There are a lot of questions floating around about whether or not it’s possible to apply methodical analysis to business uses of social media, including buzzword-rich realms like content strategy, permission marketing, social media marketing, online community, virtual reality, PR 2.0, and whatever the hipster term of the week might be.
The diehard old school will tell you that conversation can’t be measured, that information wants to be free, and p.s. take poison and die.
(See Bill Hicks’ hilariously bitter and profane riff on advertising, Twittered by DoshDosh and not remotely safe for work unless your boss has a very good sense of humor.)
There is a traditional belief among social media oldsters (some of us have been doing this since the late 80s, god help us) that normal business ideas like ROI have nothing to do with the brave new world. It’s too weird, it’s too chaotic, and it changes too fast.
This view basically holds that online community is like a vast, 24/7/365 Burning Man, each participant vying with the next to be less predictable, less ordinary, and less interested in any conceivable commercial engagement.
Here’s my take
There is some truth to the oldster view. You can think of social media as a kind of hopped-up primal ooze, with various critters evolving out of it in no predictable order.
Trying to run predictive quantitative analysis on a MySpace or Facebook or Twitter campaign is a sucker bet. And a blog or content/community strategy isn’t like direct mail–the results aren’t linear. You can’t build a mathematical model and start plugging numbers in, unless your spreadsheet has a way to quantify "8th dimension," "monkeys" and "naked girls riding bicycles."
Taken as a whole, the social media world is not manageable or predictable. It’s a swirling ocean of chaos. The fashionable 5% of social media is in love with the weird, the disturbing, and the radically new.
Consider Boing Boing
Once you get the sensibility, it’s not hard at all to predict a Boing Boing story. But it’s impossible to manufacture a Boing Boing story (there is nothing on earth that shines brighter than faked weirdness). And it’s impossible to know how getting onto Boing Boing would affect your business.
Other than a brief but massive traffic spike, none of us knows what a Boing Boing hit would bring. "Make something Boing Boing likes" is a strategy for dopes, unless you’re doing it for the pure fun of doing it.
But, you know, there’s a lot of social media that is not Boing Boing. There are stay-at-home parents who blog about air freshener. (Really.) There are a whole bunch of normal people with day jobs who blog about their commute, or the jeans they like best, or who they’re thinking about voting for.
The great secret of social media is that most of its participants don’t have much desire to drop acid and wander the desert wearing only a feather boa.
Because social media is vast (and growing at a breathtaking pace) and populated by human beings, it’s inherently unpredictable. It’s a classic chaotic system. The weirdness of social media, on the other hand, has been overstated.
Sure, you can still find magnificent weirdness if you know where to look, (and some of us dig that) but you can also find rather nice, normal people who just want some good advice, some useful tools, and a place to hold a conversation. Possibly even about air freshener.
Additional reading:
Flickr Creative Commons image by MikeLove
Nice post. Next time I try to translate the nebulous and useful social media to someone, I’ll point to your blog. Thanks.
Thanks, Shari!
but what makes headlines is “the weird”.
Definitely. And tools like Digg and even, to some extent, StumbleUpon reinforce the idea that only weird stuff matters. I talked with a CEO recently who doesn’t think social media has anything to do with his customers, even though he has a very lively online forum that could be giving him some important feedback, if he’d listen to it. He thinks that’s just “the yahoos” who use these tools.
It’s interesting stuff. 🙂
This is very interesting! I have enjoyed reading this very
insightful post. Very engaging
and informative. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Sonia – just came across your blog through copyblogger, started wondering around your blog, came across this article and thought I would comment!
So, perhaps it is simply that we do not have the tools to analyze social media right now? While the system at a macro level might seem chaotic, some academic type studies could yield data helping both current & future marketers better quantify and support their efforts.
In fact, such studies would go a long way to making social media marketing more attractive and more understandable to the average business owner. It may just be that social media marketing is more akin to say, biological research – you poke, prod, collect data, analyze, hypothesis and continually test until some actionable insights can be found.
Though social media marketing is more complex given its inherently dynamic nature, I like to think it can become measurable!
I actually think social media is very measurable, but it’s not *predictable*, at least not now. As it becomes more mainstream and less the province of people who like being out on the edge, it may get more predictable. Or its very many-to-many nature may keep it chaotic, as there are just too many permutations to be able to predict it well.
I like the idea of measuring it the way you do bio research. That is a very cool metaphor, I will chew on that awhile.
There’s also a good set of best practices that the experienced (or the observant) can engage in. Folks like Chris Brogan are doing wonderful work getting those practices defined and getting the word out.
That’s a great distinction – measurable (i.e. # of diggs, saves to delicious, etc), but not predictable. It has to be predictable w/in some margin of error for it be useful to management. Yup, that’s a good way to think about it!
For the moment, I suppose it’s very much a black box, which is why I like the bio-metaphor. As SMMs, its our job to unlock the inner workings of the box.
Thanks for pointing out Chris Brogan. I’m new to the space – and will definitely read through his work.
And by the way, in a recent comment on TopRankBlog someone mentioned a study that measured the effectiveness of word of mouth/social media marketing. If I can get my hands on a PDF, I’ll gladly send it your way.