Back To Basics - The 3 Legged Stool
by JohnSheridan
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/80652380@N00/940353490
I read a blog post today from Peter Kim, that demonstrates a discussion I was having with Chris Kenton last week via email and on his blog. Peter has changed the way he uses Twitter. How? He follows an enormous amount of people now, and uses tools to filter what he wants to hear.
As I said to Chris, Social Media tools will necessarily grow in three areas:
- those that help you listen
- those that help you speak
- those that help you determine the state of the conversation
Back to basics - the 3 legged stool.
Social media can require a presence in thousands of places, all at once. Filtering what is actually something of interest to you, is becoming more and more important. The means to listen today, are highly primitive, and are still too hard to use. Aggregating the content and helping you determine what is important to you, in a truely intuitive way is something that is not yet available. Friendfeed, Google alerts, Twitter search, etc. are appreciated, but not effective enough. It’s still a high-maintenance activity to train any virtual personal assistant.
Equally, participating needs the same amount of attention. When there are a million conversations occuring, choosing and participating is still too hard. Netvibes, HelloTxt, Laconi.ca installations, etc are good, but not good enough for me, the person looking at endless tabs in my browser.
Most importantly, social media is not yet mature enough to allow me to quickly understand that state of my conversation. Some call this “sentiment”. I call it, virtual eye contact and body language. It’s what we humans use to understand each other.
In all, you must realize it’s impossible to keep pace with Social Media at the micro-level. When Jeremiah Owyang starts to tweet references to “burnout”, you know that this new world is too resource intensive for us mere mortals. I personally suffer from TADD (Technlogy Attention Deficit Disorder) and spend far too much time listening and not enough doing. Or walking the dog. Or riding my Harley. Or playing with the kids. Or…….
SocialMedia404 is in several spaces, because that’s what we do. We don’t “say” much, because listening, observing, understanding is our objective. If you choose to participate, appreciate what this new world is all about, it’s limitations, it’s benefits, and what it needs to be in the future.
As Social Media matures, you do need to be in the game. But now, more than ever, understand what you are getting into, and find someone to help you before you get in too deep. You may not choose us, but look here or here for help. Save yourself time, and money.
And Jeremiah, give yourself some slack, would ya? We’re all in this together. (^:=
John–
Good points–and thanks for the link to my site. I couldn’t agree with you more–the volume of conversations going on is accelerating, and being able to zero in on what’s relevant is only growing in importance. In some industries, like consumer electronics, the number of conversations we find about a brand can easily run 500-800 per day. Being able to simply crunch the numbers on the conversation is interesting, but not nearly sufficient, and often misleading. Monitoring has to go hand in hand with engagement–even if engagement is “listening” and not “talking”. If you simply trust computers to tell you what’s in the conversation, you’re going to miss the substance of the market dialog and eventually get left behind. But I see a lot of companies reaching for that unfortunate mistake.
Keep up the dialog, John. I enjoy the discussion.
/chris
[...] may have read another post here, where Chris Kenton (CEO of startup SocialRep) and I were discussing a new cornerstone that will emerge as one of the most important facets of social media: [...]