Webtropic

I have been a big opponent of the vanity twitter use (aka harvesting followers, hoping that “followers” equals “audience”).

In practice, this meant that from a point on,  I completely stopped looking who is following me, did not reciprocate at the cost of being perceived as arrogant and kept my follower/following ratio to 4.

Still not content, I unfollowed quite a number of twitterers (some of them pretty big names)  on the grounds that they were either producing too much noise, or were talking about things I found irrelevant to me.

For over two years now, I keep experimenting with twitter:

• In the beginning, it was conversations. But as people kept flocking around twitter, conversing became hard, if not impossible.
• Then it was news tracking which, although useful, it was far from complete. Yes, the news came to me, but not the news I was always interested. And with it came a lot of repetition and nonsense.
• Then, based on retweets, it was content discovery and evaluation.
• Occassionaly, it was polls, mini-crowdsourcing, asking questions etc
• Grouping people allowed to create filters: filters for news, for content, for community info.
• Finally, there came mindcasting. The most interesting use of twitter. The one I subscribe.

The grouping feature offered by many twitter clients, has, for a long time, being the single organizing factor that brought some order into chaos.

But, lately, we have another one, far too important: Lists!

Although lists look pretty much as the  groups of twitter clients, they are not the same: groups are for  the people we follow or those that follow us, while lists are for everyone! This difference is a game changer.

Already people use how often they are listed as a measure of importance, influence or popularity.

But lists have another function: they are metadata. The criteria we use to classify twitterers in lists, describe what they are or how we view them.

Also, lists, unlike groups, can be public, can be viewed and subscribed by others. And as such, they bring focus and attention from another angle.

“Ok”, you might say. “Lists bring new features. So what?”

Lists can bring back the sanity in twitter. They can undermine the follower fallacy, they can bring value to ordinary users as well as to businesses and marketers.

How?

By allowing us to make a fundamental distinction: following is an action of trust and, to some extend, intimacy. Subscribing to a list is  willingness to be informed.

So if you are on twitter to spread your message (be it news or offers or corporate messages) seek to be listed, not followed. Your very intention implies that you most likely want to use twitter for broadcasting and not for creating relationships. That is fine. You won’t have to pretend you are a ‘friend’ from now on. You aren’t. You never were. But  now message spreading can be done without undermining the everyday experience of ordinary users.

—– end of part I —–

My lists…

Image from Flickr by RBerteig

I remember a time (not so long ago) when people were disgusted by partial feeds and most of the major blogs and bloggers abided by this unwritten law. Publishing a partial feed was synonymous to cheap exploitation, putting ad revenues over readership, alienating your readers etc.

I, myself, am guilty of accusing blogs for  this kind of ‘malpractice’.

But things change.

I see more and more probloggers publishing partial feed and very few readers  complaining.

Why?

Because the way we read and follow blogs has changed too. Information is coming to us. And usually it comes in the form of a short sentence with a link in it, something especially true for twitter.

So the trend of reading everything in the coziness of our feed reader is in decline, while reading from the source is back with a vengeance.  Twitter and Facebook are the benefactors of blog ad revenues.

I think it is, and I tweeted so  yesterday.  And the reason is obvious. What is SEO about? Ultimately, it is about one thing: the ‘website’. It’s about making a website and its pages discoverable, ranked favorably in search results, described appropriately so that searchers hook on the description etc.

But ‘websites’ are not ‘in’. Check the diagrams  from Google trends for websites below.

Website traffic for 5 major IT companies

Website traffic for the 2 major consumer goods companies

While the overall number of people online is increasing, the visits to the web sites keep falling.

At the same time the volume of searches for these brands shows a completely different picture.

Search volume for the 2 major consumer goods companies

Search volume for 5 big IT companies

In the last 12 months CG companies see a volume increase or remain steady (amidst the crisis) while, for IT, a longer perspective reveals a mixed picture that has to do with what these companies are and technologies they offer:

• oracle and ibm are gradually decreasing,
• apple is increasing,
• dell  increases too  although less quickly,
• and hp seems to hold its ground or slightly decreasing.

But there is an equally important movement undergoing: people shift their reliance from search to peers for news,  recommendations and answers.

I don’t remember how many times and about how many things I  have asked my twitter friends’ advise. And it always comes. And most of the time  it’s good too. Not so  abundant as  search results, but who reads search results past the first page anyway?

Enter social seach. Google injects results in search from our social graphs (opt in). I don’t have to reason the usefulness of this.

What should we expect? What else than  these two inversely related trends accelerating?  Less reliance on search, more reliance on peer recommendations.

There are some interesting implications here: SEO consulting and search advertising have profited from our reliance on search. Search won’t go away anytime soon, especially with the social element in it. But what would be the need for SEO? And what would be the need for adword advertising, if the important factor in search results turns out to be our peers?

Is Google shooting its own foot?  So it seems. But I am sure they have figured it out already and they are thinking of alternatives.