Understanding Social Clatter ™
March 15, 2010 by Nate Winter
Social clatter ™ is a Pomegranate-coined term that describes the social "noise," or overabundance of content, being created by social media. In today’s article, I’ll explain this term and explore the social media landscape that created it.
Etymology
Social clatter isn’t an incredibly complex term, but its meaning has some nuances that I think are important to point out.
We all know what “social” means, and in the context of this term, it refers to social media. “Clatter” is where things get more interesting. Dictionary.com defines the noun “clatter” as “a rattling noise.” If we use the metaphor of social media as a conversation, social clatter is the unpleasant background noise that distracts us and makes it difficult to communicate.
“Clatter,” however, is also a verb meaning “to make a loud, rattling sound, as that produced by hard objects striking rapidly one against the other.” This understanding of the word introduces the idea of speed-- the rapid striking of objects. I think that’s extremely relevant here, where the immediacy of social media has lead to the constant acceleration in content creation. In the conversation of social media, clatter is noise that’s getting louder and more disruptive all the time.
Beyond all that, the word “clatter” looks and sounds like “clutter,” which adds another dimension to the meaning. Clutter illustrates the way that a large volume of content gets in the way of the conversations we’re actually trying to have using social media.
The Landscape
Now let’s look at how the state of social clatter developed. To do that, we begin with social media.
Social media is-- how to put this?-- big. The popularity of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are astounding. MySpace has more than 100 million monthly active users worldwide, 70 million in the U.S. alone. Facebook boasts more than 400 million active users, Twitter maintains over 75 million, and LinkedIn has over 50 million. And while these are some of the biggest social networks, they’re far from the only ones.
We can’t forget about blogs either. Written blogs, photo blogs, video blogs and more are key components of social media too. And there’s almost too many of them to count.
So, yeah, social media is big. And that means it yields an incredible amount of content--status updates, blog posts, comments, messages, photos, songs, videos, event invitations and much more. So who’s consuming all this content? As the users of social media, we’re consuming it all-- at least in theory. But in actuality not all of it is being consumed. We consume more than we care to at times, and we’re still missing out on some content we wish we’d read, watched and heard.
That, my friends, is the social media landscape that creates social clatter. It’s the point where the social media messages we use to share ideas and keep in touch have proliferated so much that we’re overwhelmed by the very volume of content we create. The sheer vastness of social media content has outgrown our ability to glean useful information from it.
As we saw in last month’s article “Innovations in Social Media,” advertising and ecommerce are now part of social media sites, bringing the clutter and clatter of commercial messaging into the social media realm.
What the Future Holds
One way to deal with social clatter is with social media monitoring tools. A basic example is something like LinkedIn Network Updates, automatic notifications that give you a quick overview of how people in your network are updating their LinkedIn profiles. But there are far more advanced tools now too. One example for businesses is Trendrr, a service that tracks references to brands and products in social media.
But there’s still a long way to go. Without a way to filter through the clatter and navigate easily to the content we really want, social media will perish. I view this challenge as a second phase in the evolution of social media. Now that social media has reached a critical mass, we must develop new tools, habits and mindsets to continue enjoying meaningful use of these tools.
What other services and tools have you encountered for overcoming social clatter?
