SocialMediaBust

Q: We are seeing more mention of the importance of "influence" on social media as social media metric, as compared with just looking at the number of friends or followers. What's your opinion on influence as a metric?

Robert: Theoretically, if you COULD measure real influence, you'd have something. But you can't. The people talking about social media influence should really know better, because the concepts are simple. Influence, the ability to affect user behavior has TWO distinct components.

The first is whether behavior ON social media can be affected by the influencer. That is what all the metrics measure. For example, if someone receives a lot of retweets on twitter, that means the person is more of an influencer than someone who receives less. That can be measured, as can how many times someone is mentioned. This has absolutely zero to do with the really important "influence" businesses want to create. None of us make money from how people behave on social media, not directly except for the people who run the social media platforms.

This is whether behavior in "real life" is being influenced. So, if I can influence you to visit my store, or buy something from me, or buy a book I recommend, or somehow act differently in the non-virtual world, then and only then do I have something useful for business. That is real influence, and you can't measure it directly in the general case. You can only measure "it", given enough resources, using survey/self report data which is almost always of poor quality for reasons I've set out elsewhere. Conversion data is an indicator companies can look at but simply doesn't get at the larger issue of influence.

This is SO basic, I can't figure out why even the most enamoured, in terms of social media, can't or won't talk about this.

Q: So, why do you think this is "dangerous"? Isnt that extreme?

A: No, because anything that provides false information also misleads, whether it's about one's own business or the businesses of others. That's because business people should be keying their decisions based on valid information, not on ideas that are illogical or false. For example, if you are well retweeted on twitter, that may encourage you to continue to spend inordinate amounts of time tweeting, when in fact you have zero influence on behavior that affects the health of your business. These days, nobody can afford to squander time. I've long said that time is a resource far more valuable than money, particularly for small businesses, and false notions about the positive values of social media can result in huge losses due to lost opportunity.

I've been curious about how people who advocate for customer service and social media actually use the tools they say businesses should use. That's because their use of terms like relationships, connections, customer experience, ENGAGEMENT, transparencey and so on are so common, of course these should be the standouts in actually behaving in accordance with their own advice given during their chats.

I decided to do a quick and dirty analysis of exactly how these folks really behave by clasiffying the tweets marked by the Twitter hashtag #chat. Here's the classification scheme:

Link: A post that is clearly designed to share a link to somewhere else, whether to one's own site, or material on another person's site.

RT (Retweet) Resending the tweet of someone else, either verbatim or if it also includes a very brief comment that is clearly not meant to start or respond to a discussion on Twitter. A RT that contained a link was considered an RT and not included in the link category.

Singles: A single is a post without a a link that has some content and COULD be used to start a conversation. IE, that is it's not a response to someone else. These would be conversational seeds, and include questions.

Convo: A tweet that responds to another person's tweet or question, either as part of an ongoing multiple tweet thread or simply a one off response. A conversation.

It's actually quite easy to use this classification system. I expected it would be much more difficult with a lot of overlap but almost all the tweets looked at clearly fell into one of the categories, and only one.

The #Custserv Data (How They Interact On Twitter)

Data was collected on August 12, 2010 for tweets sent between 7:45 a.m. and 12.25 pm, a period of close to five hours, using the tweets marked with #custchat as they appear in my Tweetdeck column set up to track this tag. A total of 80 tweets were found for that period. Here's the breakdown:

As you can see from the table the clear majority of tweets were retweets (52%) of what others had sent. This is actually interesting and rather useless since those that follow the #custchat tag will see all tweets so tagged at least theoretically, so retweeting post tagged as #custchat is not only pointless if one includes the tag again, but is also annoying to readers who have to wade through all the repetition.

Next most common was th posting of links at 20%.

With the conversational tweets there's a small glitch. During the period of monitoring, I and another person had a conversation (actually the ONLY conversation that occured that went on for more than a single interchange. My conversation accounted for the majority of the conversational chats. Excluding my conversation only 6% of posts were part of a conversation. If you include mine then that number goes up to 16% but that's deceptive since I'm not a "real" member of this set of people.

What Does It Mean?

Althought it's a small sample, it's hard to argue that those using #custchat are not interacting in any meaningful way and with any frequency at all. Not only are they not interacting but they aren't TRYING to interact, as indicatd by the very low "singles", conversation starter Tweets.

Even worse perhaps is that there is virtually ZERO original content or thoughts posted to Twitter using the #custchat hashtag, although certainly the links go to more substantive comments. However, the really good stuff is not posted to Twitter by these people (and tagged with #custserv.

It's fairly obvious that it's a case of do as I say, not as I do, with respect to the customer service mavens haunting these particular halls of discussion. While it's easy to talk about connection, engagement, customer service, relationship building, when one talks about what OTHERS should do, when it comes to these folks, it's not happening. They ain't conversin', dialogin', or even trying to learn from each other. It's announcements only!

Make of that what you may.

Footnote: I hope to look at other hashtagged topics to classify the tweets. If you are interested in doing the same, feel free to post your results in the comments section.

Oh, that IS funny. I've long been saying that what is driving business use of social media is a combination of "hype and hope", plus the somewhat irrational (not supported by data, evidence, logic) belief or faith that social media works. In short, it's a religion, a movement based on faith, not generalizable results.

So, I saw reference to a blog post entitled Converting the Disengaged to the Church of Social Media by David Ryan. It has this great picture of a bible with a usb port, which is actually far better than the article content, but oh that title. Inadvertently David hit this right on the head. It's about converting and it's about faith, and it's about Church, and the only thing he left out is that it's about bulls***.

Pity. But it IS funny. Take a look at it if you have a moment.

Here's my comment on the blog:

This post inadvertently hit the nail on the head by virtue of the reference to the Church of Social Media. That is it exactly. Those IN the church do so on the basis of faith and belief, not facts and data, and describe those outside of the church as people who do not "get it, the one true way".

That's typical of religions, we know, you don't, and I'll tell you it's all both insulting and wrong. The reason many reject social media as business tool is that the data to support it over other alternatives is either very poor, misinterpreted, or completely absent, and if you actually look for them, you will find thousands of businesses who have tried social media, failed at it and quietly left. Nobody talks about those.

That's not to say that social media is useless. It has uses, but not even close to what the reverends contend. That will become evident in the next few years. It's based on hype and hope just the way it was in the 90′s for the web in general. By and large the claims and hopes were bogus then, as were the business models,and thousands of people suffered as a result.

Paul Sutton wrote an interesting blog which references me (I think) related to negativity online, consquences and such things, which brings up some issues of interest, so I thought I'd respond here and on his blog. The response below appears to be too large to include on his site in one chunk. Is All Fair In Love and Social Media

Great article, Paul, and I like the comments. I'm presuming Paul is talking about me here, which is fine. There's so much here to discuss, so I'll try to present some short related ideas and comments.

1) We really can't have a conversation about "negativity" in any intelligent way without defining it operationally -- what specific behaviors and phrases are exemplars of bad negativity and what are examplars of useful criticism.

2)My use of social media platforms to criticize both the platforms and the people using them is not odd at all. As Jaron Lanier says "Criticism of the digital world should not be left to Luddites". (You Are Not A Gadget) I don't like spending much time on telephones but it doesn't stop my friend and I from criticizing their weaker points on the phone. Likewise, I don't like the pollution from autos, but we still have critical discussions of same as we drive down the highway in a vehicle.

3) When I use the word ignorant, I understand why people don't like it, but it simply means not knowing. We are all ignorant about many things. No biggie. I think we should face that. All of us.

4) Who is potentially more valuable, the person who retweets the same quotes about social media or customer service or e-learning and says exactly, often word for word, what others say, or someone who says: "Whoa up. We need to think here". I'm the latter. No problem if you want the former, since God made so many of them on social media.

5) When social media fanatics tell "us" (businesses) what we HAVE to do, that's arrogance. My view, that's the best word. Worse this stuff comes from people with minimal track records in anything, particularly running businesses.

6) Can anyone say what they want? Sure, provided they are willing to take the consequences. Unfortunately, there is no useful self-regulation for many contexts, and since anonymity exists and one can be whoever one wants to be, there's room for much damage. I'm in favor of accountability, which is why I don't make anonymous comments, and I'm easy to find. I pay a price, no doubt both personally and financially.

Anyway Paul, that's a start for more convo. If I can add, those interested in seeing the errr..."negativity" can do so WITHIN CONTEXT and I believe that's important at:

http://socialmediabust.com
http://customerservicezone.com/wp/
http://thetrainingzone.com/wp/

PS. This will probably sound defensive, but what the heck. The reason context is important is that the "negativity" that Paul talks about is such a small part of my body of work and contributions over the last 20 years, so it's important to have that context to understand me as a person, and what I do. I only add this because several tweeters have commented about what MY contributions are. One only has to look and read.