From #msure to Google+

• There is a difference in perception between what is commercial spam and what is relevant to a community of interest.

• There is a difference in perception between the good that a brand can do for a community, what a person can do for a community, and how both can do harm.

• Competition amongst branded accounts is a root cause of some persistent commercial spam.

There is a difference between relevant commercial messaging, persistent repetition commercial messaging (spam), and community contribution. Reasonable people can disagree about what constitutes persistence, and, if content milling and syndication really constitutes link-spam. Newcomers to analytics will indeed find great utility from content-mill posts. Established professionals derive less utility. What’s spam and what isn’t depends on the frequency of the message and the relevancy of the message. That depends on the audience attributes and the contributor behavior. Perceptions vary.

Reasonable people can also disagree if brands are doing good or doing harm to the #measure community. The statement that #measure is largely defined by brands themselves is also debatable. Most users can label brands that have done tremendous good with thoughtful, respectful, high quality original content that is posted at very low frequencies. Tremendous disagreement would ensue if we listed brands that have done tremendous damage with high frequency, low quality posts. Perceptions vary.

Competition amongst certain brands is driving the frequencies.

There’s no win in writing about it here, and, it is extremely clear that this is the minority point of view.

A small audience segmented onto #msure. It drew support, respectful concern (thank you John) and real hostility. Some actually changed their social strategy to hammer the hashtag with persistent commercial messaging. A few other brands posted valuable updates a extremely low frequencies. They were great because they are great and awesome because they listened.

The hashtag also suffered from the legacy Twitter functionality of RT classic. The repetition of RT’s, while helping spread a message, is persistent repetition, and as such, it jams a channel.

From Twitter to Google+

Twitter is not the medium to have value exchanges or to generally have a community. It’s great for barking. It’s a horrible environment to converse.

There are major challenges in analytics, and I’m looking forward to collaborating with you on how to solve them over at Google+.

Onward.

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I’m Christopher Berry.
I write at christopherberry.ca