There is a new game in town and it is called Twitter lists

As I write this post Twitter is rolling out lists.  If you are not yet familiar with twitter lists they are basically a way to categorize people into logical groups based on your own perceptions and the way you use Twitter.  A list can be private or public and, if public, others can see them and can add users to their own lists directly from them.  This seems like pretty simple and basic functionality, but I tell you it will create a fundamental change in the functionality of twitter and the value that users will get from it.

Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) has written an excellent post that outlines all of the features of lists and makes some conclusions about them.  Robert is a power user and I think some of his conclusions are biased by his particular use case scenario,  but in general Robert is spot on in saying “(twitter lists are) brilliant because it instantly made Twitter much more usable and interesting again”

While this is true, I think it will have some other interesting repercussions:

Ease of Adoption

Lists are curated by individuals.  Each member of a list has been hand selected by the list creator for the value they contribute.  Services like Listorious that make finding lists easier have already launched.  One reason that it takes a while “to get” Twitter is that it takes time find people who bring value to your Twitter experience and, in turn, cultivate a Twitter community.  Lists destroy this barrier to entry; from day one you can easily find a list or multiple lists of people with similar interests or experts in a field.  If you your interested in the stock market you can follow @stocktwit’s suggested list, if you like to cook follow @ZagetBuzz’s celebrity chefs list.  Immediately the content you see will be demonstrative of the greater value that you will gain form twitter as you begin to interact and cultivate your own twitter community.

Lists make the utility of twitter much greater for the casual user who can identify a few highly curated lists and simply follow the list stream rather than the people.  Once Tweetdeck, Seesmic and others Twitter clients integrate lists into their apps you will likely be able to view individual lists as columns in the application.  In this scenario it makes sense that “follower” growth rates will decline. After all why should I curate a list of “Influential in Tech” when Robert Scoble has done it for me; or “Thought Leaders” when Josh Weinberger has done it for me!

Taking lists and Making Them Your Own

Eventually people will realize that they need to cultivate their own lists.  This could be done by starting from scratch or starting from an existing list created by someone else.  One reason to make lists your own is that if you follow and rely on someone else’s list, and the creator deletes it – It’s gone!  Or if they delete or add someone, then you are subject the change.

It’s very likely that Twitter clients will soon make it easy to copy other peoples lists and will make it possible for you to convert your existing groups that you created in their native applications into twitter lists and vice versa.  In a recent conversation with Loic LeMeur (@loic) CEO of Seesmic, told me that they already have the API that enables them to incorporate lists into their client and web application, and Iain Doddsworth (@iaindoddsworth) of Tweetdeck, in response to my tweet “Wishing I could take Tweetdeck columns and convert them to Twitterlists with one click”, hinted to the same when he responded “watch this space”.   Already Dabr and TalkinPuffin have integrated lists into their Twitter clients. Until this is done effectively, it is really very difficult to use list and get value from them, unless you have a very specific purpose and the list is topically on point for your purpose.

Once you can see lists in columns in these clients the efficiency and productivity will be greatly increased, especially if you are able to change the constituents of the group directly from within the client.  True to Twitters nature they implemented a core feature and have left it to 3rd party developers to innovate.  This is a huge opportunity for Twitter clients and the Twitter client that best implements lists will be deeply loved.

Power and Influence

So what does this really mean to social structures within Twitter?

The act of creating lists may result in a dual class of Twitizen – Those who are on lists of influential people and those who are not.  To some extent lists may freeze the status quo of power structures within Twitter as they exist today, giving those with influence even more, while making it much harder for new users to be discovered and may hinder engagement by the long tale of users.

Lists are quickly becoming unwieldy and it takes a lot of effort to create and curate a list.  Anyone can create a list, but it is likely that the lists created by already influential people will be those lists most quickly adopted.  These widely followed lists will either be followed directly or used as the core to create one’s own list.  Either way, those who are on these lists will gain additional reach (one basic measurement of influence), while those who have not made the cut will have a difficult time being heard and their value will be lost in the background.

Everyone can see how many lists a person is on and people’s perception of each other will naturally be influenced by the quantity of lists that someone is on; this will become a default measure of their value.  Listorious is already ranking lists by number of followers.  This further amplifies the perception that quantity of followers a list has represents quality of the list itself.  This perception makes it more likely that the individual members of the list will be followed and amplifies their reach and influence.

The number of followers someone has, and the number of lists one is on, are both poor measures of influence for the simple reason that influence resides in context to presumed expertise – their domain of influence.  There are domains of influence in which a person could be extremely influential and other domains of influence where they may have very little influence at all.  Let’s take Barack Obama, he would have a huge influence if he were to say that there is a raised security threat and that Americans should not fly, but comparatively little influence if he were to say that kids should be careful of what they post on Facebook.  He is influential in the domain of national security and not so much in the domain of social matters of children.

In a perfect world, lists are a much better measure of influence than the number of followers that someone has, but just like follower counts have been gamed, so will lists.  In the near future you will see automated systems for reciprocal listing.  Also people will reciprocate as a social courtesy.

Still many people will create great lists, and these great lists will make it easier for people to gain value from their Twitter experience.  The problem is that many people will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of lists and will likely use the number of people who follow a given list as the measure of the quality of the list itself, where it is more accurately a measure of the popularity and/or influence of the list creator, or the result of first mover advantage.  This means that many great lists will go largely unnoticed.

Regardless of their imperfections, Twitter lists are a significant step forward.  While they are an imperfect measure of influence, in general they could be a great indicator for you to evaluate how and to whom you add value.  This is especially true if you have not yet created lists of your own, so the lists you are on are free from the influence of reciprocal listing.

My hope is that Twitter Lists are used by most people as a mechanism to discover new people to follow and they actively use the feature to create at least some of their own lists from scratch.  This would certainly make twitter more effective for many,  but I suspect that  many casual users will simply follow existing lists and only a serious few will take the time an effort to cultivate their own, in this scenario power differentials expand.

To be perfectly clear, I think list are great despite their imperfections and am deeply honored and humbled by all those who have put me on their lists, and I am glad that I have been able to add value.

I would love to hear your thoughts and impressions of lists and encourage your comments, or just tweet me @andrewmueller if you’d like to discuss it.

For some suggested etiquette and strategies for using lists you might want to check out Liz Pullens Twitter list 101 post

Update: 11/1/09 According to Techcrunch, Twitter Client Seesmic become the first major Twitter client to integrate lists, Tweetdeck will soon follow. You can find out more about this here.

In my last blog post I discussed the significance of Ashton Kutcher beating CNN in a race to be the first account to amass 1 million Twitter followers.  After this accomplishment, Ashton went on Larry King Live and proclaimed “We now live in an age in media that a single voice can have as much power and relevance on the Web, that is, as an entire media network.” This insinuates the individual has transcended the traditional power dynamics imposed by the structure of corporate media.  

While this may be partly true, we must remember that Ashton Kutcher is a celebrity and celebrities are brands and to understand this whole ordeal we must define brand.  I like Marty Neumeier’s definition of brand, “the customers gut feeling about a product, service or company.  Celebrities are both a product and a company.  Ashton used twitter as a platform for brand management, as he should, and did so very effectively.  Until now corporate media controlled almost all influence of a celebrities brand; Ashton demonstrated that he can take matters of branding into his own hands. This is great but at the same time he may have a disproportionate amount of influence on social media channels similar to the influence differential in corporate media.

As for the charity of donating 10,000 mosquito nets and bringing awareness to the horrors of Malaria, Bravo, I cannot commend him more!  It was a beautiful thing to do and a highly effective move for his brand.  But that is said and done; now there are more issues to raise, things to talk about, and inequities to understand.

My premise was that while this event signifies a milestone of relevance for social media, it simultaneously signifies the imbalance of power inherent within.  With that I suggested an experiment to see how much influence that I could exert by attempting to activate my twitter followers and coordinate the action.  I designated Monday April 20^th 2009 as Unfollow Ashton Kutcher Day, wrote a blog about it, and used social media to get the word out.

Unfollow Ashton Kutcher day was not about Ashton Kutcher, it was an attempt to understand the power imbalances inherent to Social Media.  Honestly, I think that if Ashton Kutcher were to read this blog he would agree.  That said, I am glad that he did not or at least did not make any mention of it as it would have skewed the results of this experiment

While we failed to reach the goal of reducing Ashton Kutchers follower numbers back below 1 million, we succeeded in bringing attention to, and generating conversations about the issue of power imbalances inherent to social media

 Ashton Kutcher had net gain of more than 50,000 followers. The Oprah effect and net momentum that Ashton built dwarfed the amount of media attention that I was able to generate through my 1200 followers. 

So this is how it all went down:

·         I wrote a blog talking about what 1million followers signifies both between corporate media and social media and suggested a test to mass unfollow Ashton Kutcher and posted that blog on Friday late afternoon.

·         I created a hashtag #ufapluskday and started tweeting about Unfollow Ashton Kutcher Day and linking to the blog post.

·         I sent Twitter Direct Messages to people who I thought would be interested in helping.

·         I sent @replies to people on twitter that were not following me but I wanted to get involved or inform of the idea and my blog.

·         I commented on others related blog posts and left links back to my blog.

·         I submitted the post to Digg.

·         I engaged with those who retweeted the post thanked them and built alliances.

·         I posted all comments made to my blog Pro and Con and answered nearly all.

Some results:

·         More than 1400 people viewed my blog between Friday night and Monday evening at midnight (about 80 hours). Keep in mind that was posted to a brand new blog with zero existing traffic.  

·         According to Retweetsist, the tweets were retweeted 61 times.

·         The blog post was Stumbled.

·         Allies were created and Evangelists appeared that took it upon themselves to promote the issue.

·         I had 20+ comments to the blog  People truly engaged with the issue and did not just pat me on the back for making the post. These comments were both pro and con, and I answered many.

·         Some of my tweets were retweeted and then those people who retweeted were retweeted.  In some cases my original tweet was shortened and other times my name was mentioned in another person’s tweet,  but in the process of the retweeting cycles, the other person’s name was left off and mine remained attach to their tweet.  This was interesting as the link to my blog was attached and my name attributed but the message was off target and I was uncomfortable having a this message being attributed to me.

Some Observations:

·         The more followers a person had, the more they seemed to resist helping with the effort.  In fact, it was clear that some folks understood and approved of the action as a test, but were reluctant to be vocal.  They had personal brands (images) to manage and did not want to take sides as they were unsure how their followers to react.  When I look at many folks with lots of followers I notice one thing in common, they have distinct personalities, actively engage with their audiences, but rarely tweet about issues that may be controversial.  This is unfortunate as taking a position is demonstrative of authenticity.  It shows who you are and what you believe in.  A lot of folks build huge followings by being benign while others build more targeted group of followers by taking positions and openly communicating them.

Some Conclusions

·         So Ashton you are right about social media — the little guy does have a voice, no matter how many followers they may have.  And this voice has the potential to engage and influence others to take action.  It is just that the voices of a “popular few” have much greater reach. 

·     Imagine what would have occurred if Ashton Kutcher were to take the same steps that I took above to promote an issue… How many blog hits, retweets, diggs, stumbles and ultimate effect would he have.  I suspect he would have crushed my achievements and that is illustrative of the power imbalance inherent to social media.  A “popular few” have a much greater potential to influence the community at large than the average member of the community. 

·         The fact that we were unsuccessful does not mean that an individual with relatively little influence cannot generate a social media groundswell that could have viral impact on a mass scale but rather that this attempt did not succeed in achieving its stated goal.  It is much harder to prove something impossible than something is possible. 

·         I must confess here that this was an imperfect experiment but nonetheless I believe we succeeded in demonstrating both the amazing democratizing effect of social media, as well as, its inherent power imbalances. 

I encourage your comments on this blog or tweet me at http://twitter.com/andrewmueller

As pointed out so eloquently in Brian Solis’ blog post,  perhaps it is true that Ashton Kutcher @aplusk reaching 1 million followers signifies a change in the power distribution between corporate media channels and individuals.  

This said, it may be that the only individuals who can transcend the power and influence of corporate media are celebrities.  Andrew Keen says, in this video interview with Tech Crunch, that a social media as a platform will create great imbalances of influence.   Everyone can join the conversation but a “popular” few will have a disproportionate amount of power.

So as this event signifies a milestone of relevance for social media, it simultaneously signifies the imbalance of power inherent within.  

The challenge for “us” as as a social media tribe is to monitor those with great social media power and let them know whether or not we are pleased or displeased with how they are using their power.  With Twitter we “vote” by choosing to follow.  The beauty of this is that our vote can be taken away or recast at anytime.  Collectively, we can group together to exert our influence.  

I propose a test of our power:   For a single day we chose to unfollow Ashton Kutcher.  The next day everyone can follow back, but for that one day we say to Ashton, and others with disproportionate influence, that they only have influence because we choose to put our trust in them to use their influence responsibly.

So Monday 4/20/2009 is Unfollow Ashton Kutcher Day #ufapluskday – you can exert your power and unfollow Ashton here

Our Goal:  Bring Ashton’s follower count down below 1 million by the end of day on Monday.

Feel free to  follow Ashton back on Tuesday, but wait until Monday to Unfollow!

For the record, I have nothing against Ashton!   I think his efforts are mostly noble and good, regardless of the fact that this is a brilliant publicity move on his behalf.  In fact, If Ashton were to pledge another 10,000 mosquito nets to be the first to reach 2,000,000 followers, I would work to help him achieve that.  This is not about Ashton Kutcher, this is to test to see if the inherent power imbalances between a “popular” few and the masses make twitter just another media channel or something much greater.  

Success in this effort would be good for everyone, including Ashton.  He seems to believe in the relevance of social media and  this is an effort to demonstrate the relevance of social media.  Ashton will get his true followers back very quickly, and people would see how social media can be used by people with relatively little power, to influence the powerful.

For Twitter, if effective, it would show that Twitter narrows the power imbalance between those with popularity and those without and thus is truly a game changing platform. 

Update Sat April 18:  It appears that Twitter has is still preventing people from unfollowing @aplusk.  It would be a shame if this was still in effect Monday as it would render this experiment invalid.