I said yesterday that I envisoned social media gaining adoption via stealth means rather than a concerted effort to push for adoption and Rob Diana asked “so what are we going to do about it?” Now, I am not a social media professional or involved in marketing but my response, which seemed obvious, was that if big business is going to drive stealth adoption then that’s where we need to concentrate: on the outreach.
Chris Brogan posted on the responsibilities a “Community Manager” for a company would have (here’s a good idea of what one does) and I believe that building the community is key to the adoption of social media as a means of interaction between business and consumers.
Chris stated that organisations should develop “a non-marketing community outreach” which is spot on. Creating a community via social media is not spamming potential customers with a sales pitch it is about outreach and availability. Providing existing, or future, customers with a means to engage with the company, receive pre-sales advice, learn about the products and services on offer, and even get after sales support. A community could also extend to allowing customers to discuss their experiences amongst themselves.
Wrong questions
Too often the wrong questions are being asked. Businesses should not be trying to push their products via these avenues so should not be seeking the best way to market a product via social channels. By creating a relationship with their customers they will instead develop a feeling of trust which itself will lead to initial sales and repeat business.
Measuring the effectiveness of social media is going to be difficult to generalise so will have to considered with regards to the specific organisation. There must be a way of gauging the quality of any outreach so just saying that you’ll respond to a query within 24 hours is only the start, the result of that response is what’s really important.
Conversion
A qualitative measurement will have to include the rate of conversion of interactions and the ability to effectively manage your online reputation. Can you convert a query into a sale or turn around complaints to give the customer an overall positive experience of your organisation even if their initial impression was a poor one.
The uptake of using social media as a means of communication between business and consumer will depend on how much emphasis and importance is going to be placed upon the ‘community’ in comparison to more traditional methods of interacting with customers. With an increasing number of consumers switching to online shopping or using the web for research before making a purchase decision the importance of establishing an effective online community around your brand cannot be stressed highly enough and cannot be ignored. At the same time the traditional methods should not be ignored as we are a long way from any sort of mass adoption.
Choice
Just as you cannot force a product on to people without being accussed of spamming them, the adoption of social media cannot be forced on them (see Rob’s comment) or you will end up with a backlash. People like to discover things for themselves or be given a choice; those comfortable with interacting in this way will set the tone and even become evangelists of the community if they have good experience of it.
People listen to their peers and word of mouth recommendation is fundamental to building a better reputation. It is, therefore, vital to look after your customers and treat each one as though they are your first.
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Image by Marco Cassè.
The blogosphere came alive yesterday after Kara Swisher’s post “Twitter: Where Nobody Knows Your Name” in which she recounted that of a survey of 100 people attending a wedding everyone knew about Facebook (even half of them accounts) but no-one knew of Twitter, FriendFeed or other similar services. In all truth, this is not surprising.
As I wrote yesterday, just because someone uses a social media/networking service such as Facebook it doesn’t automatically make them a social media user – that is, it doesn’t mean they actually know what social media is or want to go looking for other services.
Knowledge gap
If this knowledge gap exists amongst those who use social networking services how are we then supposed to get those people on board who aren’t even that far along the web 2.0 road? There is a much larger percentage of the population who spend next to no time online and may only use a computer to check their emails and visit the odd website – the TV generation.
Clay Shirky proposed that the vast number of hours spent watching television could be used to far greater effect and would have a huge impact on ‘media’ if those consumers became content producers instead of wasting away in front of the small screen. I agree with Frederic at The Last Podcast, however, that those consumers would not want to become producers; the reason they sit back and watch so much TV is due to apathy – they simply cannot be bothered to do anything that requires more effort.
Stealth
This apathy extends right across the board so expecting the general populace to become involved in new media avenues is wishful thinking.
Social media may well go mainstream eventually but it will be by stealth rather than a concerted push for adoption. As business picks up on ways to effectively utilise social media to increase their outreach consumers will begin to use these tools by default but it will take a long time. As the concept slowly seeps into the fabric of our lives it is our job to cajole and encourage where we can in order to help people realise how this ‘new’ form of communication is beneficial.
It is not about individual applications or services going mainstream but more the idea and facility of social media and social networking. Much is said of the success of Facebook, YouTube and MySpace as examples of ‘new media’ achieving success but this is because they fulfil a function or because of the status attached to them at a specific time – the cool factor as described by Steven Hodson. Even so, the total usage they have achieved is but a drop in the global ocean. Despite the growth of these sites ask the average account holder if they use any social media/social networking services and you are likely to get a blank stare – they don’t understand the full implications of what there are using.
The chances are that the current applications on offer won’t be the ones going mainstream; it will be next generation of services that take off after piggy-backing on the likes of Twitter etc. to gain popularity – it is the natural evolution of an organic industry. Eventually, something comes along at the right time and has the right spin just like MySpace and Facebook did.
Simplification
As Alexander van Elsas states at his blog the whole web 2.0 space is awash with clones, variations on a theme and mashups which pull these services together. Innovation has slowed and it is difficult to see where the next big thing will come from. While the numerous services are fighting for our attention it is hard to envision anything going mainstream. This is why I believe social media will sneak in via the back door as consumers start to use whatever they are given by the service providers they currently hold contracts with, or those companies whose products they already use.
This is how social media ubiquity will be achieved whether we like it or not, and no matter how precious we get over our favourite startup or service.
Your take
How do you see the current social media sphere developing? Is there any way that we can actively promote adoption or will it just be a case of waiting?
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Image by “passamanerie”.
A lot has been said about the way conversations are fragmenting across the web due to the ability to leave comments in places other than at the original source. I’ve had my say as have many other bloggers.
Attempts are being made to re-centralise comments – such as disqus, fav.or.it and the FriendFeed plugin for WordPress – and we now have a new offering from Rob Diana of the Regular Geek blog called YackTrack.
YackTrack is designed to poll a number of services for comments that relate to a given URL (of a blog post for example) and gather the comments into one location. At present YackTrack supports Digg, Disqus, FriendFeed, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and WordPress blogs with plans to incorporate others.
I have built a link to YackTrack which is displayed in each post so you can easily see what is being said in all of the supported locations.
YackTrack is gaining quite a bit of exposure which seems to surprise Rob, he mentioned by email: “I am getting a little more attention than I thought I would” but any service which aims to bring order to such a contentious area is bound to get noticed.
I look forward to seeing how this service develops but, for now, check out Rob’s post at for more information.
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Last week, Chris Brogan suggested that today, April 28th should be pronounced Read and Comment Day where we should all get out in to the blogosphere, find some good stuff and add your thoughts in order to progress the conversation. It’s a great idea and I intend to do exactly that but, in a sense, it is a shame that we need such a call to action.
So, go on, get out there and participate.
In his post “The danger of social media falling in on itself” Steven Hodson argues that sites like FriendFeed could potentially kill the likes of Twitter or Flickr as more people interact with their contacts via the FriendFeed interface without actually visiting the source sites.
While FriendFeed happens to allow posting of messages and comments these are secondary to its primary function of being an aggregator and, as Steven says in a subsequent comment, FriendFeed could not survive without those services it aggregates; it would be self defeating for FriendFeed to kill other services unless it changed its own model.
Using Flickr as an example, FriendFeed could only compete if it allowed you to store your pictures on its servers instead. Even if this were to happen Flickr would still remain dominant as it has become the ‘go to’ resource to upload your photos; this is something that goes way beyond ‘social media’ users.
Task oriented
Admittedly, anyone who uses something like Flickr is technically a social media user but the majority don’t see it that way – they are just looking for a way to perform a specific task such as share their images. Returning to Jim Tobin’s post “Think Before You Ning” he states:
”Nobody wants to join a social network – and they never have”
The point he was trying to make appears to have gotten lost somewhere in the discussion but is totally correct. People do not wake up one morning and think to themselves “I know, I’ll join a social network today“. Instead, they may think “I need to find a website which will allow me to upload my photos so the rest of the family can see them“. Social Media and Web 2.0 is task oriented.
Of the millions of Flickr users – be they uploading content or searching for images to use – how many access that content via means other than the Flickr website? The answer will be an incredibly small percentage which illustrates that the average person is often not interested in the ecosystem that exists around the periphery of a service, only the core service itself. Once using a service they may become involved in the more ‘social’ aspect of it but this will be as an aside. Even Flickr itself has “Keep in touch” as the last item on its 7 point tour so little emphasis is placed on the social networking side of things.
Until the ‘concept’ of social media becomes ubiquitous, rather than those services we place under its umbrella, the services and web sites will remain predominantly isolated with only a limited subset of users making use of sites like FriendFeed.
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Image by Andy Woo.
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