Six months ago I wrote about Social Media's Short Term Memory. But it was promptly forgotten.
I revisited this and other topics in Reputation Economics: Early Thinking a few days ago. This sort of rolling 'memory formation' is something I do on DailyKos and I see a few others using the technique as well.
Tonight I'm back with some brand building, brand jacking, and other thoughts on social media's growing ability to form long term memories.
As readers may recall I posited the idea that Twitter's flow of small messages could be viewed as short term memories. This was written about three months after I seriously started playing with Twitter, mostly with our 'secret sauce' of message delivery. That sauce is still like the Coca Cola recipe, but the expanding circle of tools available to store, connect, and value the links between concepts, as well as their connection to individual tweets, has grown dramatically and is not proprietary, although the wits to make use of it do seem to be a rare commodity thus far.
We recently launched the Railroad ReModelers Club, a grassroots organization dedicated to furthering the goal of electrifying our nation's rail system and taking other steps to end our oil dependency. One of my parts in this is assisting in the public awareness of the concept. As an aside to the efforts in the bit.ly namespace directly related to the RRMC the Blog Workers Industrial Union pretty well demonstrated that the Conservatives OWN Twitter. But not really. This is a fine bit of brandjacking and if we can beat Kossacks over the head with an obvious exposition and only a few get it I'm sure the technique will be safe from the relentless dullards astroturfing on behalf of the alleged conservative movement for some time to come.
The Railroad ReModelers Club takes advantage of the rich reputation economics systems of the WiserEarth web site, which supports not only reputations for people and organizations but for varying forms of ideas as well. We fully mapped people, organizations, and ideas to bit.ly URLs in preparation for both measuring and enhancing a public relations campaign for this effort. The visualization tools of WiserEarth are a nice aside to the rich connection methods, greatly facilitated by Kossack and Wiser Earth advisory board member boatsie.
Google will come with their own shortener soon enough and it'll have very different dynamics than the gold rush approach on bit.ly, but Newt Gingrich will forever suffer my highly inappropriate reference being bound to his name in bit.ly, and this pleases me. Pearltrees is another interesting new method for creating shared long term memories. I only noticed this one an hour or so ago but I am fascinated. I think we're going to need pearl divers for every political campaign, but I have to dig a bit more to see exactly what sort of #boat we'll need to construct for them. This may well involve some dancing with the code in our Twitter rapid response system, but I've hardly had a chance to fully explore, let alone start adding to this wonder.
I plugged myself in and it read my mind as well as my relationships, right down to spotting how much time I spend talking to Twitter sex goddess @DCdebbie.
Here's another tidbit that explains part of our social media success; last night I spoke simply and honestly about the nature of my autistic superpowers and this is a stark contrast to the soup & pooties methods @Spedwybabs employs. I'll warrant sight unseen that the failing efforts in this space lack the sort of diversity of skills and views apparent in this diagram.
If you want such a diagram they're free in @Twitalyzer. If you want to move your stuff around in an orderly and professional fashion you'll need the $360/yr business version for such work. Besides developing long term memory Twitter has some other trends in evidence.
Those trends include visually or operationally appealing single use tools either being directly integrated or falling by the wayside as their features are duplicated in more broad competitors. Solutions themselves are growing links at the API level, links that are not readily apparent to a user, but that are easily discernible to a software developer. The need for process beyond the context keeping of long term memories, both shared and private as we've discussed tonight, has begun in earnest.
The first adopter pornography distributors and affiliate marketers have been terminated with prejudice. There's a curious yin/yang effect there – the free, community based affiliates, as annoying as they were, are gone, while the large corporate forces wrestle with brandjackers and the slowly dawning understanding that a corporate person, take @BP_America for example, may be jumped and beaten by an angry mob.
The conservative efforts on Twitter thus far have relied on strident, combative attitudes, but a thousand forces nibble at their methods; humans want to be talked to by their peers in respectful tones, not talked at by some jabbering grabasstic cluster of automata. You can't tell by measuring volume but the truth shines through in a qualitative exploration; the Progressive community on Twitter is larger, more diverse, and much, much more clever than their conservative peers. And we're beginning to make our weight felt.