I caught this Ad Age article yesterday and simply couldn’t resist sharing it. The article discusses a new job function at many Web-savvy companies today: “Chief Listener.” It sums up the point of this new role in only two sentences:

The big task? Data mining — and figuring out who needs the information.

As I’ve said over and over, the trick over the next decade is going to managing the sheer amount of data thrown our way each and every day. Nowhere is this more important than with social media. Some have called it the Social Data Revolution, pointing out that in 2009, there was more data produced than in every single year preceding it–combined. The key to managing this incredible amount of information? Listening.

And it’s not just listening, period; It’s all about listening well. Listening efficiently. Listening to the right people, at the right time, in the right medium.

Anyway, read the article, shout out your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter (@alexpriest), and expect plenty more on this topic from me in the future.

Chapter 5, “Kenna’s Dilemma,” in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, is a fantastic bit of insight into market research and the challenges there are in really figuring out what people think—because often they don’t really know what they’re thinking either.

The chapter takes on a number of different case studies where market research has failed to beat the experts and where consumers have simply been wrong about their very own preferences. This is all framed around the story of Kenna, a young musician with a unique sound that the critics loved, but listeners couldn’t quite wrap their heads around. While everyone from Fred Durst to U2’s manager loved his sound, he didn’t test well and suffered because of it. Gladwell puts this in context, comparing his situation to the “Pepsi Challenge,” the development of the Aeron desk chair, and even a couple classic TV shows. These were products that never tested well and no one expected to succeed, but beat the odds because research failed to capture the market’s feelings accurately, or because companies failed to interpret that research correctly.

There is one line in the chapter that I think really sums up the lesson to be learned most succinctly: “The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.”

Without a doubt, this is the most important and interesting insight to take away from this chapter for marketers, and for anyone who wants to understand how revolutionary products often succeed. Whether it’s the disaster that was New Coke, jam tasting, or Kenna getting screwed over by the record companies, market research is by no means an exact science, despite its appearances.

I think one of the most fascinating applications of market research today is with regard to social media. Take Facebook, for example. If research is to be believed, everyone hates Facebook. According to all the polls and surveys, its brand value is practically worthless, privacy concerns outweigh all its benefits, and users are threatening to quit in droves. The user interface isn’t as smooth as it could be, the privacy controls are too confusing, they’re selling private information… the list goes on and on of complaints people have about Facebook.

But this isn’t a new phenomenon—people have been complaining about every single thing Facebook has ever done to improve its service, all the way back to the advent of the newsfeed, which is now one of the most iconic features of social media as we know it today, and instrumental to the development of entire industries of new products, services and marketing. And Facebook’s user population is still growing tremendously. Only recently they passed up 500 million users, making them far and away the largest social network in the world, ever, and their growth and revenue shows no signs of slowing down. But if market research says they’re in such trouble, why are they so successful?

It’s because they haven’t listened to their customers. They recognized that every single change they make is going to be looked at unfavorably, because everything in the social media world is “merely different” for the average user. As I quoted above, market research, polls, etc. can’t detect the distinction between bad and different, and everything in social media is different—in fact, revolutionary. So we’ve got a cycle: people hate it because it’s different and they don’t understand it, and they’re wrong. Facebook goes ahead and does what they want anyway, because they recognize that consumers don’t understand their own behavior—not to insult their (our) intelligence, but it’s simply true—and then the feature gets gradually accepted and molded into part of the social media standard that we all know and love today. Facebook reaps the rewards and continues on its way to becoming one of the most important and successful companies of our generation.

As Gladwell points out, this isn’t new. Market research isn’t a secret weapon now, nor has it ever been. There have always been products, services, and people who tested poorly but went on to succeed, and consumers who misunderstood their own interpretation of different and revolutionary products. Is market research still important? Of course, and I don’t think Gladwell means to suggest that it isn’t. But it also should never be relied upon solely and without context, and that’s a lesson we can all learn from.

Consumer behavior is unpredictable and hard. It’s never the same and consumers can react one way to one industry and just the opposite in another. Tastes and culture change, personal beliefs and lifestyles change (such as the rapidly evolving attitude towards privacy in the U.S.), and especially in the past two decades, technology changes. Market research plays a key role in understanding how to market products in every industry and to every kind of customer, but it’s certainly not infallible.

It’s a great feeling. And it’s a great milestone to recognize how important my bike has become to me and maintaining my sanity over the past few months.

Throughout the spring and this past summer, I’ve gotten busier and busier. My life has been turned upside-down thanks to social media, networking, and entering my final year of undergraduate study at American University, and this upcoming year isn’t getting any calmer. With three jobs, six classes, a new organization on campus and two executive board positions–not to mention maintaining posts on more than five blogs and numerous social media accounts–things are understandably a little crazy. I like it that way (I wouldn’t have it any other way, in fact) but having a little down time every day is kind of nice.

And that’s where my bike comes in. With the 15-20 miles I ride every day, it gives me just enough time to relax. No news. No social media. No talking. No distractions at all. No stress.

On my bike, it’s just me and the wind and the city I love around me. It’s navigating the winding, bumpy streets of Georgetown, or riding through the quiet little neighborhoods between Logan Circle and Dupont, or riding along the Crescent or Mt. Vernon trails, enjoying the nature around me. It’s the small amount of time every day that I can push everything else out of my mind and just focus on the wind, the smell of the world, and the beautiful, refreshing pain in my legs as I pump those pedals up Wisconsin Avenue.

In Copenhagen my bicycle became my life. It was a form of transportation, and a conversation piece. It was a form of protest for climate change during the COP15 climate change conference. It was a souvenir in my photos, videos, and my memory. It was a crap bike, but to be honest, I kind of miss it.

In DC I brought that back with me, and it changed the way I look at my city and the world around me. I learned this city like I’d never seen it before. In my first two years of college I viewed DC as a series of metro stations, small, separate communities connected by tunnels and nothing more. But the city is so much more than that–not to mention more than the politics and the nonsense headlines (“Is Washington BROKEN?” ::GASP::). My bicycle let me explore the city in new and unexpected ways.

Anyway, here’s to 1500 miles, and here’s to 1500 more.

I sold for $45, to the always amazing @jillfoster. We’re planning a “morning date” for next week–despite the fact that she’s married! Of course it’s not a real date, but I offered to hang out and help her with her blog and any other personal technological projects that have been put on the back burner lately–I’m looking forward to it!

The event was a blast. When @andinarvaez contacted me earlier in the week to ask me to auction myself off, I wasn’t entirely sure what to think, but it couldn’t have been more fun. While obviously I wasn’t looking for a real date–this crowd isn’t exactly my target market, ya know–I’m thrilled to be able to hang out with such a brilliant professional like Jill!

In other news, I’m exhausted! The beginning of classes have hit hard. The classes themselves aren’t that difficult, but it’s just a lot to balance, and I’m sure I’ll adjust as the summer goes on. But more on that later… for now, I’m grabbing some shut-eye.

Today I will reach my 30,000th tweet.

Or I might have already, depending on when this is published. It's been a long and winding journey and my 30,000 some tweets so far tell a number of stories, but primarily that of myself, a young professional making my way through college, traveling the world, and working towards career success (with a little luck).

I started it all on July 20, 2007, sitting in a cramped little apartment outside of Tokyo, Japan, where I was staying for six weeks as part of a cultural exchange scholarship program. I signed up not knowing what this little micro-blogging service called Twitter was, and with no possible idea where it would take me over the course of the past three or so years.

As I tweeted out my excitement about hitting 30,000 tweets this morning, a follower asked me, "How many were of value?" That got me thinking. How many of these little 140 character messages really provided value to anyone? What have I accomplished in my 30,000 tweets, my approximate 4,200,000 characters, those 50,000-some-odd words?

To me, all of them provided value, and I've accomplished more than I ever dreamed I would with a social network.

With social media there's a constant struggle between quantity and quality. Do you want to be the one who's always present, always first on the news, and with the highest stats and metrics? Or do you want to be the one with the highest quality, who provides intense value in a small number of tweets, updates, or blog posts?

I think that depends on your goals, and I don't think there's any rule saying you can't have both, as long as you balance it right and engage with those around you–it is a social network, after all, not a wire service.

For me, my 30,000 tweets have taken me around the world, transformed my relationships, integrated me into the city I live in, and propelled me on a career path I never would have expected even two years ago.

With those 30,000 tweets I've made thousands of friends and I've shared countless lessons. I've shared my joy during the 2008 presidential election, participated from afar in the attempted Iranian revolution, shared my experiences protesting for action to solve climate change in Copenhagen, and enjoyed the calmer moments in life with thousands upon thousands of both digital and real-life friends.

After those 30,000 tweets I can now look at how I've evolved on social media. I can look at my activity from a personal and a professional perspective–as a student, marketer, communicator, citizen journalist, activist and more. And taking a step back and looking at those 30,000 tweets, I see that I've created incredible value for myself, and I hope I've created value for those that follow me and those I've gotten to know through this remarkable social network. Here's to 30,000 more.

Facebook thrives on being important. And now that they’re the largest social network in the world, they can proudly proclaim themselves “the most important.” Without a doubt.

But in the past year a new social media ecosystem has sprouted up–location-based services, e.g. Foursquare, Gowalla, and the like. And tweeting back and forth with my good friend @bigguyd just now, I realized that Facebook’s strategy is much larger than either of theirs. They don’t want to put them out of business, or buy them out, or pound them into obscurity. They want these other services to thrive, but only if they play by Facebook’s rules.

Look at what Facebook has done with games on their network. When developers started creating simple games for the network people initially dismissed it as nothing but a distraction. Users hated all the application notifications. They were annoying, they were everywhere, they ruined the user experience. But Facebook is important to us, and no one quit.

After a certain amount of time, everyone got used to applications being there and developers started getting more aggressive with their games. And then came Farmville. And in 2009 companies like Zynga were seeing revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

And they were also totally, without a doubt, 100% reliant on Facebook for survival.

That’s why Facebook just entered the “location wars.” They don’t want to take over the location network craze. They want to own it. They want to force everyone else to build on their system, making them the ultimate backbone of the location-based social network realm. By creating a dumbed-down, ultra-simplified check-in based service, they created a simple and flexible platform that developers can use. By keeping the stream of data flowing openly both ways through their platform, they’re enticing both new and old developers to jump on it and take advantage of their 500 million ready and willing users who are already plugged in and not leaving any time soon, if ever.

In essence, Facebook delivered a captive market of over 500 million users to Foursquare, Gowalla, and myriad other developers on a silver platter. And as those developers become increasingly reliant on Facebook’s Places platform, Facebook will begin taking a cut of all the revenue and everyone–within reason–wins.

Is it diabolical? A little. Is it not-exactly-a-good-thing for the ambitious, startup LBS developer? Yea, kinda. Is it abso-effing-lutely brilliant? You bet it is.

Today’s Twifficiency fiasco (don’t you dare click that link, much less authorize the service) is all the proof you need that there are simply too many talkers and not enough listeners on Twitter. Despite it’s creator’s supposed brilliance, it’s spammy and worthless. Still, even among the people I follow–all of whom I consider remarkably intelligent people–almost every other tweet I saw tonight was about “Twifficiency”. Everyone was just so excited to have found the next big tool for measuring “Twitter influence” (an idea in and of itself that’s completely abstract and pretty much bogus, if you ask me) that they were thrilled to try it out, regardless of the consequences.

That in and of itself isn’t that big of a problem. Even I clicked on it at first. But on Twitter time is fleeting and everything moves extraordinarily quickly–I clicked on the link early this morning, before it had blown up the way it did. Immediately after realizing what it did, I closed it, deleted the auto-tweet, and posted a warning to all my Twitter followers. Rather than these warnings spreading (mine, and others), instead the link itself spread like wildfire, as Twitter users found themselves overwhelmed by the desire to talk and not to listen.

Had I waited a few hours, I would’ve quickly seen that “Twiffiency” was bogus and spammy. I would not have clicked the link. But even as I write this–after 8:00 p.m. on the east coast–people are still clicking away at that link, convinced it must be something worth trying out despite the myriad warnings floating around the Twittersphere. Simply put, there are too many talkers, and not enough listeners.

This points to a larger issue with Twitter. I love the network, and I’ll likely use it until the day they shut it down or the day I die, whichever comes first. But there’s no doubt that far too many users see it as a soapbox, and there’s not enough listening happening. It’s not just spreading a few spammy links, it’s that people simply aren’t utilizing it to its full potential.

There’s a lesson here–you knew it was coming: Twitter is a learning tool. Not a tool for screaming through your digital microphone to your umpteen-thousand followers. It’s not a tool for mass marketing your brand. It’s not a tool for venting, ranting, or debating. Not fundamentally, anyway.

It’s a tool for listening.

If you use Twitter to listen, only then does it become a tool for any of those other things. By listening to the voices on Twitter–including your own, on occasion–you can figure out what the conversation is. You can figure out who the people are you want to talk to. You can figure out your audience, your target, your customers. And then you can slide yourself right into that conversation.

But nobody wants a screaming, blathering salesman barging into the middle of their bar-talk. So don’t do it. Listen. Just stop talking every once in a while, and listen.

It’s that time of year again, when my life goes from being just abnormally busy and ridiculous to absolutely-mind-esplodingly busy and ridiculous. Yup, school starts back in just under one week.

I’ll admit, I’m already feeling the pressure a little–which is odd, given that I haven’t stepped foot back in a classroom yet. It’s mostly mental, and it’s not necessarily bad, but that extra responsibility for my six (6!) classes is going to be a kick in the butt for the next few months. Thankfully my work schedule will calm down soon (cutting my hours almost in half), and with a little luck the weather will get nicer, leaving me a little less exhausted at the end of the day than I have been in this heat.

In fact, I’m kind of excited for my classes this fall (and yes, I know I say this every semester, and by the end I’m about ready to bang my head against the wall). I’m done with general education requirements, and really, based on course descriptions and syllabi alone, I’m not expecting this to be that difficult of a semester. And well hey, I slogged through six semesters and a summer course already, surely I can manage two more, right?

The biggest thing hanging over my head is the amount of ongoing projects I still have on my plate. I’m designing not one, but two websites (both of which will likely extend throughout the semester) and I have a fair amount of blogging responsibilities. Bad thing? Not really–in fact, blogging and designing are kind of nice, relaxing escapes from the textbooks and assignments I’ll be facing over the coming months. But they’re still more to do, which means I’m going to have to put a little more hustle in my step to get it all done.

Probably my biggest ongoing project–and I’m really regretting not getting this all done and out of the way in June–is my spring capstone project. While the content is finished, the website is not. And I’m contemplating turning it into an e-book, at the prodding of @amandamogul and @riethja.

But it’ll all get done. A little positive thinking and perhaps a teensy bit less sleep, and I know I’ll make it through just fine. Will it be a little stressful? Sure. But then again, I seem to kind of thrive on this stuff. And if all else fails, I know I’ve got an amazing community of friends–online and off–to turn to for a little extra moral support.

Amanda let off the workshop with a quick overview of the power of Twitter and building a brand on the social network. I then concluded with a presentation of nine tips (and a bonus!) for being more efficient and effective when using Twitter and various Twitter tools. The presentation is embedded below, check below the cut for links to the tools I mention and an archive of the tweets from the workshop this morning (hashtag #dcpowertwitter). Thanks so much to Amanda for inviting me to present, @chinatowncoffee and @sprint for sponsoring coffee and Wi-Fi, and to everyone else who attended!

I mention several tools in the presentation:

• CoTweet.com — great Twitter client, Web-based, excellent tool for scheduling tweets in the future.
• TweetDeck.com — my favorite Twitter client, just fantastic all-around. Can also schedule tweets.
• reader.google.com — the best RSS reader out there, excellent for keeping up with small, unique, personal blogs.
• ManageFlitter.com — excellent Web-based tool for monitoring who you follow, whether they follow back, and for identifying the “quiet” people you follow.
• TweetStats.com — the best charts and statistics you can get for your Twitter account, with lots of great features.
• Klout.com — the only measure of influence I value, provides an in-depth analysis of your Twitter style, content, and engagement.

Thanks so much to @leslysimmons for also sharing with us a fantastic open list of Twitter chats–find it here.

Check out the hashtag archive from this morning’s workshop, and continue the conversation on Twitter!

For anyone interested, my presentation was created using Prezi, which I simply cannot recommend enough. You’ll never use PowerPoint again.

Once again, thanks so much to everyone who attended, and please share this post with your friends! Be sure to click the “like” and “tweet” buttons below, and of course, comment below or tweet at me with any comments or questions.

For people running WordPress.org installations, it’s super easy to install–you just drop the line of code in where you want it to go. For me, for example, it goes in a tiny footer at the bottom of each of my posts.

The only minor hiccup I had when installing it was getting it to tweet the correct entry title and URL when someone clicked on the button from my homepage. Because you’re technically on my homepage, the button’s default settings led users to tweet nothing but my homepage and the URL for alexpriest.com. Thankfully, it’s a super, super quick fix.

The line of Twitter code is simple:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” class=”twitter-share-button” data-count=”horizontal” data-via=”alexpriest”>Tweet</a>

This, by itself, will do nothing but create a Tweet button sharing the current page. In order to get it to tweet the correct post (even from the homepage), you need to add these two bits of code to the link HTML in the Twitter button:

data-text=”<?php the_title(); ?>” data-url=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”

This makes it so that the text of the tweet is the title of your entry (<?php the_title(); ?>) and the link is the permalink to that post (<?php the_permalink() ?>). In the end, my final code looks like:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” class=”twitter-share-button” data-text=”<?php the_title(); ?>” data-url=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” data-count=”horizontal” data-via=”alexpriest”>Tweet</a>