I recently had someone tell me about their up and coming piece of software. Before we even got to the laundry list of problems with what they’re planning to do, the description started out with “you double right click the mouse to launch”. It went down hill from there.

I’ll just leave it at that.

When AT&T was forced to break up in the early 80′s one of the side effects was that they had to allow other companies to provide long distance service.

Since AT&T and all of the Bell companies still owned the physical infrastructure (although ownership was now split up by region), part of the deal was that they had to sell access to third parties. New companies such as MetroPhone, Sprint and MCI came into existence to meet that challenge. Eventually Sprint and MCI worked to lay their own copper, fiber and/or satellite infrastructure for handling calls between cities so that they wouldn’t have to carry their calls over AT&T hardware.

Initially to use these services you would call a local or 1-800 number (called an extender). You would punch in a customer account number and then the phone number you wished to call and it would connect you through.

Additionally, many large companies and universities had their electronic switchboards setup so that if you dialed into a specific number and punched in a code, you would be connected to that locations trunk line (aka, business party line) for an outbound call on the companies preferred long distance carrier.

As you might imagine these system were ripe for exploit and if you were clever enough you might have gotten away without paying a single long distance call in the mid to late 80′s.

One really big problem of early automation came about from businesses putting up automated dial-up services. For a period of time in the late 80′s and early 90′s you had to be sure that you had completely logged out a phone system first before you hung-up the line as the system might not detect your disconnect quick enough before another call came in. The net result would be the next caller could carry on with your phone session. Voice mail systems were the biggest problem spot for this issue since they were some of the earliest, fully automated phone utilities in common use.

A few more idiosyncrasies to note specifically about person to person calling was the lack of Caller ID. Until the advent of Caller ID people had no way of knowing who was calling. So, if you were trying to avoid someone you just wouldn’t pick up the phone. Then, you hoped you didn’t miss anything important. Yikes! If you were extra worried about missing that call from your best friend though you would tell them “Ring once, then hang up and call back so I know it’s you.” Or use some other kind of predetermined ring pattern.

Another odd behavior from the years prior to Call Waiting. If you were expecting a call you had better keep the line clear so that the other person didn’t get a busy signal (a corollary to that is if you didn’t want someone to know you were home you would stay off the phone as well). Call waiting was also a bane to modem users as the chime that alerted you that another call was pending would disrupt the modem and force it to hang-up your connection. Some phone companies eventually offered the ability to punch in a code prior to dialing that would disable call waiting for the duration of the call.

Wow, what a pain in the butt now that I think about it.

More next time…

Or, jump back to Part 1

Here in the U.S. we have officially converted to digital broadcast and most stations (with the exception of low-watt operations) have turned off the broadcast of a signal that some have kept running for over 50 years. This got me to thinking about frame of reference and forgotten methods of communications.

Let’s talk about the telephone. To start with originally you didn’t own your own phone. Phones were leased from AT&T or one of the regional Bell operations until around 1982 when AT&T/Bell was forced to break-up as a monopoly.

In the early days of the Telephone you couldn’t actually dial direct, you had to speak with a switchboard operator for assistance. Have you ever seen the old phone that is simply an ear cup, a funnel to talk into, a bell on the top and a rotary crank on the side? Well to use this kind of phone you would pick up the earpiece (receiver) and crank the phone to send an electrical signal down the line to alert the operator that you wished her (men generally weren’t operators originally) attention. She would plug a headset cable into a jack that was bound to your residence to see what you needed. If you wanted to be connected to another local phone user she would disconnect with you, connect her headset to the other local users phone and ring that remote phone by sending an electrical pulse down the line. If the remote user picked up she would let you know that you are being connected and then run a patch cable between the two ports on the switchboard connecting the lines. That connection would remain open until she pulled the wire out (eventually switchboard had little lights on them to indicate active current so the operator could close the line when you were done).

In addition to the local switchboard operator, there were hub operators above them than handled trans-local calls. The same at the National level and even Internationally. Depending on the location and era there would be even more granularity. When you wanted to make a long distance call in the 50′s you hoped that the recipient was there to answer the phone because your local operator just spent an hour working with who-knows how many other operators requesting patch links between who-knows how many switchboards just for you to be connected.

Another lost aspect of early phone network distribution came in the guise of Party Lines (not the kind of “party” you’re thinking, it’s more like “the party to which your dialing is not available”), where you would share a trunk line with a number of other users. This also allowed you to share the cost making phone service more economical for early users. Typically you were sharing with your immediate neighbors. Party lines worked great for outbound calls but not so hot on inbound so you would have assigned ring patterns to listen for to know if the call was for you or someone else which solved the problem well enough. FWIW, you could eavesdrop on others calls if you were sneaky about it. A modern analogy would be an office where there is single shared outbound phone line but individuals call each others desks separate of that line using an on-site electronic switchboard.

Eventually automated switching came about which allowed direct local dialing but for many years long distance (especially International calls) still might have required an operator to patch your call through on a switchboard (physically and the electronically).

In fact it was the early electronic systems that some of the first phone hackers (called phone phreaks) exploited to do their work since everything was controlled by one company (AT&T) the system was a trust based network. If you layered onto that social engineering practices you could get up to no end of mischief.

Another bit of phone fun you could have during the early 70′s was to pickup your phone and dial your own number then quickly hang up. The latency in the early automated switchboards was enough that the automated switchboard wouldn’t issue a disconnect in time to stop the connect command and the system would attempt to connect the call to your now hung-up line (which of course would ring since it was disconnected!). When you picked it up you would have a dead line. Great fun for pranking friends and family.

Did you know that in the very early days of Touch-Tone dialing, AT&T distributed little song books that showed you how to play out popular songs on the key pad. The idea was to encourage adoption, but it was also great fun for calling friends and punching out Beatles tunes.

Can you imagine having to use phones like this? Check back for more soon…

Before we get into what Twitter is though, let’s start by reminding everyone what a blog is.

At its most basic a blog is an online diary/journal authored by someone who wants to share their thoughts and opinions with others in a public location. It is not generally a real-time format (people aren’t reading your post the moment you post). A blog is generally long-form and a writer is best served when they put some thought into what they are writing before they post it. For instance you do not normally write “going to get some coffee” as a blog post. In fact if someone comes to your blog and sees that as your only post, they probably aren’t coming back.

Fundamentally, a micro-blog is a blog where the author just wants to fire off a thought without having to compose it into a full sentence/paragraph. It is a very informal and casual medium by design. It’s also very transient in that people don’t generally go back and reference old micro-blog posts like they would a standard blog.

Twitter is a specific micro-blog platform (like WordPress or Blogger are for blogs) where everyone’s micro-blogs are published exclusively on one web site. By design it makes micro-blogging real-time (people are reading it as you post) because your friends can monitor your updates without much effort by just leaving their Twitter home page up on their desktop someplace or by using an RSS client (among many options).

What makes Twitter more interesting is that it is effectively a giant chat room where a million people are all talking at the same time but you can decide exactly who you want to listen to, and since everyone is on Twitter you have lots to pick from. Common courtesy has also been that if you are going to take the effort to listen to me and you think that what I have to say is important (followers) then I’ll listen to you in return (following)… quid pro quo.

Additionally, Twitter has the ability to allow you to send a direct private message to any other user (of course you can only do this with people that follow-you thus establishing a trust relationship which in theory reduces the risk of spam). Plus it allows for a shorthand quick-sort/search capability vis-à-vis hashtags (placing a “#” before a keyword).

But, let’s not forget the thing that makes this all work. As I mentioned above, everyone else is on Twitter… even Oprah. Sadly though, she is not following you. She’s pretty busy.

Of course Twitter use has evolved since it’s launch and people now use it in many ways to connect with one another here are four possible use-cases:

1. You write corporate tweets that are one-way communications of news to followers who want to know about your company.
2. You write corporate tweets about the company but also engage with customers both publicly and privately. Generally this two-way usage will need you to conform to an agreed to corporate voice and protocol since you are acting as an official voice of the company when you engage with the world.
3. You write personal tweets about your company where you follow others and engage them in conversations about your business either privately or publicly. This method really calls for you to talk in your own voice, but still retain a certain level of professionalism. Since you have identified yourself as an employee of your company, you are now a public representative and poor behavior can reflect back on your employer.
4. You write personal tweets where you say nothing about your employer and just go on about every time you get a cup of coffee and scratch your nose.

That’s just four use-case scenarios from off the top of my head but I hope you can see that there are lots of ways to use this tool that are only limited to your imagination. Just remember that any given usage approach you take has it’s own certain social expectations and acceptable uses.

For instance, if you’re writing in case #1 you are probably going to be posting links to press releases and news stories about your company and executives. Posting in a corporate or personal voice is purely optional and either way is acceptable. Just be consistent! This is the best case for when you are planning to automate your tweets via some kind of robot program or reprogramming your press release publishing system to also push out a Tweet for the release when it goes live.

In case #2 you’re more than likely going to post tweets in a personal voice but you should never become casual in your language. Again, consistency counts here.

In case #3 a strict corporate voice is going to get you looked at funny… unless that’s the kind of person you are in day-to-day communications. You still don’t want to get to casual here but people expect you to be yourself.

In case #4, how you handle your personal life is your business

You’ll find that from a business perspective most corporate Twitter users fall between case 2 & 3. You’ll find personal users will be a mix of 3 & 4 if they talk about their employer at all but hopefully they will learn to separate the two before they do something that costs them their job (see my series about personas).

Bottom line… Twitter is a Pull technology (more on this later). Because of this it makes it easier for marketing teams to engage users without negative repercussions since the only people listening to you are people who want to listen to you. Generally the only ways you’re going to get a negative hit by corporate engagement with customers via a Pull technology is if you misrepresent yourself or your activities to your readers (ie, be transparent!), you make some culture transgression that causes a backlash (eg, you get a million people to follow you on Twitter and then you start spamming them with direct messages to buy your product), or you trick people to lure them to your content (back to the transparent thing).

Twitter is a great tool to communicate to people, no magic… just a tool.

I can’t emphasize enough for people who want to jump on the social media bandwagon. DO YOUR HOMEWORK FIRST.

If you get invited to a party hosted by someone you don’t know, you might ask some questions “what kind of party is it?”, “what should I wear?”, “am I expected to bring a bottle of something to drink?”, “should I be on time or fashionably late?”, etc… You get the idea.

Think of social media in many ways as a world party. First a little secret though. I can tell you right now that by the time you hear about the next big thing you’re already fashionably late, so we can settle that question right away. If you by some happenstance find yourself as an early adopter though, you’ll know because you’ll be one of the people annoyed (oddly enough) that your world was just swamped with a million people who don’t know what they’re doing.

So anyways, you’re going to the big party now and you want to fit in with the cool kids right? Well that’s where you do your homework. First things first, go ask your friends and family if they’re already using the new thing. If anyone is already there, ask them for their perception of the social etiquette for the environment. Initially 95% of them will probably be wrong but listen anyways because right now you’re developing a consensus.

In the neutral scenario, you ask 100 people who all give you the same bad answer, at the least you’re following social norm so that’s a win of sorts. At best you find someone from the 10% crowd who’s totally up on everything and will give you the straight scoop. In the worst case you hook up someone from the opposite 10% who has less of a clue than you but are so emphatic with their bad advice that it all seems reasonable.

Next go to your favorite search engine and enter “_____ for noobs” where blank is the new thing (eg, Twitter). Now, just so you understand what you’ve just searched. Noobs is derogatory slang for the word Newbies which is itself effectively derogatory slang for the term New Users. Many people ignore the derogatory nature of these terms anyways and I wouldn’t let yourself get to upset over it either. It’s the fastest way to find the information and it’s the common term used within the community where many of these things start. The important thing here is to read through some of the pages that come up in your search, and take it all with a grain of salt. The people writing these pages are frequently early adopters who are complaining about the missteps of new users or they are existing users making a genuine effort to reach out and educate new users so the new users can integrate with the activity faster without annoying everyone else in the process and/or embarrassing themselves at the same time. For instance check out this slide show presentation on Twitter that came up as my first search result at the time of writing this. There are certainly some gems out there.

Beyond that, you’ll do yourself a big favor by going out and trying to learn what problem this new tool was invented to solve. For instance Blogs were originally created by people who wanted to keep a public journal of their lives for their friends to read. Maybe that’s not what it’s being used for by everyone now but it can clue you into a greater understanding of what may or may not be a successful tactic to take in using the new thing. I would suggest doing some research on Wikipedia but if you do remember that Wikipedia editors are like the guy at the big box store you paid to pre-assemble your kid’s new bicycle (secret, he’s just reading the instruction book and probably never assembled a bike before… just like you).

On a tangent note let’s through out an example, if your mom always roasts chicken upside down, are you going to do the same thing when you roast a chicken or are you going to ask her “why are you doing that?”. Maybe there’s a better way to roast a chicken and maybe your mom is doing this because that’s what her mother told her to do and she never asked. Seriously! Go get a cook-book and see how other people roast chicken. Maybe doing it mom’s way ends up being the best way but you’ll never know until you do your research (for the record my mom does not roast chicken up-side-down).

So what’s the bottom line? Soak it all in.

In general, if you take a day and study up on any given social media platform you’ll be able to glean enough information to know if it’s something you personally want to deal with. Remember just because the cool kids are using something doesn’t always mean its right for you and just because everyone else is jumping in head first doesn’t mean you have to as well. That, also doesn’t mean you should ignore it though. Step in and get you feet wet for a moment. Post a comment on someone’s blog. Be sensible. Think of it like the social event party where everyone is offering you a drink. You can skip the party, you can drink a soda pop, you can carry around the same bottle of warm beer for the next four hours, you can drink sensibly, or you can wake up the next day without a clue about what happened the night before. If you’re a grown adult, it’s your call. Just think about how you want to be perceived before you participate in the community.