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Last week, on my personal site, I published On Chatter, an essay about Twitter, Facebook, and the nature of the always-on stream of noise, which I’m calling Chatter. We thought that some of it would be relevant to readers of the Gruden blog, so I’m reproducing a couple of excerpts here.

Starting to Get Twitter

Admittedly, it took a long time (I first signed up in the second half of 2006), but Twitter has grown on me. It’s not quite right, and it’s still incredibly geeky, but it points to an always-online, always-chattering future for everyone.

While it’s geeky, it’s not necessarily techy, so there are a lot of different people on Twitter, every one of them using it slightly differently. Some are using it to broadcast, some are using it to chat, some are using it to keep in touch with a group of friends. Many do all that and more. I find myself using Twitter in two very different ways. On the one hand, I follow people for their links to news or cool new things online. I’ll ocassionally tweet in the same mode myself. But on the other hand, I follow people I know in the real world. This is, for the moment, a much smaller group of people, and their updates tend to get lost in the noise created by the first group. But it’s the mode I normally tweet in myself, and it’s by far the mode I’m most interested in.
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Real People

The thing about ambient intimacy, is that it really only works with real people. Characters and personas you can get away with — we’re all putting on personas, all the time, both online and in the real world. But no-one wants to be intimate with a corporation. And a corporation can’t tweet about what it had for breakfast.

So there’s no easy answer for companies, no three-step process to monetise those eyeballs. No-one will own the æther. There’ll be money in plugging people into the æther, and in helping them filter it. But you’ll be working with a whole lot of other people, and other systems. And through it all, you’ll have to be yourself — be a real person.

At work we’re starting to get into the social media space a whole lot more. But when we looked at the idea closely, we realised, we don’t want to go into that space as Gruden. Most of us already have a presence, and an identity of our own, and Gruden is just a part of that identity. So we blog and tweet in our own spaces, and sometimes we blog in Gruden’s space, and sometimes we link or tweet each other, just like anyone else in our social space. It’s not about creating a new persona, it’s about being real people. And any company looking to get into this space needs to be ready for that — you don’t do this as a job, it’s just something you do as a person.

The essay explores more of the cultural impacts of these services. But what about the impacts on companies, and on marketing? Everyone seems to be aware that “social media” is something they should be doing, but no-one’s really sure of what that means, or how they’d go about taking their brand message into the social media space. The key, however, is to not think about social media the same way you think about your traditional media. There are half-way points, like Facebook’s Pages, designed for a traditional brand presence within Facebook. But if you’re going to embrace the social aspects, you need to be sending real people into the space. In some ways you’re loosening control over your company’s message, letting all your employees into the social media space. Some won’t want to identify their work, some will embrace it.

To take it further, let key outward-facing staff (be they marketers, public relations, sales, customer service) put some of their work hours into their social media presence. Obviously, such an investment requires some return, but the pay-offs are, initially, going to be difficult to measure. The key, in the short term, is in establishing a presence as a recognisable and real identity.

Steve Rubel is arguing that, while it’s clear that Facebook and Twitter will be replaced, they won’t be replaced by a new ‘hub’, but rather by the open web. The argument is that the web will become “one giant social network”. So you’ll no longer be able to setup your brand presence on the kids’ latest favourite website, but will instead need to focus on your identity, and really participate.

Marketers need to really embrace the fact that it’s peers and their data, rather than brand, that will become the primary way we make decisions. The greatest rewards will go to those who embrace and participate in as many communities as they possibly can in credible ways.

The social media space is still in its infancy. It’s an area in which we’re all experimenting. It takes such a dramatic rethink of the way we market a brand that it’s bound to ruffle a few feathers. We’ll look back on this period and wonder why it was so difficult. But this experimentation is only human; it’s what makes our presence all the more real.

So we’ll continue experimenting with our own presence. And we’ll encourage clients to start sending people into the social media space. Some are going to be more ready than others — we’re not suggesting everyone go create a Twitter account immediately. But as you start to look at what you or your employees are already doing with your personal presence, you’ll find it becomes easier to bring the company into the conversation.

The last couple of weeks has seen some big announcements in the Semantic Web. Google announced a number of new features at Searchology 2009. And Wolfram|Alpha soft-launched a new alternative to the search engine, what they’re calling a computational knowledge engine.

These two represent two very different approaches to the semantic web. The web has traditionally been designed and written for humans. The semantic web represents an effort to design and write the web for machines. We can run a search, look at certain results in context, and determine that one particular string is an address, another is a phone number, another is a name. But a machine struggles to tell those apart. The “lower-case” semantic web attempts to introduce some structure to the human web in order to assist a machine’s interpretation. The strong “upper-case” Semantic Web introduces data specifically designed for machines, oft-times invisible to humans.

The Microformats effort attempts to extend the human web by encouraging the adoption of common semantic structures in order that a machine might also read this web. Google’s recent announcements included initial support for the hCard and hReview microformats, used to identify names and addresses (hCard) and reviews (hReview). Initially, Google are reading the hReview microformat to pull ratings for businesses and include that information in search results.

While it’s only in the initial stages, we’ve seen Google slowly extend search results with rich snippets in the past, and this is an indicator that they’re taking microformats seriously. This is a strong case for adding hCard (or other microformats) to your website — it’s not hard to imagine Google pulling address data and showing maps next to search results. This is something we’ll be adding to the Gruden website in the coming weeks, and we’ll include details of our implementation. In the meantime, Google’s webmaster documentation includes detailed examples to markup business and organisation data.

Another new Google feature sits between the lower-case and upper-case forms of the semantic web. Google Squared (link is to a YouTube video) lets you setup a grid for comparative search results. Eg, a search for Hotels might return different hotels down the page, with locations, prices, ratings across the page. In typical Google fashion, all this data is mined from the human web, but there’s an obvious attempt to impose machine-readable structure on the content.

Wolfram|Alpha has been compared to Google, but really is a radically different approach, and for a very different end. Wolfram call it a “computational knowledge engine”. It works with strongly structured data — it’s designed to give answers, not a list of results a human then needs to mine. Some example searches are:

• Sydney, Australia, which returns population data, a map, the current time and weather
• apple and orange protein, which returns detailed nutrition information

And then there are the classic unanswerable questions (via Amnesia blog):

• life, the universe, and everything
• the speed of an unladen swallow