Still on air. Flickr photo credit: jean djinni
Information gatekeepers are losing the war to control the stream. But they’re still powerful—and they still have their jobs. Let me be clear here that I’m not alleging any conspiracies; I’m not going to tell you that a powerful elite holds an iron grip on information to willfully disadvantage the masses, or to shape our reality. Certainly, our reality is shaped by what we see and hear, but this is a consequence of nature, and not an elaborate scheme for our minds and obedience.
Interestingly, the fact that you and I can access a vast, digital universe of conspiracy theories; the fact that a loony-bin conspiracy website, Infowars.com, ranks among the top 500 websites in the US, is a testament to how wide the cracks in the information barriers are getting.
But why did barriers exist in the first place? The gatekeepers have a few goals that are worth considering.
First, gatekeepers can serve as filters for truth and accuracy. By staunching the flow of bad information, and only releasing information after careful and thorough vetting, gatekeepers ostensibly make sure the inputs to our worldview, beliefs and resulting decisions are based on their controlled information output of “better” information. This might be called “paternalism by filtering.”
Second, gatekeepers aim to steer the public’s collective focus toward what matters, versus things that are trivial, irrelevant or inconsequential. A classic example of this role is the media’s handling of John F. Kennedy’s sex life. As Alicia C. Shepard wrote in American Journalism Review:
“It used to be so simple back in the days when John F. Kennedy was president. What reporters covering the White House knew about his promiscuity never saw its way into print. It just wasn’t considered relevant.”
Third, gatekeepers may control the flow of information in an attempt to shape outcomes. In other words, traditional media might actively try to push content that supports a particular agenda—a step beyond bias by omission, to bias by inclusion.
Media gatekeepers are now only able to control the flow of their information through their owned properties. Other stories, narratives and characters have an unprecedented ability to compete with the traditional players and, increasingly, they’re able to win. One story that’s particularly hard to bury: The data isn’t looking good for traditional media. In just six years, ad spending on newspapers has dropped 51.6% (2005-2011), and newspapers’ audience shrunk by 4% from 2010-2011. Television news saw mild growth in 2011—but the 4.5%, 3% and 1% increases in viewership for evening network news, evening local news, and cable news, respectively, aren’t the large reversals many were hoping for.
Publishing, too, is undergoing a rapid transformation. February, 2012 saw e-book sales beat out every other format in book sales for the first time ever. Amazon sold more e-books than both hardcover and softcover books combined in January, 2012. Both booksellers and publishers have had little choice but to embrace the trend, but for ailing retailers like Barnes and Noble, it may be too little, too late.
Everyone’s a critic
All of this means that the cost of entry into the media landscape for the average person has fallen dramatically. Want to be a singer? Post videos on YouTube and record your own MP3s. Want to be a writer? Start blogging and put together an e-book. Want to be a critic? Start critiquing the films you see and post them online. You’ll encounter very few filters along the way.
But there’s another side of gatekeeping that benefits those that are let through. Gatekeepers have audiences and resources. Once you’re through, you’re in front of a crowd that has been gathered for you, not by you. Gatekeepers have promotional budgets, ratings and sales targets to hit, and bosses to please. Letting you through is an investment. They might buy ads for you, or give you airtime, or book you high-profile gigs—expensive, time-consuming things that are extremely difficult for the average person to achieve on their own.
When you’re on your own, building an audience is the hardest part. There’s a saying that drives me nuts: “Content is king.” Oh that it were so! What about the millions of great authors, musicians and comedians you’ve never heard of, and never will? Their content is superb, and yet they toil in relative obscurity. Why? They devote most or all of their time to perfecting the content, and not enough time building an audience for it.
Build your own embassy. Flickr photo credit: NCinDC
This section isn’t, “How to get blog comments,” or, “How to make your posts go viral.” Google those things if you want, but be wary of what you read. When the how-to format meets blogging, the quality of advice often gets iffy. Blog comments, “engagement,” subscribers, top-100 placement—they’re all means to an ill-defined end. These things are not the goal, only loose indicators that you’re on track toward something bigger. Everyone blogs to better their life in some way. Blogging can make a very real impact on that one, big goal, if you stay away from measuring your success in ways that have nothing to do with what you’re really after.
To make an impact, you need a central outpost that acts as the heart of your social media presence. Blogs are great for this. They are built for long-form content like blog posts, but can also be a great way to aggregate your tweets and YouTube videos, link to your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, and other digital footprints you’d like to showcase. Think of your blog as an embassy. If a stranger were to visit the Embassy of You, what would you want them to see? More importantly, what would they want to see?
Play to your strengths, and write about what you know. If you’re trying to prove to the world that you’re an expert in something, abide by the old writers’ saying, “Show, don’t tell.” Don’t simply tell people about your expertise. Anyone can do that. You need to show it. Write with authority about something you have passion for, and your expert self will steal the show. Most of the people you’re competing with will start by talking about themselves, playing up their status, telling the world how great they are at something—and little else.
Define your niche. Generalists usually don’t get very far, because they’re going toe-to-toe with millions of others that have been doing it longer, and probably better. Google likes niches, too. Unique content fares better in search results, so ask yourself what the people you’d like to influence are searching for.
Don’t be shy about featuring what others have said about you and your work. On the page of your blog that explains who you are, let others tell the story for you—they’re better at it. Pretend it’s the back of a book. Public praise by a third party is infinitely more impactful than self-congratulatory copy. Successful blogger Brian Clark put it this way: “What other people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.” Some of the praise you feature will come naturally, even unexpectedly. But you’ll usually need to ask for it when you’ve done good work, so make a habit of it. Be sure to disclose that you plan on putting their words on your blog. Most will be flattered.
After putting in all that work, the last thing you want to do is sit back and wait, believing content is king. The concept of reciprocity should guide your efforts to promote your blog. Think about what actions you want people to take when they visit your blog; literally make a list of them. Then make a list of bloggers you respect, whose work you enjoy, and who you’d like to get to know better. Make sure to include bloggers that aren’t hugely popular yet; due to the volume of activity on their blogs (and perhaps, their egos), well-known bloggers are less likely to reciprocate.
Now the fun part. Take your list of people, visit their blogs, and start doing the things on your other list. Comment on their blogs, subscribe to their newsletters, send thoughtful tweets in their direction. You’ll quickly find that people like people that validate their work in these ways, and they like people that share their passions. Many of them will take a moment to discover who you are by following the link in your Twitter profile, or the backlink in your blog comments. And then they’ll reciprocate by commenting, sharing your content, or something else similar to what you did for them.
Flickr photo credit: c r i s
The technology adoption lifecycle has been studied exhaustively ever since Everett Rogers developed his famous Rogers Bell Curve in 1962. As more of a population adopts a technology, adoption becomes less expensive. However, as a communications technology edges closer to saturation, other costs emerge for its early users. Increased activity volume requires more attention and follow-up. The exclusivity that once appealed to early users—and the related benefits of being in an elite circle—all but disappears. As more people start using the medium, access is given to anyone and everyone. This is when gatekeeping kicks in as a set of tools and practices that preserve the value of the medium, while reducing the costs associated with being accessed more easily.
Most decision makers aren’t actually early adopters, and they’re usually not even in the early majority of users when looking at total adoption. But they can be considered early users within their peer group. Executives, for instance, actually tend to lag behind the general population in personal social media use. Of Fortune 500 CEOs, only about 14 are active on Twitter—less than 3%. Among US internet users in general, that rate jumps 333% to 13% of the population. Let’s consider one CEO’s use of social. Brian J. Dunn, CEO of Best Buy, has tweeted 1,680 times as of this writing. More than 14,000 people follow him, and he’s mentioned about five times per day. This relatively manageable level of inbound activity allows him to respond to “regular” people, like librarian Adam Haigh, who tweeted that he enjoyed Dunn’s article in Harvard Business Review. But what happens when that number goes up to 10 or 20 mentions per day, let alone 112 (the average number of emails received by corporate users daily)? Being accessed becomes burdensome when the number is big enough.
Advertising adstock is a way of talking about advertising’s influence on what we buy. At its most basic level, repeated exposure to advertising rapidly increases awareness, until the rate of awareness-building slows, and then plateaus, due to saturation. A similar effect can be found in social media, but on more than just influence. Let’s call it social media decay. Social media decay occurs both on the individual and systemic levels. When a user first ventures into social media, every event seems significant. Friend requests, Twitter mentions, LinkedIn messages, blog comments—these are all events that excite for hours due to their relative infrequency at early stages of social media use. There is also the pay-off aspect; the effort we’ve been putting into building a blog readership, or growing our Twitter networks, is starting to yield a return. My first few blog posts received almost zero interactions. Then, on my fourth or fifth, out of the ether, a blog comment appeared. I remember how it felt—like it was all uphill from there. This one positive interaction resonated throughout my entire day, and I could barely wait to write another post and see what would happen next. You’ll see this degree of excitement lead to a lot of sad exchanges with spammers on early-stage blogs. An automated spam-bot will leave a generic, barely legible comment like this one from “Dentist Barry,” pulled from the spam filter on my blog:
Hello your website is great .I am with your side that you are making your horizontical knowledge.I would love to know more of your site.Will come back!
And the new bloggers, bless their souls, will approve the comment, and leave enthusiastic replies:
So glad you liked it, Barry! Thanks for your kind words, and I hope you like my next post, too!
But the real comments and social interactions keep you going, making you hungry for more.
Flickr photo credit: Loren Javier
Trailing not far behind the introduction of a successful new communications technology are the human and technological gatekeepers. Human gatekeepers include receptionists, executive assistants, recruiters, bureaucrats, budget managers, script readers—anyone that has the power to slow, stop or accelerate access to someone or something. They’re used to taking messages that they’ll never actually relay, used to deciding whether inquiries are worth the attention of the people they work for and, above all else, used to saying “no” and “not interested.” Their ultimate charter as gatekeepers is to allow the people that are paid to focus on important things from having to make hundreds of tiny decisions every day that threaten to derail productivity. It’s easy to see this work from a cynic’s perspective. After all, these are people that are paid to stop others from getting through. But the reality is more nuanced. Great work requires sustained concentration, and the ability to devote high-level resources to the projects and tasks that merit this attention. Everything else can be more efficiently dealt with by subordinates or no one at all. Making those calls is a necessary role, and probably fairly thankless.
While it still plays a big part in society and business, human gatekeeping needs to be supplemented or replaced by technological gatekeeping in order for organizations to scale. Some technological gatekeeping is put in place to hide or remove public information. The CEO’s direct line can’t be listed on the company website, and his or her email address shouldn’t be something easily guessed, like firstname.lastname@companyname.com. In 2009, The Radicati Group projected that the number of spam emails sent per day would reach 424 billion in 2013, making up 84% of all messages. But, thanks to automated filtering, only 20% of them actually show up in inboxes. This gatekeeping comes at a significant cost, however, as the same report found that medium to large companies are spending millions each fighting spam.
Some gatekeeping occurs without the people behind the gate ever knowing it. Controlling the flow of information is one of the oldest forms of gatekeeping, and we often have no say in the matter. Media outlets choose which programs and content to air, newspapers choose what to print, and the audience traditionally has no say in these decisions. Information that is of high value may never reach us, and in the old media environment, the best we could hope for was that some of it does. As we’ll explore in later chapters, social has radically changed both distribution and consumption. It amplifies our ability to reach and influence people with information, and is not constrained by the same level of media gatekeeping.
Flickr photo credit: A. Davey
Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!
-Alexander Graham Bell, March 10, 1876 (the world’s first phone call)
inviting coworkers
-Jack Dorsey, March 21, 2006 (the world’s first tweet)
Shortly after a new communications medium arrives, a side door of access is created by the confluence of low adoption and technological immaturity. This side door does not last forever. The excitement and mutual opportunity that initially passes through it eventually becomes costly, and sometimes, a liability. The fortunate few who discover these side doors get in early and make out like bandits before the rest of the world finds out. Side doors soon become crowded and unreliable, while the people that originally left them open see no choice but to seal them against the oncoming crowds.
Social media has created an incredible array of side doors, and all of them remain open—if you know where to look. Right now, social media is the telephone before secretaries and voicemail. It’s email before spam and autoreplies. History tells us that this degree of access is not sustainable, and side doors don’t stay open. Sometime soon, we’ll be telling “remember when” stories. It’s up to you: do you want to be the storyteller, recalling how good the social side doors were for you, or do you want to be the audience, wishing you had known—and acted?
One year after Bell invented the telephone, the world had 3,000 working telephones. Think about the calls placed to and from those first 3,000 telephones, the excitement with which they were placed and received, and the elite circle that one instantly entered just by placing one of them. By dialing a number, one could connect directly with those who are all but unreachable by other means, an exclusive channel of access that opened up for these early adopters alone—a technological side door.
The normal rules of polite society would, of course, apply to early telephone communication—no foul language, no harassment or violations of privacy. But outside of these limitations, one would have free reign to explore a brand new communications channel. The voices on the other end were no doubt tinged with the excitement of early adoption. Most calls were between familiar parties, and the telephone was a new way for existing contacts to connect. For the most part, it helped maintain and build relationships, not start them.
There were certainly a lot of doubters of the telephone’s potential. Among them was Western Union, who dismissed the technology in an 1876 internal memo: “The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” On the other end of the spectrum, there were early evangelists, who trumpeted the telephone’s invention without much evidence of its eventual success—some of history’s lucky guessers. In between the two extremes were the early adopters, who focused on the telephone’s utility at the time and stayed out of the predictions business.
This is where we find the opportunists throughout history. They’re busy putting the technology of the day to work for them. Whoever made the world’s first sales call was among this group. I imagine this person taking a deep breath as the operator connected them to their intended prospect. The recipient answers, expecting a familiar voice, only to find a stranger on the other end. An exchange of greetings, and then the moment of truth. Does the prospect hang up, or cut the conversation short? Or does he or she sit and listen to what the stranger has to say? I suspect it’s the latter. The recipient has no concept of phone solicitation. It probably hasn’t yet dawned on them that this new network can even be used to conduct business between people or firms. To him or her, the person on the other end of the call is not a nuisance, but a member of a limited circle in which having access to a connected telephone is the sole qualification. And people do business with those in their circles, even if the circle was entered through a side door.
I’ll never forget walking out of that mall, proud of myself for nailing the job interview at a cell phone kiosk. What’s more embarrassing than not getting that job—I didn’t even get a call back, and it stung—is the fact that I was so close to settling for it.
It was early 2010, and I wanted to make the jump from salesman to marketer. I had almost no on-paper experience in marketing, and my resume was far from impressive. That cell phone kiosk was the first interview I had, and I went to it because I had begun to doubt whether anyone would give me a chance in marketing.
A few days later, still feeling pretty hopeless about my situation—why did I major in Political Science again?—I found a blog post about a young PR job seeker named Grant Turck. He had targeted the agencies he wanted to work for with Facebook ads, and he was getting some interest, as well as publicity from well-known bloggers. I decided to give Grant a call, and he was happy to walk me through his strategy.
Even before the first click, I felt a renewed optimism. I was doing something different, something only a handful of people had tried—ever. My Facebook ad targeted marketing managers and executives in Austin, mentioned the fact that I was looking for a job in social media, and finished with, “Can you help? Click here.” I put together a special Hire Me page on my blog, linked the ad to it, and waited.
It started with a few blog comments from well-wishers. Then I got a handful of emails offering to connect me to companies that were looking for talent. Within a week, I was talking to hiring managers, setting up interviews, and getting consulting inquiries. It was working, and I promised myself I wouldn’t settle for the first offer on the table.
Three weeks and less than $200 in ad fees later, I had multiple offers to choose from, all of which were infinitely better than that damned cell phone kiosk. While weighing which offer to accept, I got a call about a job I had previously been screened out for. It was perfect for me: a social media manager position at Bazaarvoice, my top pick for employers. I had written about wanting to work for them in a blog post about my job hunt, and the CMO had found it after my post had triggered a Google Alert for the company name and sent him an automated email. Several interviews and a test presentation later, I had my dream job.
Writing about the experience brought me some attention, and has helped a lot of other dispirited job seekers. But I had stumbled onto something much bigger than a new job hunting technique. I had found an entirely different way of doing things, an alternate path to achievement in almost any realm. Why stop there?
What I found was a social side door, a way around the barriers that pose constant threats to our forward progress. I later realized that I had found social side doors before, but hadn’t known them as such. In my sales work, I had been using my active social media presence to reach prospects that were otherwise unreachable. Before that, working in collections, I had honed a detective-like knack for tracking down and reaching out to people that had learned not to pick up the phone or return email. And now, working in marketing, I’ve developed ways of engaging with C-level business decision makers and earning more of their budget for my company. I’ve been able to interview my heroes, people like Seth Godin. My words have been printed in Harvard Business Review, and I’ve written for many of the top blogs in the world. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, but it continues to happen for those of us that have the discovered social side doors in our lives and careers.
Social side doors have opened everywhere. Through them, we can engage with billionaire business leaders, famous authors and heads of state. We can shift massive amounts of spending in our company’s direction. We have the unique ability to earn the attention of people and organizations that are bombarded every day by countless competing traditional requests for attention and consideration—resumes, emails, phone calls, invitations, meetings and more.
Through these side doors, a universe of opportunity exists that few people are even aware of. My job is to explain how these side doors are changing our world, and to show you how to discover them for yourself. Your job is to walk through them before they are overrun and, inevitably, locked. We’ll talk to some truly fascinating individuals on both sides of the side door, and learn how access has changed, and will continue to change.
The delta between our aspirations and reality might be wide, but social media offers us more ways than ever to navigate it—if we can find the social side door.
It sure beats the hell out of pushing cell phones at the mall.
Flickr photo credit: user Maggie Osterberg
When people talk about social data, they usually focus on two dimensions that are relatively easy to measure and articulate—volume and source growth. More data coming from more places. But something else is happening with a lot of social data that makes it difficult to draw conclusions from on its own—noise is increasingly making it difficult to achieve true signal strength. A lot of companies may be experiencing this without even realizing it.
Let’s say I’m a corporate user of the average listening tool, and I’m trying to trend some of the standard social metrics over time. Specifically, I’m looking at number of mentions, follower/fan/subscriber numbers, and sentiment for Twitter, Facebook and blogs.
Mentions
Imagine that hundreds or thousands of tweets and blog posts mention my brand every week, and that number went up this week. In raw form, what does that number tell me? On the surface, it tells me we’re doing something right…right? Not necessarily. How many of the accounts that tweeted it are actually human, controlled by humans and followed by other humans? Estimates of the prevalence of Twitter spam accounts are difficult to come by, but some are as high as 48% and even 57%. It’s clear that spam mentions shouldn’t factor into your assessment of your brand’s social performance, but that’s just the tip of iceberg. Redundancy matters, too. If two accounts for the same entity tweet the same positive thing about your brand, for instance, that doesn’t mean you have two advocates. The best you can hope for is that different sets of real people follow them, and that same message thus reaches more people.
Within that spike of activity, you notice that blog mentions of your brand have gone up. You dig a little deeper and see that the blogs are actually saying the same exact thing—down to the letter. It’s scraped content that has been duplicated over and over across the web, usually without the original author’s permission. Maybe a keyword in the text triggered it, or maybe your own content has been added to a feed that disseminates it into hundreds of nearly-identical (and totally useless) scraping sites across the web. If only one of these mentions is original content, and 100 of them are scraped content, the raw data tells you that your presence on blogs has increased a hundred times over. It hasn’t. In fact, if it’s your content, you’re likely being hurt because duplicate can hurt your search rankings.
Sentiment
Now let’s talk sentiment. Most tools out there today for assessing sentiment from unstructured social data aren’t very accurate, but that’s not a problem with the data itself. One of the biggest problems is that most companies want to know the sentiment of people toward their brand and products, and raw, unstructured social data is full of data from non-people, like automated RSS feeds. For example, if my company puts out a press release—which of course will contain a lot of positive text—and it’s picked up by 10 different automatic Twitter or blog feeds that post things from the various press release wires out there, this tells me absolutely nothing about how people feel about my brand. If an actual human reads the release and posts something negative about it, my aggregate sentiment data is going to reflect something completely false: that positive sentiment is 10 times higher than negative sentiment.
Followers/fans/subscribers
On to follower/fan/subscriber numbers. Would you rather have100 followers/fans/subscribers that never interact with you in any way, or one follower that does? The only thing those 100 followers can do for you is provide a tiny amount of social proof by making you look more important to people that use follower count as a proxy for importance. But if your single follower actually pays attention to you, responds to your calls to action, or shares your content with their followers on occasion, he or she is way more valuable to your brand—and you’ll have to earn it.
What’s a brand to do?
Tom Foremski outlines the problem well:
“Accurate data on social media users is essential. It’s the foundation of all successful social media marketing and advertising campaigns: the precise targeting of related groups of users with their interests.”
The best solution to this problem has three parts.
- Raw, unstructured social data needs to be processed, filtered and cleaned up before it means much of anything
- Once signal is separated from noise, it should be paired with reliable data from other sources to create a more accurate, holistic view of your customers. For example, you can match your social data to your CRM records
- Look for direct results, not proxies. Are visitors from Facebook converting at higher or lower rates than other visitors? How much did revenue increase after a product change was made based on your analysis of social feedback?
None of these things are particularly easy. All of them are totally worth it.
Tweets, Facebook updates and news headlines are strikingly similar in two ways:
- They convey limited information at breakneck speed
- Their value is entirely contextual
Social updates are short by design. They each tell part of a larger story. Their accuracy and usability depends on the credibility of the person creating them, and the content they reference and link to. People get this, mostly. But no one can read the piece behind every link, or separately assess the authority of the people sharing it with them.
Headlines work the same way. We can’t get the full story from them alone. We can’t truly say whether we agree or disagree with an article if we’ve only read its headline. The article and author behind the headline give it almost all of its value.
But we take shortcuts, because it’s impossible to fully evaluate every piece of content aimed our way. If I trust The Economist, I’m not going to be as skeptical of its articles as I would be of the “news-repurposing turbine” that is HuffPo. If my friend is an amazing cook, the opinions she tweets about food will carry more weight than tweets from my culinarily-challenged college roommate. And if enough people point to a headline, people start to think the headline tells more of the story than it actually does. It’s human nature.
When the conversation is about something as complex as social, that effect is amplified. How do headlines like these shape our understanding of social’s value?
- Social Media Impact On E-Commerce Called Overrated
- Facebook, Twitter Fail to Promote Brands; Offline Works Better
- Most Consumers Still Don’t Talk About Brands on Social Sites
- M-Commerce Rocked the Holiday Season. Still No Word About F-Commerce
- Why Social Isn’t Helping Online Retailers Find Customers
Together, these headlines appeared in thousands of tweets, Facebook and Google Plus posts. The research and reporting behind them is actually pretty solid and nuanced. But headlines and nuance don’t mix well. As a result, the conversation has a difficult time evolving past the narrowly-defined, shortsighted understanding of social’s value.
Traffic, conversion, followers, likes, mentions (we might as well add pins to the list now)—all good things to celebrate, monitor, analyze and even worry about. There’s a whole other universe of value to unlock. We get there by trying our damnedest to answer questions like:
- What do my customers actually care about?
- What are they getting out of sharing their data with me?
- How can we build social experiences without building barriers?
- How can better data move “influencer engagement” past sending people free stuff, and hoping that they’ll blog about it?
One of the unfortunate realities of the conversation about social is its tendency to swing between hyperbole and incredulity. It’s just like political coverage in this way:
Hyperbole
- Fake SM headline: Drop everything and get on [new social network or tool] now—or you’ll be sorry
- Fake political headline: [Candidate name] is unstoppable
Incredulity
- Fake SM headline: What’s so great about [new social network or tool]?
- Fake political headline: [Candidate name] wins [state name], but does she really have a chance?
If there’s one thing we in new media love talking about—and writing about—it’s how different “our” new media is from “their” old media, how much better we are. In a lot of ways, we are better. But on this point, whether we’re really less prone to sensationalism and superficial exploration of topics that deserve deeper digging, I think we’re far from proving it. Let’s change that.
Flickr photo credit: WoofBC
This one’s going to be short. Here we go…
Social professionals don’t get to decide that ROI isn’t important. Our clients and bosses decide that, and it’s usually coming from the right place. We can joke among ourselves about ROI-crazed executives and managers, but I think we all know that it’s pretty cool that our companies are putting any money into social–into us–at all. Of course they want to know what they’re getting for it.
That’s one end of the ROI attitude spectrum, the scoffers. I’m not going to devote this post to proving that social ROI can be calculated–that’s something they’ll need to do for themselves (before someone higher up asks for it).
At the other end of the ROI attitude spectrum are the obsessed. They believe in social ROI, as they should. But the way they think about it is neither sustainable nor scalable. To them, ROI is something that justifies what they’re doing. Sometimes it’s even a defensive calculation, as in, “I can’t believe they’re shrinking the social budget–just look at this ROI!” Most of the ROI-obsessed rarely have to play that card, because they’ve always got their finger on the number, which figures into all of their reporting, etc. But why tread water when you can swim? Both will keep you from sinking, but swimming gets you somewhere.
Reporting is good. ROI is good. They both have so much more to offer. Truth is, if we obsess on reporting-as-justification we only get a sliver of the ROI we could see if we used reporting as a basis for optimization. That’s right, improvement.
Social is the most dynamic, interesting development to hit business in the last few decades, and we’re using numbers in a static, one-dimensional quest for approval. Imagine if we decide to devote 10% of our reporting to justification, and the other 90% to improving what we do, and delivering more ROI than before.
Who would disapprove of that? Let’s stop treading water and see where swimming takes us.
This post started as a comment on Brian Solis’ blog.
I've got problems. Flickr photo credit: faberzeus
Champagne problem:
n. A choice between two positive or ideal things; a problem that actually demonstrates one’s good fortune.
It’s hard to think of something that I would write about here, but not on my company’s blog. Let me assure you that this is a champagne problem, not a case of low standards. But it still feels like I’m letting someone down by not updating this more often; perhaps that someone is you.
The truth is that social media exaggerates our sense of self-importance. I admit that I feel a tinge of guilt when thinking about the dearth of content on this blog, as if you’re sitting there twiddling your thumbs, just waiting for my next burst of genius. Ha.
At the beginning of 2011, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to consistently update this blog with quality content, because in reality, that would be at the expense of quality content for my employer. Here’s the math I used:
- I like when people read my writing
- My employer benefits (inbound contacts, 3rd party coverage, etc.) when I post on their blog, and also when I guest post on 3rd party blogs
- Tons of people read Bazaarblog and blogs like Convince and Convert, SME and MarketingProfs
- This blog’s audience is far, far more…intimate
- So, it makes more sense for me to write original content for other blogs
Add to that the book I’m trying to write and the wedding I’m trying to plan, and tons of fresh posts here just aren’t in the cards. Instead, here’s a roundup of some of what I’ve been writing about lately elsewhere.
- I wrote about brands that let their customers drive, and brands that are too afraid to give up the wheel.
- I unfairly divided everyone working in social into two species: foxes and hedgehogs. Everyone thinks they’re the fox, but just like geniuses, we can’t all be one.
- I tempered our current enthusiasm for social data with a dose of reality—most companies won’t be able to harness its value until they understand the three major impediments to proper social data analysis.
- I explored what I know best—b2b social media, and argued that only data will assuage the doubters.
