Adrian Chan

These screenshots are taken from Radian6, social media monitoring application that I've been using for the past couple of days.

This screen shows topical clouds taken from twitter accounts of several social media influencers. Shown here are Tara Hunt (missrogue), Chris Brogan, Adrian Chan (gravity7 -- the parser apparently doesn't like alphanumerical names), Dave Winer, Stowe Boyd, Michael Arrington, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, and Brian Solis.

(note I worked myself in there? crafty eh? I'm not really an influencer, of course, so I put myself in there as a proxy control group.)

You'll need to hit each of these and pop them to full size to be able to read them. If you do, you'll probably wonder as I did what, if anything, this tells us. These are cloud views, and could be provided by tweetclouds, but I found it handy to be able to lay them side by side, and to be able to flip each window over and change parameters (eg. date range). And they're updated in real time, so they refresh every few minutes or so. MORE »

I've been having a fascinating time reading through papers on NextStage Evolution, a company in the business of metrics and online media analysis. And I'm compelled to write briefly on some core methodological principles, primarily because the methodology behind social analytics warrants careful consideration. All of us in this space want to know what the user wants, does, and might likely do. That would be valuable information, and having it would allow us to anticipate and deliver, and engage, with users. Unfortunately, user's don't declare their motives or intentions, and so it is up to analysis to model user interests from user behavior.

I sincerely believe that social media analysis needs to account not only for the user's proximate activities, those being his or her online behavior and actions as trackable by analytical tools (be they within a walled garden social network, on and around blogs, in conversation tools like twitter, or even through social applications and widgets), but also deeper and less available interests. These are the interests that underlie interpersonal interactions, communication, and relationships. And no matter how near or far interactions, communication, or relationships may appear through social media applications, they form the basis of user agency.

Agency is a sociological concept, and it underlies user actions and activities. Agency, to me, involves intentionality and motive, as well as content (information), and is interested (identifies or attaches to an object or subject). User experience is about agency. Interaction design is about agency. And inaction can be about agency, too. Fundamental to the concept of agency is that of self-reflexivity -- that we know what we are doing. MORE »

I happened on a local bookstore going out of business yesterday and raided the psychology section, picking up a number of cardinal texts at $2.98 a pop. One of them was Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, of the Keirsey personality test. Actually, they call it temperament, not personalities. Reading the complete descriptions of what makes up INTFs and ENTPs et al was a real eye-opener, not to mention an entertaining and insightful read.

Character types, modified to account for the effects of social media and related technologies on interaction and communication, and taking into account users' communication styles, relationship preferences, and sense of self and self image, could be a powerful addition to current efforts to architect social analytics and conversation analytics programs.

The state of the art in measuring and making use of social media users and social graphs still centers on relatively straight-forward views of influence, attention, intention, and social capital. While these are more easily measured on closed social networks, a model for analysis of distributed social media tools, including feed-based apps, is clearly on a lot of people's minds. PR, marketing, advertising, branding, and customer service industries all want in on social media, and whether they stand by the sidelines watching, tracking, and monitoring, or jump into the river of conversation and engage, analytical tools and engagement applications will be essential. Nobody, but nobody, could possibly manage to be in the flow everywhere and at all times.

Traditional mass media approaches to audience metrics may have given us the right questions, and brought us to an appropriate starting point. But social media approaches will be needed now if we're to make proper sense of audience behavior. And here's where character psychologists like Keirsey might be of help.

I have an approach to social interaction design that takes conventional view of user experience and interaction design and extends it to social media users. With an eye to interpersonal dynamics, communication, and social practices, I like to call user behaviors "competencies." Each of us, as users interacts with social media and with others using it according to personal preferences, tastes, and most importantly, perceptions and interpretations. Our social skills online are social competencies. But each of us is different in our uses and, as psychologists would say, our behavior is informed by our psychology.

While this might be looking down the road a couple years, wouldn't an effective social analytics tool, and engagement platform (say, for advertisers and marketers) use not only social metric data but also psychological and personality models? Take the concept of the influencer, for example. As it stands today, an influencer is a well connected, credible, trusted, and active. He or she may also be on topic. That's not currently in the model, but should and probably will be, shortly, as we fold in not only who the person is but what s/he talks about (with credibility). So we might add expert to influencer.

But there are other kinds of user types, too, whose role in conversation can benefit specific marketing, branding, or advertising interests. There's the expert. The inviter. The emcee. The connector. The artist. The follower. And more. Keirsey has 16 types, I've got a similar number, tho based around communication and presencing styles. The inviter, for example, would serve the needs of event promoters. The follower, the needs of PR and news dissemination. The expert validates new products. The emcee gathers together like-minded friends, and would benefit branding or entertainment rollouts.

This is a new medium, and it begs for appropriate analysis. The metrics used in mass media measurement serve the purposes of a medium in which two-way and friend or peer-network constrained interactions don't exist. The future is engagement. Granted, masses of data will have to be mine and modeled. But isn't that what we're good at?

There's consistency in psychology, and applied appropriately and insightfully, durability in behavior and relationships. The noise will subside if we can wise up and if we put users first. If we fail, the doors blow open and a river of spam will inundate the flow. Either way, the mass marketplace is going to enter the stream.