Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Social media is a deeply personal ecosystem that I lovingly refer to as the EGOsystem. As such, there is a “me” is social media for a reason. It is quite literally a world in which we are at the center of our online experiences, a place where everything and everyone revolves around us.

Placing ourselves in the role of this emerging social consumer for a moment, brands, businesses, and media aren’t sure how to see or reach us directly yet. We’re lured through creative attempts to follow them on Twitter or “Like” them on Facebook. But for the most part in social media, we are faceless consumers brought only to life through avatars, bios and a history of our online activities and connections.

Sometimes we’re part of demographic studies where we’re grouped by age, income, gender, education, etc.. Sometimes, we’re part of psychographic studies where we’re grouped by commonalities, shared interests and passions, and themes. And often, we’re lumped together through keyword mentions or online influence scores. But the real question is, who are we online and what makes us connect, share, and live online? Finding these answers is revealing and hopefully, inspiring.

If ignorance is bliss, awareness is enlightening…

Behaviorgraphics

Last year, I teamed up with my good friends at the JESS3 creative agency run by Jesse Thomas and Leslie Bradshaw to capture the essence of how and why people were “living in public.” The characteristics of online behavior were diverse to say the least. However, I documented recurring traits and organized them into 18 categories.

I’m happy to share that Behaviorgraphics is now available as a free high resdownload and also as a 22 x 28 poster.

Click below for various sizes(free):

1. Presentation/Slide

2. High Resolution

3. Poster

Which one/s are you?

At the center is Benevolence – The unselfish and kindhearted behavior that engenders and promotes recognition and reciprocity, and in doing so, earns the goodwill of those around them. This is the hub of social networking with a purpose, mission, and a genuine intent to grow communities based on trust, vision, and collaboration.

Problem Solvers – One of the most common sources of conversations and updates in social media are questions…people seeking information in the hopes that commenters will respond with resolution or direction.

Commenters – Providing thoughts, opinions, observations, experiences, and sometimes, unfiltered reactions to the information shared online. They are less likely to produce original content, but are compelled to share their views based on the introduction of content by others in and around their social graph.

Researchers – Peer to peer influence is prominent in social networks and researchers rely on their social graphs for information and direction to make qualified decisions. They are also active in championing polls and surveys to truly learn about the thoughts and opinions of those connected to them.

Conversationalists – Participation in conversations through proactive updates seeking responses or direct responses to other content, conversationalists fuel threads within and across networks.

Curators – In the context of behaviorgraphics, curators carry a different role. This group works diligently to find and only share what captivates them as filtered by what they believe will interest their followers.

Producers – Among the more elite group of online participants, their stature is earned by the amount of content they generate within multiple networks.

Broadcasters – Social media is proving to be both an effective broadcast and conversational platform. Broadcasters are mostly one-way communicators who either intentionally or unintentionally push information to followers without injecting conversational aspects into the mix.

Marketers – Profiles dedicated to marketing ideas, products, or services and may or may not include content outside of their portfolio, unless the account is focused on funneling beneficial and value-added solutions to specific audiences regardless of origin.

Socialites – Individuals who have earned varying levels of weblebrity, these new internet famous personae earn recognition and attention in online networks which is increasingly spilling over in real world fame.

Self-promoters – Unlike broadcasters and marketers, self-promoters are unconcealed in their intentions through constant updating of activities, events, and accomplishments.

Egocasters – Contribute to the “ego” in the egosystem and represent the evolution of self-promoters. Through constant promotion and the activities and responses that ensue, promoters graduate to a position of perceived prominence and collective unawareness.  What they think and say is what they believe to be the reality for one and for all. They lose touch with perspective as listening gives way to telling…

Observers – Often referred to as inactives, lurkers, or simply consumers, Observers represent the majority of the social Web today, defined by those who read and also share information in the backchannel, including email, and also in the real world.

Social Climbers – Social capital is not only something that is earned in social networking, it is something that is proactively pursued by those whose sole mission is to rise to the top. These individuals intentionally climb ladders on the avatars, profiles, and social capital of others most often misrepresenting their purpose and stature to earn an audience based on disingenuous intentions.

TMI – The things some share in social media continue to blur the line between what’s relegated to inner monologue versus that for sharing with others in public. The state of sharing “Too much information” is dictated by those on the receiving end of the update, not those who publish it.

Spammers – Those accounts and profiles that are created to push messages blindly and without regard for those with whom they come into contact. Often times they’re tied to current events (using trending keywords or hashtags) or targeting influential voices to lure them into clicking through to their desired goal.

Leachers -Not included in the graph, but an important category to recognize as leachers take the good work of others and channel it into their own accounts almost exclusively for the sake of promoting their cause.

Complainers – When we love something, we tell a few people; when something bothers us, we tell everyone.  Complainers are often sharing their discontent as a primary ingredient in their social stream. And, as customer service takes to the social web, these complainers are only encouraged to share their experiences to achieve satisfaction and earn recognition for their role as the new social customer.

From robotics to space research, from physics to computer science, the Internet is a vast trove of information about the sciences. Resources such as Wikipedia (and its easy-on-younger-minds counterpart, Simple English Wikipedia) and online video make the process of learning about and teaching science subjects much easier than ever before.

Rather than resorting to yet another 600-page textbook, next time you’re hard up for understanding or inspiration, check out one of these six websites that offer information on the sciences. And particularly if you’re a scientist or educator yourself, let us know in the comments where you hang out online to learn about and discuss your favorite science topics.

1. Scitable

If genetics and evolution are of interest to you, Scitable is a must-see resource. This free (paid for by sponsorships from brands) science library acts as a classroom resource as well as a personal learning tool. The site comes from Nature Publishing Group, a reputable publisher of science-related materials. Users can pursue topics in learning paths or build online classrooms of their own. The site has an “ask the expert” feature that is staffed by four internal PhDs who help students answer series of questions with a turnaround time of less than 48 hours. Most importantly, the articles and information on this site are peer-reviewed for journal-level quality.

Cool Fact: “Genetic drift describes random fluctuations in allele frequencies in populations, which can eventually cause a population of organisms to be genetically distinct from its original population and result in the formation of a new species.”

Must-See Page: Student Voices, a blog about science by students, for students.

2. iTunes U

More than 600 universities — including Stanford, Yale and MIT — distribute lectures, slideshows, PDFs, films, exhibit tours and audiobooks through the iTunes Store. The U also includes content from public broadcasting outlets and public libraries. For educators, iTunes U can be useful for the distribution of syllabi, notes, schedules and other important documents. The Science section contains multimedia content on topics including agriculture, astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, ecology and geography. Beware: iTunes U just might be the most education time sink since WikipediaWikipedia.

Cool Fact: “This immense machine will recreate, on a tiny scale, conditions that existed just after the Big Bang. It is hoped that the Large Hadron Collider will provide a glimpse of the theoretical Higgs boson and explain the origin of mass.”

Must-See Page: A series of lectures on entomology, the study of insects, from Texas A&M.

3. Space.com

If the firmament is your thing, look no further than Space.com. This site is a massive repository of information on the heavenly bodies, including space flight missions and space-related technologies. Multimedia features let users watch videos of solar eruptions or view galleries of photographs of Saturn’s rings. A team of space news veterans also present the weekly video series, “This Week in Space.”

Cool Fact: “Future satellites could deploy solar sails to help take down pieces of space junk floating around Earth and a tiny new spacecraft hopes to make it possible.”

Must-See Page: For the stargazers, a calendar of celestial events that will take place in 2010.

4. Scientific American

With subtopics in the categories of basic science, space, medicine, energy, evolution and more, Scientific American’s website is one of the most thorough resources available online for learning and teaching science. The site also hosts a bevy of blogs and 60-second podcasts — perfect supplements to the well-rounded roster of news articles and in-depth features offered. And of course, an important aspect of the site is its link to and content from Scientific American magazine.

Cool Fact: “Feathers developed differently in dinosaurs’ life cycles than in those of modern birds. A rare fossil find of two young feathered theropods has revealed that these animals sprouted a much wider range of plumage as they matured than contemporary birds do.”

Must-See Page: Expeditions, field notes from the far edges of exploration.

5. PhysicsCentral

Physics is a topic of fascination for many curious minds, young and old. This site, a product of the American Physical Society, offers features that help researchers communicate their passion for physics to students of all ages. PhysicsCentral offers a hub of information, from how physics makes the world around us “work” to how physics applies to current events, with a decidedly kid-friendly bent.

Cool Fact: “A free-floating ball of plasma (electrically charged gas) is created when electricity is discharged into a solution.”

Must-See Page: Physics in Pictures features exciting illustrations of nature’s infinite variety and humankind’s ingenuity.

6. Learn About Robots

This resource is more 1.0 than the rest of the community-oriented, feature-rich sites we’re exploring today, but we can’t resist a site that’s all about robots. Most robotics sites cater to postgraduate academics or hobbyists and professionals in the field of robotics. For the casual and curious learner, this site is a great starting point. It features a not-so-frequently updated but still fascinating blog as well as encyclopedic information given in formats that are simple to digest and understand. The site houses sections on undersea and airborne robots, on nuclear and military robots, on space robots, and on the basics of how robots work and who builds them. In short, if you want to know more about a particular area of robotics, Learn About Robots is a good jumping-off point to explore the web for more information.

Cool Fact: “The folks working on the first atomic bombs pretty much defined telerobotics in this country. They had no other way of working with the radioactive materials.”

Must-See Page: Jobs in Robotics , a fascinating read for the young and ambitious… or unemployed and curious.

Leonardo Da Vinci once wrote, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Kelly Johnson modernized that philosophy with an alternate twist, KISS, Keep it Simple, Stupid a.k.a. Keep it Short and Simple.

In a social economy where attention is a precious commodity, the ability to strip a social object down to its essence to capture attention has less to do with compacting character counts and more to do with the art and science of packaging and presenting content so that it is immediately compelling, simple to grasp and appreciate and in turn, share across social graphs.

For participants in the socialization of media, an ever-thinning attention span is forcing the rapid evolution of our ability to multitask – albeit at shallow depths.  Cognition is thereby stimulated by relevance, simplicity, and in social networks, the objects and content screened and shared by peers.

In Twitter, we learned that there is indeed an art to ReTweets and to increase the likelihood for tweets to spread, the words and times we choose dictate their lifespan and ultimately, fate. To examine social objects and how they affect sharing in Facebook, I once again reached out to my friend and social scientist, Dan Zarrella.

Zarrella studied Facebook data for quite some time and observed that simplicity, among other interesting linguistic and timed attributes, is the key to triggering word of mouth.

Readability’s Effects on Sharing in Facebook

With a view from the top, we can see that Facebook sharing is enhanced by simple language and thus modernizes the old adage KISS to now represent Keep it Simple and “Shareable.”

In his research, Zarrella examined article titles and matched the propensity for sharing with reading grade levels. The results were revealing to say the least. Essentially, the higher the share rates, the lower the reading grade level, with notable spikes resonating at fifth and ninth grades.

Numerical Value

For those looking to capitalize on propagating your content in Facebook, although the same could be true in other online mediums, consider the addition of digits to your titles.

Yes, there’s a reason why we as content consumers, are duped into reading and distributing social objects with numerical digits in the headline. For example, the title of this article is intentional “7 Scientific Ways to Promote Sharing on Facebook.“  Social science now shows that there’s a reason why articles with similar titles consistently perform well.

In Facebook, titles with digits (1-9) outperform text only titles. As much as I’d like to see more originality in and creativity in the school of compelling headline writing, the numbers add up to make a strong case for considering alternatives.

Carpe Diem

Similar to Twitter, there are days and times where we as content consumers transform into curators by sharing relevant content objects.

Whereas on Twitter, RT’s occur most often on Monday and Friday, Facebook users seem most likely to share on Saturdays and Sundays. It’s important to note here that while sharing is notably higher on the weekend, the volume of URLs introduced into Facebook are higher during weekdays, most notably Wednesdays and Fridays.  However, as Zarrella observed, stories published on the weekends tended to be shared on Facebook on average, more than those published during the week. This could be due in part to the fact that more than half of businesses in the U.S. block Facebook and other social networks in the workplace. But then again, if this were true, the science of retweets would also prove otherwise.

Personally, I’ve experimented with this over the last couple of years. Indeed, content introduced on Twitter, tends to spark greater reactions during the week, with Monday and Wednesday and Friday in particular. However, when I withhold the same object and introduce it to my social graph in Facebook on Saturday morning, responses are far more notable.

What Are Words For, When No One Listens Anymore

The act of sharing implies so much more than curation. When we “Like” or share content in Facebook, we are essentially endorsing it and as such, recommending it to friends and followers to act and react.

The words we intentionally or unintentionally surround the objects we share result in either relevance or irrelevance.

While current events play a role defining the most shareable content, truly, experiential words such as “why,” “most,” “world,” and “how” trigger the greatest volume of shares in aggregate. However, when viewing the activity of words in isolation of sharing events, “you” and “video” prove extremely noteworthy.

When words aren’t working for you, they’re working against you. As documented, certain words serve as inhibitors to sharing, closing the attention aperture before content has an opportunity to breathe. According to Zarrella’s research, the least shareable words include expressions I would not have otherwise guessed, including “review,” “poll,” and “social.” Among the least shareable words however, the following terms are introduced with greater frequency, however do not engender the desired outcome, “time,” “Twitter,” and “live.”

Action Speaks Louder Than Words

Part-of-speech also lends to the shareability of social object. Much like Tweets or any other update in the “statusphere,” brevity serves as a framework for what we introduce into the stream.

Seems that we have proof that actions speak louder than words, or at the very least, verbs as action words appear to motivate sharing with important nouns following in second. As to be expected, there are a greater number of nouns introduced into updates, however, it is verbs that imply action and therefore the right verbs compel us to share. Adjectives and adverbs appear to be among the least shared parts-of-speech in Facebook as our attention spans are trained to look beyond promotion or hyperbole.

The Glass is Half Full

The effect of linguistic content and the tone of updates and objects introduced in Facebook say everything about you. At the same time, determine whether someone reads, ignores, and more importantly, shares what they encounter.

Negative updates are among the least shared objects with positive sentiment and words sitting on the opposite end, prove to be among the most shared. It’s interesting to note that a greater number of negative updates are introduced into NewsFeeds than those that are positive. I suppose it’s to be expected, but sex is at the very top of the list and also among the least often introduced into social feeds. I’m also pleasantly surprised and encouraged to see learning, media, work and constructive in the company of shareable linguistic performers.

There are times where the content we introduce into the activity feeds of those in our social graph is intended to inspire sharing across the graphs of friends and friends of friends. Consider the science and then craft the update to employ it to your benefit – and hopefully the benefit of others.

Antione de Saint Exupéry observed, “Perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Please consider reading my new book, Engage!

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