The Twitter Archives – A Historian’s Treasure Trove

The announcement last week that Twitter was providing its complete archives of public tweets (minus the meta data, though, damn) to the Library of Congress sent a shiver through the history geek in me.

On Tuesday Slate did a write up that captured the cause of that shiver nicely:

But the decision to archive Twitter takes digital preservation to a new level of detail. In the past, all archives, even digital ones, had to be selective. The Internet Archive doesn’t preserve every last byte of the Web—only the seemingly important parts. The Twitter archive, by contrast, will be mind-numbingly complete. Everything from reactions to the uprising in Iran to Robert Gibbs’ first tweet to your roommate’s two-sentence analysis of Hot Tub Time Machine will be saved for posterity. Which is, from a historian’s perspective, historic. Now that we’ve started logging all the stray thoughts hurled into cyberspace, the prospect of recording every last word ever published—to paraphrase archivist Brewster Kahle, we’re “one-upping the Greeks”—doesn’t seem especially crazy.

Twitter’s archives are just one piece of a larger puzzle, and really point the insane amount of detail about the minutia of our daily lives in the early 21st century that electronic communications, and social media in particular, will provide for the future historian. Assuming of course, they are properly archived and the analytic tools of the future can properly read and mine them. The latter we can’t know, but the decision by Twitter and the LoC is a huge first step to ensure the former.

Imagine if historians of today had the complete Twitter archives spanning the final few years of the fall of the Western Roman Empire? Or the years of the American Civil War? The more recent we get in time, the more historical records we tend to have, but more often than not those records focus on the major events and characters in time. Historians and archaeologists have to rely on historians of the time, often referring to primary sources that no longer exist, complimented by fragmentary evidence (from pottery shards to personal letters), to piece together what the daily lives, thoughts, passions, and reactions of the general populace was at the time.

Twitter, for all the criticism it takes as a time waster, is a treasure trove of daily insights of huge numbers of people whose names, thoughts, and insights will otherwise never grace the pages of the history books of the future. Again from Slate:

Or take the history of adolescents. The source material for studying how and what kids think has always been limited to school papers, letters from parents and teachers, the occasional diary. Again, mostly “top-down” history. There’s little real-world data about how kids interact with each other. Blogs, tweets, and Facebook updates offer glimpses into the lives of children on a scale that no randomized study could re-create.

It’s hard to fathom, while we’re living in the moment and all just trying to keep pace with the obscene rate of change in tools and norms, what the eventual impact of all this sharing, blogging, and tweeting will be done the road. It’s busy reshaping business, politics, and culture right now, but it’s also clearly going to fundamentally reshape how the historians and cultures of the future view the online citizens of this era.

So get busy tweeting. It just may be how history remembers you.

Social Media ROI and ROMI

Social Media ROI is one of those “oh God will it never die?!?” subjects that engenders endless debate across the blog and twitterspheres, very often with seriously suspect results. It’s just a damn hard question to answer – how do you determine the financial impact of all that time, energy, and budget your organization is investing in tweets, posts, comments, podcasts, and so on?

In doing some client research on the subject last month, I found it useful to consider the subject in terms of Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).* That helped me break down my understanding of potential Social Media ROI (smROI**) into two parts:

Short- and long-term smROI

Short-term smROI is loosely defined as when you use social media right alongside traditional demand generation elements within the marketing mix (think direct mail, email campaigns, etc). Companies like Dell use Twitter to drive direct, trackable sales through accounts like @DellHomeOffers and @DellSmBizOffers that offer up targeted product discounts and specials. Thousands of brands use blog posts in a similar manner, and you can see the same across pretty much every social media channel there is.

Calculating short-term smROI is the (relatively) easy part – you can make a pretty clear, compelling, and defensible ROI argument for these kinds of activities (X tweet generated Y sales). Unfortunately for us, that’s not really the kind of smROI that’s the subject of so much debate. That pain-in-the-ass kind is what I’ll call long-term smROI, which is really a fancy way of asking what all that “engaging in conversations” brouhaha is really worth.

Long-term smROI is akin to long-term ROMI – it’s all about brand awareness, loyalty, and other very difficult to quantify – in terms of bottom-line financial impact – activities. In traditional marketing these are the brand-building 30 second TV spots and conference sponsorships, among countless other activities. To create impact metrics many brands use survey-driven scoring such as Net Promoter, satisfaction, and so on. The same applies for social media activities that fall outside the definition of short-term smROI – they’re just hard to really measure, and as such marketers, consultants, community managers, and so on are constantly working to justify and defend them.

So what’s the solution to determining long-term smROI? Run NetP or CSAT surveys all the time? Maybe – I won’t pretend to have a firm answer, though I obviously have an opinion (a later post). One line of research I am fascinated by however is found in the ENGAGEMENTdb report from Altimeter Group/Wetpaint (PDF), released in July 2009. They paint an interesting picture to claim there is a direct correlation between brands that are deeply and broadly engaged in social media and financial success (more or less – read the report). That’s still a hell of a leap to take to management: lots of SM engagement —> analyst report! —> ROI, done! But they have some great data in there and filled an important gap in the debate.

A debate which I’m sure will continue for many years to come…

As a side note, some of the best thinking I’ve seen on the subject in a long while is by Oliver Blanchard. You can find just his smROI videos up at http://smroi.net/. Well worth the time invested.

*This isn’t to deny other ways to realize ROI from social media, such as through decreases support costs. My focus, for now, was on marketing.
**Using “smROI” based on the Twitter hashtag in use of #smROI. Seemed handy enough.