Twitter Engagement and Authenticity

A few days ago I wrote a blog about engagement with thought leaders who post Twitter. I also wrote about Twitter often seemingly being oriented toward broadcast-only.

I have a thought more about this and what I value first and foremost is authenticity. I want to see posts from and engage with persons and entities in near-real-time, not merely be placed at the nozzle end of a firehouse pouring out tweets and links.

I have begun slowly un-following people who spray large volumes of posts but do not engage other twitterers via the reply function. While there is nothing inherently wrong with being broadcast-only, if you are not sharing information that improves my understanding of areas that are complex or lie outside my knowledge base, why should I expend precious bandwidth on you?

Those who spew torrents of tweets without looking back are of no value to me. Those who are high-volume, interesting/horrifying/thought-provoking/infuriating tweeters but who also choose to engage and defend/explain/retract their tweets are the beating heart of Twitter. Think what you will of the analysis or politics of @TheStalwart (Joseph Weisenthal), he presents information and theories that challenge one to think. Equally important, he will respond to challenges, questions, and differing perspectives. He is authentic, and that is the sort of Twitterer I seek out. Others like @ericjackson and @reformedbroker who, like Weisenthal, are financial and market experts that have taken the time to help an economic novice like me understand concepts from the POV of an market insider that would otherwise be inaccessible to me. I'm more learned for the experience.

Further, I've not found any of the aforementioned trio pre-posting tweets. They appear, at least to me, to be investing the time to tweet real-time instead of resorting to HootSuite, TweetDeck, or similar to put up a lawn sprinkler of orphaned tweets. Again, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with pre-positioning tweets if all you want to do is push messages out. However, I believe that you are cheating yourself and your followers out of potentially enlightening engagement if the bulk of your tweets only serve your agenda of putting X in front of readers. You'll earn enough replies, RTs, Mts, and favorites to drive up your Klout (or similar), but it's an empty accomplishment.

It is authentic to tweet with people, not at them and engage as you do so. Otherwise how different from robo-calling is what you are doing?

Message Boards and Forums--Still Relevant

One of the oldest forms of online social media is the message board. I'm sure that many younger users of social media would disagree that forums/message boards/groups are not social media as it has been defined by Facebook, Twitter, et al.

However, I view online social media as any place where people can gather to exchange information, ideas, images, and share experiences. Message boards also have their own rudimentary version of curation; it is not as immediate and user-friendly as Instagram or Pinterest, to be sure. However, the searchable messages, file folders, and photo albums of the richer forums (think: Yahoo Groups) are most certainly the antecedents of the sharing and life-casting that we do on their modern descendants.

The Yahoo Group I run has been in place since June of 2005. It has nearly 5,000 members, averages at or over 1,000 moderated messages a month, and large numbers of photos and files the members can access. The Group recently passed 50,000 messages posted and the archives contain all posts in the history of the Group (unless deleted by the poster or moderator) in a searchable format. This is a highly-focused, very specific Group, yet is very active. Many sub-cultures and specialized interest discussion groups still rely on this hoary, old, but effective system to connect with like-minded people.

There is still value in the 20-year old forum/message board/group format. It should be recognized as part of the biosphere of the social media environment and-when possible-linked to its flashier, more in-the-moment relatives. Remember, with the advent of internet alternatives telephone chat lines were thought to be dead, but they have returned and are still part of the landscape. Don't underestimate older internet social media that still has a role to play, and to ignore them is to miss opportunities.

Dinosaur of Curation-Not Yet Extinct

The recent change of CEOs at Yahoo! (('m going to leave the ! off hereafter) seems to be reinvigorating that long-standing (and long-suffering) pioneer of social networking. Some like @ericjackson of Ironfire Capital believe that Yahoo is going to be made relevant again; I have my own reason for hoping this happens.

In the late 1990s, Yahoo Chat was very popular, bringing together people with the wonder of meeting anyone from anywhere in the world to chat about....well, it usually devolved into attempts to get laid and a large amount of trolling. Even so, in 1998 when I booted up my first personal desktop computer from Gateway, it was a wonder to talk with people in India, Germany, and all over the US.

Yahoo also provided what they called "Groups". These were (and remain) message boards with lots of useful tools to build virtual communities. Despite being a relic of Web 1.0, those Groups are still offered by Yahoo and many remain vibrant. I run one of them with a surprising large and active membership of over 4,900 with ~1,000 posts/month. One of the features of the Groups is that all messages, unless deleted by the posting member or moderator, are retained and are searchable. If I want to go back to June 24, 2005, and see the first few posts made to the Group they are easily found and accessed. This curation of messages has been a boon to the members and to me in my role of Moderator.

Sometime in 2011, one or two CEOs ago, Yahoo tried to convert the Groups to more of a Facebook/Timeline appearance. The angry villager rule was invoked and Yahoo quickly reverted the Groups back to the 'classic' Group appearance. Much as the smart phone, iPad, and Macbook each fill a specific niche despite some function overlap, there is a place in the social media/network biosphere for older forum-type applications like Yahoo Groups. It is my hope that this particular dinosaur continues to roam the Mesozoic savannah for many years to come.