I spent my last morning in San Francisco at TWTRCON - “the first conference entirely focussed on Twitter as a business platform: how to use Twitter to reach and engage customers, influence opinions and activate markets.” - their words not mine. I’ve started to get quite a knee jerk response to putting tw in front of things… enough already, today brought forth such utterly contemptible allisions as “twophy” and “twizard” - the latter being the poor soul trying to rangle the polls onto the projectors. All in all it made me want to use my own favourite, “twunt” and made me a bit grumpy. 

Enough of this. No one is going to take it seriously if people keep doing this stuff. I must sound a bit hypocritical in a way. I thought Twestival was wonderful, but that was because of what it was rather than the name. It was also a fair while ago too. If someone invited me to a tweetup I’d probably be a bit twabby stabby about it. 

What frustrated me more in a way was a phenomenon which I think should be known as “Powered by intern” or “Intern inside”. I think the human touch is essential in Social Media, I’m passionate about it, however some of the tasks being described that reputable, smart, big companies were getting their interns to do were both crazy in scale and also scarily bad in terms of observer bias. The one which sticks in the memory was the company who had an intern check 40,000 messages mentioning them for the sentiment of the user. There are some reasonably good sentiment analysis algorithms out there and after a few messages I can imagine that the observer bias is actually quite a strong factor. I had a really lovely Twitter message from Jason Wiener.

If this is the case and they’re replying to customers then that’s fine, that’s a good use of a human adding their emotions into the mix, however I’d just seen a demo of a product designed to help with workflow where they’d shown me some filters you could apply to categorise a conversation and the template for the response text. When I asked if this was the robot doing this they proudly said “No that would be really spammy” and then showed me how the user had to manually fire out the cookie cutter button to send the message. Just because it’s an intern pushing the button that to me doesn’t change the fact that the message isn’t personal. Then they compounded this by showing me the schedule your tweets function so you could send out the same message over and over again, in a clear attempt to bludgeon your audience into submission in 140 characters or less. 

I think Kevin Marks may have misunderstood what I was saying (easily done in 140 characters) and I hadn’t given the previous bits of context well.

All I was trying to suggest with message below was that everyone seemed to be throwing people at a problem you could partly crack with software. Use sentiment analysis to determine the level or urgency or priority if you could, use software to sift/sort and produce the overarching demographics and then use the humans for what they could do best, composing human messages to customers full of the emotion and intelligence that Kevin was talking about.

Another thing about TWTRCON interested me. Even compared to Somesso the other week which had a similar seating arrangement of round tables with some chairs with their back to the stage so many people were facing away from the stage hunched over their TweetDecks.

Somesso (from David Terrar)

vs TWTRCON

it really reminded me of this wonderful video of SXSW

I’m not wishing to knock TWTRCON or its organisers (and it’s not sour grapes because I wasn’t elected by the people to do a lightning talk), but the morning seemed quite navel gazing and also quite full of panels where anecdote was prized over data. The fact that you recognise one of your followers of your company Twitter account in an airport baggage hall and you’re from that airline and it’s a lovely moment is really nice, but it can’t and won’t scale. The human connection side of it is definitely why I like Twitter and use Twitter. The conversations are wonderful and it is nice meeting followers or people you follow, but we do need to get smarter about measuring and sorting and interacting personally on mass scales.

Then a panel arrived where there was someone who does just that. MC Hammer. I’m now such a fan. He was, and not just in contrast to the other parts of the morning, so eloquent, smart, switched on and erudite. I shouldn’t really be surprised. He’s now a successful businessman and a self confessed geek. Dave McClure summed it up well.

I was really impressed and it wiped a lot away of the morning’s vagueness from some companies. His thinking about identity, personas, perceptions and trust was so spot on, I really hope they’ll stream it (they were recording). This was my favourite of the things he said : “social media is not from platforms, there was socializing before there were platforms”. It cut through all of the rubbish you hear and brings things back to the obvious, that it’s about people, saying things to you. I’d never want to replace human responses to that with robotic ones, however having an army of interns pressing buttons to launch templated responses to messages in the style of chickens hitting buttons for food doesn’t appeal much too. 

In every utopian vision of the future, as well as the overpromising of the availability of jetpacks, there are always notions of robots doing the menial tasks, normally leading to humans having a better life. I’d love the robots to improve the dystopian lives of interns and help them out in their roles as work units.