With the rise of the social web the credibility of the news we consume has never been more pressing.  New research by Penn State looks at the interesting area of news aggregation, and whether the credibility of the aggregator rubs off on the news provider and vice versa.

With news aggregators sending an ever larger portion of traffic to news websites, it's an issue that will be of interest to publishers and aggregators alike.  The research suggests that credibility can flow from the news source to the portal, but seldom flows the other way.

So this means that a great article from a credible news source can make the aggregator look great, but a rubbish article included in the aggregator seldom reflects badly on the aggregator.

“A news portal that uses stories from a credible source gets a boost in credibility and might even make money through advertising,” says the research team. “However, if there is a lawsuit for spreading false information, for example, it’s unlikely that the portal will be named in the suit.”

So a low credibility story featured on Google News (high credibility) is unlikely to make your story appear any better.

Article first published as Two Out of Every Three Tweets are not Worth Reading on Technorati.

Ever since it launched, Twitter has faced accusations that is merely the home of the self centered amongst society telling each other what they had for breakfast.  New research by Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Georgia Tech lends some credence to this suggestion.

They've created a new website called Who Gives a Tweet?, which is a kind of hot or not for tweets.  Users are asked to rate whether they found a tweet useful or not amongst the Twitter stream of the people they follow.

Over the course of the study, conducted during December and January, nearly 45,000 ratings were supplied by over 1,400 Twitter users.

The results

The results are pretty damning. The users in the survey found just 36% of the tweets they read useful.  25% were actively disliked, whilst 39% produced a meh reaction.

“A well-received tweet is not all that common,” Michael Bernstein, a doctoral student at MIT who worked on the project, wrote in a blog post. “A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons.”

Tweeting Room 101

So what kind of tweets did people hate the most?  In no particular order, these tweets fell foul of users:

• Semi-private conversational tweets
• Mood related tweets
• Activity related tweets

It wasn't all doom and gloom though.  The researchers also revealed some tweets that proved popular.  These included:

• Asking questions of followers
• Linking to a story you wrote (ie self promotion)

9 ways to avoid annoying people with your Tweets

The researchers also offered some tips to help you avoid annoying people with your tweets:

1. Don't tweet old news
2. Add your own thoughts
3. Keep it simple (stupid)
4. Don't overdo Twitter shortcuts.  RT and # is plenty
5. Don't tweet about your lunch
6. Provide context to your tweets
7. Don't whine
8. Provide tempting headlines
9. If you're a celeb – do try and be interesting

The study comes hot on the heels of research by MIT revealing 10 great ways to get retweets.

Whether it's Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+, the various social networks all have distinct characteristics.  Facebook for instance places an emphasis on who you are and who you know.  Twitter by contrast focuses more on what you say.

New research from the University of Manchester questions whether our choice of social network is related to our personality type.

The research team surveyed 300 people about the way they use Facebook and Twitter, and on which network they preferred. In addition, they were asked questions aimed at determining their personality type.  These latter questions sought to determine the sociability of each individual and their need for mental stimulation.  The questions revolved around the so called big five personality types:

• Extraversion
• Neuroticism
• Conscientiousness
• Openness
• Agreeableness

The results suggest that our choice of social network has little to do with our personalities, with factors such as intelligence and motivation believed to be bigger influencers.  There were some correlations between the use of social network and personality though.

For instance people that used Facebook for socialising perhaps not surprisingly scored highly on sociability and neuroticism.  Soial use of Twitter by contrast correlated with high sociability and openness.  Neuroticism wasn't a factor because it's more about opinions than likeability.  These findings suggest that Facebook is used more often to combat lonelyness, whilst Twitter is a means of social procrastination.

In information terms there were also some interesting findings.  Facebook users who turned to the network for information were found to score higher on neuroticism, sociability, extraversion and openness, but lower on conscientiousness and need for mental stimulation.

Twitter users seeking information were the polar opposite.  They scored much higher on the mental stimulation front and lower on sociability, extraversion and neuroticism.

There are obvious implications in these findings.  It clearly suggests that Facebook users tend to share fluff, whilst Twitter users look for more stimulating content.  The results revealed that people who desire mental stimulation preferred to use Twitter than Facebook.

It should be noted that the feedback from users was largely self-reported, so might not be entirely accurate, but nevertheless it chimes almost exactly with a similar study conducted by Boston University recently.

Cloud computing is one of those things that has been set to change the business world for a few years.  When most heavily hyped, paradigm shifting arrive on the scene there will always be those that hold back, fearful of the change it will bring, unwilling to move out of their comfort zone.  If the potential benefits are sufficiently large however many will tentatively make the move.

Social business expert highlights 8 ways that cloud computing will change the business landscape:

1. The creation of a new generation of products and services.
2. A new lightweight form of real-time partnerships and outsourcing with IT suppliers.
3. A new awareness and leverage of the greater Internet and Web 2.0 in particular.
4. A reconciliation of traditional SOA with the cloud and other emerging IT models.
5. The rise of new industry leaders and IT vendors.
6. More self-service IT from the business-side.
7. More tolerance for innovation and experimentation from businesses.
8. The slow-moving, dinosaur firms will have trouble keeping up more nimble adopters and fast-followers.

If you're still not convinced, the Process Excellence Network are hosting a webinar next month that aims to lift the fog on cloud computing and how it can help your business.  It's a free event running on the 7th March.  Well worth checking out if you're interested in the potential benefits of cloud computing.  To register visit the link below.

http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com/business-process-management-bpm/webinars/enterprise-2-0-the-transformational-power-of-cloud/

I wrote last year about the sheer number of big brands that don't really get Facebook, evidenced by research showing that big brands typically need 1,000 fans to generate 1 click through to their website. 

New research provides more grist as to the depth of this malaise.  The study, by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, revealed that just 1% of fans are engaged with big brands on Facebook.

The research team used the 'people talking about this' metric to gauge the level of interaction between fans and big brand Facebook Pages.  They compared the engagement metric as a percentage of overall fan growth of the top 200 brands on Facebook over a six week period.

They found that the average engagement figure was just 1.3% of the overall fan base.  What's worse is that this metric includes all of the people that like a page, so the more new likes you get, the higher this score.  If new likes were subtracted, the truer reflection of engagement was a pitiful 0.45%.

So let's get this straight.  Of the fans of big brand pages, only 5 in every 1,000 fans do anything on the page, with just 1 of every 1,000 clicking through.

What is interesting is that the researchers believe this is an ok return and compare Facebook to mass media.

"I don't think it's a bad thing," said Karen Nelson-Field, senior research associate for Ehrenberg-Bass Institute who describes herself as a "Facebook advocate." "People need to understand what it can do for a brand and what it can't do. Facebook doesn't really differ from mass media. It's great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnight is just unrealistic."

They suggest that growth is achieved not by reaching out to a core group of loyalists, but by reaching out to a much larger number of light and medium buyers.  In that context social media offers strong reach, with engagement an afterthought.

I'm interested in your thoughts on this.  Do you regard social media such as Facebook as merely another channel to reach out to as many people as possible OR is it a channel whereby you can deepen the relationship with people?

I've created a poll in LinkedIn to gauge your opinion, so feel free to vote below.

My latest article for the Social Business News website went live today.  It provides some examples of how the open source movement generally kicks arse at innovation.  In particular they:

1. Modularize the content – thus making it very easy for people to work on small chunks of a project.
2. Encourage small contributions – thus removing a major barrier of entry and ensuring they get lots of contributions
3. Make it easy for people to find information – all open source projects make it dead easy for you to see what's already been done, what people are working on and issues they're having.  It's a key element of any collaboration.

Anyway, I've fleshed out each point more in the article so stop by and check it out today.

http://www.socialbusinessnews.com/the-open-source-school-of-innovation

The Australian Open tennis final yesterday between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal has been widely acclaimed as a classic, with the match the longest final ever seen at Grand Slam level, and the longest ever match at the Australian Open.  The final set produced epic drama, with both men seemingly out on their feet, dragging their bodies to the conclusion by sheer will alone.  As a spectacle it was impossible to take your eye off of.

Up until the thrilling conclusion however the match wasn't really the greatest.  Both players had been severely tested en route to the final and it told as the first three sets saw neither player at their best, and the match to that point was not of the same quality as other encounters between the top 4 players in the game.

It reminded me of a famous experiment conducted by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kaheman called the Peak End Rule.  Each subject was asked to undergo two painful episodes. One was to hold one of  her hands for a minute in water at 14" C, which is cold enough to hurt. After a minute the subject took her hand out  of the water. The other episode was to hold her hand for a minute in water at  14" C and then  keep  it  there  for another  half  minute, while the water was slowly warmed to 15" C. This is still cold enough to be painful, but noticeably less
painful. Some subjects suffered the shorter episode first; others the longer one.

Afterwards, the subjects were asked to say which of  the two episodes of pain was worse. Generally they said the shorter one. To test the firmness of their judgements, they were told they would undergo a third painful episode. They were told it would be a repeat of  one of the two I described, and given a choice of  which it should be. They generally chose the longer episode.

He did a similar experiment using positive experiences and found the same thing.  So a short tennis match with a strong ending will generally be regarded as more enjoyable than a longer match with a poor ending.  The reasoning is that the ending is fixed much more firmly in our memories and it's our memories that form our opinion of an event rather than what actually happened.

So the barnstorming end to the match yesterday undoubtably played a major part in our recollection of the match as a whole, and therefore we over-inflated the quality of the match as a whole.

The morale of the story is that if you want to be remembered fondly, you have to go out with a bang.

Starting a new job recently I've generally been feeling a bit knackered recently, with so many new processes etc. to learn and all.  As a morning person I've always been at my best in the morning, but even mornings have offered scant respite lately.  When you wake up tired there's not really anywhere else to go.

Now I'd imagined that would be a pretty bad thing for my creativity and general mental alertness.  New research suggests the opposite though – that we are actually at our creative height when we're at our groggiest.

So how does this work?  The researchers suggest that the Eureka type insights that represent our creative peak happen most often when our brain is in an unfocused state and is prone to aimless meandering.

The team rounded up a few hundred participants and asked them if they were morning or evening people.  Interestingly, albeit probably for another blog, most of them were night owls rather than morning people, although as the participants were mainly students this is not that surprising.

Anyway, they were then asked to complete six problem solving tasks, half of which were analytic type questions, half of which were insight questions that required creative thought.  They had just four minutes to solve each question.

To test their performance outside of their peak time, half were tested first thing in the morning, with the rest doing their tess late in the afternoon.  The results are quite something.

For creative tasks the students were at their best at their least optimal time of functioning.  The night owls performed creative taks much better in the late afternoon than they did in the morning!  You might think that the analytic taks might revert to the norm, that people would do best at their peak time, but it was shown that performance in analytic tasks was not affected by the time of day.

So there you have it.  If you want to unleash your creative juices, it might be best to do it when you're not feeling at your best mentally.

Most of us have certain values that are dear to us, whilst there are other values that we don't hold quite so dear, they are more pliable by nature.  New neural research has revealed that the values we do not budge on involve a completely different part of the brain to when we're thinking of values that aren't so important.

For instance religious beliefs are generally pretty sacred, and the research found that these thoughts required a distinct cognitive process.  They tend to utilise a part of the brain traditionally associated with rule based thought processes that fall into the right or wrong camp.  This compares with other thought processes that fall into cost/benefit style thinking.

The researchers fitted people up to fMRI scanners and asked to choose between 62 pairs of statements, including things such as 'you support gay marriage' to the more mundane 'I am a tea drinker'.  The participants were then later offered money for each statement via an auction that saw offers of up to $100 per statement.  If they wished to opt out of the auction for a particular issue they could.

“We used the auction as a measure of integrity for specific statements,” the researchers explains. “If a person refused to take money to change a statement, then we considered that value to be personally sacred to them. But if they took money, then we considered that they had low integrity for that statement and that it wasn’t sacred.”

The fMRI data revealed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward.

So why is this important?

If you think about how most public policy is designed, it tends to involve incentives and disincentives.  This research suggests that this thinking will not work when it comes to issues people find particularly sacred.  These values are processed in completely different areas of the brain than are used for processing rewards and punishments.

What is also interesting is that participants that were active members of clubs like a local football team or a church group had much stronger brain activity in the region linked with holding sacred values.  So it seems the two are linked, and being part of a team is strongly associated with holding strong views.

“Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” the researchers said.

So this also has implications for advertisers and the like who may try and get us to change our preferences by offering financial incentives or special offers.  The lesson is that if someone has very strong allegiance to something you may as well not bother.  So if you're trying to get people to change their toilet paper you may have a chance, but if you're trying to get them changing football team you'll be out of luck.

As a social media man a big part of the role over the past few years has been selling in the benefits of social media to my employers.  I've also done a wide number of lectures around the country and a similar type of sales job has been required to showcase the importance of social media and then of course to reveal some ways people can use it.  A major tool in achieving this has been the wonderful Social Media Revolution video.  It presents the importance of social media in a really nice way and with Fat Boy Slim providing the soundtrack has convinced many an indifferent soul of the value of social media.

I sense that such efforts are required in a wide range of spheres.  In my current role we're champions for process improvement.  This includes things such as lean and six sigma and it appears that many in the mangement world are skeptical of the benefits of process improvement.  So we've tried our hand at a video of our own.  I'm undoubtably bias but I think it's pretty darn good.  Have a look and see what you think.