Pointless Babble?

According to recent research carried out by Pear Analytics, 40.5% of all tweets are classifiable as ‘pointless babble,’ which the researchers defined as  ‘the “I am eating a sandwich now” tweets’.  You can read their full report which is downloadable as a white paper from their website; however, the BBC sum up the percentages here stating that:

it found that 40.5% could be classified as pointless babble, 37.5% as conversational and 8.7% as having pass-along value. Self promotion and spam stood at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively.

To be honest, I am dissatisfied with the classification of certain tweets as ‘pointless babble’.  In fact, I would go so far as to say it is those tweets which inform us about your choice of sandwich, the weather in your area, your indecision over which shoes to wear or your confession to treating yourself to a sneaky glass of rosé that brings the necessary level of humanity to your twitterstream.

It’s these small insights into the ordinary everyday that offer necessary points of connection; they offer a degree of commonality which others can relate to and respond to.  Following the sharing of the quotidian, conversation naturally flows, and it is from here that one can then go on to self-promote or offer those tweets defined as having a ‘pass-along’ value.  By offering up small, seemingly insignificant details, communication is sparked and friendships are born.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t follow bots.  I’m not interested in the firing out of information regardless of how relevant it may be to my interests.  I would much rather follow those that tweet about their everyday triumphs, struggles, decisions, disappointments, appetites.  I would much rather follow human beings with all their wonderful foibles, idiosyncrasies, oddities and failings.

For me the ‘babble’ is far from pointless – it’s the glue that sticks a community together; it’s the unapologetic celebration of human conversation.

How about you?  How do you feel about the classification ‘pointless babble’?  Do you think there’s too much of it on Twitter, or are you like me & revel in these invitations to connect?

Announcement: New PeopleMaps Role

I have a bit of an announcement to make today.  For the last month I have been working with a fantastic company as their online community manager and as a contributor towards their social media strategy.

PeopleMaps is a company that provides personality profiling technology through their creation of a Personality Power Widget.  In their own words:

PeopleMaps builds Personality Power Widgets to provide psychological profiling (sometimes called personality or psychometric testing) products to businesses and individuals across the globe. We are experts in psychology, technology and marketing and make affordable profiling available to everyone with access to the Internet.

I am so excited to be working with them, not only because they are at the cutting edge of developing innovative personality products, but also because of their Philosophy Manifesto.  Who wouldn’t want to work with a company which states:

As a philosophy, we believe that one should alter the environment to suit one’s individual personality, instead of bending the individual out of shape to suit the environment. This could be a work environment, a home environment, a romantic environment; it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that to be productive, to be inspired, to be happy, to be successful,  to be at your best, you need to be operating in an environment compatible with your personality. We need the world to relate to us – and communicate with us in a personality centric way.

Pretty cool, hey?

So, what exactly is the service that I’m providing PeopleMaps?

Well, my role as an online community manager means that I am setting up and maintaining Ning communities, so as to facilitate collaboration and co-ordination within the company, as well as managing PeopleMaps’ participation in larger communities such as those found on Twitter and FaceBook.  I’m also creating training documents for a number of social networking sites, such as Ning and Twitter, to ensure that all those within the company are comfortable and capable of participating within the PeopleMaps online community, and to that end, I offer ongoing support and advice when needed.

I have also helped to develop the social media strategy for PeopleMaps, and I will be helping to deliver that strategy over the coming months.  This will mean that I (along with others in the company) will be growing, contributing & promoting the PeopleMaps twitter account, @peoplemaps,  and the PeopleMaps FaceBook fanpage.

If you are unfamiliar with PeopleMaps, then I thoroughly recommend that you check out their brand spanking new website.  It’s got some fantastic content on it already, and they have just launched a private beta of their Power Widget.  Also, if you’re looking for some free fun stuff, check out the PeopleMaps Playground!

NB  If you are interested in working with me, please check out my About Amy page for more on my skills & background, and my LinkedIn profile will provide you with more on my professional activites plus recommendations etc.