Comments on: Twitter : Where Are The Normal People?

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:47:04 +0000

I wouldn’t really count people I “know” purely on Twitter as friends. If I’ve had significant contact in person or via the phone then I might call them friends, but a brief exchange on Twitter really doesn’t count for me.

By: Daniel Sullivan

Daniel Sullivan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:10:58 +0000

Sinead, where here was it said that all bloggers were IT people? I suspect that people are saying that X was said and reacting to that instead of responding to what was actually said.

By: Niall Harbison

Niall Harbison — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:40:30 +0000

Yeah pretty sure Bloggers can and do come from all walks of life. It takes a certain type of person to Twitter or Blog but they certainly can’t be pigeon holed into chefs, or techies or journos etc. Generally a large percentage of people just have no interest in having their voice heard and prefer to have their thoughts kept private.

Sinead I would agree with the research as it just seems like blogs are popping up all over the place in Ireland these days and it has moved well beyond tech at this stage

By: Sinéad

Sinéad — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:37:12 +0000

There was a piece of research conducted by DCU in 2006 which found that blogging in Ireland was dominated by members of the IT industry, but in the last 3 years this has shifted significantly (going from over 90% to only 30%).

Yes it might still be “wholly unrepresentative of the wider national population” but it still doesn’t make it right to describe all bloggers as IT people and is an interesting statistic to look at when considering future trends.

By: Daniel Sullivan

Daniel Sullivan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:11:55 +0000

Sinead, if the numbers were exclusive to one another then 47% of bloggers being from the tech or media worlds would be wholly unrepresentative of the wider national population.

Again, I’ll beat the drum of there being no online communities. There are communities of people who are online but no online communities. There is no twitter or blogging community. As for rationality, tweeting and being on twitter are not necessarily the same thing. There would appear a significant listener population on twitter who aren’t much interested in tweeting themselves but are inclined to follow. The lurker/listener phenomena has been known about from much early research work on various bulletin-boards.

By: Sinéad

Sinéad — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:05:47 +0000

Some of the comments here suggest that most Twitter users are bloggers, and have some involvement in either the IT or the media sector, but from my own research on Irish bloggers I found that there was no link between being involved with IT and the inclination to blog. In fact, I found that only 30% of Irish bloggers were coming from the IT industry and only 17% were coming from the Media sector.

So where do the rest fit in? Geeks? Social misfits? Normals?

These are totally different categories/descriptions from “publishers” or “marketer” etc. and are unfair speculations with regard to personality types. Besides, most research has shown that extroverted people are just as attracted to computer mediated communications as introverted ones. Also, being a geek these days is far more “normal” than it’s ever been and it’s meaning has dramatically changed too.

Members of online communities often make the assumption that they have a thorough understanding and awareness of the online landscape and who travels through it. However, Twitter is not an ideal landscape to navigate in an attempt to discover individuals outside of your own community, so it’s even easier to make assumptions like the ones above.

Is it not more rational to assume that those who tweet have something to say, and those who don’t, don’t?

By: Niall Harbison

Niall Harbison — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:26:56 +0000

Yes John I can confirm having seen you up close and personal that you are indeed normal

By: mcawilliams

mcawilliams — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:47:10 +0000

I am normal!

By: ROSEMARY MAC CABE » Twitterific

ROSEMARY MAC CABE » Twitterific — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:02:43 +0000

[...] an addendum, check out this interesting debate going on at Simply Zesty. And above all, get on Twitter – you don’t know what [...]

By: Anton Mannering

Anton Mannering — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:05:48 +0000

Anyone who uses any new tool without at least observing what others are doing first (if not taking instruction) and then proceeds without caution is a fool and deserves the results. Imagine using a hammer that way!!!
I would suggest this is an indicator of a business that has far bigger problems than it’s misuse of twitter.

By: Daniel Sullivan

Daniel Sullivan — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:40:41 +0000

Daragh, the problem with the use of words like normal is that they have rather correct meanings in the world of maths from which they come but have often come to be understand as meaning something else when in fact they don’t. Average is another word that gets misused. And average and normal aren’t the same either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

So what is normal is that which is clustered around the middle of a distribution. The distribution could be made up of interests, income, age, educational background, musical tastes whatever you like. Since people are made up of a variety of unique characteristics it is actually quite hard for anyone to be ‘normal’ for all measurable behaviours and activities along with other characteristics. So to be normal you need to like what most other people like and do what most other people do, and using twitter is not something that most people other than yourself are doing. Hence, you are not normal, nor am I. Almost no one is completely normal but when it commons to twitter as in this case, with most people not using it then they are by definition normal and those of using it are not normal.

My apologies for the pedantic nature of the reply but I’m an engineer not a sociologist and some words really do mean what they mean.

By: Niall Harbison

Niall Harbison — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:01:01 +0000

Ah the steep learning curve is that it can go massively wrong for some people at the start just coming in to sell, sell sell and plenty of people get called C*nts for taking their first steps and making small mistakes. What gets me the most is that every client we speak to these days wants to only talk about Twitter as if it is some sort of magical tool that will fill sell all their products. There is so so much more to social media than that and you are right that no point talking if nobody listening

By: Colm

Colm — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:00:15 +0000

jeepers – major hoo haa over this one Niall!
c’mon lads – if you look beyond what is probably a bad turn of phrase (i.e. normal people) and focus in on the point Niall is making – there is a lot validity to it. I also have a lot of tech savvy friends who just don’t use twitter at all – and some of those are very geeky too. Twitter has higher barriers to entry in my view aswell. Facebook et al. have higher engagement rates and therefore more users and more active users because the main conduit to use it is facebook.com – when people first use twitter.com they don’t see the value of twitter. For me, it was only when I got an iphone and started using one of the many twitter iphone clients that I truly started to appreciate the value of twitter.
An interesting segway would be to find out twitter usage amongst iphone users – my guess would be that it would be considerably higher than overall usage.

By: Darragh

Darragh — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:56:24 +0000

Okay, so if we just take you as an example – “you like interacting with people online” – I assume you saw you could do that, you gave it a go and it worked out for you. Not all your tweets are geeky/pimping/linking – there’s a lot of you in there. For the most part though, you spent time on it because it proved of value.

The simple fact is – not many people do the same.

Look at Skype as a perfect example – possibly the cheapest phonecalls on the planet and yet most people (including me) don’t use it. Why? Haven’t tried it or spent time learning it.

I don’t think everyone should be on twitter. Just like not everyone needs a mobile phone. Or a camera. Or a website. I do think though that showing people how to use it, how it could be relevant to them and what it could mean for them is a great start.

By: Niall Harbison

Niall Harbison — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 18:37:31 +0000

I have lived online for 3 years and would consider myself a “geek”. It would have been kind of hard to miss it. I am attracted to it as I like interacting with people online