Monday, March 26, 2012
Social Media Scape
There are a lot of lies out there. First you can rarely bump into someone who has a really big firehouse no matter what they say they have and second once you turn on their hose, you need to boil the ocean to the point it will probably stink up any assumptions you had about the space you are looking at.
What they don’t tell you in Industrial Social Media College is what you find when you begin to boil the ocean. What really happens if you look at 90-120 days of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Blogs, Forums, and more blogs streams of data?.. The amount of data is amazing. So what do you find?
Well, that depends on what you are looking for. Say you are looking for a competitor. Say you have a software suite that offers many different solutions to various use cases. Where do you start? Do you use your industry terminology? Nobody says on Twitter “Do you know of a great Media Management Solution?” Or “BTW , just tried a great Transcoder Video Solution”.
For the most part, what you find is what we find in our ocean, garbage. Sssshhh! Don’t tell the social guru sipping a cocktail next to you about how you have to engage in conversations... If a guru tells you that, or tells how to create “Viral” content, then I suggest you stick his or her nose against the screen of a Radian6 query for 30 days and tell him to go at it...
You can try to find that set of organic conversations but you will sadly be disappointed. It turns out that affiliate bots, marketers, and wanna be social capital entrepreneurs have spammed the space...
A word to the wise.
So when you use a tool like Radian 6 or Meltwater Buzz, or Sysmos or Jive. You need to brush up on your Boolean Logic. Because that’s how your going to query the social data sea or Boil that Ocean. So if your company is say Issac Bernbaum Management, your going to need to set up a NOT statement for “IBM” or at least for NOT Computers” and a range of other statements to clear out the detritus. And there is a lot of detritus...
Luckily I aced Symbolic Logic in College.
Next, to create these filters of phrases you want to find go into Google Adwords, go to the keyword tool. And start thinking like a customer not mid-level tech management geek. Look for phrases that reach at least 100K Nationally or Globally. If the phrase is less than that it will probably not show up in the Social Media Query.
So you have scrubbed the phrases as best you can. You have knocked out every piece of crap you can. Then what? Did you scrub out competitors? Did you scrub out affiliates for competitors? Did you scrub out patterns for associated verticals? Say you are looking for scrapbookers but knocked out photobookers because mixbooks ran a Groupon for Photobooks? Even if you don’t then what? The truth is you put garbage in and you get garbage out. And there is a lot of garbage going into the social verse. So let’s say you take a middle approach looking for an average guy or average gal?
But here you must hold back your analysis too. You see, average joe and average josephine are not what you find in the social verse. I am not going to bore you with statistics, but UGC is not a conservative or pragmatist function. Its for the early adopters or first movers or tech enthusiasts.
Please don’t hand me Mommy Bloggers, I list those under “Affiliate Sites”. That means they have insignificant followers, and over produce content that is either a re-post of a deal or have their own real - world social network supporting their blogging efforts. I know, I look at dozens of blogger sites daily, and well, they don’t have a lot of readers.. Some do, and they actually generate good distinct vertical content. But they are so rare it is ridiculous.
So what you find is not what you want. What you find is what you get. And that is not academically actionable data. At least my professors would find the sentimentality, number of mentions, and other data stats supplied from your Sysmos, Radian6 or Meltwater Buzz totally un-usable.
Now the Social Media Guru’s who are selling Mom and Pop’s the Social Media Bubble Gum, talk about hugging the user, developing relationships with each follower. While none of that is bad advice for a very small company that can afford to pay a social media guy a wage. As a consultant, if you were a brick and mortar company and you had even 35K a year to spend. I would not spend it on a social media guy or gal.
I would suggest spending that on a good small PR agency. Yes, walk away from social media if you are not national. If you are regional, but have many storefronts then again, get your marketing gal or guy on a few things “Social” but really, don’t waste your time. Branding via LBS or Facebook ads really are not cheap. And doing them at small numbers are ineffective.
Spending 35K on Facebook ads is a waste as well, when I can get you 35K new emails for that price via voluntary double opt-in programs.. But more data and tools for next time.. For now as I ramble sarcastically along. Suffice to say this:
As with any free-scale network, 90% of the nodes are not connected to much. There is a lot of salesmen, and very few buyers. Most of what we see in boiling the ocean is absolute crap. So if you were to follow most of the suggestions of those Social Media Books.. Take a Seth Godin book and burn it. Because once you boil the ocean you can’t hug every starfish to develop a relationship.
It all comes back to the new dirty word in Social Media.... Complexity. Because if you want to understand complex human systems, and that is what social media is, you better understand complexity, and you better understand the science of how complex systems work. And you best understand systems, so you can model and figure out how they might behave before you begin another promotions or game-ification of your community...