a social media experiment gone awry - seesmic and x-files Posted on July 6th
For those of us that were on seesmic on recent friday evening, a very strange thing happened. A major flood of new faces talking up X-Files seemed to take over quickly and completely.
It was very clear that these new faces were not interested in a free-flowing conversation and give & take as is the social norm of seesmic.
Instead were excited fans talking about the X-Files movie and nothing else. For the seesmic regulars,
it was as if the ‘community center’ of seesmic turned very quickly into a bus-station where no one knew anyone else and there was no connection between people other than X-Files related.
My reaction was to pull off of seesmic for a break. Other users were more vocal about the onslaught of unexpected x-files chatter. It was akin to watching a train wreck. The frustration grew slowly and kept building like a train unable to stop. A few seesmic regulars were frustrated enough to say “no more!”
A quick primer to this issue is that for anyone using seesmic, the common refrain that is heard again and again. The complaint is that the public timeline is frustrating because you cannot find what you’re looking for. Once a video drops off the first page of the timeline, it’s seemingly rendered null and void.
This reaction is played out again and again by users new to seesmic.
What the X-Files widget did was exaggerate this behavior, rendering the public timeline absolutely useless to anyone who was not discussing the X-Files movie.
There were casualties - during the building wave of frustration, a seesmic user identified herself as the connector between seemsic and 20th century fox and took credit for the launch of the x-files widget.
Talk about putting your head up in the middle of cross-fire. Very quickly, she realized that the unexpected behavior of the x-files widget- putting all of the video comments recorded at the x-files site on the public timeline on another site [seesmic.com] was problematic and creating a building wave of frustration among seesmic.com users as well as the X-Files fanbase.
This revelation was the first explanation of the X-Files flood for many of us, although it was announced on Seesmic CEO Loic’s blog here.
Please note the X-Files stunt was not the first PR exercise that Seesmic had participated in. Another PR stunt that comes to mind was the Indiana Jones event in Cannes just a few months back.
What were the differences? Well, unlike the Indiana Jones stunt, the X-Files pr stunt had no build up on the timeline. It was just a floodgate opening up to the surprise of most seesmic users.
During the Indiana Jones event in Cannes, there was regular communication to the public timeline from a regular seesmic user, @Sizemore, leading us through the preparation and execution of his efforts to capture the stars of Indiana Jones via Seesmic.
By handling things this way, with a slow buildup to the event, seesmic users felt a part of the action and were prepared for the eventual onslaught of videos that would come along. As an added bonus, Seesmic users got the opportunity to converse with the stars of the film.
Is this an isolated issue that will only pop up when PR stunts are done via the Seesmic widget?
I think not. Here’s why…
I recall a few conversations i’d had with some deaf seesmic users. They were frustrated that the seesmic widget they were deploying on their sites was attracting users who didn’t know sign language and this, from outside of their sites. These users were encountering the same design flaw that was creating friction between the x-files fan base and the seesmic user community.
i’m not sure who or why the seesmic widget was designed this way. I’d expect that my putting a seesmic widget on my blog for my readers, only my blog readers will see the video and it’s associated comments.
Instead, the seesmic widget behavior [today] is that my video and any comments that are recorded on my blog are also streamed to another site for it’s users to review and comment.
Do you see the potential for conflict?
There are some communities that don’t want people outside of their boundaries to comment on their content. There are other communities that would rather avoid having to educate or deal with people unfamiliar with their lingua franca.
This behavior of the current seesmic widget is confusing at best and problematic enough, for some, to pass over.
If nothing else, it’s fascinating to note how the design choices of a software development team can result in a petrie dish of data to social psychologists.
Kurt Lewin would be having a field day with this.
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-we switch the public timeline to following timeline by default
-we give our members more context on where the videos are coming from.
the intention was that the community could also participate on the Xfiles conversation, obviously it did not work as expected even though some old time members like Frieda loved to see the new faces and welcomed them.
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