Phil Pearlman

My aunt Ookie called and told me she had a great strategy for businesses who wanted to get on Twitter.

I am kidding of course but it does seem like everyone is chiming in with what businesses should be or need to be doing to enhance their public relations or customer service or to gain followers or get their message out or whatever.

The truth is all organizations are distinct and so they have different needs and goals and must approach the medium differently.  There are an infinite number of variables which will demand an infinite number of strategies.  The size of the business, the product for sale, the customer base, the stage of the company, the revenue model, the brand image etc.

So I can not provide one golden post which defines what all businesses should or should not be doing.  No one can because it will always be different.

What I can do though is identify a critical common factor.  That is, one quality which cuts across all company specific variables, all goals and all strategies.

And that is to Just Be Awesome.

You want to be awesome by generously providing the best information in a way that is captivating and to do so consistently over time.

It doesn’t matter what you are selling, if you have an area of expertise then share it and then keep on sharing it.  If you can’t communicate effectively then find someone in the organization who can.

Twitter provides the potential to impart information with a global audience for every vertical no matter how narrow and as a result organically promotes meritocracy.

Just being awesome will bring you credibility and trust and everyone who is interested in your field from customers to potential customers to journalists to prospective employees will become aware of your awesomeness and seek you out over the long run.

You will build brand.

Here is the link to the SIIA Panel discussion I pariticipated in moderated by @graubart with @harrisj, @pop17 on “Why Twitter Matters.

This was a great bunch and a lot of fun.

A while back I wrote a post about how Twitter had created an optimal relational field, fertile soil upon which others might grow vertical communities by adding a bit more structure.

By promoting an intuitive fairness, clarity in relationship dynamics and balance between control and freedom, it has managed to get the next phase of global connectedness just about right.

Since then, I have indeed observed not only the broad Twitter community continue to grow rapidly but the velocity of new communities sprouting on this field accelerate.

Now I would like to take a moment to focus on the other side of this equation and to discuss how these new communities might want to position themselves at least initially.  If you are building social applications atop Twitter this might serve as some guidance…

Keep first iteration extremely simple and flexible. This trumps more features by a long shot.

Twitter is becoming huge by keeping their platform simple and flexible and the fierce loyalty of the community even in the face of the fail whale is a testament to this fact.

And, while many social media experts continue to flaw Twitter for not adding this bell or that whistle, new users keep showing up and old users keep coming back.

The people get it.

They have come to rightly adore and crave this simplicity so you can add features later once you have a viral product.

People are social and they want to connect on a field that provides structure but not too much structure, freedom but not chaos and clear and fair relational rules.

Define crisply a narrow service or vertical and do little more than make that one thing awesome and you will thrive by unobtrusively fostering communication and connection to your user’s delight.

When people interact, very little attention is paid to the spaces between them, the field upon which they are interacting.  Nevertheless, this space is an incredibly important part of the interaction. The energy behind the correspondence, the relationship of the participants, the implicit rules of the setting, the physical surroundings…

I call the space in between people’s interactions the relational field.  Im borrowing the phrase from relational psychology which posits that humans are inherently social and that  no personality exists independent of relationships. Think about it, the dependent personality must have others to lean on and the domineering personality must have others to boss around and so on..

A few years ago on my old blog I used a baseball diamond as a metaphor for the optimal relational field:

In the movie The Field of Dreams, the baseball diamond serves as a rich metaphor precisely because the one the Kinsellas build in their corn field carries with it relational meaning - from being a place where a ball is thrown back and forth purposely between members of a team to representing a game where countless fathers and sons have bonded both literally in games of catch to figuratively in their inherited common interest in the home team..The baseball diamond contains many attributes inherent in the constructive relational field. It is a simple space with clean lines and defined dimensions while at the same time connoting openness and free space where team members can chase down fly balls or slide in the dirt.  The diamond wonderfully balances structure and freedom, a fundamental dialectic in human relations.


I bring all this up because I like to think of the online social network as a relational field as it too is the space within which people interact. I think by framing the socnet as such I can glean some insight into structure, process, function and ultimately optimality.

The optimal relational field

The relational field has attributes such as clarity, contingency, complexity and structure and relational psychologists know a good bit about how the qualities of these features affect the development of relationships. 

The optimal relational field is one that has the potential to foster enduring authentic relationships. It is defined by clarity and a balance between a control and freedom dialectic.  Clarity implies that the rules of the field are understandable and contingent.  That is, the participants get the rules and sense that there is an internal fairness to them. 

Balance within a control and freedom dialectic implies that there is enough structure to maintain the field while at the same time allowing for the participants to express themselves authentically and without fear of noncontingent retribution.

Twitter as an Optimal Relational Field

Its my sense that a primary (and not yet discussed) reason why twitter has grown so quickly and produced so many loyal participants is that it provides the closest we have seen yet to an optimal relational field among the online social networks.

To begin, the level of clarity is high.  That is, everyone understands the rules.  If you are interested, you can follow someone and she can freely choose to reciprocate or not.  Likewise, someone, if she is interested, can choose to follow you and you can choose to reciprocate or not.  Further, while the default is openness one has the choice to prefer and adopt a higher degree of privacy by either choosing a private account or blocking specific followers.  This is simple, straightforward and intuitively reasonable.

Next, the dialectic between control and freedom is well balanced.  On the one hand, there is a clear structure to the site as expressed in the above paragraph, but on the other hand, there is also an incredible openness in terms of what can be discussed, shared, linked and retweeted.  As I wrote above,

It is a simple space with clean lines and defined dimensions while at the same time connoting openness and free space where team members can chase down fly balls or slide in the dirt.

The optimal nature of Twitter as a relational field is one of the critical reasons why the platform is growing quickly.  The balance of the control/freedom dialectic fosters an environment which allows for connection with others and a broad range of types of communications.  It is no surprise we are finding so much innovation atop the platform, such fertile soil…