I’ve been thinking a lot lately about twitter because, well… that’s what twitter users inevitably end up doing. Twitter is almost infuriatingly great. Infuriating because it doesn’t make sense to anybody when they first discover it. Great because, once you take the leap and start using twitter, it fits into your life so damn well.

Trying to explain what twitter is to a non-techie person is damn near impossible. You end up sounding stupid: “It’s like a weird hybrid Blog/IM/Facebook/Chat program with an arbitrary character limit for every post. You should try it!” They probably won’t. But the thing about twitter is that, once you do start using it, it’s remarkably easy to become utterly obsessed with it.

It happens organically. You sign up for an account. Start following some people. Maybe it’s only something you check a couple of times a day. But, soon enough, it takes hold. And you can’t get away.

I think Tim Bray pretty well nailed twitter earlier this year, when he wrote this:

I think that with Twitter, something important is happening. But I’m having trouble figuring out what.

So here’s twitter: a web application that doesn’t sound very appealing, but whose users are often obsessive about it. An internet milestone that no one can really define.

Does it have a legitimate business use?

This is the question that I’ve been turning around in my head. There are a few places where twitter has already had a sizable impact at the business world. In tech and design circles, it’s become an inseparable part of the conference/trade show experience. Having a dedicated backchannel is incredibly useful, and makes networking a snap.

Further, I’ve seen some stories of people using twitter as a successful marketing tool. (Here’s a good rundown of one example.) It’s a way to directly interact with potential consumers, and join the conversation. If twitter does nothing else, that’s valuable in itself.

Still, though, I can’t help but feel like twitter is still mostly untapped potential for business users. In terms of marketing, communication, promotion and brand, twitter offers something that no other social networking app has been able to before.

Twitter versus Facebook

Brief digression time: A lot of markets are focused on Facebook right now. And Facebook is a huge resource, especially considering its market penetration. But I’d argue that twitter is far more potential-laden. The differences between twitter and facebook are pronounced, especially when it comes to features. (Facebook has a lot of features; twitter has none). But the important differences may seem minor: Facebook is a closed system, twitter is open. Facebook is still very passive (You don’t need to contribute a lot to enjoy it), twitter is active, and requires you to be outspoken. Facebook users are generally either netural or wary of the service, twitter users are passionate.

Small differences, but incredibly important.

What to do with twitter in your business today

If I could tell you exactly how to use twitter as a business tool right now, I’d be in an incredible position. I could make tons of money if I had those answers. But I don’t, unfortunately. The exciting thing about twitter is that it’s all still kind of uncharted territory for business.

I can tell you what NOT to do, though, if you want to experiment with twitter. First, DON’T create an account that is just a feed for your blog. (The only case where it’s okay to do this is if you’re very clear that this is all your twitter feed is. You probably need to have an enormously popular blog to do this.) DON’T go out and follow 1,000 top users you don’t have an interest in, then get mad when they don’t follow you in return. DON’T send messages from the guise of some disembodied ‘company’ — be a real person. And, finally, DON’T expect success overnight.

The last one is key. The thing about twitter is that it’s virtually no risk. It costs nothing to join. It’s very easy to use with no learning curve. And, unlike a blog, you really can’t spend a whole day working on a post. Just dive in. And have fun.

Photo by Carrot Creative. Licensed Under Creative Commons.

The other big reason is that, with the time I do spend in front of my Macbook, I’d rather be reading insightful posts than trying to craft my own. Reading, I’d say, is about 95% of the reason I use the internet.

Yes, Viriginia, I do enjoy reading on the internet

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about. It’s something I’ve been seeing again and again from so-called ‘business leaders’ (who like to talk about ‘integrated verticals’ which, I think, breaks the record for two words who, together, mean absolutely nothing at all) who fancy themselves exports on the web. They claim that people do not read on the internet.

Not to single anybody out, since I came across this quote as the result of a random search, but take this article from masternewmedia.org titled Online Reading Habits: How much content do web audiences read?:

Though hard to believe for most, a recent research study shows that “on average, users will have time to read 28% of the words if they devote all of their time to reading. More realistically, users will read about 20% of the text on the average page.”

I don’t quibble with the result of the research, but what I do quibble with is the conclusion that’s often reached as a result. It’s the Pro Blogger mantra, calling ‘wordiness’ a sign, and recommending lite content, full of easy-to-digest lists and giant pictures. In essence, it’s calling for an almost-illiterate web.

I’m not an elitist. I like lists. I like pictures. I skim articles when I come across them. But I also, and I am going to bold this, like to read on the internet. I like reading long, interesting articles. I like encountering so-called “walls of text” when I know it’s subject matter written by a talented writer. Never have I encountered a post by Gruber or 37signals and thought “Damn, I wish this content was presented in the form of a Top-10 list.

I like to read on the internet. I like to read paragraphs on the internet. Maybe I’m not a large audience, or even a common audience, but I am an audience, and I hope that the talented writers out there, drowning in a sea of advice calling for short, easily-digestible, content-free writing on the internet, are aware that readers like me exist.

Postscript: What makes a good blog?

Man-about-town Merlin Mann has a post titled What makes a good blog?. It’s really good. The best bit:

Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.

Exactly.

As we move through new generations, blogging is going to become a very common tactic for businesses. It works better than the traditional brochure-style website, because a blog creates a strong connection with the reader. It’s more like having a conversation than viewing a commercial. It gives your business personality. And personality on a corporate level is more important than ever. (Look at Apple versus Dell, as an example.)

But if we let blogs descend into a swamp of nothing but links, lists and funny pictures, we’re never going to get anywhere meaningful. To be honest, I’m a little concerned that maybe we’ve already passed that point of no return. But, hell, all I can really think to do that might help is say, proudly and over and over again, that I like to read on the internet.

Photo by rosefirering. Licensed under Creative Commons

At my old job, I had my own office and there was zero IT oversight. My new job has me in a cubicle–at least my screen isn’t facing outwards, but I still have little warning when someone will walk up to me (but at least I’m fast with Alt-Tab). I made friends with the IT guys, who basically said, “Don’t give us a reason to check your browser activity, and we won’t do it. We have better things to do.” So for the time being, looks like things are safe.

There’s also discussion in the thread about writing a browser plug-in that will insert random “business-looking” graphs and buzzwords into internet pages to make everything look work-related.

I still struggle to understand why this seemingly never-ending game of cat-and-mouse is worth it.

The complaints against multitasking are the usual; you’re not as focused as you could be if you were just doing one thing at once, switching focus repeatedly actually makes you less productive as each time your brain takes a few moments to reprioritize tasks and so on.

I’m the first to admit that there’s a lot be said for shutting down everything else and focusing on a single task when you just need to power through and get something done, but these days talk of ‘multitasking’ seems to take the form of huffy managers cruising through the office, looking over shoulders and trying to catch a glimpse of someone looking at something “non-work-related”.

This, quite frankly, is a lame thing to do.

Gitlin again:

Employers seek ever-greater productivity from their workers, which means getting more work from them for the same amount of pay. Faced with that situation, it’s hardly surprising the cube-dweller responds by spending 15 minutes an hour looking at LOLCATs. Besides, I’m just old enough to remember the days before you used to be able to multitask; people used to sit at their desks reading the newspaper instead.

Technology has definitely exasperated this issue. It seems entirely acceptable for an employee to spend 10 minutes chatting with co-workers about the movie they saw on the weekend or 5 minutes on a personal phone call, but apparently just a glimpse at Facebook is an instant productivity killer. The message, I guess — and this is coming from those generally clueless about everything online — is that you can’t be working if you’re also on some website.

The real issue I have with this is one of trust. By constantly monitoring your employees’ screens, by installing filters and blocks, by blanket policies forbidding access at work, you’re essentially saying to your employees that you can’t trust them. “Why would you do this stupid work I’ve assigned you when you have fun internet things to look at?”

Could spending a lot of time on Facebook at work cause an employee to miss deadlines or produce sub-quality work? Absolutely. And those employees should face hell because of that. But you’re always smarter to criticize and (if necessary) discipline based on outputs, not process. The process is entirely subjective and unique to each person, whereas the outputs can be objective.

If the work is getting done, does it really matter if the worker is ‘multitasking’ all day, bouncing between windows and tasks like — as Gitlin puts it — a crack-smoking housefly?

Technology has led to a diversification of work styles.¹ There is no ‘right’ way to get things done in the computer age. Trying to establish one-size-fits-all processes, policies or rules — even for something as seemingly frivolous as ‘banning Facebook’ — is a losing battle.

Thanks to Ari Najarian for pointing me to the article.

Photo by Vedlia. Licensed under Creative Commons

1. I’m thinking of things like keyboard users vs. mouse; command line versus GUI; maximized versus juggled windows; open source versus Microsoft, etc etc.

Listening this time, though, I was struck with something that’s actually been rolling around in my head for a while. Whenever anybody talks about Generation Y these days, they mention technology.¹ According to conventional wisdom, Generation Y loves technology. We love video games and cell phones and the internet and every gizmo, gadget or doowhacky under the sun. It is undoubtedly a very very ironclad part of our overall generational identity.

It’s not hard to find evidence. The Financial Post ran an article about the Ryerson Facebook incident (which I touched upon here) this week, and included a standard technology-is-everything piece in their explanation of Generation Y:

Confident, global -thinking and impatient, this generation of workers — approximately everyone born between 1982 and 1990 –does not know life without computers. It takes technology for granted, turning to e-mail, blogs and social-networking sites 24/7 to gather information and interact with colleagues and friends.

I’m not meaning to appear as contrary to this, because it totally does describe me. I’ve been a lifelong nerd, accessing the internet well before my teens and living a life largely based in three-letter acronyms for over a decade now (ICQ, IRC, AIM, WWW, FTP, HTML, CSS, JPG, BRB, LOL, ETC.) And the connectivity and virtual communication piece seems obvious: look at the explosion of popularity in any kind of online service that connects people with their friends.

But the paradox part of is that, for the last few years, I’ve spent a significant amount of time interviewing, hiring and working with other, younger members of Generation Y and throughout that time my questions to them about computers have yielded a fairly consistent statement:

“I’m not very good with computers”

This kills me, because it just seems so unbelievably wrong. We’re the COMPUTER GENERATION! How can you not be good with them? That’d be like a Gen Xer not being good at wearing flannel! Or a baby boomer not being great at complaining about everything! Or a traditionalist not being great at making babies!²

Plus, generally the same people making the claim that they’re not good with computers are the same people who spend their evening with seventeen instant messenger windows open while downloading tracks from Limewire and working on a term paper: “I’m not very good with computers, but often I use them for ten hours straight to do any number of tasks simultaneously.”

Trying to make sense of all of this

I’ve been trying to figure out why this disconnect exists, and I’ve come up with some potential explanations:

• Pure Semantics: Refer to the idea of a Digital Native and think about cars for a second. I would never describe myself as “good with cars” but that has absolutely nothing to do with my ability actually operate a vehicle. I’ve got no real idea where the fuel lines are or even how to change a tire but I still do pretty good at driving to work a few times a week.
  

  Similarly, I think a lot of Gen Yers see themselves as “not good with computers” because they don’t know how to install RAM or put in a hard drive, but that doesn’t mean they’re not adept at using software and performing creative/administrative/organizational tasks on a computer.

  As so-called “digital natives”, we tend to speak and think differently about computers — more compartmentalized, specific to software, hardware and even individual programs — but Gen Y needs to be aware that, by and large, this isn’t how the older generations (read: the ones hiring you) think.

• Confidence: Gen Y lacks a lot of confidence when it comes to some of their skills, particularly their computer skills. Again, if you think about it in terms of being a digital native, it’s easier to understand why this is.
  

  If you asked a native English speaker if they were “good at English” they’d likely reply that they weren’t, especially if they struggled with Shakespeare and hated James Joyce. On the flip side, though, if you asked a native English speaker if they were “good at Spanish”, they might answer in the affirmative even if all they know is how to ask where the bathroom is or how to get back to the cruise ship.

  One of the more difficult things you need to do when selling yourself to a potential employer is frame your skills in relation to their expectations, not yours. This goes beyond computers, but it is perhaps most important within the technology sphere. Just because you don’t feel like an expert at Photoshop, for example, because you don’t know how to work with Lab colours and multi-layer documents, doesn’t mean your potential employer won’t see you as “Photoshop expert” because you know how to do rudimentary tasks. It’s all context.

• Education: This is a big one — almost too big to go into here — but to sum it up: everything they currently teach about computers and the internet in high schools is terrible and does more harm than good. The track in high schools has been, until very recently, to separate “computers” into its own once (or maybe twice) a week ghetto, where you learn how to type and not much else.
  

  As a result, I think a lot of people come to understand “computer skills” as separate from math skills, writing skills, artistic skills, communication skills, business skills, etc. When, in reality, a computer should be thought of has nothing more than a tool through which you exercise and develop these primary skills.

  As a first step toward providing real, valuable and much-needed education that fits into the ‘digital native’ sphere, schools NEED to start blending computer-use into every class, in a way that makes sense and isn’t just window dressing. (Letting the kids who finish their math problems first play on the computer is not, for example, a good way to handle this.)

But, then, I don’t know

I think there’s even more to this that I fully understand at this point, so I pose the questions back to the readers: have you ever claimed that you’re “not good with computers.” Why? How do you justify that to yourself? And is Generation Y’s much ballyhooed technological expertise a myth?

Photo by practicalowl. Licensed under Creative Commons

1. In fact, I recently attended a session where a presenter summed Generation Y up thusly: Love technology, difficult to manage. Which, you know, I won’t dispute, but there’s a little more to it than that.
2. I’m kidding. Don’t get mad.

Toronto Police Welcome Generation Y

From Toronto Police Services Chair Dr. Alok Mukherjee:

So – what do “Yers” want?
An interesting job with many changes and challenges
Work-life balance
Superior training
Access to cutting-edge technology

Where can they find all that? The Toronto Police Service.

Generation Y demands Instant Messaging at Work

From Computer Business Review:

77% of the Generation Y respondents believed that a webcam and access to instant messaging in the office (73%) would help them offer clients and suppliers a faster and more personal response.

Make the workplace fun to retain Gen Y

From The Nashville Business Journal:

Employers who recognize Gen X and Y’s needs will retain them longer and get more and better work from them. Create a “fun” work environment. Employers who embrace a fun, rather than conventional company culture create a higher rate of job satisfaction with younger employees.

What does fun mean? It means converting the breakroom to a game room with video games. It means periodically bringing in a massage therapist for chair massages, an ice cream cart for sundaes or a rolling barista for onsite lattes.

Job Hopping an Option for Gen Y

From Penelope Trunk in the Boston Globe:

So there’s lots of chatter about how people can recession-proof their careers. But what should young people do, when their golden demographics make them recession proof already? Job hop, of course.

The best thing you can do early in your career is move around a lot so you can figure out what you’re good at and what you like. If you compare people who job hop with people who don’t, people who job hop build their network faster, build their skill set faster, and are more engaged in their work.

If you haven’t noticed already, all mediums are starting to shift towards the internet. People are actually spending more time on the internet than watching TV. (I know I do) The internet is too great a location for advertisers to ignore. I am inclined to believe that print media will suffer a lot in the coming years. Who needs a newspaper when you can go on to CNN.com? Perezhilton.com has all of the tabloid lovers. Anything you can find on the newstands, you can probably find on a blog or a website.

This is pretty much impossible to dispute. Circulation on magazines is way down and book sales have been mostly flat. I guess it makes sense, then, that the question everyone is asking is this: is print dead?

The Difference Between Death and Irrelevance

Erin and I have had lots of conversation about this topic (we both tend to side with the “yes, dying or dead” camp, for what it’s worth) but lately I’ve been thinking about the idea of print as an industry in a whole new light. The battle lines have been drawn as print-versus-technology but that’s not really apt, when you get right down to it. Because consumers aren’t buying the material — the paper, the ink, the glass, the microchips, the whatever — they’re buying the stories.

Products should be defined based on why the user buys or needs them, not based on the physical materials that make up the product. An example: We don’t (or, more accurately, didn’t) buy audio CDs because we liked the shiny colourful back surface or the way it spun in the player. We bought audio CDs because we wanted to hear music.

Painting the battle as print-versus-technology is akin to vinyl-versus-CD or, hell, buying coke in a plastic bottle versus a glass bottle. In either case, the product is the same. Schultz points that out perfectly in his post: the stuff on the internet is the same product as the stuff on the newsstand (or on TV).

No funeral march for ink and paper

The technology isn’t there yet, so we’re still a ways away from the true shift from print to purely tech-based content. But it’s looming, and anyone who claims otherwise is probably burying their head in the sand. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Like with any shift, the only people who will be hurt or left behind by the shift are those who refuse to see it coming.

The market still wants the product — they want news and gossip, comedy and drama, fiction and non-fiction, art and pornography — but now it will be beamed to them, through devices that sit on a desk or fit in a hand (some of these devices might look just like paper). And, yes, this draws all sorts of questions about monetizing and content customization and the dynamics of publishing-as-business but the bottom line is simply this: people still want what publishers are selling. You’ll be okay.

What Gen Y should do

One of the most changed dynamics will be the ‘opening up’ of the content creation process. Whereas in the past writing went through a sort of ‘funnel’ through editors, publishers and printers before making it to the public, we’re at a place now where any business can make themselves visible instantly. For most organizations, then, a good, solid, web-savvy writer is going to be nothing short of a weapon. Remember that as you build your skills for your career.

Photo by oskay. Licensed under Creative Commons

Generation Y has, by and large, earned their digital stripes. We’re technology savvy and, coincidentally, we’re also environmentally conscious. Add those two together and you get a generation of employees that might finally push to make the paperless office a reality.

That said, my two years of experience in the workplace have shown me that there are still a number of barriers to the paperless office that have absolutely nothing to do with the readiness of the technology. Unfortunately — or, I guess, fortunately, if you’re one of those people who loves their printer — paper is pretty culturally and politically ingrained into office life.

Here’s a list of a just a few of barriers I’ve noticed standing in the way of a paperless utopia.

1. Signatures

The Problem: Let’s start with the obvious one: people need to sign things. And there is no real way — accessible to your average office — to sign a document without printing it out first.

On one hand, I absolutely understand why this is a barrier. The signature is really all we have, in this digital age, to act as a marker indicating that, yes, this came from me. And a scanned-in signature obviously isn’t worth as much, given how easy it would be to cut and paste a signature from one file to another.

On the other hand, though, my to-hell-with-history side is asking why we still put such an emphasis on signatures as any kind of legal indicator of anything. Especially given that a lot of signatures are now faxed through on contracts or whatever. Do you know how easy it would be to fake a faked signature? The only prerequisite is knowing basic arts and crafts. You need scissors and a glue stick. And even with in-person signatures, it’s not as if they’re above reproach in terms of forgery or whatever. Going digital and doing away with old-fashioned signatures might actually INCREASE security, assuming we use encryption or PGP or similar.

How we get around it: Barring doing away with the signature altogether (admittedly unlikely), I’m thinking touch screen technology might actually help with this one. Being able to ‘sign’ your screen with a stylus, like you do to accept a Fed Ex package or (at some retailers) sign your credit card receipt, is likely just as good as signing a piece of paper.

2. On-screen proof reading and editing modes

The Problem: One of the big reasons people still print out documents is so that they can take a red pen to them. And why not? This is how we’re taught to edit other people’s work. Even if you’ve never taken a copy editing course in your life, you’ve likely been passively trained to edit on paper. It’s how all your teachers did it, after all.

How to get around it: Let’s start in the schools by training, and then encouraging (and, if necessary, forcing), teachers to edit student assignments on screen. The technology is already there: Microsoft Word’s ‘Track Changes’ mode is probably one of the most powerful features of the program. And, if that’s too complicated, just highlighting in red is a perfectly fine substitute.

3. Digital back-ups

The Problem:Despite using it every day, the older generation still doesn’t have much in the way of trust for technology. You can see it in every middle-aged person making off-hand comments about how things used to be when the e-mail server goes down for two minutes in the morning.

And they’re not without justification. A lot of companies did not have a smooth transition when it came time to adopt computers and the internet into day-to-day procedures. Most egregiously, many of them had lacklustre or sometimes non-existent back-up solutions, leading — on occasion — to massive data loss, either due to virus or hardware failure. Or, as I’ve had it described to me once or twice, because of gremlins.

Because of this, a lot of people see a hard copy of something as more tangible: once they’ve printed it out, they can’t lose it. It won’t just disappear.

How to get around it: Back-ups Back-ups Back-ups. Apple’s Time Machine is a step in the right direction, as an effortless, user-friendly way of backing up files. And, while network-level back-up systems are obviously a necessity, there’s something to be said to doing user-level back-ups as well — letting people see how their own files are backed up, and where they’ll be if something were to happen to their computer. Once they have that level of calm, hopefully they’ll be less likely to print everything for posterity’s sake.

4. Battery Life

The Problem: Having everyone use laptops or other portable devices as a meeting might sound like a good idea, but it can quickly fall apart when everyone is looking for an outlet 20 minutes in. Ideally, it’d be great to just have everyone reference the agenda file in a network folder, avoiding having to put ‘packages’ together that often total dozens of pages, but that plan is only workable if everyone has a screen that works.

How to get around it: I think the holy grail of battery life for laptops is somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten to 12 hours. Once people can pull their computer out at work in the morning and not worry about charging it all day, the on-the-go dream will truly start to take hold. Given that battery technology is not advancing as fast it should this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Unfortunately, the meeting room might be the last place to go paperless.

5. “I can’t read on a screen”

The problem: Most people nowadays are comfortable using a computer for active tasks like typing an e-mail or an essay, but when it comes to a passive task like reading, they maintain that they need paper.

For anyone touting paperless as the way to go, “I can’t read on a screen” is going to be a familiar rebuttal. There are, for better or worse, a group of people who just find the idea of reading a long document on a computer screen to be incredibly unpleasant. And so they go to their printer.

How to get around it: Some of this is purely just people being stubborn: it’s not how they’re used to reading things, so they don’t like it. But I think, if you dig deep, a lot of the reluctance people have about reading on-screen comes from the screen they’ll be doing their reading on. How many of these people are using low-bit LCDs at some weird resolution? Worse, how many of them are using ancient CRTs with terrible refresh rates?

Of course reading on screen will suck if you don’t have a screen suited to your eyes. For employers seeking a paperless workplace, giving employees high-quality monitors that are easy on the eyes is undoubtedly the first step. Cheaping out on computer screens is a surefire way to ensure that your employees — particularly your older employees, as their eyesight starts to go — will be running to the printer every opportunity they get.

And so

There are undoubtedly more. Coming into the workplace, I was all abuzz about how I was going to make the workplace paperless. Having experienced it now for a few years, I can see how hard it truly will be to separate paper out of the workplace equation. Even if you don’t print anything, someone is bound to print things for you.

Any tips for reaching paperless status? Let me know.

Photo by thatts. Licensed under Creative Commons

There are very few ties that keep us in one place or in one job. The internet allows us the ability to be instant experts on any given topic – learn about a topic one day, spend the next researching it, teach it the third. With the right resources and determination it is a very easy process. Sure, we won’t be experienced experts but we’ll know what the tools are, what the problems look like and some general idea of how to mix the two. Creativity will fill in the gaps.

I love this quote. I think a lot of people will quibble with it, arguing that the internet isn’t a deep enough platform for real leaning. And, sure, it’s rare that someone will actually become an expert on a topic after honing their google fu for a day or two.

But that’s really the point: how useful are experts, really? Once we get away from the more traditional varieties of work, specialization and expertise loses its value. In its place, adaptability becomes paramount.

Someone who is exceptionally good at, say, Microsoft Visio isn’t really going to be of much use 99% of the time, but someone who can learn the basics the morning before your board of directors needs an extensive org chart? That employee is golden.

Something to think about.

Some thoughts:

• I’d love to see some historical data. It’d be neat to see Facebook’s growth versus myspace in English-speaking countries
• Why has Facebook been so so slow to launch international (non-English) versions of the platform? It’s only now that they’re getting going on that. It seems to me that the time spent developing the application system would have been better spent shoring up mindshare in big markets like India and Latin America.
• Friendster? REALLY, Asian Pacific?

This stuff may seem trivial now, but consider the future of business as a peer to peer network of contacts and resources. Your chosen platform may end up meaning more than you think.