On Twitter, Everyone Knows You're a Dog
I’m feeling inspired, after ready Marty Cagan’s “Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love.“ Marty describes some clear best practices for success when creating a new product, or updating an existing product. He references segmentation, and points out the importance of using personas when planning features and releases. I finished the book last night, and I immediately started to think about whether or not I truly know my user base. Truth be told, I don’t know as much as I need to about the users who come and quickly leave. But new tools such as Twitter and Facebook make it possible to understand your users better than ever before.
Peter Steiner created a famous cartoon, captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Well, this is simply not true anymore.
Copyright Image from New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner.
Take Facebook, for instance. I know more about my real life friends than I ever did before. Just the other day, on Facebook, I got notified with what must be quickest spreading Facebook content ever; “xxxx tagged you in the note 25 Random Things About Me.” I read, in awe, that years after being the best man at his wedding, I still didn’t really know him. And here I was, learning more about a real life friend.
Twitter has a tremendous amount of following. People follow complete strangers to get them to follow back. People follow others they think might be interesting, and yet others that are accepted thought-leaders. If you analyze someone’s posts, you can quickly learn a great deal about them. And some tweeple’s fingers are like loose cannons, allowing you to even learn about their personalities. Take this rant from a well-followed Tweep, for instance. With some tools doing some basic analysis on a user’s tweets, you can learn an awful lot about this user.
This is where social media and social networking start to close the gap between a publisher and it’s users. With new features such as Facebook Connect, site publishers are gaining a lot more access to this valuable insight available based on users’ contributions to your site, and to others as well. This insight will really help to identify one or two of the personas you will undoubtedly need to create to ensure you’re building your product for the audience.
Truth be told, on the Internet, everyone knows exactly who I am.
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2 Responses to “On Twitter, Everyone Knows You're a Dog”
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The question for you and I as content owners and publishers though is how do we harness all of that data? I have always agreed with Marty Cagan on the importance of establishing personas and who our customers are.
This helps to understand how they use our products–because it is never as we designed.
But the true cross point for Twitter, FB connect and anything else comes from mining all of that data and then putting it into practice.
This is where analytics companies like Omniture and it’s few competitors will have a huge opportunity. Plug-ins into their architecture to grab your “connect” list, or to consume your user database and its’ profiles, links to connected services, etc, and analyze. I also think search companies like Endeca have a real opportunity here as well.
I was working on a start-up about 8 years ago, and the CEO was all about psychology, and learning about user behavior so that he could sell these lists. Serious fail, but now times have changed. While I certainly wouldn’t sell the lists, we do want to sell to the people on these lists, and being able to classify each user could really help create some awesome personalized user experiences.
In a company with a large number of Internet properties, it may pay to leverage a shared warehouse of “connected” user data, and provide a central service to access that classification. I don’t know how many businesses would take that kind of a project on in these financial times, but it would pay off in the long term.