This afternoon I found myself a fly on the wall listening to two very insightful, and intelligent women discuss the nature of systems, chaos theory, sustainability and social media. It was quite a delightful surprise.
One of the women was working to become a consultant of some sort, marketing and business development for sustainable, or non-profit causes, while the other was a Ph.D. in economics whom recently wrote a short (twitter-esk) book on leadership (and consequently was marketing herself via social media).
Anyway, as the two bounced various ideas off one another I understood that while there is this group of people that do in fact realize social media, and the chaos of its system (aka you can’t control it!), they still are unaware of how to use it. They commented that it mostly works for people who are all about “self-promotion” and I have to tend to agree with them to some degree.
Facebook for example, can be a very narcissistic social application. Once you have befriended this person, that person, and their mother it can become more about a constant and detailed account of your life, and your experiences, and your feelings, or what you’re doing right now, and it’s debatable how much it really is about “the community” you are sharing these experiences with?
I read a study recently for example, that non-profits are “engaging” large groups of people through social application, and on Facebook in particular utilizing “causes”, but they are not raising money. So they may have 20,000 people supporting their cause (although 74% have around 1,300), but less than 3% are raising money, so monetarily speaking these member groups are not substantiated, and there is no real proof that these people do in fact care about this cause (this isn’t to say there is no value, most non-profits surveyed around 65% said they found their SM efforts successful even without raising money).
My point is really that I don’t think people quite understand the different “personalities” that exist online, and consequently the mass amounts of people you need to engage to get some real traction.
One of these women, the author / Ph.D for example, was making the point that she finds herself posting very “controversial” and “compelling” questions or thoughts, but that her fan group (of 100) do not respond or comment. Her conclusion for this lack of response was that these people were simply not notified at the right time so she must be missing her opportunity to engage with them. And, while part of that may be true, I think that more so its a matter of the the “kinds” of people or online personalities that are members of that group, and also the number of people in a certain group. I think in most cases, the real success stories come from those communities that out of their sheer mass produce a substantial amount of UGC, or commentary.
In order for people to have real expectations of their social media efforts, I think it is important to educate them more on what Forrester Research calls the “Social Technographics” ladder (see a presentation). Their research shows of adult online consumers:
- Only 13% are “Creators” or people that publish web pages, blogs, or upload to video sites–sources of UGC.
- Only 19% are “Critics” meaning they comment on blogs, or post ratings and reviews.
- “Collectors” (15%) those who use RSS and tag webpages
- “Joiners” (19%) actively “joining” social networking sites
- “Spectators” (33%) people that “read, watch & listen”
- “Inactives” (52%) are those that do not participate in any of the above activities
Since most people fall into the last three rungs of that ladder (making them less “active”) I think if people understood these different levels of engagement for different groups of people it would help them set more realistic expectations for social media.
For example, if you learned that most of your target market was actually part of the “Spectators” group–those who read blogs, watch peer generated video, and listen to podcasts, but do not proactively engage with the content, you may perceive the value of your efforts differently.