If you are old enough to remember the late 1990s, you surely remember the overwhelming pressure felt by businesses and others to get to the World Wide Web. A colleague in an Internet consulting firm told me the story of a FORTUNE®100 marketing executive who literally burst into the reception room of the firm and demanded to be “accepted” as a client! Those were the days!
The first wave of websites primarily delivered static information. As web application development progressed, those sites were dismissed as “brochure ware.” Everyone demanded commerce, then collaboration. Online content aggregation (bringing together content from multiple sources, as do sites like amazon.com, ebay.com and weddingchannel.com) became an industry.
[I’m going to footnote here that this exciting new option brought with it tremendous complexity. Integrating channels, meaning having the ability to track, sell and deliver goods from multiple media (online, stores, resellers, etc.) required expertise and investment. Security became, and is, an ongoing concern. These are not today’s subject, so I’m going to leave it at that; they're important, however. Maybe another time.]
Of course, not every solution fit every problem. Companies got in over their heads. They took sites that were designed for one purpose and jury-rigged what they had to serve another (for example, brochure ware sites got commerce engines tacked on with very mixed results.) Performance and user experience issues stymied and angered customers.
I am admittedly a broken record on this topic, and will always be one. The bottom line is, you have to know what problem you’re trying to solve.
And so it is with social media. We all “had” to have the World Wide Web, and now we “have” to have social media. In fact, we really do. Because just like websites, if we are realistic in what we expect of social media, it can be (or become) a very powerful tool.
For business, and especially services—and certainly for job-hunting and recruiting—most agree that LinkedIn is the killer social media app. The targeting tools of LinkedIn are nothing short of genius. Their utility is highly dependent on the participation of users (the targets), and LinkedIn has ably convinced users of its value proposition. Hence, in June 2012 LinkedIn reported 175 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories.
Most of us can understand and appreciate its value pretty readily, if not easily. But what about Facebook and Twitter for business? Or even blogs, which are technically a social media application? What about all this talk about being “closer” to the customer? What are the upsides and downsides of creating these new kinds of relationships? Are they really relationships? And are they really new?
Always one to try to debunk myths, I have admittedly struggled with these questions. Today I read a description of how blogs are being used in-house at companies to help people connect and share information. Geez, it sounded pretty familiar to me. In fact, the description sounded a lot like the language that’s been used to describe collaboration platforms since the 1990s (for example, Lotus Notes)! Could it be that these social media solutions simply represent the next generation of collaboration platforms?
If that is the case, then allow me to share what I learned from my experience as a passionate advocate for and user of Lotus Notes: participation is the Holy Grail. The more people participate in the proposed collaboration, the more robust and useful the collaboration.
But robust collaboration takes a lot of time and effort, and both equal money. Therefore, one has to be clear about what one expects from the investment, in order to decide how much to invest.
Here are some reasonable goals for neophyte social media experiments.
Awareness. Pure and simple, being in the game. Giving consumers the opportunity to find you and explore what your organization is and has to say. This is roughly the equivalent of brochure ware, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Don’t forget: the first wave of websites didn’t benefit from the extremely sophisticated search engines (and search engine optimization tools) that are readily available and widely used now.
Page views, friends and followers are some of the outputs to measure against this goal.
Education. Taking opportunities to share your expertise in ways that are valuable to consumers. A more advanced version of awareness, taking a much greater degree of work and attention to be done well. Appreciation of your ideas accrues back to you.
Again, page views, friends and followers are good outputs to measure. Unique visitors and content- sharing up the ante.
Identification. As consumers find ways to connect to your content, you have multiple opportunities, through the interactions and especially through analytics, to meet and learn about them. Add to the above the quality of content shared back to you in order to discover how well you’re doing. And noticing what resonates (e.g., “likes”) yields gems of insight, if you’re paying attention. That said, interaction is demanding. It requires constant monitoring and thoughtful responses to questions and comments. For some businesses it’s essential; for others, Awareness or Education are adequate.
BOTTOM LINE: What’s important to you?
Part III, following that: What is Good Social Media Content?
