I wrote a post in June of 2009 called Calling Bullshit on Social Media. The goal of the post was to put twitter, and facebook, into an honest perspective, given all the hype and idiocy surrounding the phrase social media. It was picked up all over, as echo-chamber articles about social media often are, and has well over 100 comments and links to it.
In the six months since then my use of twitter has increased, warranting a follow up post.
I don’t retract what I said – but now I have more experience to explore similiar points.
Stats: I’ve been on twitter for 7 months. My follower count has doubled to 3000+ since the above post, while I’m still following about the same, ~350. Total tweet count is 1500+ over the 7 months I’ve been on twitter (@berkun). Which is an average of 7 tweets a day (although I’m not on every day).
In summary I’m a reluctant, cautious fan. I don’t expect anything to radically change anything else, but its sensible for me to use any new media that helps spread my work.
I don’t believe the hype, but I do see results for some of the things I need to do to be successful. I do get pleasure now and then in connecting with new people I don’t know, or joking with folks I’ve met on the road.
If you use twitter, has your opinion of it changed over time? And if you haven’t tried it, what would it take to give it a serious spin?
Howard Rheingold wrote an interesting essay called Crap Detection 101, which provides both commentary on how to separate fact from fiction on the web as well as some practical advice. He wrote:
I got good strategy advice from John McManus, author of “Detecting Bull: How to Identify Bias and Junk Journalism in Print, Broadcast and on the Wild Web”, who told me “you have think like a detective.” Think of tools like search engines, the productivity index, hoax debunking sites like Snopes.com, and others I will mention later as forensic instruments, like Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass or the crime scene investigator’s fingerprint kit.
It’s a good essay and it made me realize one thing: the problem of how lazy we are. Most people know they should ask more questions, and take more time to verify sources, but that takes effort. And that effort, if spent well and results in the discovery of a unreliable source, it costs double. We’ve lost not only the time verifying something, but also the time spend finding that now unreliable source, and the kicker is you still don’t have a fact you can use. Fact checking is a double-whammy against seeming productive to others. We have natural reasons to not want to check that source, even though we know we should. Part of us doesn’t want to know.
When people find a fact that supports their argument, regardless of where it comes from, its incredibly tempting to grab it and run, assuming whoever reads what you write, or listens to what you say, will be as lazy as you were. You can bluff your way into credibility because there’s no one depending on what you say enough to openly challenge what you’re saying. Often online when people think you are full of shit, they’ll just click away. You have to care to take the time to challenge someone’s facts or sources. And even when people do criticize, they’re in such a rush to prove you wrong for something, it’s common to be criticized for things you didn’t actually say, or with claims that are not supported, sparking a dozen ratholes that have no possibility of convincing anyone of anything. Communication speed makes the downward spiral of miscommunication spin much faster.
I’ve written my own take on detecting bullshit, but the thing I don’t know how to tackle is what to do when our innate desire for efficiency works against us. Being “productive” online in writing blog posts or frequent tweets, demands spending little time verifying anything, much less seeking out evidence for the opposing view and vetting them against each other in what old school folks used to called thinking. If there is anything I want to promote it’s thinking. Honest, open, generous amounts of critical thinking where people are just as willing to admit when they are wrong as they are to prove they are right.
My gripes about social media, and the future of technology in general, comes around to how we’re increasingly rewarded for volume online, or believe we will be rewarded for volume, rather than quality. Which is strange given how successful the web has been at making volume of information moot. We have more to read, watch and listen to than we can consume in a thousand lifetimes. Volume isn’t the problem. It’s the search for quality and the shortage of critical thinking that we need to solve and this includes the promotion of the kinds of questions Rheingold suggests everyone asks of things they read online.
Critical thinking will always require effort – and if we’re overwhelmed and stressed by too much information, or feel we’re falling behind and running out of time, the feedback loop works against slowing down to ask good questions. That stress fuels making assumptions and jumping to misguided conclusions.
How do we fix this? Or is it even a problem at all? Let me know what you think.
While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted – if only to take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to help calibrate where the truth is.
For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around – first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.
That said, here’s some points not made often enough:
If you liked this post, you might also like my general purpose essay, How to detect bullshit.
Update: @jmichelle posted a response, In defense of social media, on O’Reilly Radar. I responded in the comments.
Update, part 2: six months later, here’s a follow up post: twitter reconsidered.
Interesting analysis by fellow Harvard Business blogger John Sviokla about Microsoft’s missed opportunity to enter the social network game:
Microsoft’s Outlook may be the world’s Rolodex, but they have not figured out how to link up all the latent connections that sit inside our Outlook address books. Put another way, they have the ends of the network, but don’t know how to tie them together!
In your email is a latent network of most of the people you know, and how often you talk with them. The Outlook add on – not made by Microsoft – called Xobni (pronounced ZOBNEE, and named for Inbox spelled backwards) looks through all the mail on your machine and figures out who knows whom by who is copied on which emails. In other words, your emails naturally contain your social network. It would be easy for Microsoft to simply ask your permission to contact the people in your email list, and Outlook contact database, and ask them if they were willing to join your Microsoft social network.
There is a ton of social network data in our cell phones (who do you call/text most often? Talk longest with?) and email applications, and a simple app could mine that data and build, or at least enhance, networks from it.
The problem is that for many people Outlook is no longer the primary contact list. Anyone using Linked-in or Facebook depends on those sources as virtual contact lists. Facebook wisely offers to import contacts from many sources when you create your account.
The surprising thing to me is that there isn’t a wikipedia, or craigslist, of social networks. A free, non-corporate, social network that protects it’s users by charter against the pressures of corporate raiding of personal social information.
Thanks to Brady Forrest and Jen Pahilka for giving me not one but two slots this week in a high caliber lineup. It was awesome to meet and talk to so many folks in just a few days (talking to people is always where the value is). (Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson).
Its been awhile since I’ve been to a big tech conference around a singular theme (web 2.0) during its rise. To see both the promise and the hype swirling around together made for a fun couple of days. Walking the expo floor, where vendors and companies demo and pitch for your pleasure, gave me flashbacks to Internet World in ‘96 and ‘97. Back then, there were a zillion “push technology” companies, services and products. Now it’s “social media” or “web 2.0″, with a zillion companies all throwing the same jargon around and mostly failing to distinguish themselves from one another.
There are certainly good ideas in the mix, and I think Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky’s opening keynotes did more than any company I saw to speak for those ideas, or even attempt to describe what substance might surface from all the technology, energy and money bouncing around.
The problem for me is how infrequently people investing their lives making these things can describe how, at the end of the day, all of the potential described gets transfered into value. Or why the value provided is worth the risks and costs of using whatever they are selling (register for this, buy that, use this, etc.) It’s not a complex question, but it is the primary one I’m sure many attendees were asking: how much substance and takeaways can I fish out of the buzz?
I wasn’t surprised, but I didn’t hear anyone mention how many amazing things are made, in 2008, by organizations with little interest in web 2.0 concepts – namely Apple, Toyota, your favorite film director, or your favorite music band. Not to mention all of the great amazing things the world produced before 1994 (the year the web, even in 1.0 form, was born). That’s not to say this alone proves anything – my point is only this: it is possible to achieve amazing things, without -insert name of current trend here-. Thriving communities, tribes, and cultures have existed for ages. If its possible to do well without whatever the new secret sauce is, it suggests there’s an underlying element that’s not being talked about. I’m convinced there is a more refined explanation for what people might gain from buying what the expo vendors are selling, but very few people seemed capable of even suggestion one.
The unspoken nugget / explanation / marketing line that might get me jazzed is this:
We have always been collaborative. Always been social. It’s in our genes and it’s what we have evolved to do well. Good technologies enhance our natural abilities, give us useful artificial ones, and help us to get more of what we want from life. Web 2.0 and social media make the process of collaboration and developing relationships more fun, efficient, powerful and meaningful.
Ok. Now we’re talking. With a statement like this I can walk the halls of the expo, or converse with the greatest web 2.0 pundit, and have a straight conversation. Will this get me more of what I want from life? More of what my customers want from me, or vice-versa? I can make tangible arguments about what I want or my customers need and sort some decisions out. But note that the statement above is devoid of hyperbole like revolution, ground breaking, disruptive or transformative, things that are entirely subjective. If you identify a real problem well enough, you never need those words: the people who have those problems will naturally find what you do revolutionary if you really solve their problems.
Ok, enough industry talk. Here’s some shop talk for anyone that saw me speak: I’d give my performance at my innovation workshop a B and the keynote a C+. The keynote was mostly new material and, surprise, I never found my rhythm. I gave it my best but it wasn’t a great 10 minutes. The other funny thing is that the tech crew warned me the remote doesn’t go backwards – it’s kamikaze style – a warning I shrugged off as I couldn’t imagine in a ten minute talk needing to go backwards. Well, guess what, I did. I could have asked them to go back if I’d wanted but didn’t, it wouldn’t have saved my performance anyway :)
Workshop slides here: How to Innovate on Time
Check out isolatr. Currently in public beta. Everything you need to know can be found here.
SCOTT'S NEW BOOK
A provocative collection of behind-the-scenes tales from the life of a successful public speaker, bestselling business author Scott Berkun offers a unique insider's take on what public speakers do, how they do it, and how anyone can do it well. Book Details
OTHER BESTSELLERS
Receive short, near-monthly emails with new essays, most popular posts, and occasional big announcements. Not cheezy - it's good, funny and concise. (privacy policy here)

Book Details
Book Details
Book DetailsYou're reading Scott Berkun, All rights reserved unless noted. You can subscribe here Blog RSS Comments (RSS)