Avaya was a sponsor of last week's 140 Characters Conference in Manhattan. Mike Killian and I were on stage for the 'future of communications' panel.
This #140conf is an eclectic gathering of twitter users. Its focus is more around building relationships and not so much about the technologies of social networking. Jeff Pulver says it “was more about the evolution of our collective soul and the underlying effects on both our relationships with each other and the effects of this on businesses, institutions and organizations”. The live gathering felt a little like a large family reunion with hundreds of Twitter users meeting face-to-face to share their experiences. With well over a decade of running conferences, Jeff Pulver has mastered showmanship. And this conference didn’t disappoint. It opened with Miss America
(All sessions for the conference can be found here: http://nyc2010.140conf.com/schedule . Click on “watch this” to see the individual sessions.)
The conference format provided little opportunity for deep technology insight. Each speaker had on the order of 10 minutes, and each panel had about 15 minutes. This gives one the chance to make assertions, but not really back them up with substance. It allows one to share broad ideas and helps users to decide who to meet or follow.
How popular is twitter, really: According to TechCrunch, there are about 75M twitter accounts. It grew tremendously last year. At its peak (July, 2009), 2-3 accounts were being created each second. 25% of the accounts have no followers, 40% have never sent a tweet, and only 17% tweeted any time in December. They estimate that there are about 15M active twitter users. Compare that with Facebook that has inarguably several hundred million active users and Skype which has almost twice that. When the celebrity John Mayer announced that he was no longer going to use twitter, it was observed that he has 500,000 followers. Putting that in context, it’s somewhere between 1-3% of all twitter users!
Main conclusions:
- The value of twitter: A key value of Twitter is about listening to others, not only about marketing. Sure, foursquare and coupon applications show benefits for business marketing. And many of us have followed up on comments made on twitter to clarify facts, fix customer issues, or even gather leads as a start of a sales process (click here for a great blog summarizing Avaya efforts - thanks to Paul Dunay.) But the greatest impact observed here was when twitter was used to create a connection – to develop a rapport across the internet – to lend a personality to your business. Whether educators, artists, or business leaders, the message was consistent. This provided a powerful new way to connect in a more real way with others. Oddly enough, the most direct impression I had was of Ivanka Trump. While admittedly not a technologist, she went through how she cautiously started using twitter and how her use grew as she learned it was a valuable tool to have a broad-based conversation on her projects - exploring “crowd” opinions.
o An example is applying twitter almost as we use email broadcasts or blogs internally - an open conversation tool among others with similar interests. While it’s too soon to tell, at a minimum I’ve already met up with one of our channel partners and am discussing future methods of collaboration with them and, through them, with potential customers. In short, it's another way to find and create linkages to people and topics.
o In the schedule, speakers were given with their tags so people could follow them and comment to them directly. This further fosters conference collaboration in a new way.
· The possibilities real time interactive internet: The conference thematically portrayed an interactive and collaborative internet showing example-after-example of how static web pages are not as useful as interactions that adapt the resources dynamically. While augmented reality is a clear example, the adaption of news sites is another example with search tools and feed sites now incorporating live twitter feeds.
· An augmented real time event - fully engaged while staring at devices: Everyone was tweeting constantly. But at normal conferences when people seem to be more distracted by email, they were conversing via text directly. The use of a common hashtag (#140conf) brought people insight into what others were saying and hearing live, turning the 1-way stage into a broad-reaching collaboration session. (Periodically, Jeff would announce where the $140conf hash tag was in the rankings of twitter search.)
Use of Twitter for customer communications, a picture of what’s possible:
Eric Stegemen @EricStegemann of tribus group Real Estate described an application that he’s having built from his firm that uses real time data to link with his firm. He looks at tweets about real estate in a given area, rates the content, and (for a subscription fee) provides a lead to local brokers with guidance. If the user tweets asking about “Real Estate Prices in NJ”, for example, it’s not a very serious customer. But if they ask about “homes for $200-250k in Leonardo”, this more specific request is a hot lead that a local broker can help handle. He has this handled via a customer management system, but it’s not yet tied to telephony.
A few other notes.
· Democratization of news and speeding up information flow: There were panels and speakers from the news media. They discussed the implication of faster information flow. Twitter feeds news faster than any other media. News web sites took 40 minutes before providing an article about the Haiti
· Pure raw capitalism: For those people who can place investments, this kind of instant information form a basis for quickly capitalizing on news.
· EDUCATION:
Jeff had an education theme for this conference with several speakers and panels on new approaches for education. This was exemplified by a standing ovation for Chris Lehman, a Principal of the Science Leadership academy in Philadelphia
· On curriculum: “What we can do and what we are asked to do in education are radically different. For teachers, it doesn’t matter if it can’t show up on a test.” “We aren’t teaching creativity since we can’t figure out how to measure it”.
· On technology: “At dismissal, every kid grabs their devices when the door closes. They use these devices in ways that we can’t imagine and sometimes in ways we don’t like. But we provide no way to guide them because we don’t participate in these conversations.” He compared these new technologies to something a pencil … “we don’t have a pencil lab, why do we have a computer lab? These technologies are like oxygen and should be part of our teaching methods, not outside of them.”
Another standing ovation was given to the St.James 8th grade class. They created a short skit and song, and their creativity was rewarded with an eruption of applause. The point of this was similar to Chris Lehman’s. The teacher (George Haines @oline73 of Saints Philip and James School
· The future of communications panel: http://bit.ly/9iKIr3 Our panel was late in the second day, and it was a bit afield from the rest of the conference. But communications technology is a passion of Jeff’s, and he was leading this panel discussion. Jeff Pulver wanted to explore how communications contact information will diverge access away from telephone service providers. We spoke about the seamless integration of communications channels and the need for an aggregation service – probably not provided by these vendors.
o From reading tweets, the messages people seemed to get from our brief session was that social networking has a chance to replace directories, but that there won’t be a single directory. Phone companies right now are connectors for people, but they may not play this role in the future. Jeff has asked if we would help him develop a future communications conference.
o Listeners also heard that social networking is recognized as a popular and important communication modality, and, will/should be embraced as an integrated part of the communication system. Michael Killian’s comments were tweeted by audience members: “presence in communication leverages the where-are-you and what-are-you-plugged-into on aspects of presence in helping learn how available are you”
