In times of yore, like last month, having a long username was a liability for getting "retweeted" because your Twitter nickname counted toward the character count in the retweet (which sounds like something Elmer Fudd would say to the troops do if being overrun by superior forces: Retweet! Retweet!). Twitter has recently added new functionality that makes the length of the username irrelevant, but I’m somewhat sorry they did. I think that this is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.

Under the new system, if I retweet something, it appears to my followers as if they’re suddently following that person. In my profile picture appearing in their stream, but the person I retweeted appearing out of nowhere in their stream. This is in theory good for the the person who wrote the original post, but not necessarily.

• From the end reader perspective. I find this confusing. Suddenly people I don’t know are appearing in my stream. Maybe I’m just not used to it, but I don’t particularly like that. On the plus side, I have instant one-click access to the original author’s information.
• From the retweeter’s perspective. I lose my identity. I may want to share something, but I may want my followers to know that it’s from me. On the plus side, I don’t have to edit a post down to fit into the 140-char limit.
• From the original author’s perspective. You might think there’s no downside here. Suddenly, there you are with your picture and everything in the stream of everyone who follows your beloved retweeter. The downside here is that you’ve mostly lost the benefits of social proof and the value of a retweet as a personal recommendation.

The last point bears some further comment. Let’s say I’m an author hoping to reach potential readers of my forthcoming book via Twitter (see Twitter for writers). I’m now injected picture and all into the user’s stream, which has to be better, right?

The problem is that the challenge is not in being available to the largest number of people, but in actually finding a way to cut through the noise. I delete at least half of my non-spam emails unopened and read at best 20% of what appears in my Twitter stream. And I follow very few people. I think the numbers are worse with someone who follows 200 or 2000 people. I tend to skim for the people I really want to read. More and more, Twitter applications let me filter into user lists, topic lists, and all sorts of things. So though I will always read something if it has @simplytheresa’s smiling face, on most days, I skip most people in my stream unless I’m in a serious procrastination mode. And to be clear, I’m not skipping people I actively dislike, because obviously I’m not following those people. I’m skipping anyone that I don’t really really really want to read, some days anyone who isn’t my wife. In other words, when
I’m skimming, it’s a whitelist algorithm, not a blacklist. I’m looking for people I actively want to read. If I’m not looking for you, you don’t get read. So if you someone retweets you with the native Twitter function, that means you. I don’t know you and I won’t read you.

It’s not clear what’s going to happen with the native Twitter. Most people use some third-party application to tweet from and that functionality is not included in most of them yet, though I suspect it will be soon. And then the next question is whether or not it will be widely adopted. I suspect it will.

So that leads to the important question: how can you get people to retweet old-style? In short, there’s not much you can do to positively encourage it. The best you can do is remove obstacles. Above all, that means making sure that your message stands on it’s own and doesn’t need editing to be retweeted.

Again, consider an author who wants to get the word out about his book, in part using Twitter. So if you’re giving a book reading, for example, that you announce on Twitter, you want your fans to be able to pass that on to their friends, which they will usually do with a "retweet". The old and still standard format is to take your message and copy it into their message and add "RT @yourname[space]".

Thankfully for Robert Louis Stevenson, he wasn’t trying to sell books in the Twitter era. By the time he leaves enough space for retweeting, he’s used up 25 characters, 18% of his total allotement. So he can’t tweet this 140 character message

I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8:30pm @ Moe’s in Berkeley

Because it would become

RT @RobertLouisStevenson I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8

Homer, on the other hand, would have it made.

RT @Homer I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Iliad this month – Dec 12, 7pm @ Book Passages, Corte Madera; Dec 14, 8pm at Moe’s in Berkeley

If at all possible, Robert Louis Stevenson would have wanted to get on Twitter day one to reserve RLS or at least RLStevenson. Regardless of the name, when composing a tweet that he wants retweeted, RLS would want to know his retweetable character count. The easy way to do this is to simply compose the post as a retweet, and then lop of the RT @RobertLouisStevenson part. Beyond that, people will do what they do and it remains to be seen whether the new interface features will overcome established practice. As I say, I suspect they will, and you’ll just have to live with it.

What do you think of the new Twitter Retweet function? Add a comment with your thumbs up or thumbs down.

This is the third part of the series on Weapons of Influence, based on Robert Cialdini’s book Influence, Part 1 discussed the principle of reciprocation; Part 2 covered the principle of commitment and consistency.

Social Proof

Birds of a feather, flock together. Or so we’ve been told. In other words, we like to be around people like us and we like to be like them. We also look to others for cues as to how to act. This explains a famous incident in New York where 38 witnesses heard a woman’s scream for help and did nothing. The failure of others to respond is a clue to us that the situation is not serious, we don’t need to respond either. Unfortunately, that cue, often reliable, cost the woman her life in this case. It turns out that you’re much better off if one person sees you being attacked or sees smoke coming from under a door than if a crowd of people do. If you do find yourself in a bad situation and there’s a crowd, use the word "help", look someone in the eye, point at that person and say "You, sir, in the red shirt, please help." General pleas to a crowd tend to go unanswered until one person responds, then the social proof works in the other direction and others will jump in to help.

The effects of social proof go beyond what I would have guessed. For example, in the months after a highly publicized suicide, the rate of airplane and automobile fatalities goes up significantly. This has been observed over long periods in large numbers and with numerous controls. Furthermore, if it’s a murder-suicide, it is more likely for multi-passenger airplane and multiple vehicle automobile fatalities to occur. If it’s a simple suicide, it correlated with single-victim crashes. After adding in numerous controls to the data, researchers were forced to conclude that these increased crashes were secret suicides. In a similar vein, after a heavyweight boxing championship bout, murder rates briefly rise around the country.

Back to how this is typically employed specifically to influence you, Cialdini looks at laugh tracks. Everyone polled says he or she hates canned laughter soundtracks on television shows. And yet, research shows that even though the canned laughter is obviously fake and we say we hate it, we find shows funnier if they include a laugh track because our subconscious mind can’t escape the fact that "others" are laughing so it must be funny. Similarly testimonials, even when it is obviously not a "natural" unsolicited testimonial, influences our decision to buy (and someday I have to tell the story of the Hansen’s soda lady trying to elicit a testimonial from me. I didn’t end up famous).

There are some crazy variations on the influence of social proof. For example, in a study by Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Polytechnic University, the researchers created two conditions: one where people heard several people express a given opinion once each and one where one person expressed an opinion several times. It turns out, that in both cases, respondents judged opinions to be popular based on the number of times they had heard the opinion, but did not adjust for the fact that in some cases it was actually an opinion expressed repeatedly by one person [1]. So strangely, we sometimes perceive social proof when what we’re really seeing is one persistent loudmouth. That’s a good lesson if you really want to get something done in your community, but it’s not so good if someone just has a big enough budget to broadcast that message at you 12 times per day.

How to Say No. First, remind yourself that the testimonial you’re seeing is quite possibly faked. Large numbers of review sites on the web are laden with fake reviews. If you don’t have a reason to trust the testimonial, don’t. Second, don’t assume that if a lot of people are doing something, they must have information that you don’t (that’s not a person in a diabetic coma who needs help, but a drunk sleeping it off in the gutter). I must say, I don’t think Cialdini has read Kierkegaard, because he grappled with this question over 150 years ago with his famous ruminations on Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, knowing that this was a solitary and unjustifiable act. Kierkegaard believed that only "the crowd" could have executed Christ and that if each person had had to face Christ alone, one at a time, he would never have been crucified. Kierkegaard argued that truth is subjectivity, not objectivity and that when you side with the crowd, you cannot know if your decisions are moral
or true. It doesn’t make them immoral, it’s just that you don’t know. So Kierkegaard’s philosophy implies a simple question: what would I do if I had to make this decision with nobody else around? What would I do if everyone else were doing the opposite of what they are doing now? In other words, if everyone wanted to honor Christ, would I still vote to crucify? If everyone was rushing around in a panic because there was smoke coming from under a door, would I calmly walk past? Are my actions conditioned by the crowd, or by my sense of what I should do in this situation? I think Cialdini finds it impractical to pose such questions every minute of the day and that may be why he doesn’t invoke Kierkegaard. I cite Kierkegaard because I like to pretend I’ve actually read Kierkegaard instead of just heard about him on Jeopardy. Don’t tell Alex Trebeck.

[1]"Everyone Agrees", but Melinda Warner, Scientific American Mind, Aug/Sept 2007 (vol. 18, no. 4), p. 13.