The Song of Socialism

Social is the new buzzword, and what a loud buzz that is nowadays.

Everyone from sedate bank to hippy dippy start-up wants to be "social". Being unsocial nowadays is like admitting to a fondness for bellbottoms - hopelessly anachronistic and just a little worrying. Its not unlike the early days of the Internet where everybody wanted to "be on the web" and "have a domain". What does social mean, though – does it mean putting up a Facebook page? Does it mean obtaining a twitter handle? Does it mean encouraging a bunch of people to like you on foursquare? And what does good this do my business anyway?

This rush to keep up with the social Joneses lead to some absurd decisions. Companies put up, sometimes at considerable expense, a "Facebook presence" and then proceed to be puzzled when no benefit accrues from all this. As with many technologies in their early days, people glimpse vast potential but simply cannot figure out how to convert this potential into actual gain. I spend a lot of time my time using social media, and it set me thinking on how it works, how companies can take advantage of it. Not unexpectedly, I find the most effective uses of social networking comes from game developers (at least that's my official excuse for playing Scrabble on company time). I will use games - especially the hugely successful Candy Crush - as my examples (assuming of course that you play games - what kind of a social person are you otherwise?)

There are, I feel, four levels of social media involvement (and it took my consultant avatar only a short while to come up with the relevant four Ps) providing different levels of value to organizations. They are, in increasing order of value:

1. Presence
2. Participation
3. Penetration
4. Platform

Consider a real life analogy: Presence is like a speaker in the park. People come up to the speaker to listen, and possibly take away a brochure or fill a form. Participation can be thought of as the next step, where the listeners include the speaker in their conversations, invite him to parties, engage in dialogues, willingly sharing his or her identity with the speaker and may even assist in enlarging the conversation by encouraging his or her friends to also connect with the speaker. If this is successful and grows, it becomes a campaign (Penetration), or even a movement (Platform).

I’m sticking to Facebook for the examples, but you can apply the stuff to other social sites too.

Presence

The first level - and the simplest - is about presence. The quick way to social is to put a Facebook Social Plug-ins on your own page – “Like” and “Share” buttons or “Activity Feeds”. These are simple javascript widgets, small snippets of code easily included into your own pages.

Presence is just a small extension of your existing web presence into the social world. It gets you the tick mark, it makes your page look social and it does allow for sharing and commenting. It does not hurt to have a flavour of Facebook on your existing pages, it makes sharing content a little bit easier and does encourage a bit of virality; things like blog posts and event announcements benefit from easy sharing. As a company though, your upside is limited.

Presence gives you two things. One – a popularity proxy that is a little bit better than the old proxy – visitor numbers. Two – it makes sharing the content on your page a whole lot easier – and thus gives you a chance at virality. The companies that benefit most from these are companies that want the maximum number of people to read their content, such as a newspaper or an e-commerce site; these numbers are much less useful, for instance, if you’re selling machine parts to power plants, or other businesses that do not really care about popularity or virality.

Participation

The next level of engagement (and currently the most popular flavor) is to put up a Facebook Page. It’s a noticeable step for many companies, since it involves creating a new web presence, not part of any existing web presence. The technology is not challenging – indeed this is little more than brochureware hosted within Facebook. Ten years ago, having a website was the latest in cool, today it's a Facebook page.

Participation is more than presence, which was all passive. Here, you have to constant contribute to your Facebook page to keep the beast alive. Pages that have more frequent contributions by the page owner usually have more fans. More than a website, a Facebook page (or twitter handle or google+ page) is all about fresh, frequent updates. And no, comments or replies to comments do not count.

How does a company gain from participation – from putting that extra effort into creating and continually posting to a Facebook page? What does a Facebook page give you that adding those widgets to your existing web page does not? The gain is easy to see in entrepreneurships and small companies who can’t go about creating fancy web presences or splurge on SEO budgets, but why large companies? You will see a lot of statistics on how many users there are on Facebook (a hundred million in India), how they spend a lot of time there, how you should be there because everyone – are those good reasons? Think of it this way - if population was all that important, India would be a bigger market that America; what decides a company’s market share is much more than just population.

Presence made it easy for a Facebook user to share content, but how do you persuade them to share? Also, each share is relatively shallow - if that person has a few hundred friends, that’s the number seeing the share. You have to get a lot of shares before numbers start to tally up. Participation, on the other hand, pushes this content out to all your fans - it gives a company much more influence, a louder voice. Everything you post on your company’s Facebook page appears as a wall post on your fan’s pages, to be seen by all their friends. If you have – say ten thousand fans, every post on your Facebook page or Twitter feed is straightaway seen by ten thousand people. No waiting for people to lift their lazy fingers and press the share button. On average, a Facebook Page has 4,596 fans; Barack Obama has nearly 7 million – that’s a very loud voice. CEOs of some companies would do well to have that kind of voice (of course, as mentioned earlier, you’d better have something to say). And these fans can also talk to you, or even each other.

There’s another benefit. One of the challenges of the web always has been that it is essentially that people don’t have any identity. You can easily find out how many people visited your website, but who they are, what sex, what age, all that is invisible. Websites try many things to get a better idea – registration drives, cookie analytics, loyalty schemes – but the great thing about Facebook is that everyone there already has an identity. Even better, the identities are mostly real; a big percentage of the data is correct. Names, faces, birthdays, education, jobs– people usually don’t lie or fake it on Facebook since it would otherwise spoil the social experience. You can learn a lot of real life stuff about your fans on Facebook; far more than almost any other way.

Two Ps down, Two to go. Its in the next post.