feedback, feedback, feedback
Image via Wikipedia
Is all the talk about ROI, talk about “Close the loop”?
Generally we don’t like open feedback loops very much (unless we are ducking and diving). We like to see how we are doing. And if we can’t see immediately, we want an interim signal, or reassurances from an expert who knows what delays to expect.
I think the brilliance of social media is not so much that it creates sales. Its brilliance is that it allows feedback. And feedback is in both directions.
- We can hear what people are saying.
- And we can tell them what we have done.
Moreover, social media is a conversation not a head count.
- It is more sensitive and responsive to the nuances of what is said.
- People relate to neighbors rather than to a big impersonal organization - so it is closer, more frequent and more personal.
Social media allows us to continually reinforce the network. As far as we know, we have to do that or the links just fade away.
Sci-fi time
Imagine call centers organized around communities.
The number of calls taken would be irrelevant. After all, like police & crime, doing more work could mean things are going right or going wrong.
The first measure would be feeding insights about the community “upwards”, “ease” of making sales in the neighborhood, the balance of traffic (value added over problem fixing). I am sure we could think of a few more.
The second measure would be the ease with which changes in the business are communicated to the community. Have people been informed? How quickly? How well? Obama’s campaign is credited with telling people where their money was being spent - and he spent a lot $85m on ads - almost as much as the Republican Party and Clinton combined. When people see that we are responding to them, we reinforce our relationship.
Glocal, in other words. Global businesses built around local communities.
ROI
I’ve found it interesting to hear the emphasis on ROI in marketing. There isn’t the same emphasis on HR. Personally, having worked in a joint department of Marketing, HR, Management Science and Strategy, I think this is a lot to do with the feeling that Marketing guys have too much of a good time. So my cynical mind would suggest a two fold strategy:
- Go slow with the slower functions.
- Make sure they enjoy the party too.
Get them to do the numbers, organize the surveys, define the objectives! Put them to work in other words.
Also turn the ROI around. Help people envisage the community we are trying to create. We often don’t want one that is massive or overly enthusiastic. Do I want the whole village discussing their health for example? Do I want everyone at my coffee shop? We can also measure our social media about being clear where to stop. That will reassure the other functions who find marketing too “unconstrained”
Feedback. Close the loop. Well I am a psychologist. We know we hate being deprived of sensation, company, and recognition.
Can we raise the levels of contact, companionship, involvement? Do people feel that they belong? Do they feel they “own” us? Are we “theirs”?
Who wants to collaborate in Social Media School?
Greek school, Hebrew School . . . who would like to co-operate in social media school?
This is what I am thinking.
Social media requires us to think about our identity much earlier than, well, when I was growing up.
I think youngsters hitting the job market need a portfolio. I no longer want to see what exams they wrote, and which university they want, or who they studied with, or who examined them. I am not going trawling for party pics on Facebook either.
I want to see what they have done. I want to see how they have explored the world. I want to see how they have organized their ideas. I want to see who they worked with, and why.
In the past, if dad was rich, kids would go to the ‘right school’ and the ‘right university’ and have the ‘right summer experience’ - well certainly having a rich dad helped to to get the right building blocks in place.
Now, I can see what the kid himself or herself has done - partly because on line portfolios are so easy - but mainly because social media allows us much greater freedom to expand our horizons.
Kids want to set their own frontiers. Since the 60’s at least, adolescents have obsessed about their identity: will I be allowed to be “me as I am, not who you want me to be”. And periodically, we revisit the same panic. English corporate poet, David Whyte, quotes Dante on the mid-life crisis: “In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in the dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.”
It is scary too.
Hence the need for a school: attitudes, skills, knowledge, support.
- I would be interested in doing the psychology part: how do I organize my thinking about who I am and what decisions I make?
- People also need content production skills - writing, photography, etc.
- Basic website, programming and hardware skills make life quicker and snappier.
- Social media marketing skills are key to developing an on line identity measured by the feed back loops (have I just solved the metrics conundrum?).
- Project management skills - getting it done through others preferably.
- And networking skills with some basic economics, sociology, law, etc. etc. Some street smarts.
Where are expectations going?
Does anyone think the same way?
Would there be a market for a social media school?
PSYCHOLOGY: Social Preferences
I read in a recent science paper by Yamagishi, that game theories and analysis can be used to assess individuals that are engaged in daily group activity, in that they can be said to be belonging to a “self-sustaining” institution where they operate according to a shared set of incentives.
In these types of environments it has been shown that individual strategy and behaviour can be based on considering specific outcomes, or the “payout”, not exactly rocket science of course, but let’s dig deeper.
The specific example used two groups of different cultures; Americans and Japanese. Each group were given a set of coloured pens and asked to choose a single colour pen as a reward for completing a survey. The experiment showed that the Japanese were less likely than the Americans to take a coloured pen IF that were the only pen of that colour in the set, indicating that they were not comfortable in reducing the number of options in the set for the remaining group members, therefore not creating a negative impression of themselves.
This is said to reflect that the Japanese are more conforming and less individualistic than their American counterparts. However, there was no discernible difference between the two groups when each group were informed that they were the first or last to receive, therefore instruction plays a part in institutional behaviour here.
You may not find this as fascinating as me, though I am wondering what you may be thinking, do you see parallels here in social network behaviours, can we assume a social network IS a “self-sustaining” institute? And can we predict different behaviours in each, both conforming in nature or the more individualistic approach, and more to the point how can we change that behaviour by instruction… ?
And what is a psychologist doing in social media?
Image by lounger via Flickr
At the moment, finding my way around here. Will be back later.
Jo
