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Why I'm Deleting My Twitter Account

Michael LoBue writes: I can’t remember when I signed up for my Twitter account — probably 6 months ago when a colleague in the association management space assured me that it was “where it’s all happening”. It is where it’s all happening; the train wreck of thought!

Intuitively I couldn’t quite accept that much of anything could be communicated in 140 characters unless a deep context already existed between the communicating parties. If other means of online communications didn’t exist (e.g., email, group lists, blogs, SNSs, etc.), then there might be some value to it; but I couldn’t see the there, there.

This morning I read Why Email No Longer Rules in the WSJ. Jessica Vascellaro contends that “services like Twitter, Facebook and Google Wave, with their constant stream of interaction among users — for better or for worse” has knocked email off its top perch. I think for worse – much worse!.

I reviewed a wonderful little experiment commissioned about one of our firm’s clients, the Institute for Innovation & Information Productivity (IIIP).

This study sought to understand whether attention deficits and associated performance drop-offs were statistically significant and if they varied with age or gender when an office worker was interrupted with email and text messages. Subjects were given a cognitively challenging task to perform, and then were interrupted with email and text messages to test their abilities to recover focus and complete the original task. Here’s what the researcher, Dr. Martin Westwell of Oxford University’s Institute for the Future of the Mind discovered:

• There was a significant difference between age groups on performance with cognitively demanding tasks under conditions of high interrupts.
• Younger people (18 – 21), lost their cognitive advantage over older counterparts when interrupted continuously during cognitively demanding work;
• The older group (35 – 39), saw no significant performance degradation under conditions of high interrupts and cognitively demanding tasks.

When I spoke with Dr. Westwell about this research, he went on to say: “The drop off in performance was akin to suffering from a concussion resulting from an injury in a contact sport such as football!” Find full report here...

The point is, email is bad enough in the hands of someone with little discipline — Twitter is like crack-cocaine to an addict. If you’ve read this far — well beyond 140 characters — and you think there’s some merit to this position, then you should read Mark Baurerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.

This post also appears on AssociationVoices.

Model for Audience Engagement

Michael LoBue writes: Yet another shoe seems to have dropped for the crumbling industry we’ve known for almost two centuries as “newspapers”. Well, it’s actually larger than just print newspapers; it’s also crumbling for some of the recently popular electronic media formats. The fact that newspapers and some traditional TV news formats are crumbling is not news — what is at least noteworthy is that we’re beginning to see the new, successful form emerge. I think this is instructive for associations and how we communicate with our target audiences.

Let me repeat — nothing fundamentally new here, except that we are seeing some trends emerge from what has seemed like a tsunami of information cascading at us from all directions (e.g., print, broadcast, website, blogs, etc.).

TMZ chief is speaker at Cal journalism school
On Thursday (3/12) The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the visit of the guru of celebrity news to UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. While the faculty at this prestigious journalism school don’t seem to get it yet, their students appear to recognize the entire model of reporting news has already changed and Harry Levin’s TMZ model seems to be one of the more effective models.

Washington Post Folds Business Section Into Front
This story could have been filled with “Latin filler text” as I think it missed the real story. The story is NOT that the Post needs to cut costs. The story is that this is yet another example of the print media alone isn’t cutting it; there’s not enough of a market to sustain either the “print-form writing style” in newspapers, or the print-form by itself.

Stay with me…this is a build…

TMZ’s Financial Page
Whoa – TMZ, the leading paparazzi channel that got its start focusing on the Thirty Mile Zone in Hollywood is now using its investigative style to report on the intersection of politics and the economy.

TMZ is not the first to use this form of engaging dialogue vs. the over-powdered, teleprompter reading talking heads — TMZ takes Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” style even further.

What does this have to do with associations and how we communicate with members and non-member target audiences? Everything! We need to complement our traditional “publish” model where we’re feeding audiences bits of “history”. Even if the news or information was created just this morning, it’s still fixed-in-time.

The success of TMZ and The Daily Show is not that they are telling us what we want to hear; but they are engaging news-makers with questions that we’d want to ask – questions that stripe away the highly controlled message the news-makers wants to tell us. I realize that traditional journalism has been about just this — but they have allowed their medium to control their reporting — their days of reporting history are over!

If you’ve never watched TMZ, you should. Not because the subjects are all that interesting, but for the style they use. It’s very dynamic; you feel that the story is unfolding in real time. If you’re not convinced, then watch ET (Entertainment Tonight) and you should see the extremely dramatic contrast.

The successful communication channels of the association world will be the ones that capitalize on this model. One obvious feature is to allow visitors to go beyond just reading the pronouncements of the experts, and be able to engage the experts in a dialogue.

This is also cross-posted on AssociationVoice’s blog site….

Social Media — A Threat or Opportunity for Organizations?

Michael LoBue writes: :  Just back from the ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) Annual Meeting (aka:  annual gathering of the association faithful) and there were a fair number of breakout sessions on the various aspects of social media and the world of organizations.  In fact, I even co-presented one of the sessions with Jeff De Cagna of Principled Innovation.  Jeff is a self-described social media evangelist and thought leader on the subject. 

There seemed to be two general reactions, or schools of thought, about social media at the 2008 ASAE Annual Meeting.  One, proffered by a small number of evangelists is that we in the association world better understand and use social media – soon – or the consequences to our organizations will be dire.  I even heard the question:  “Will these social media tools render traditional organizations obsolete?”  The other school of thought seemed to be:  “Hmm?  Social media seems like a technology in search of a solution.”

I would argue that like most debates of this nature the truth lies somewhere in between and even at different points between the extremes for different organizations.  The important thing is for association leaders and executives to not loose, nor bury their heads over this situation.

I think the more interesting and useful domain in which to explore these tools is against the basic justification of an organization in the first place.  If organizations (or “firms” as the term was used in research on this subject in the early 20th Century) were formed because it was a more effective and efficient way to organize resources, including handling such overhead costs as communications and coordination, than the market, then it would be logical to understand how social media tools impact the “overhead” optimized by the organization itself when certain communications costs go to zero.

Clearly, communications is not the only element of overhead managed by the organization.  So, suggesting that social media tools will put organizations themselves out of business is naïve.  Conversely, it would be foolish to ignore the impact of social media tools on organizations.