Please read this article first: “Not Happy New Year”.

In that article I wrote in 2006, I did an experiment. To prove that “I can never over-state the importance of the display name of an Instant Messenger (IM) in the current age”, I kept my MSN Messenger displayed name unchanged for half year (1/1/2006 to 6/30/2006) as “Jian Shuo Wang – Happy New Year”, and changed it to “Jian Shuo Wang – Not Happy New Year” for another half year (7/1/2006 – 12/31/2006).

At that time, I got many message to urge me to change my display name, and I got some sense of how people react to a person who use MSN Messenger often but doesn’t change the display name for one year!

That is my style – do an experiment, and do it in really long term.

Twitter’s Profile Photo

So you may have guessed the new experiment I conducted later. I used 3 years to complete this experiment. I kept the default Twitter profile photo for 3 years. My assumption was, Twitter will replace MSN Messenger as the key channel for people to connect with other, and twitter’s status will replace the display name of MSN Messenger to be the key way for people to express themselves. Now, it is about 1100 days of this experiment, and I am preparing to wrap up this experiment by the end of April. Here are my conclusions:

It is confirmed that Twitter plays a more important role, at least in my life, and in the lives of most my real life friends, than MSN Messenger. People care about my profile photo more than they cared my display name. Even compared with the year of 2006, the current queries are more (I know it is based of the big user name, since I had less than 150 friends on MSN Messenger, but about 800 followers, and following).

During my observation about @jianshuo mention on Twitter, I discovered that if you don’t have a profle photo on twitter, people will think:

• You SHOULD user your PHOTO, real face photo.
• You are incompetent to change the profile photo.
• You are technically challenged person.
• Surprised that it is possible for someone not to have a profile icon.
• An icon on twitter is just like pant in real world. They are shameful to see others don’t have icon.
• You are too shy (too ugly) to show your face to the world.

The message kept coming this way. Sorry that I ignored most of the message, because it is a social experiment itself.

Finally, when I am going to stop this experiment, I got back to the question behind it. A good product design is not only provide the functionality to allow people to change their profile photo, it designs a social environment that pushes everyone softly to update their profile photo, so everyone’s experience is better. Twitter is, maybe, a service with one of the highest photo completion rate, at least for its active users. I, myself, feel I am pretty stupid to run this experiment for as long as 3 years.

This post is in response to Robert‘s request to clarify my status update in Facebook. I said

just realized that I don’t really understand the social media yet.

Robert asked why. Let me share some indicators.

I never took Social media serious

I had a twitter account on February 14, 2007, and sent my first twitter message that day. But I didn’t really take it serious afterward. I dropped some tweets in the beginning and recently, but compared to 1195 blog entries I wrote since than, 869 messages are much fewer. Majority of them are notification of new blog entries. Obviously a blog entry is longer than 140 characters, and takes much more time to write.

The same happened with Facebook.com and Kaixin001.com, the two major SNS I still consider myself “using”.

No wonder that I don’t have too much in-depth knowledge about the rising of Social Media.

Social Network Services (SNS) vs Social Media

Let me clarify two concepts first. SNS is the websites everyone uses today – Facebook, twitter, or Kaixin001, or Renren… SNS is the service to help people to connected with their friends. People don’t use it as a “media”.

Social Media is a another concept. Just like most people use paper to write mail to their friends, some small amount of professional use paper to print newspaper. The previous paper is called tool, or carrier at most, the later is called “media”. Another example, not all blogs are media, at least not with that intention, but many blogs are built to be a media.

“Social” media is a new form of communication. They leverage the social interaction to spread out the message. Although it exists long before Internet even come into being – the Tipping Point described the roles of connector, maven, and salesman in the case of the American War of Independence.

So a group of people and company are researching how to leverage the social connection (especially in today’s SNS sites) to spread out the message.

How They Do Social Media

I talked with Isaac in Xindanwen the other day, and got a lot inspiration. Here is the step some companies do on their Social Media effort.

• They build their identity (a fan page, or an account) in all SNS site (call it as cloud of people). There is nothing new about it.
• They generate interesting contents and feed into accounts. They designed the message to flow from the account of one network to another. There is nothing new here either.
• They do research to find the most-well-connected people in each network (the Connector role in the Tipping Point book), and try to let the connector follow them. If that is hard, they check out who the Connectors follow, and make them (the Maven) follow their account. This is the key since you need to design the path for the message to spread.
• They track who re-tweeted, or re-posted it, or “liked” it, and fine tune the message to make it either more useful, or more interesting, with the hope that the message will be spread out by the Connectors. If an influential connector RTed the message, huge amount of people will notice it, and it is likely that they will RT again, and again, and then hit another big connector. The circle goes one.
• Finally, with the message spreading out so quickly, many people will start to follow the genuine source of the message, the account the company or person setup.

With time going by, with the help of connectors, there will be more and more people follow the original account, making it a powerful, sustainable channel for the company. That can be called a true media, or a social media!

That is Something New

When Google became big, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) becomes important, and now everyone knows link matters. Now, when SNS shows the trend to deliver more traffic, and more awareness than search engine, it is something that everyone in the industry should look carefully at. Obviously, I was not in this circle before.

P.S. I just broke my rule of only following people I know on Twitter. I just followed back all the 824 followers, and start to use Hootsuite.com as Twitter client. People warned: “You cannot follow that many people! That is huge distraction, and you cannot handle it”. Well. After I did it and check the timeline for a while, I realized, it is just like glance on the 800 people in the People’s Square. You may not see every individual, but the few individuals you happen to noticed tells you a lot of information about this city already. You don’t need to check every of the 800 people, or look at them 24 hour to get the impression that “it is hot, and people are wearing T-shirt”, or “the economy is bad, since most of them are not happy”…