Looking at our pool of 200+ community of influencers, we were wondering which one would won the Twitter race (i.e: which community shows the larger usage of Twitter based on % of twitter account detected from the influencers’ blogs we store in our db).

Excluding the Social Media Marketing community, Mommy bloggers come first with 82% of the top influencers having a Twitter account and tweeting and close to 70% for the overall community (we have close to 10000 mommy blogs in our db).

FYI, Social Media Marketing bloggers is 90% for the top and close to 70% for the overall community.

Mommy bloggers love Valentine’s

Mommies highlight and focus on the celebration and party side of Valentine.

Daddies appear to fish for gift ideas, associated cost and remind themselves of the date.

Something happens, let’s call it “small bang”.

In order to “real time” search it; you have to know about it, right ? You can only search for something that you already know about.

But if you already know about it, that’s no longer real time. Hence,  real time search is an oxymoron.

We should rather name “the need to be on the top of something as soon as it occurs”,  real time listening or real time discovery.

And this opens several interesting challenges:

1) One can listen to so many sources at a given time.

Although one can talk/ tweet to millions in one click, listening, and even automated listening does not work the same way.

The consequences is that people and brand have to prioritize and organize who they are listening to.  That’s what Facebook Friends, Twitter followers, RSS lists are all about.

I remember attending one Robert Scoble talk where he was mentioning having a 45 mn advantage over CNN learning of events like plane crashes, earthquakes …

To do that, whether on purpose or not, he was relying on a network of people spread across the globe and counting the repetition of the same tweet to validate the information and judge its importance.  He also had trusted sources he could count on to double-check.  Even implicitly, there was an organization around his listening effort.

If let’s say, 95% of his contacts were in Silicon Valley, then he would have a hard time spotting a new event happening in Italy or Brazil.

For a brand, the implication is that  they have to map their target communities and align their listening efforts and resources to their strategies and to “who matters”.

They also have to give up the dream of real time listening to a few billion people real time.  The “more is better” approach of listening  is a root cause for “systemic intelligence failure” as Predident Obama just named it.

2) Any discovery process starts with a definition of what is supposed to be discovered:  “patterns”.

Pattern can be simple ones

• mentions of brand & product names, executive names, competitors … (yes/no, number, frequency)
• lack of mentions of brand name in their target communities… which is usually a much bigger issue for mid-size brands.

or more complex ones.

• expressions that have surfaced recently  in a given community
• changes in the structure of the community (let’s say top influencers start linking back to your competitor blog, following an outreach effort this competitor just performed)
• changes in the tonality of the conversations around your brand in a given community

Poincare (early 20th century French Physicist) once said: ” to find something without looking for it, one must have looked for it without finding it for a long time” (“Pour trouver sans chercher, il faut avoir beaucoup cherche sans trouver”).

Back to Robert Scoble example, he was not just looking for “anything” but discovering potential already known phenomenas. He also had to have an idea of  normal versus abnormal frequency of events.

This is the same for brand. They need to get an idea of what they should be searching for in order to instruct the discovery process.

This is best done with a non directed listening for a while; to get an idea of the events that are usually of interest and a generalization into “patterns” that can be looked for.

After community mapping and strategy definition, listening is a mandatory step before setting up any “automated” discovery.

I stumble on these two posts during my daily musing of our list of  ~1000 social media marketing blog.

First, a piece of psycho-analysis on twittering, which was brought to my attention by Andy:
From the clinical psychologist Oliver James:“Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.”
Me: Is it possible we wouldn’t say anything to anybody if we had a strong sense of identity?

Second, a risk to your health of too much social networking, which was brought to my attention by Matt:
Based on a paper by Dr Aric Sigman: “social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems”.  Apparently it’s to do with spending less time socialising with people face-to-face and could lead to a rise in illnesses including cancer.
Me: Will that be a virtual cancer?

Ever heard of the blackberry thumb?

And this is interesting…talks about how social influence spread in social networks.

Joke apart, technology is so pervasive that it’s really easy nowadays to abuse it and when you cross an invisible limit, different for each of us, you may suffer.
It’s clear that we have to be able to disconnect. We have to accept that there’s way too much to read, way too much to share with others….and we can’t know it all. And that it’s ok. May be we should spend more time in our circle of influence!