#1 takeaway from the Oklahoma Twitter Study

I’ve given it a lot of thought and the number one takeaway from the Oklahoma Twitter Study doesn’t have anything to do with Twitter and yet it is what I find most fascinating about social media. Are you ready…?

The number one takeaway from this study is that it was done at all (power of the crowd) and, without social media, we wouldn’t know anything about it unless the mainstream media picked it up. If they did, by the way, we wouldn’t be able to discuss it in this format.

Here are the facts:

Matt Galloway (@mattgalloway, #supergenius) is 5′ 6″* and spent days developing the code to pull the information needed for his study from the Twitter API (Matt and others, my apologies if I get any of the technical elements wrong) and spent more days fine tuning the queries. Then he spent weeks pulling the data. Once he had the data he spent even more days (maybe weeks) going over the data and then putting together a presentation to share the findings – his last push being an all-nighter posting his results at 5:37 a.m. (college students take note, you aint the only ones pulling all-nighters).

How many days and weeks did he dedicate to this? Too many if you ask his amazingly understanding wife, @hetty4.

How much will he get paid for his time? I might buy his next burger if he plays his cards right but probably not much more than that.

Here is what I find most fascinating – Matt doesn’t have a day job which is in any way related to social media or communication. In fact, he is a male stripper (okay, he isn’t but I think it adds a lot of character to the story if we went with it… in reality he is a tech guy. Your call on which path to follow) who has found his passion in social media. Back in the day when he was first writing on his blog The Basement and getting street cred and mentions from folks whom most social media wonks wish they could capture their attention if only for a split second. Bottom line, this isn’t the first time he has worked on a project of this sorts.**

So why did he do it? According to Matt the answer, “is always some variation of ‘because it was there”. It is the same reasons, in not so many words, millions of people work on projects, by them selves or collaboratively, just for the heck of it and then share it with the world for their benefit and to use as they see fit. It is the value of crowd sourcing, the value of creators who give their time, knowledge, opinions, etc. for altruistic reasons or because of intrinsic motivations. It is the value of social media and we have a first hand example of its power in Matt’s effort.

If you would like to hire Matt you can reach him through his twitter account. Apparently he is pretty cheap but I get the impression his price is going up by the hour.

* I know this from his about section on his website…

**this maybe the first time, in a long time, he has received 100% credit deserved for his hard work…