The new meme is the stream, and it’s being taken to the extreme. With Twitter growth exploding, Facebook redesigned its home page to be more Twitter-like: a stream of everything you (never?) wanted to know about your friends. Now Friendfeed has also redesigned to provide a live stream of updates.

The problem with streams is that they rapidly become overwhelming floods as more and more people participate. In theory, the more people I connect with, the more valuable Facebook and Twitter should become to me. In theory, the more reviews or user-generated content I see on a site, the more credible and usable it is.

Unfortunately, reality is quite different. Streams don’t scale, because I simply can’t keep up with the torrent of content. Useful, interesting stuff from my friends scrolls off-screen, pushed aside by fresh updates on just how tasty that hamburger was.

Jeremiah Owyang nailed it by saying, “An incredible amount of hay is created with very few needles.”

The question of 2009 is this: How do we create better magnets for finding the needles? How do we help people increase the signal and reduce the noise? If Phase 1 of social media was to get people talking, Phase 2 is the curation of all that conversation.

There will be many tools for social media curation, each more successful when combined with others. Keep your eyes on these areas:

• Personal curation: Right now, I have no way of filtering out sports content from my Facebook stream or reading movie reviews only from sci-fi lovers. But semantic analysis of content is getting better, and the result will be increased control for people who want to manage the stream themselves.
• Social curation: We’ll increasingly trust the crowd to help us find the valuable needles. This is already happening in tiny ways, such as prioritizing Amazon reviews that get the most “helpful” votes. Look for a profound increase in tools that help us better filter for each other.
• Professional curation: Steven Johnson’s vision of the future of news is a powerful reminder that we already have people who are great at curation. Professionals in many industries (including journalism) might now be creating less content in the face of all the user-generated content, but they are incredibly valuable at collecting, validating, prioritizing, and publishing all that newfangled social content. I’d love to have Samantha Brown’s help sifting through hundreds of TripAdvisor hotel reviews.

Those of us who already live in the stream need to keep in mind that we’re not, well, normal. We splash around joyously in the cacophony of voices and don’t always mind being overwhelmed. But if we truly believe in the value of social media and want to take it mainstream, we need to work hard on the curation problem. We need to bring meaning and sense to the raw data of social media so that it’s easier to digest and use.

The recently launched Facebook Connect has been getting a lot of attention, but largely for the wrong reasons. Yes, it means people can use their Facebook logins on other sites, which saves users time and reduces the registration barrier. And yes, it means that people can broadcast their activity on other sites to their friends on Facebook, which as we know is an excellent way to broaden reach and increase brand awareness. These are both good things.

But Facebook Connect means more than this. It’s likely a transformational moment.

Go to the new Citysearch beta and sign in using your Facebook account to see what I mean. On the old Citysearch and the many other sites that incorporate ratings and reviews, forums, tags, wikis, and other user-generated content, the wisdom of crowds succeeds because, in general, people trust the advice of strangers. If 50 people have rated a restaurant, a consumer is fairly comfortable relying on that judgment.

Only one thing is even more trustworthy: the opinions of people I actually know. And that’s why sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Netflix have been rolling out their own social networks. When I consider a restaurant, hotel, or movie, I benefit from seeing my friends’ ratings first and foremost. The problem is that this requires consumers to manually reconnect with all their friends on each of these sites – or take the risk of uploading their address book, which many are reluctant to do. As a result, the social networks on those individual sites are used by a small percentage of visitors. My network of friends (i.e., my social graph) as it exists on Facebook hasn’t been portable.

Facebook Connect opens the floodgates. As more people in my Facebook network sign in to Citysearch using their Facebook logins, I see their reviews automatically, without having to reconnect with them. Seeing more of my friends’ reviews translates into increased usage, increased contributions, and increased loyalty. As more sites implement Facebook Connect (or its rival Google Friend Connect), my network completely changes: It’s no longer a single place I go to (Facebook), but a posse that follows me around wherever I go. Every product, every service, every purchase consideration online can be strengthened by my network. They’re the angels on my shoulder, wherever I go online.

Before, people had to put in some labor to reap the benefits of having an online social network. But now the level of effort drops. The benefits across sites rise. The number of participants grows. And a tipping point is at hand.

Dearest Marketers,

BusinessWeek is now talking about it. So is The New York Times. Mainstream companies are jumping on board, including recent entry Dunkin’ Donuts. And a bunch of CEOs are too. But please, my friends: Don’t ruin Twitter.

If I had to sum up the most important thing to know about marketing via Twitter (or via any social media tool, actually), it would be this: Market with your customers, not at them. Twitter is not a channel for pushing marketing messages. It is a platform for forming relationships. It’s not one-way, and it’s not even two-way. It’s where multi-way conversations happen and, if you do it right, where authentic conversation (not marketing speak) can lead to awareness, engagement, and loyalty.

For Molecular’s take on how you can use Twitter effectively, check out our article on iMediaConnection. For a list of useful Twitter-related tools, also click to this comprehensive list.

Something like 95% of all email is spam. When so many voices are yelling at customers, they simply stop listening. Let’s not do that to social media tools too.

During a recent presentation on social media, I was asked a question that still has me thinking weeks later. Someone asked if all these social media tools (blogs, tags, collaborative filtering, social networking sites, etc.) are harming us as a society because by their very nature they help us find people and content that reinforces what we already believe or like, rather than introducing us to new and unexpected ideas. The fear is that by following only people we agree with or products similar to what we already like, we could live a narrow existence and miss out on surprises or things that challenge us.

The question reminded me of a diagram from a few years back. Someone plotted political books based on how likely they were to be purchased together on Amazon and found a clear liberal vs. conservative divide. People tended to buy books that confirmed preexisting beliefs.

Do social media tools produce similar divides? Yes but no.

There are certainly some “Web 2.0″ elements that are intended to find similarities and could potentially limit serendipity. Any kind of collaborative filtering (“People who viewed/liked/bought X also viewed/liked/bought Y”) has this risk. If all the music I ever purchased were related to what I currently like, how would I ever be exposed to amazingly different artists? One can also argue that blogs can reinforce existing beliefs. I read Talking Points Memo, which points to other progressive blogs that keep me in a cocoon of Obama-loving sweetness. Do I care that I’m not reading conservative blogs also? No. Do I miss important ideas because my reading is limited? Probably.

But even if some of these social media tools can potentially constrict us, I believe they expand us far more. My liberal blogs expose me to ideas and news I never would have found on my own, including things outside my political beliefs. Forums focused on a particular narrow topic inevitably contain discussions that are far-reaching and broadening. Tags bring together certain items but also lead to unexpected connections.

And of course the best source of new ideas that expand us and challenge us is other people. Friends and relative strangers I’m connected to via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other sites generally happen because of some kind of connection I have with them: work, interest area, belief, social connection. But of course those relationships are never confined to what we share in common. The joy of social networking is the exposure to differences between us, to new ideas and knowledge that expand our minds.

The whole point of social media is to encourage dialogue between users and dialogue between organizations and their customers. How can it not expand everyone involved?

With many new online products and services, value isn’t clear at first glance. The value of a new site comes less from its positioning or intent and more from how people end up using it. And this value can take a while to emerge.

Twitter is currently in the throes of this gray area of value evolution. Some people swear by it as social glue they couldn’t live without. Some people are bored by the mindless trivia of what their distant acquaintances had for breakfast. Others have no idea what to think about Twitter’s relatively fast growth (despite serious lingering performance issues).

Like any new communications platform that becomes popular, Twitter is under the increasingly curious gaze of marketers. Companies such as JetBlue, Dell Outlet, and Salesforce are dipping their toes in the water to see if this could be another effective marketing and communications channel. On the one hand, it offers the ability to distribute short, attention-grabbing messages that can engage consumers and keep your brand top of mind. On the other hand, it requires real effort to create a Twitter stream that has real value and that opens up an authentic dialog with customers.

We’ll all be paying attention as marketers begin to play in this space. But one truth seems guaranteed: Those who treat Twitter as a platform for true two-way conversations are more likely to succeed than those who think of Twitter as merely one-way messaging. These new communication channels are not about pushing your message out – they’re about engaging and interacting with customers.

Twitter has the momentum, but copycats are trying to push this concept further. Check out Plurk as an example.

So you probably heard about the chaos and hilarity that was the Mark Zuckerberg keynote at SXSW. If you haven’t, check out the Wired News coverage or Valleywag chatter, or just watch the video.

The firsthand experience was bizarre. My take is that Zuckerberg was lucky that BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy was such a bad interviewer, because otherwise the attention would have been more on him and his utterly unengaging wall of silence. The guy had little to say and resorted to repetitive platitudes. If he were my CEO, I’d be worried. I know, I know, he’s only 23. But he needs more coaching fast.

Sarah Lacy made me wince continously. Like, she’s like a flirty 13-year-old and comes across as, like, soooo unprofessional. Like, you know? I know this informal valley girl interview style is in vogue, but the lack of content and expertise was embarrassing. Stop giggling and ask real questions.

And OK, the crowd overreacted. She deserved criticism, but not real-time cruelty. The SXSW audience is more demanding and impatient with BS, no doubt. It was fascinating to see it unfold in person.

Interesting broader coverage about the participation of the conference crowd: “SXSW: 2008, the Year the Audience Keynoted”

Not too many years ago, customer research was something many Web teams had to fight for. Companies were reluctant to invest time and money learning about their customers, because they thought their customer knowledge was already good enough.

Fortunately, times have changed. Organizations recognize that customer knowledge is a competitive advantage and a critical success factor, and Web teams can often find themselves drowning in research findings from interviews, focus groups, surveys, and the like.

It’s valuable to listen to users, but as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for. Listening to what users say can lead you in the wrong direction.

When a team at Sony was launching the boom box years ago, they held a focus group to decide the color. They had narrowed it down to black or yellow, and the focus group participants were unanimous in their recommendation: Yellow was dynamic, unique, and perfect for the marketplace. Sony thanked the participants and, in addition to paying them, mentioned that they could each pick up a free Sony boom box on the way out. There were two piles: black and yellow. Every single person took a black one.

What people say isn’t necessarily what they do.

Getting user opinions is always valuable, but it’s never enough. What people tell you in an interview or survey may not be what they actually do when using their site. People aren’t lying, they simply aren’t aware of everything that motivates and impacts them. That’s why behavioral research methods are so important. Usability tests enable you to observe behavior and see issues that users themselves might not even be aware of. Web analytics enable you to observe behavior patterns and problem areas that wouldn’t emerge any other way.

If all you’re doing for customer research is listening to what users tell you, you’re not really listening to everything they have to say.