Category Archives: Social Media

White Salmon and Black Swans

First published July 22, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The conversation started innocently enough. We were entertaining out-of-town guests at a winery and restaurant overlooking Lake Okanagan. And, as often happens when people visit B.C., they ordered salmon.

“You know, I heard that not all salmon are pink. There are actually white salmon.”

“Really, I’ve never heard of that.”

“Well, let’s see if there really are white salmon.”

So, we turned to the arbitrator of all such things: Google. If it can be found on the Web, apparently it exists. Which is an interesting behavior in itself, and a point I’ll come back to in a minute. But first, let’s talk about why the existence of white salmon is important.

A Fish by any Other Color

A white salmon is important because it’s a black swan. Or, rather, it’s a Black Swan. The capitalization is critical, because it’s not the animal I’m referring to, but the phenomenon identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book of the same name.

For all of human history, until the 17th century, it was commonly accepted that all swans were white. But in 1697, Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered a black swan in western Australia. Why is that important? Well, for the vast majority of us, it’s not. But what if, for some reason, our world revolves around swans? What if our ability to earn a living depends on the predictably of a swan’s natural coloring? Then suddenly, it becomes vitally important.

Black Swans — and white salmon, for that matter — are outliers. And outliers are important because they cause us to change our view of the world. The normal, regular and expected allow our lives to run down predictable paths. As long as this continues, nothing changes. But the unpredicted, the unknown outlier, is an undeniable occurrence that forces us to reframe our view of things and take a new path. It was a Black Swan that changed the world.

According to Taleb, Black Swans have to have three things: they have to lie outside the realm of regular expectations, they have to carry extreme impact, and, when we discover them, they force us to alter our view of things to explain their existence. We have to change our view of the world to accommodate them. Taleb asserts that all of human history has taken a path that pivots on the discovery of Black Swans.

Discovering Black Swans

Now, back to our dinner conversation. Black Swans only become important when they were discovered. The vastness of the physical world meant that it took us a long time to find that first black swan.

But the world today is significantly different than it was in 1697. Today, Black Swans pop up all the time on YouTube or in a blog post. Every single day, somebody somewhere is googling a Black Swan. And, when they find them, Black Swans go viral because the unexpected is naturally fascinating to us. We can’t help but talk about it, and today, when we do, chances are it’s through a digital channel.

The more the world becomes digitally connected and synchronized, the faster word spreads about Black Swans. And when word spreads, we are forced once again to change our view of the world. This means that the pace of change in human history, catalyzed by Black Swan discoveries, is picking up speed. Today, you can’t step outside your door without tripping over a Black Swan.

The discovery of a Black Swan sets in motion a recurring chain of events. First, we have to acknowledge its existence. Let’s call this the Black Swan Googling stage. Then, we have to talk about it. This would be the Black Swan Twitter stage. Then, we have to rationalize its existence, creating an explanation for it — the Black Swan Wikipedia stage. Then, it becomes an accepted part of our new worldview, the new normal. What used to take centuries to filter through the civilized world now happens in the matter of days, or, at the most, weeks.

After all, when I woke up yesterday morning, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a white salmon. Today, my world has changed forever.

Everyone’s a Critic: The Splinters of our Discontent

First published January 14, 2010 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I had a bout of inbox convergence today. Just as I was speculating what this week’s Search Insider might cover, two separate emails surrounded a juicy little topic and delivered it to me on a platter. First, a post from Ad Age about how marketers are reluctant to use online conversations as a source of customer feedback: “‘Listening’ ostensibly has become the rage in consumer research, but the Advertising Research Foundation is finding that many marketers view what would seem one of the digital age’s biggest gifts to marketers — the torrent of unsolicited consumer opinion — as more of an added expense item than a blessing.”

And then, a small blog post on Echouser got me thinking: “It’s a concept for what an iPhone app designed to measure experiences (any experiences, from surfing a website to hopping on BART) could look like… Can you imagine if we were able to rate experiences on the fly, all day every day?”

Customers are Talking…

There’s been a lot of talk about the shift of control to the consumer and empowerment. As 2009 drew to a close, I talked about the shape of marketing to come. One of the key foundations I identified was participation — actively engaging in an ongoing conversation with customers. The two posts in my inbox start to get at the potential of this conversation.

In the first post, ARF laments advertisers’ reluctance to tap into ongoing online conversations as a source of customer feedback. Valid point, but I can understand their reluctance. This is unstructured content, making it qualitative, anecdotal and messy. Marketers balk at the heavy lifting required to mine and measure the collective mood. Some tools, such as Collective Intellect, are starting to take on the hard task of migrating online sentiment into a dashboard for marketers. The easier it gets, the more likely it will be for marketers to actually do it. Until then, we’re stuck with consumer surveys and comment cards.

…Anytime, Anywhere…

But it’s the second post that really got me thinking. Always-on connections have already given a voice to consumers, one that’s heard loud and clear. But what if we did indeed have a convenient and commonly structured way to provide feedback on every single interaction in our lives through mobile connections? What if marketers could know in real time what every single customer thought of them, based on the experience he or she just had? Some cringe at the thought. Others are eager for it. The second group will inevitably prevail.

Given the level of investment required on the part of the user, I suspect this channel would only be used in extremely negative and extremely positive circumstances. We don’t tend to take the time to comment on things that come reasonably close to meeting our expectations. But even so, it’s a powerful feedback channel to contemplate, giving the truly user-centric company everything they could ever wish for.

…So Listen!

Last week, I talked about the mother lode of consumer intent that exists in search query logs and how we’ve been slow to leverage it. This week, we have an equally valuable asset rapidly coming down the pipe — a real-time view of our customers’ sentiment.  That’s a one-two punch that could knock the competition out cold.

Twitter Declining? I Don’t Think So…

One item in this morning’s in box caused me to look twice – eMarketer, using numbers from Nielsen, stated that “Data on Twitter Decline Stacks Up.”

twittergraph

Turns out it caught the eye of Jim Jansen at Penn State as well. After a quick and flurried Twit-Talk with my friend Jim, we both agreed the title’s misleading.

If you continue to read down to the fourth paragraph, you start to find the article begins to refute itself:

“The decrease in visitors could mean either falling interest in Twitter or simply migration to other platforms, such as third-party applications and mobile access. ”

Well..duh! Through the rest of the post, eMarketer starts to show just how much Twitter traffic has migrated to 3rd party platforms. As Jim said in a tweet “Don’t even know why they are reporting it like this.” Why indeed? This is just sloppy and misleading. It’s one thing to attract eyeballs from the email in box (worked with me) but it’s another to falsely or misleadingly report research and drop the real picture down to the bottom of the post. I’ve seen enough eye tracking to know that the majority of readers would never get past the first paragraph or two.

Shame on you eMarketer!

The Twitter Follower Personality Sorter

I had a friend in college who said he could tell everything he needed to know about a person by asking them who their favorite Beatle was. The frustrating thing was, he was usually right. For the record, mine was John Lennon. His was George Harrison. I miss them both.

I was just thinking that you can also get a great glimpse inside someone’s psyche by checking out their Twitter follow list – published there for everyone to see. For example:

I just started following Marissa Mayer. I don’t know Marissa very well and the extent of our acquaintance stretches to a few telephone interviews, but I do know what makes it to the popular press, and we share a passion for user experience. But I found it interesting to find in her list fairly slim list of Twitter follows a rather eclectic collection including Ivanka Trump, Ballet Russe, SF MOMA and Al Gore. Of course, there’s a fairly healthy dose of Google and tech based follows as well, but these others may provide some bearing points for Marissa’s personality.

Of course, you’re now going to wonder who I’m following. Well, in addition to the typical industry folks, my bearing points include Jack Welch, John Cleese and NASA.

Socially, We’re Suckers for a Deal

Razorfish’s new FEED 2009 report found that consumers like to spread the word digitally about great deals on brands. In fact, this far surpassed their desire to just talk about brands.

Humans are still Humans, even Online

Here’s the thing that gets me. When we talk digital channels, we seem to forget that humans are humans. We’ll still be the way we’ve always been, we’ll just do in on a new canvas. The “finding” of FEED 2009 discovered that we like to talk about deals. This has been hardwired into humans since we crawled out of caves. In a bit, I’ll share the findings of an interesting study that looked at how this social news spreads through our networks.

The Results of FEED

But first, let’s look at the other results of the study. Despite my morning grumpiness, this is a report worth downloading:

FEED09_Chart-Q1765% of consumers have had a digital experience that either positively or negatively changed their opinion about a brand. Again, this is behavior that is common, we all have perception altering brand experiences. As we spend more time online, it’s natural that this will happen here too.

Branding is now a participatory experience. We’re no longer passive consumers of brand messaging. We now expect to roll up our sleeves, get in and muck around with the building of brands. We want to do things with the brand. We will now participate in building the aggregate story of a brand. 73% of study participants had posted a product or brand review on web sites like Amazon, Yelp, Facebook or Twitter. We now have a voice and we’re using it.

We’re becoming Brand Fans. 40% of consumers have “friended” a brand on Facebook and/or MySpace and 26% of followed a brand on Twitter. Again, this isn’t new, it’s just going digital. There are certain brands that inspire fierce loyalty: Apple, Harley Davidson, Nike. It’s natural that these Brand Fans would now be expressing themselves online. One word of caution for Brand Marketers here. People won’t suddenly become fans just because you’re on FaceBook. You have to be a brand that people care about.

FEED09_Chart-Q27Here’s the study tidbit that was “surprising”. Of those that follow brands on Twitter, 44% said access to exclusive deals is the main reason. Same is true for those that “friended” a brand on Facebook or MySpace..accounting for 37% of participants. The next highest reason for following a brand on Twitter? Being a current customer, at 23.5% And again, this would be for those brands that inspire an unusually high degree of loyalty.

Strength of Weak Ties

Sometime ago, I talked about a fascinating study by Frenzen and Nakamoto that looked at how rumors, or in this case, news of a bargain, spread through social networks. It explored the roll of Mark Granovetter’s famous “Weak Ties” in social networks. Social networks tend to be “clumpy”, rather than uniformly dense. There are dense clumps, representing our families, closest friends and co-workers that we see every day. You’re connected to these people with “Strong Ties”. But the clumps are also connected with “Weak ties” that span the gaps. These are ties between more distant family, casual friends and acquaintances. As Granovetter discovered, news spreads quickly through the strong ties within a clump, but it’s the ability to jump the weak ties that really causes word to spread throughout the network. We rely on the “connectedness” of these weak ties for things like news on potential jobs, social tidbits and yes, the scoop on a great bargain. If you look at the nature of these weak ties, you’ll realize that it’s exactly those types of ties we tend to maintain on Twitter and Facebook.

In 1993, Jonathon Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto decided to explore the conditions that had to exist for news to jump from cluster to cluster across those weak ties. They tested the nature of the message itself and also how the news would impact the person delivering the message, a condition called moral hazard. In other words, would the messenger lose something by spreading the word? The scenario they used to test the conditions for this social “viralness” was news of a sale. There were three variables built into the study: the structure of the network itself (strongly connected vs weakly connected), the attractiveness of the sale (20% off vs 50 to 70% off) and the availability of the sale item (unlimited vs very limited quantities – introducing the aspect of moral hazard).

Frenzen and Nakamoto found that in all cases, news of the sale spread quickly through the strong clusters. But when the message wasn’t that remarkable (the 20% off example), word of mouth had difficulty jumping across weak ties. Also, when moral hazard was high (quantities were limited) again, the message tended to get stuck within a cluster and not be transmitted across the weak ties. If you look back at the original post, I go into more depth about how this impacts our inclination to spread news through our networks.

Twitter: The Weak Tie Pipeline

So, let’s take this back to the Razorfish study. There needs to be a few conditions present for news to spread along weak ties: The information has to be valuable (50 to 70% off) and it can’t put the person holding the information in moral hazard (if I share this information amongst too many people, there will be nothing left for me or my family). The example given in the study, following a Brand on Twitter to get news of exclusive offers, is our “weak tie” to the brand, so we can be first to benefit. And, if the discount is substantial and there is low moral hazard, we will in turn Tweet about it ourselves.

The Razorfish study indicated surprise that more people were engaging in social networks to learn about discounts and not to evangelize brands. Again, if we look at human behavior, there is no surprise here. Brand evangelization engages a completely different part of our brain, the same part, incidentally, that gets triggered when we talk about religion and other unusually strong beliefs. These are things most of us hold closer to our chest. We share them with our strong ties, but we don’t usually spread that across weak ties. There are exceptions, of course, but I think most marketers assume all of us are willing to build public shrines to their products. That’s just not how humans tick.

But, humans can’t resist spreading the word if that word has social value (a great bargain) and we don’t miss out ourselves by spreading the word. Those are the messages built to set Granovetter’s weak ties singing in a social network. We’ve been this way for a long, long time. And now that Twitter and FaceBook are here, we’ll still be that way.

Two Different Views of Tweeting

DigitalNativeComparison2Last week in San Jose, I was talking to a group of marketers about how digital natives and digital immigrants use social networking. Inevitably, the subject of Twitter came up. In our recent BuyerSphere research, we found that Digital Natives (the younger generation that grew up with technology) use Twitter or microblogging platforms more than Digital Immigrants (the older generation that adopted technology as adults). Someone in the audience said that he thought it was common knowledge that younger people don’t “tweet” but older people do, running counter to our research. The following chart shows the percentage of difference in time spend each week between the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants in our sample:

As you can see, Digital Natives spend significantly more time on social networks and Twitter..almost 50% more time than Digital Immigrants. Yet, Twitter is labeled as an older person’s platform. Today, from the PEW Internet group, new numbers came out on Twitter usage that seem aligned with our findings:

emarketertwitterThe core audience for Twitter is squarely in the Digital Native age group. I think the answer lies in how the respective groups use Twitter. And this difference in usage and attitude extends beyond Twitter to almost any social networking platform.

The Digital Immigrant views Twitter as a tool. It’s a way to get information out, build traffic to a blog, connect with someone. We treat it as technology that offers us another way to get things done.

But for the Digital Native, Twitter is just part of the world they live in..like air or water. They don’t treat it as technology. It simply is. This attitude towards technology as not being technology is common amongst Natives. They don’t have the same “Gee Whiz” awe of technology. They’re not constantly comparing Twitter or Facebook against the good old days. Why should they? For them, this is just part of the world they live it..there is no reference point in the past. That’s why Natives spend substantially more of each week interacting with technology that connects them with their lives and social circle. For myself, FaceBook is a destination, as is Linked In or Twitter. I only go there when I need to do something. But for the Native, it’s just part of their environment.

Finally, I want to share the view of another Digital Immigrant, Comedian C.K. Louis, who ranted about the Native lack of appreciation for technology.

And Now: The New News Regime

First published October 8, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week, I moderated a session at SMX about real-time search. Personally, I find the convergence of social and search to be perhaps the most significant trend of 2009. Social adds an entirely new dimension to search. Traditionally search has been used to find “what” you wanted to know more about. Social adds the dimension of time. Suddenly, relevance isn’t the only measure. Search now needs a “stale date,” a measure of the freshness of the results.

Flying Rumors

There were a number of interesting things that came up in the panel. Presenters used a few recent examples to show how stories broke online: the death of Michael Jackson, the elections in Iran and the emergency landing of a United flight in Iceland.  It was fascinating to see where people turned as news broke. Not surprisingly, behaviors followed age-old grooves, but now those behaviors played out over a brand new landscape, the digital one.

For example, Jeremy Crane from Compete showed how, as we learned the news of MJ’s death, we first turned to Google and news sources for confirmation. But as time went on, we took new online paths. We turned to Twitter, to real-time search engines, to YouTube and other richer media sources as we worked our way through the process. If you were to look at how humans deal with loss, these paths really aren’t surprising. First we want confirmation from an authoritative source, and then we have to participate in our own ways. We need to talk about it (Twitter) and we need to reminisce (watching old videos on YouTube). We need to participate in some way in the experience to reach our own measure of closure. Funerals are never really for the departed; they’re for the ones left behind.

If It’s Not New, Is It News?

But the most interesting question came from out of the audience, right at the end of the session. The internal SEO manager for ABC asked a huge question: As news increasingly breaks online, how do traditional news publishers stay nimble and relevant? How do the New York Times and ABC News keep up in a world that includes Twitter and TMZ? That, indeed, is the question.

A few columns back, I gave my own example of real-time search, as forest fires encroached on my home town of Kelowna, BC. There I touched on the new speed of news. But the ABC’s staffer’s question brings up some added dimensions to that. The answer is not as cut-and-dried as it used to be.

Traditional news channels, with their journalistic checks and balances, can never be as nimble as rumor. It’s a game they can’t play; yet they feel they must. They have a decades-old tradition of being not only the official and credible source of the news, but also the first place most people hear news as it breaks. Now, however, we often hear about the news while it’s still a rumor, perhaps several rumors, as they bounce around the Internet.

The New Regime?

What we have here is a discontinuous shift in the industry. As one of the presenters quipped, public relations is now really about the public. News spreads through millions of instaneous connections, rather than tightly controlled and edited channels. Often, the traditional news publishers are relegated to a role of listening to and verifying online buzz, trying to sort what is true from what is social gossip. It’s a middle ground they’re having a difficult time adjusting to.

The news industry is in the middle of what Christopher Freeman and Carlota Perez  called a Regime Transition. When technology shakes the very foundations of society and its supporting institutions, there is usually a resulting passing of the torch from what was to what will be. My suspicion is that what we were talking about in that session is pointing to a regime transition of epic proportions. We are defining the new reality of news by where we turn to be informed. The traditional players have no choice but to see if there will be a place for them here — when the dust settles.

The New Speed of Information

First published August 27, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This summer, we had fires in the town I live in. From the back deck of my house, I could see the smoke and, as darkness descended, the flames that were threatening the homes in the hills above Kelowna. I had friends and co-workers that lived in the neighborhoods that were being evacuated, so I wanted to know what was happening as soon as possible.

I was sitting on the back deck, watching the progress of the fire through binoculars and monitoring Twitter on my laptop. My wife was inside the house, listening on the radio and watching on TV. Because I had an eyewitness perspective, I was able to judge the timeliness of our news channels and gained a new appreciation for the speed of social networks.

News That’s Not So New

If you had tuned in to our local TV station even hours after the fires began, you wouldn’t have known that anything out of the ordinary was happening. There was no mention of the fire for hours after it started. The TV station in Vancouver was better, with real-time coverage a few hours after the fire first started. But their “coverage” consisted of newscasters repeating the same limited information, which was at least 2 hours out of date, and playing the same 30-second video loop over and over. If you needed information, you would not have found it there.

The local news radio station fared a little better, reporting new evacuation areas as soon as they came through the official communication channels. But the real test came at about 8:45 p.m. that night. The original fire started near a sawmill on the west side of Okanagan Lake. Around the aforementioned time, I noticed a wisp of smoke far removed from the main fire. It seemed to me that a new fire had started, and this one was in the hills directly above the subdivision that my business partner lived in. Was this a new fire? Were the homes threatened? I ran in and asked my wife if she had heard anything about a second fire. Nothing was being reported on TV or radio. I checked the local news Web sites. Again, no report.

Turning to Twitter

So I tweeted about it. Within 15 minutes, someone replied that there did seem to be a second fire and fire crews had just gone by their house, on the way up to the location. Soon, there were more tweets with eyewitness accounts and reports of more fire crews. In 30 minutes, the Kelowna Twitter community had communicated the approximate location of the new fire, the official response, potential neighborhoods that might be evacuated and even the possible cause of the fire.

Yes, it was all unvetted and unauthorized, but it was in time to make a difference. It would take TV two more hours to report a possible new fire, and even then, they got most of the details wrong. The local radio station again beat TV to the punch, but (as I found out afterwards) only because a reporter was also monitoring Twitter.

We’ve all heard about the new power of social media, whether it be breaking the news of Michael Jackson’s death or the elections in Iran, but for me, it took an event a little closer to home to help me realize the magnitude of this communication shift. Official channels are being hopelessly outstripped by the efficiency of technology-enabled communications. Communication flows freely, unrestricted by bottlenecks. One might argue that with the freedom in restrictions, one sacrifices veracity. There is no editor to double-check facts. But in the case of the Kelowna fires of 2009, at least, official channels proved to be even more inaccurate. Not everything I read on Twitter was true, but the corrections happened much faster than they did through the supposed “authorized” channels. Twitter had broken the news of Jackson’s death while the official news sources still had him in the hospital with an undisclosed condition. When it came to timely, accurate information, social media beat the massive news machine hands down.

Do we need a two-hour jump on the news we hear? Is it really that important that we know about events as soon as they happen? When a fire is bearing down on your home and every minute gained means you might lose one less precious keepsake or treasured photo, you bet it’s important.

The New Metrics of Fame

First published July 2, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — Andy Warhol, 1968
When Warhol made his oft-quoted prediction, he was referring to the ability of media to push anyone into the bright glare of the spotlight for a fleeting brush with celebrity. What he couldn’t have anticipated was the strange twist the Web would throw on this issue. The Web democratized media and accelerated Warhol’s prediction. Viral fame doesn’t depend on tightly controlled channels like newspapers and TV networks; it seeps, oozes and sometimes gushes, propelled by users. All of us, including middle-aged guys from New Jersey lip-synching to pop songs, kung-fu-fighting bears and teen-aged “Star Wars”-obsessed wannabes, can now be famous.

But it’s not just the opportunities for fame that have undergone drastic Web modification. It’s also the ways we measure fame. Humans are obsessed with status. We are mesmerized by social rankings, and thanks to the infinitely measurable nature of the Web, we have a legion of new status metrics available to see how we stack up against the world at large. And I’m just as big a sucker for this as everyone else. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I regularly check my status on various Web-based metrics. Here are a few of them.

Googling One’s Self

I think everyone’s guilty of this one at one time or another. You check to see what ranks for your name, who else of the same name shows up (my doppelganger is a photographer and musician in Scotland), and how many mentions Google finds of you out in the Web wilderness (22,900).As your digital fame grows, you broaden your search parameters. For example, do you break the top 10 for just your last name? This is admittedly dependent on how common your name is. Hotchkiss is not a household word, but I am competing with a prep school in Connecticut, a town in Colorado, a civil war cartographer, a precursor to the Jeep, the owner of the Calgary Flames and a ballroom dancing instructor. Or how about your first name? Gordon Lightfoot, a video game storeowner and a comic book about ultra bondage offer stiff competition for “Gord.”

Here’s a new variation: Search Suggestion Wheel of Fortune. With the search suggestions feature now available on all the major engines, see how many letters you have to type in for your name before you appear on the list of suggested searches. I come up in 5 letters (on Google.com — my home country is a little less kind. I need to go to 7 letters on Google.ca).

Techno-Rate-i

If you’ve joined the blogosphere, a number of destinations offer updated stats on how you stack up against the Seth Godins, Guy Kawasakis, Michael Arringtons and Arianna Huffingtons of the world. I have been tremendously delinquent here. I was once in the top 100,000 on Technorati, but have slipped back to the lowly 200,000s, due mainly to posting neglect. Still, with somewhere over 100 million blogs in existence (exact numbers seem hard to find) that still puts me in the top 0.2%, so my ego can live with that.

Twitterholics

The newest addiction for those seeking digital attention is Twitter. Now that the celebrities have glommed onto tweeting (come on, Kutcher, DeGeneres and Spears, can’t you share a little love?), it’s not as easy to gain top tweet status, but Twitterholics can get their fix of ranking reporting at Twitterholic. I do better here than on Technorati, once again breaking top 100,000 status. 1,649, 378 more followers and I beat Oprah (@outofmygord if you care).

Fame is Fleeting

In the new wired world, we are constantly reminded of our own notoriety, or lack of same, compared to everyone else in the world. In the pre-Web world, not only were we not famous, we were also blissfully ignorant of the fact. Today, it seems that everyone should strive to have some small sliver of fame. Keeping up with the neighbors isn’t about what’s parked in your driveway, it’s how many hits your blog gets. Social status is now measured in backlinks, hits and followers. My brother-in-law dealt my ego a devastating blow when he gave me a T-shirt that said “More people have read this T-shirt than my blog.” But I’ll get even. He won’t be getting any link love in this column.

When Search and Social Collide

First published March 12, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I feel the ground shifting under my feet. And I’m not the only one. John Battelle voiced his perception of shift in a post  this weekend:

Search, and Google in particular, was the first true language of the Web. But I’ve often called it a toddler’s language – intentional, but not fully voiced. This past few weeks folks are noticing an important trend – the share of traffic referred to their sites is shifting. Facebook (and for some, like this site, Twitter) is becoming a primary source of traffic.

Why? Well, two big reasons. One, Facebook has metastasized to a size that rivals Google. And two, Facebook Connect has come into its own. People are sharing what they are reading, where they are going, and what they are doing, and the amplification of all that social intention is spreading across the web.

Talking the Talk

I find Battelle’s analogy of language particularly apt here. I’m a big Steven Pinker fan and am fascinated by the way we process language. It maps well to our use of search.

There are two bursts of language development that correspond to the two biggest periods of brain development. The first, during the first few years of our lives, are when we assimilate the rudimentary rules of our mother tongue. We move from single words to small sentences. We use our new channel of expression to begin to connect with our physical environment, telling others our basic needs (hunger, diaper changes) and asking why things are. At the earliest stages, we explore through language.

The next is during adolescence. Now, we use language to connect with others. We fine-tune empathy, create relationships and probe the fit and fiber of those relationships through words.  We mirror others’ emotions in our own minds, and language is an essential part of that process.

As Battelle says, our use of Google equates to our first explorations of our online world. Our queries are quick and primitive stabs in the dark, hoping to find something of interest. But now, we’re become online adolescents. We’re connecting and conversing, and in that, there is a new and indexable Web or words  that becomes very interesting.

Humans being Human

Online becomes fundamentally important when we use it to do the things that come naturally for us. Seeking information is natural, and search gave us a new and more effective way to do it. Connecting with others is natural, and Facebook and Twitter give us a new way to do that as well.  This isn’t about technology. This is about being human. Technology should be transparent in the process.

But when those fundamental activities leave lingering digital footprints that are quickly converging, there is something staggering in the implications. The ability to create feedback loops between patterns that emerge in the complexity of online, and then use that ability to navigate and connect to places and people, foretells the future of the Web. Twitter and Facebook are not replacements for Google. They are social signals that potentially increase the effectiveness of our online language exponentially.  To quote Battelle again:

The conversation is evolving, from short bursts of declared intent inside a query bar, to ongoing, ambient declaration of social actions.

Consider the implications: Google’s mission to index and organize all the world’s information; the increasing use of personalization to uncover your conscious and subconscious intent; and, the ability to tap into the very vibrations of a vast social network. It will take time to bring it together, but when it does, it will change everything.