SocialMedia404

Copyright Wai Hok

(image via Flickr)

No, this is not yet-another-finaincial-crisis blog post. But it is, about watching the boards.

You 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: understanding.

Social Media and “Me”
Individuals are continually looking to the many rating tools out there (Twinfluence, Google Blogsearch, etc.) to try to understand what their “score” is, and how they place among the masses of other individuals. I tend to think this is largely driven by what Peter Kim calls The Ego Trap (see Ego Trap: Influencer Lists and others on his site).

Nonetheless, we do have an intrinsic and fundamental need to know if what we are saying is being heard. Ever have someone ask you a question, or your opinion on something and they didn’t listen to the answer? Did that drive you nuts, or what? We all feel we have something that’s worth hearing.

The problem, in what has been coined before as friendonomics (the term, not the game), are the vast amount of mostly misleading indicators we have available, in an equally stunning amount of places to find them. Just see our own Monster List. Kate Niederhoffer hits it right on the money with her post “Infuence Influenza“. There is a lack of objectivity, reliability, and validity in current influence formulas. Garbage in, garbage out.

Stephen Covey said “Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood“. So what is the state of social media and understanding?

In the personal space, start with Chris Brogan’s recent podcamp talk. It is largely focused on what (mostly) individuals should do, if you are a blogger. But here’s the nugget I took away. In my opinion Chris Brogran is, as one of my business associates calls himself, a “data nerd”. (Chris, if you’re reading, that was meant as a compliment). He goes to great lengths to use the tools he has available to understand his audiences’ behaviour, and how what he does, can influence that. He uses data, not anecdotes (a.k.a. gossip) to understand what causes affect the Community eXperience in his circle of influence. As a fellow ‘data nerd’, I am so on that page.

While this post has been in the works since the aforementioned discussion with Chris Kenton, the catalyst has been an initiative undertaken by Chuck Westbrook. Chuck is using his site to help bloggers cross-promote their work, their thoughts. It supports another important point from the Brogan talk (I paraphrase): “If you are in the mining business, don’t try to be the best miner. Be the person who supplies the tools to the business.” Be valuable to your audience, and share. That’s the power of community.

Social Media and the Organization
From the organizational perspective, I recommend you check out Chris Kenton’s webinar, “Beyond Monitoring: Managing Social Media Engagement“. He has valuable advice to provide, including the continual questioning of measurement tools, methods, outputs. Most insightfully, he predicts the emergence of a new organizational position, the “Marketing Engineer”.

You’ll need to review the webinar yourself for Chris’ explanation, but essentially, this new role will be crucial to an organization being able to understand their position in social media. This role will require deeper understanding of data sources, analysis, technology, and interpretation. Graphics and colours are nice, but marketers will need to be “data nerds”. This will be especially true in coming years, as organizations tighten their marketing budgets, and require greater assurance of marketing investment returns. Analyze and scrutinize the data before they take action. As any carpenter will tell you, “Measure twice, cut once”.

I know I’m not the only one saying this. Have a look at what a businessman who spends money on advertising has to say, the very animated Gary Vaynerchuk.

The Future
Measurement methods and tools are continually being introduced now into a space far that is already too crowded. It is making them all meaningless. Out of necessity, therefore, a new way of looking at disparate data produced by these methods will evolve.

Much of current understanding is either buried in useless information, or kept under wraps as proprietary corporate IP. As the importance of reputation increases, companies will desire promoting their stature as a competitive advantage, and expose this data. These will constantly fluctuate, influenced by the source data points that you & I create. We will all watch “the reputation boards” much the way we are glued to the financial listings now.

A standard hyper-index of sorts will emerge that combines key information into something that is easy to comprehend, and compare. And since this is the day of the power of “I”, one will be created for individuals, another for organizations/brands. The boards will use a set of key indicators that are widely adopted and are taken in context of each other. No one indicator will prevail, much like the financial indicators today.

Someone once observed that “Andy Warhol said everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. On the internet, everyone is famous to 15 people“. When everyone is striving for more visitors, more readers, more subscribers, more followers, more friends, i.e.: more influence, it is only a matter of time before the Reputation Boards are a reality.