not limited to friends). Posting, tweeting, and sharing are simple and straightforward ways of using social media. (Note that the vast majority of people find social media use to be somewhat narcissistic, or juvenile, and don’t connect with the self-promotion prevalent in social networking and conversation media. But they’re not our users.) These users are important content creators and activity contributors.

EmCees: these are users who get people together, who link, distribute, circulate posts and comments. They are on stage, but not to speak their own minds. Rather, they participate by acknowledging and recognizing those they respect (and often, want to be associated with). These users are important connectors and facilitators.

Mediators: these are users who are aware of "where people are at" and who attend to relationships, both their own and those of others. These users are not on stage but are active in the audience. They are important care-takers.

Critics: these users deepen conversation and forward the ideas suggested by many of the self-talkers. They explore, research, and often read more than self-talkers. Their contributions are important for the richness and discovery of social media content.

Experts: these users, like critics, go deep, but they enjoy being known as experts and protect and serve their reputations. Where a critic may be committed to truth or integrity, and to the content itself, the expert draws that content expertise around him or herself. Expert contributions are important because so many of us follow experts and their recommendations.

Inviters: Inviters use social media to maintain a family or network of people they care about enough to invite (to stuff). They mine the web for events, activities, and news and are happy to share it because it keeps them and their networks active — without drawing attention to what they themselves have to contribute. Inviters gain from distribution and are critical to the medium’s service to events.

there are more, such as jokers, seducers, organizers, and lurkers, but in the interest of time….

Use Cases
Use cases for your service fall into two categories: individual user use case and social use cases. Each is important. You probably know your individual use cases — and in fact were probably building with those in mind. They have to do with conventional uses and utility, but also include psychological payoff and reward (see above for what hooks different kinds of users).

Social use cases are more complex. Most social media promise utility in use — that is in the act of using the tool. But many also promise utility and value in what’s left behind for later consumption, e.g. by non-participants. Yelpers may enjoy reviewing and networking, but the majority of Yelp’s pageviews come from non-users. So if you have a service that leverages user participation to create content (niche vertical, topic, theme, community of practice) make sure that your social features lend themselves to high-value content for those non participants also.

Social Practices
Social practices are what come out of individual use when individual user activity is aggregated. You can offer the individual user an experience but have little control over the emergent social practices. Stories of social media engendering unintended practices abound, and if the practice you facilitate is against your business objectives, you’re in trouble. Dating or "hooking up" can kill a service that’s intended for serious use. As a lack of flirting may kill a site that is supposed to be high in emotion.

Those are just a few tips. I think social interaction design is a vastly under-stated aspect of social media — and is as important as technology on which it rests.

Related:  My slide shows on social interaction design, psychology of the user experience, and social media user competencies.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

The echo chamber is also a hall of mirrors.

All social media play some part in mirroring us, reflecting us, whether to ourselves or in front of others. And this doesn’t make every social media user a narcissist. It simply admits to the shiny and reflective surface of the social media screen and to the facts that we like to see ourselves reflected in this screen, and like to be seen by others. It’s a particular kind of vanity, of self-image and self-promotion.

I’ve written about self-image and profile-based social networking, but haven’t really applied it to lifestreaming. Of course lifestreaming apps like Twitter also mirror us back to ourselves — indeed, it would be strange if we didn’t see our own tweets alongside others. The production of a self-image online is essential to how lifestreaming works, and why. But oddly enough, original activity feeds weren’t posted by users at all.

Facebook can be given credit for having popularized the feed: activity, news, status. Activity and news most of all (Yahoo and Friendster each had shout outs, as did many social networks have a mood option (even blogs have had mood options for inclusion with posting). But Facebook was feeding us system messages (still does). It’s Facebook’s inspired way of making the site seem more active than it is. Everything a user does is captured, recorded, and considered for re-telling. So in Facebook’s case, it often is not the user doing the talking, but the system doing the talking: Facebook was the chamber, and Facebook was the echo.

It is easy to bundle applications together because they use the same forms, or contents. All feeds are not the same, and all lifestreaming services are not the same. Their use of activity streams, status updates, commenting, and variations on posting, etc., suggest common design and architecture in many cases, yes, but these commonalities may conceal substantial differences. A system message that reports on my activity, as in Facebook, doesn’t appear to me as something I’ve said and I won’t relate to it as if it were speech. Nor is it addressed to anyone in particular, either. But as it’s produced by the system, it may have meta data, and embedded media types, that are better structured than what I may have used in writing/tweeting.

The matter of who’s talking might read like a matter of small print and footnotes, but consider the fact that in lifestreaming apps all content is posted by users, and all content is intended by users. In lifestreaming apps users can talk by writing, recording, sharing, and so on — the applications increase our ways of talking. But in all cases they are still about talk. Facebook, by contrast, is about the aggregating content around an audience (call it graph or network). User activity is documented in feeds — it’s not conversational but is informational (informative).

On a site like Facebook, as commanding a lead it has in the market, members need not be encouraged to lifestream. Facebook provides social utility even to low-participation users. It offers a broad number of application types as well as pages, groups, and of course profile-centric activity. But lifestreaming services, on the other hand, do have to encourage participation. Talk needs to be sustained, as well as user attention. Hence Friendfeed’s integrated commenting, and close attention to supporting commenting.

Friendfeed are on opposing ends of the spectrum of talk tools– Friendfeed at the conversational end of talk, Facebook at the profile end of talk. However, Friendfeed could build up profiles around conversation and talk. Being page-based, though, Friendfeed can do what Twitter likely won’t: build up social navigation and content organization around page-based social media conventions. Friendfeed can build up social practices that sequentially extend value to those users who prefer lifestreaming to profile-based networking.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

Jeremiah summarizes his model like this:

"The System: The system is the combination of all websites combined, it’s a massive data base of content, clicks, search terms, time on site, shared posts, wall posts, links, and tweets.

Teaching the System: Humans are constantly speaking in machine language, from use of hashtags in twitter, or boolean searches in Google, or even from the act of friending folks in your social network. All of these behaviors are humans teaching the system how to understand us, so it can better serve us.

The Intelligent Web: Software that is able to collect and make sense of all the data in the system and is able to deliver meaningful content back to people in context — often without us saying or gesturing that we need it."

The web was built on links between documents — objects — and since it’s inception has grown to accommodate not only many different object or media types, but their relevance, popularity, and other measures of use also. In fact links on the social web need not always point to the same thing. Social navigation in the form of a top-ten, for example, points to not only a changing set of top ten items, but updates itself as it is used, thus reflecting social use.

Behind Jeremiah’s vision of the future is the system’s interest in capturing and recontextualizing its own use. If the static web was merely a network of static connections, the social web is a dynamic network of changing connections. If we assume that social use will remain a priority for web builders and designers, applications and their businesses, then the relevance of information provided by the web will likely be qualified along two axes: the personal and the social, or the particular and the general. The next generation web, in systems speak, is a second-order observer system. Meta data supplies a second order observation of its own use: the web knows not only what it publishes but also how users interact with it.

Because the system is open, is dynamic, and is always in use, the new system is not a static collection but a dynamic and changing set of connections — connections whose relevance to an individual user and to the audience in general change over time. The next generation system has time. The first generation system did not.

I see, or would like to imagine, a system whose links are no longer document links but are instead "views." Each view (link) of information might then take into account meta data along our two axes: one user-centric, the other social-centric. A user centric view would be informed by my past history and tacit (learned) and explicit (declared) preferences. My tastes and interests, in other words. The social-centric view would be informed by social usage, social ratings and votes, interests, trends, and so on. I might use sliders to set the view I want on a social site — stuff for me or stuff socially organized.

There is another development coming for the next generation system, and that is the temporal organization of system (vs spatial organization). The topic comes up in discussions on lifesreaming and flow apps (which I’ll discuss soon), and often takes the form of talk-based apps vs page-based apps. Twitter, for example, is not page based: it lacks navigation, topical organization, topical layout, and so on, choosing instead the temporal organization of content used by time-based apps like IM, chat, and email. As more of these apps innovate, become more visual, and go mobile, time-based interaction tools will mature. We’ll have two modes of interacting with the system: from within the river of flow or from its shores: watching as it streams past.

Innovation of late may have produced many look-alikes. But it’s when things begin to look alike that exploration begins anew at the margins.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

Tom Foremski recently penned on twitter in which he notes the growing experiential gap that separates those who use new social media tools from those who don’t. Those who use, get it, and those who don’t, don’t. Well, not surprisingly, this digitally dividing line is also the void that old media needs to bridge, if it, like its users, are to join the ranks of the initiated. The adoption curve sweeps like the arc of a #suspension bridge (!) plotting the line of escape from the old and tired traditional media landscape to the bright and shiny shores of the new.

As Marshall McLuhan (pictured above) insightfully observed:

"The "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph."

Now that bit about the telegraph may be a bit out of dot dot dash date, so simply substitute in "social media" for telegraph and you’re back in the present tense. Social media are a recontextualization of old print forms and contents within a new distribution and communication framework (social web). It’s not surprising that so many of our social practices (tools and uses) echo, if not amplify, their old media (broadcast) forebears: celebrity, self-promotion, news, anchoring, commentary, top tens, ratings, rankings, and polls (diggs, votes).

Speaking of telegraph, there was also recently a fine piece penned as well as printed by the New York Times on the ambient proximity of new conversation tools like twitter. I prefer talk tools to "micro blogs" because I think the connection is stronger between the acts (talking) than the form (writing). Blogs had sought to be conversational, yes, but clearly twitter is more a talkie than it is a bloggie. (I’ll skip the temptation to riff on silent films, inter-titling, and the arrival of the talkies, but the possibilities for extracting something out of "old content and new media" there are rife.)

This Times article artfully testified to the experiential gap, too, describing twitter with the pleasantly fuzzy phrase "ambient intimacy." The intimacy possible over social media is at best approximate, and the proximity at best ambient. Social media can only approximate the relationships and interactions of the real. And in spite of the close contact many of us now have on a daily basis with hundreds of friends and followers, there’s an experiential gap between "being there" and simply "there."

French sociologist Jean Baudrillard mischievously likened contemporary media to the peripheral image of thought footnoted at the base of any sideview mirror: "Caution: Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear." Mass media, he believed, distort the real to such a degree that he warned of a new "hyper-reality." Not only do they distort the appearance of reality, but the ambiguity suggested by "may be closer" hinted that media are also destabilizing.

To reverse McLuhan’s operational logic, we can deduce that in New Media objects may be more distant than they appear — which might describe the proximity manufactured across myriad connective webs and online social spaces. In fact, I like to liken social media some times to "social systems in failure mode." Time is discontinuous, communication fails to communicate, relationships are unrelated, attention is unattentive, attraction is distracted, audiences are disaggregated, and so on.

But it is early days still for social media, and were we to look back to the first years of TV, we’d find naught but radio shows revisualized. The migration path from old to new media is yet writing its narrative, and that arc has many more dots to connect before its line can be fully traced. If we overuse (and do we?) mass media forms and contents in how we build and use social media today, is that so surprising? What will come next can arrive only when we have stepped up to it.

Only as cultural and social practices online mature to the point that we can see what we might build next can we stitch a tighter weave, and by warp and woof, wend our way towards a tighter experiential gap.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

That said, we all know that high volume advertising across social media are just *this* far off the bottom of the feed trough. Just ask Scott Rafer of Lookery (here’s Allen Stern’s interview with him, dated but relevant). CPMs are notoriously low on social media because users are disinclined to pay attention to ads whilst they’re busy with friends. But sites like MySpace and Facebook serve up a huge number of pages, and are the equivalent of the outdoor advertising marketplace online.

Richer, more embedded, better targeted (by means of micro-targeting to the user, social graph targeting to the group, or social context targeting to audiences of followers) marketing is a better indicator of the future of online marketing. But as anyone in this space knows, ROI is not yet measurable, as is performance. In order for one-to-one or relationship marketing to make their comeback in the guise of social media marketing, industry and application standards will need to show success. And those successes will need to be evangelized by the social media community as case studies and best practices. The phase of application and service innovation is maturing, and is ready for adoption by those who can see a path to engagement.

And now back to my point on people vs content. It strikes me that there’s a fork in the path to adoption, one that possibly reflects a choice between people or content.

On the People side are those of us heralding the cause of influencers and influencer metrics, supported by social media practices like following and friending. Industry speak on the social graph, on conversation, on feeds, lifestreaming, flow apps, and so on all suggest that marketers should get in with the people doing the talking, by means of course of the talk tools we all use (twitter, friendfeed, etc).

And on the Content side are those of us who champion the visibility and relevance of social media news, supported by social media practices like content rating, digging, aggregation, blogging, posting and commenting. Industry speak on the value add of socializing the web, of user generated content, of conversation around published and wired stories, videos, images, and more all suggest that marketers get in front of the context in which social media content is produced and consumed.

These are possibly just two sides of the same coin. Marketers can approach influencers and through them obtain exposure to more relevant audiences, and by means of more valued and trusted sources. Or marketers can buy exposure in the sites, on the pages, and possibly in the feeds that get the most traction, thereby and presumably reaching those most influential and attentive.

I’ve seen more discussion around influencers and the need for a measure of social impact than I have around their content. This could be that content is covered by web analytics and page rank, search, etc already. Or it could be that social content still awaits robust and reliable sentiment and semantic tools (yes, there are some but social talk is notoriously lacking in the context and meta data that content analysis needs for accuracy).

So I don’t know if the distinction I’m making is material in the end. Current marketing and advertising practices continue to emphasize exposure: messages are placed alongside audiences and their activity. But merely being contiguous to the social isn’t good enough. One wants to be in and of the social. So perhaps the industry still needs its paradigm shift. From being in front of the audience to being in the audience, and from being associated with the consumer to talking with the consumer, attentive both to who she is and what she says.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

The distinction between contributors and contributions is at the core of social media in general. Design limitations, including allocation of screen real estate, navigation schemes, actions and features/functions, and the resulting social content and practices these limitations produce, would seem to suggest that any aggregation tool will stake a preference on either the person or his/her content.

I don’t know if this suggests that there’s a corresponding division among user preferences and interests: to prefer people over content, or content over people. As users, do we fall into two camps? Are there two types of social media users — those drawn to the social face and those drawn to the media face? Those who relate to people first, and those who relate to content first? Those who pay attention to the person, and whose trust and interest aligns with personality, relationship, authority, etc? Versus those whose interests connect with content, statements, news, and talk — over and above the people posting and doing the talking?

But between friendfeed, digg, stumbleupon, socialmedian, twitter, facebook, and scores of others now in the business of assembling audiences around social content, it does seem that some are more conversational (twitter and feed aggregators like FF) and some more topical (digg, socialmedian, the new strands).

Perhaps, indeed, some of us are more attentive (in general) to who’s talking, and some to what’s being said.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.