Shel Israel dis­cusses the impact of the real-time Web on soci­ety & business

Shel Israel’s new book, Twit­ter­ville, is due to hit hit book­stores next week. (See Twit­ter­ville site, the Global Neigh­bour­hoods blog or Ama­zon page.) A day after his book release party at the Hiller Avi­a­tion Museum, San Car­los, Calif., Shel took time out to answer five ques­tions from Socialmedia.biz.

1In the early stages of your book research you were focus­ing on the con­ver­sa­tional Web. Why did you zero in on Twitter?

Shel Israel: When you and I talked about the con­ver­sa­tional web, I was still explor­ing new book pos­si­bil­i­ties. I wanted a story that was an obvi­ous evo­lu­tion­ary step from Naked Con­ver­sa­tions.

My focus nar­rowed and locked in April 2008, when James Buck tweeted the word “arrested” on his Black­berry as he was being taken off to pos­si­bly rot in an Egypt­ian jail. A day later, when he posted a sec­ond word, “freed,” I real­ized that some­thing was hap­pen­ing on Twit­ter that exceeded what I orig­i­nally thought was there. In another cou­ple of weeks I started see­ing a very broad story that also went quite deep. I felt pas­sion­ate about it and became con­vinced that Twit­ter was about to have a very sig­nif­i­cant impact on the Con­ver­sa­tional Web.

2At the 140 Char­ac­ter con­fer­ence, some speak­ers sug­gested that the real-time Web was as momen­tous as the birth of the orig­i­nal Web. Do you agree? How do you see Twitter’s poten­tial impact on cul­ture and society?

Shel Israel: I’m not very good at “most momen­tous” type judg­ments until I can look back at an event with some his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive. I regard the birth of the real time web as a more recent point on a con­tin­uum that started back when our ances­tors were grunt­ing and ges­tur­ing around the cave fires telling sto­ries about the hunt; using blood and berries to tell sto­ries on cave walls. The birth of the web is a really big dot in that con­tin­uum. It is the moment when our com­mu­ni­ca­tions tran­scended tan­gi­ble spaces and allowed email and other inter­ac­tive activ­i­ties. How big a dot is the real time web? I think it’s huge, but we are still in nascent times. I may be opti­mistic, but we need to be able to look back fur­ther to see how it impacts human interactivity.

3Can you cite some best prac­tices about how com­pa­nies are using Twitter?

Shel Israel: The term “best prac­tices” tra­di­tion­ally his­tor­i­cally refers to refined, redun­dant, mea­sur­able activ­i­ties that can become the stadard of busi­ness pro­to­cols. I think we are still in an early phase where noth­ing is yet a best prac­tice, but merely a really good idea.

There’s a gen­eral con­sen­sus that social media has been a com­mu­ni­ca­tions game changer. Most peo­ple think it is a good idea to be trans­par­ent and not decep­tive; to lis­ten at least as much as you speak; to show a human face rather than a brand image; to build rep­u­ta­tion by being gen­er­ous to a com­mu­nity rather than mak­ing noise and to gen­er­ally tell more than you sell.

Yet there are many suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies devi­at­ing from at least some of these approaches. For exam­ple, on Twit­ter @starbucks and @Carlsjr use branded Twit­ter accounts, where the real human hides behind a cur­tain and peo­ple come and have con­ver­sa­tions with com­pany logos.

I don’t like the prac­tice, but I spoke with the peo­ple behind those cur­tains and the prac­tice works quite well for them. So these best prac­tices still remain to be seen and the era of cookie cut­ter approaches to the mar­ket­place may be over.

The good news is that your company’s com­mu­nity will prob­a­bly tell you what the best prac­tice is for you at this time and in your space.

4There’s a lot of fer­ment in the search world these days, with some sug­gest­ing that the kinds of rich per­sonal details that peo­ple are shar­ing in Twit­ter­ville has the poten­tial to reshape mar­ket­ing in fun­da­men­tal ways. Your take?

Shel Israel: In the search world, I see a sig­nif­i­cant divide between find­ing stuff by hav­ing an auto­mated spi­der crawl data over the web. This is what Google, Bing and the rest do. It’s valu­able and it is not going away. But many of us find the overuse and abuse of SEO has cor­rupted this kind of search results and it is likely that trend will fur­ther spoil the qual­ity of results we get from search engines.

Simul­ta­ne­ously, social media plat­forms are allow­ing peo­ple to search crowds and get infor­ma­tion from humans rather than data spi­ders. We get much of that infor­ma­tion from peo­ple we know and whose cred­i­bil­ity we can assess.

This lat­ter form of search is increas­ingly shap­ing what peo­ple buy, watch and lis­ten to. Ask­ing peo­ple is more nat­ural and the way we have been help­ing in mak­ing such deci­sions for a very long time. It’s both both more pow­er­ful and effi­cient than tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing tac­tics have been.

So mar­keters who con­tinue to do what they have always done are prob­a­bly going to get worse and worse results over time. This trend is start­ing to accel­er­ate and is likely to continue.

Mar­keters are going to fol­low cus­tomers online. But if they con­tinue to try to bar­rage them with mar­ket­ing mes­sages, they will prob­a­bly fail.

But if you go back to the ori­gins of mar­ket­ing, when it was defined as “rela­tion­ships with cus­tomers” rather than send­ing mes­sages to tar­get demo­graph­ics, they can again join con­ver­sa­tions and listen.

This will have a fun­da­men­tal and mon­u­men­tal impact on mar­keters in the short-term future.

5Twit­ter played a major role in the street demon­stra­tions of Iran after the recent pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. (I asked co-founder Biz Stone about this at the Brainstorm:Tech con­fer­ence, but he deflected the ques­tion, say­ing Twit­ter was a neu­tral tool.) Do you see Twit­ter as hav­ing the poten­tial to enable demo­c­ra­tic upris­ings in some places?

Shel Israel: First, I agree with Biz. Twit­ter is a neu­tral tool. What gets into the stream is deter­mined by peo­ple — just like the tele­phone or email. But that does not alter the obvi­ous: Twit­ter is chang­ing the exchange of infor­ma­tion and it is allow­ing peo­ple all over the world to bypass the world’s most impos­ing insti­tu­tions — gov­ern­ment, media, cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions machines — to let them speak and see and under­stand directly. As a result, peo­ple are let­ting us see truths that were pre­vi­ously fil­tered from us.

We saw this to some degree in Mum­bai and Gaza. But it became obvi­ous in Iran. All the offi­cial words and con­trolled press can never undo the truth of the YouTube clip of Neda’s mur­der.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.