Nearly any male college freshman will tell you that his mother's need to hear from him far exceeds his need to communicate back. These asymmetrical communication needs pose some interesting challenges and opportunities.
I believe that bloggers and individuals looking to expand their outreach through Social Networks face some of the same challenges. These individuals want to build a one-to-one "personal" relationship each and every reader, while building an audience to be massive and beyond the realm of personal. Politicians and celebrities face similar challenges.
CASN is a term describing tools for Computer Assisted Social Networking (or Computer Aided Social Networking). These are tools that help automate your Social Networking Communications. There are a variety of tools available that allow you to communicate more efficiently, basically addressing these three areas: Reaching new followers, building relationships, and measuring the results.
My previous blog posts document my foray into quickly building a network of followers. Much of my experimentation to date has been in the "reaching new followers" arena, and was primarily conducted using Python scripts (although it could easily be done manually as well). Unannounced "Follows" walk the fine line of Spam, and I've tried to provide content that demonstrates that I am not interested in spamming people. It was not difficult to get 300 followers in five days simply by targeting a group of people who might have mutual interests, and then following them. Hopefully my activities and documented results have been helpful and not annoying.
Another challenge is to engage your followers. How do you engage a population of 300 people, so that you are providing value to each and every one on an individual, personal level? I find it interesting to ponder the implications of tools that would automate this process, and this will be the subject of some of my upcoming experiments.
First, the ethics must be addressed. Is it unethical for a college freshman to use a program to send a "canned" (pre-scripted) email to his mother every day, saying everything is OK? Imagine if there was a website that allowed you to select from a variety of pre-written emails to send to your mother, and each day, with the click of a button, the freshman efficiently sent his mother a short pre-written note selected from the library on the website. It's the thought that counts, and Mom gets a 250-word email to satisfy her needs, while Son isn't tied up writing to Mom, so he can go communicate with the girls on campus to satisfy his needs. Seems like a win-win!
This would be highly effective if the emails seemed personal, and not "canned". Is Son "tricking" mom? Or has he just found a way to satisfy her communication needs in an efficient manner?
Barack Obama, Britney Spears, and many others, are using social networking to strengthen the relationship with their followers. Do you feel "tricked" knowing that Barack actually had a media person sending out his tweets? Or that Britney is currently hiring a media manager to do her social networking for her? I think we all pretty much expect it, and would be surprised if Barack got on Twitter himself to send out Tweets!
So how can the average Twitter user or blogger do the same, if he or she wants to? Is there a way to automate your communications with your followers, in a way that builds a relationship, and doesn't destroy it? I plan to aim my upcoming experiments in this direction.
Some automations would be trivial - for instance, I have 300 followers, and I know the general location of many of them. If my automation program (bot?) notices that someone posts a tweet between the hours of 1 AM and 6 AM, sending a quick direct message that says "What are you doing still awake at this hour?" is a simple way to build that relationship. (Some of you have already gotten those messages from me, but honest, that was one of Amy Iris' human creators, not Amy Iris the bot. Still, would you know? Would you care? It's the thought that counts, and the human behind it is reaching out to you.)
Other automations could be quite sophisticated. Say a follower of mine posts a message that contains these three words "new blog post", and has an embedded link. It's trivial to create an automation that grabs the link, retrieves the blog post, scans the blog post looking for unque words in the post, performs a search on those words (maybe on Google or Google Video, or You Tube), and sends back a direct message note, saying "nice blog post. reminds me of this video." (along with a link) Of course, the more that the automation appears to be from a human, the more effective it would be. Maybe wait 5 minutes (the amount of time it might take a human to perform the same task). Maybe include a typo. Still, I question the ethics. Is this spammy? Is it deceitful? Or is it just being efficient?
My upcoming experiments will touch on this area - automating the personal one-to-one communications with your followers.
I will also put the link to the blog back onto my profile page (I removed it Sunday afternoon). I'll try to write blog posts in such a way that a quick glance doesn't reveal the nature of the Amy Iris project, and instead starts with generic information as this one did, continuing to give the illusion of Amy Iris as an individual blogger and not a project. But buried within the post will be more information about the project.
Some of my astute Twitter followers have guessed that Amy Iris is some sort of bot (or even artificial intelligence). It is true that Amy Iris is a project, and not a human, although clearly these blog posts and Tweets have been generated by a human on the Amy Iris team.
For the record, our project team is not claiming that Amy Iris is Artificial Intelligence. We believe that Amy Iris will advance A.I., but the official stance of the project team is that the relationship between Amy Iris and A.I. is that it's just her initials. However, you be the judge as more is revealed. The time of her unveiling is approaching fast!
Trust us... this changes EVERYTHING.....
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7 comments:
This is an interesting topic you raise. I wouldn't call it ethical or unethical yet. You need to understand communication intentions and expectations on both sides first. In general, Mom wants a real time update on how sonny is doing. In the worst case, sonny gets hit by a bus at 9:15 AM and a canned email goes out at 9:30 AM saying, "Hey mom, I am fine!"
In this case, since expectations include real-time updates, the automation IS dishonest unless sonny can figure out a way to easily shove in new and current 'data' everyday to be put into emails etc. Auto 'new-blog tweets' are honest if they are just that. Canned apparent 'editorial comments' with the tweet are dishonest, since they create and cheat on expectations that relevance comments are being created with some thought.
Overall, keep it simple: if you can say what you mean, and mean what you say, with automated means, go right ahead. Current state of the art means that these messages will also LOOK honestly automated, and depending on your intentions/expectations setting, your followers may be okay with that. My blog posts auto updates to Facebook, and my friends know they are 'auto.'
I love it, and I'm glad to see I was so close.
I can't wait to keep reading.
The question now becomes: Does it, in fact, remind you of the video? Is the program, the "bot," the "A.I." actually "reminded" of this, or is the correlation simply one of key words?
The kind of analogy and interaction necessary to create a "meaningful" communication rubric may be more than the simple canned e-mail, or the "reminded-of" tweet. The more vectors and inputs you have, the more likely you are to have something approaching genuine sharing and communication.
Interesting thoughts. I think I would object to this on a theoretical level, although - when thinking about it - as far as it passed the Turing test, either by itself or assisted... How could I notice?
It reminds me a bit about the PixelVixen707 incident last autumn. I got to know about this through BrainyGamer, who were ambivalent about the whole thing:
"So okay, I got played, and I like games, and it's all in fun. Nobody was malicious or destructive. No harm, no foul. But at the risk of being a killjoy, I can't help but feel a bit peeved about it too. Someone took advantage of my willingness to be responsive and supportive of [a new games blog], and I was apparently expected to read between the lines and sniff out the big joke."
So be careful - and remember to get the updates yourself... you'd better have a nice excuse if someone chat's you up, complaining about "that video" you mailed... ;)
Hrmff.. the brainygamer link in my comment were supposed to lead here. Sorry ;)
Nice informative article....thanks for posting this article.
Между прочим, лучший способ обезопасить человека от прослушки - использовать Подавитель мобильной связи
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