In about an hour I will be joining my friend and colleague Taylor Hill to give an informal talk to members of my local merchant’s association about Social Networking and SEO, and how each can be used to grow a business.  I am looking forward to it!

For those who would like to follow along with the notes (there won’t be any slideshow for this one) you can download the PDF here.

As a social web participant, technologist and consultant, I am being asked on a daily basis my thoughts on Twitter and Facebook for business. I definitely have opinions about the uses of both platforms, and the suitability of each to various types of marketing and relational/conversational business networking activities. I was asked by a merchant’s association of which I am a member to share some insight on the social web strategies I see working, but of course before any such discussion can be meaningful, there has to be a short summary of the features and benefits of each platform. And the shorter this preface is the better, in my opinion.

So in an attempt to cram it into a nutshell for my upcoming audience, I was comparing and contrasting the ways in which the two networks build connections. The starting point for a connection can often be quite revealing about what sorts of conversations will be able to emerge as mutual participation and engagement ensues. If I meet someone in the context of  being “a friend of the family”, I am likely to explore radically different topics of discussion than if I met the same person in the context of “having the same interests”.

Facebook’s primary connection mode seems designed to bring together people who already know each other, or are very likely to know one another in an existing relational context, whether past or present. A slightly secondary mode is the locale-centric one, in which Facebook seeks to center activity and connections based on the reported location of its members. Both modes suppose an existing geographic or sociographic connection in order for the system to perform well in suggesting friends. And indeed, many if not most of the prompts and activities around which Facebook revolves suppose that the connections occurring within networks have some real-world mirror or context.  Nowhere is this more clear than in the memes and recurring quizzes, etc. that get passed around. Without already knowing something of the individuals participating in these activites, the answers and the exercises themselves would be of little interest, consequence or value to the group.

Twitter, on the other hand, with fewer guided activity options (and subsequently a LOT of general confusion about what Twitter really is) can be much like Facebook, in terms of mirroring confined and pre-existing real-world social connection graphs, but it isn’t designed to limit or promote only those social spheres. In fact, Twitter seems to be harder to use in that way than Facebook, because of the lack of recommendations and six-degrees-of-separation sort of ready-made connections. To find people to follow on Twitter, or to find followers, one would typically start with an interest or subject matter that mattered in their world. With little in the way of formal introduction or pre-existing awareness of an individual, connections can be made, based on little else than a mutual appreciation of a topic, interest or body of knowledge. In this way, Twitter tolerates more anonymity during interactions in the network, and thus can be an appealing place to be a genuine and transparent brand with a valuable voice in the conversations already occurring there. One does not have to know much about someone before choosing to follow them, because the value of the connection is not based on felt associations, but rather based upon a knowledge transaction.

In other words, Facebook networks are based upon WHO you know, and Twitter networks are based upon WHAT you know.

I am thrilled to have finally come up with a “10 words or less” comparison/explanation of the two services. But probably no more thrilled than my audience will be.

It’s always fascinating to read about ways that the social web is being used. The staggering growth and acceptance rate of technologies that were not even a blueprint two months ago is itself a staggering thought. The social web, for all its fickle-minded users and fad-chasing business models, has always had a bleeding edge where the “cool stuff” gets made. I should know, I’ve been involved in creating some of it.

But it is because of the fast and wide-scale adoption of these platforms and technologies that we have a full and healthy dose of the Law of Unintended Consequences operating today. For every new break-away service that comes into the light, there are a crop of parallel (and some would say “parasitic”) technologies that emerge alongside. Given the popular trend of public data APIs, this sideline innovation is often where the bleeding edge is found, much to the chagrin of the original technologies’ founders.

I’ll give you a few examples of the unintended consequences I am talking about.

1. Search. Platforms like Twitter are poised to benefit from an emerging view about the data being batted about on any given day in the social web. Turns out that this data is valuable, and once it was made searchable and discoverable, it shines as a plausible replacement to search giant Google as an even more real-time search engine. Who would’ve thunk it? Certainly not the tops at Twitter, at least not from the beginning, and I’d bet money on that.
2. Marketing. Facebook knows something about the data it has in its system. It’s a freakin’ gold mine. And if it can ever transition the unrealistic expectations of its user base to accept a business model that allows Facebook to sell more of this data (anonymous or otherwise) Facebook will be worth triple the inflated numbers that were bandied about several months ago. Marketers are standing by with very long extension cords, just waiting for Facebook to tell them where the high-voltage power receptacles will be located. Because marketers instinctively understand that knowing what Facebook already knows about its users, based solely on their organic and voluntary use of the platform, will likely fuel a global economic recovery. But if Facebook had realized the full value to marketers from the start, I think they would have laid some ground rules that would have made it much easier to do business without sparking user-generated revolt.
3. CRM. How would you like to find out what people are saying about your brand, and quickly respond before an influential rogue micro-blogger can do real damage? The social web is already changing the way businesses manage customer relationships. But I am positive that blogs and microblogging platforms were not conceived out of that desire. It’s another beneficial yet unintended consequence, and it has incredible value to those interested in harvesting the data.

The real party-pooper in the above scenarios is the user and his/her expectations about the social web and the platforms that prop it up.  For now, the social web remains a Fortress of Free, and the expectation that the user-added data in these public systems will remain private and untargeted (ridiculous notions, by the way) are so strong that any wholesale moves toward marketing the vast data sets are met with rigid and unwavering protest. Yet another unintended consequence of making everything free from the start…

There is a dynamic that has developed within the social web over the years which I find disturbing yet pervasive, and about as hard to eradicate as an infestation of cockroaches. But the future of the Social Web depends on a close examination and realignment of thought regarding ingrained user expectations. Facebook is drawing fire from users for recent (some say misinformed, inaccurate?) news about plans to sell user data to market researchers, and I think this illustrates my point beautifully.

After one of my own social startup experiments failed to gain traction with its intended audience, I had some time to reflect on my interactions with social web users, and here is a list of some of the expectations and (often contradictory) attitudes I encountered regularly (I have shared these views at times myself):

• I should be able to sign up and use Social Web apps and services for free.   If you cannot figure out how to monetize the service without bothering me, I will leave.
• Ads bother me. So do requests for donations.
• The publicly available personal information posted on my pages is mine, mine alone, and should not be used in any way I did not intend for it to be used. I don’t care if it’s public, and your commercial use of it is actually anonymous.
• I should not have to look at a lot of on-page advertising in “my” pages. They are mine, and I do not want them cluttered up.
• The free services I use should remain free, remain up, available, and working as expected 99.9% of the time. Service interruptions should be scheduled for the hours I am not online.
• Delays, slowdowns, and interruptions to service are intolerable. Figure out your infrastructure and scalability issues before you bother to launch.
• My features wish list is reasonable, and should be implemented, even though I do not plan on using the features regularly; they should be there because I think the ideas are cool.
• Web apps should not have too many unnecessary features.
• I think there should only be one or two Social Web apps and we should ignore all the others, so that it is easier for me to manage my digital life and connect with the world in the context of my favorite social app.
• There should be a mobile version that does exactly what the full web version does, and works in exactly the same way. Screen size, operating systems, phone model and carrier contracts be damned. Make it work. Now.
• Once my favorite app gets so big and successful as to a be an obvious target of criticism, I will openly blast them for their successes and work to destroy any attempt they make to monetize the service or use my anonymous data.
• When a dumb service I loved at first, then wanted to change, then criticized for changing, doesn’t succeed in meeting all my above expectations, I will place them in the deadpool, and tell the world I knew they wouldn’t make it all along.

There is another side to the user experience; it’s the side of the brave people who dream up and actualize cool Social Web technologies. This is the environment in which they have been asked to launch, develop and prove commercially viable their free services. Perhaps we need to tame down certain unrealistic expectations, mmm? How else will the Social Web find its path to sustainability?

Twitter has gotten a whole lot of people’s attention in the last year. I have had an account since the beginning, but I confess, I did not start really using it until the last few months. What a shame.

I am finally understanding the purpose, but in that statement I am acknowledging that the purpose is VERY subjective and perhaps different for everyone reading this. And to talk about the many ways Twitter can be used is outside the scope of this post.

One specific reason I am using it right now is news qualification. While a feed reader aggregates my news, I found it didn’t do a good job of telling me what was worth reading. Twitter, or more specifically, Twitterers, and those few who bother to find the good stuff and Tweet it, are serving the needed qualification I was seeking. Now, if someone I follow on Twitter says I need to see a post, and five others mention it, then rest assured I will be reading it before long. Even if there weren’t other reasons to love Twitter, that alone is reason enough.

Interesting how social media technologies, when used in conjunction with one another, begin to help filter the information noisefloor, making it easier to find the good layers you crave, and rise above the petty ones you don’t have time for.