Thought Leadership
How online social media might help you make friends and influence people…
Whilst so much written about Twitter & Co. and other social networking sites, there is a sense that they are now being more rationally appraised from a business perspective. Initially, when logging onto micro-blogging sites such as Twitter much of the information can appear narcissistic, solipsistic, banal and seemingly of little commercial value. Whilst much column space has been devoted to how big business is embracing Twitter, in reality few firms are tweeting regularly and if they are, few are engaging their customers in a meaningful way.
A recent article in the Times (http://tinyurl.com/yjcr3qs), suggests that despite all the hype about the adoption of Twitter by companies, there is a mismatch between their intentions and reality. Whilst many companies acknowledge the importance of social media as part of their marketing arsenal, (well according to Steve Jobs traditional media is dying anyway), only “one in ten UK organisations have a dedicated social-media budget”. Whilst the The Wall Street Journal reported in April only 23 out of the Fortune 500 have blogs “which link to corporate twitter accounts”.
This prompts the question, why is Twitter not being widely adopted by companies? Could it be perhaps that Twitter, after all, does not suit the suits? The article in the Times gives several reasons why Twitter is not a good fit for large corporations. Namely, the lack of responsiveness and decision-making in such companies, the need for a 2 way dialogue, the need to be brief (!) and the tonality of altruism, trust and openness which typically go with the genre. Based on these criteria, it is easy to understand the difficulties of successful adoption by large companies. It is apparent therefore that companies perhaps not best suited to online, real-time dialogue – as 1 hour to respond to a brewing crisis can be a long time on Twitter, where instantaneity is highly prized. Consequently, unless companies have a well designed Twitter strategy, led by skilled and engaging Tweeters, the Tweets may not foster a warm cosy feeling with their public and instead read like stilted press releases.
From a qualitative research perspective, there are of course other social media sites which can provide rich pickings. Linked In remains an old favourite for finding anything from sales contacts to identifying job vacancies. However, be aware that since the content is user generated the onus is on the user to present accurate and update biographical information, which is frequently not the case. As with other social media, the platforms are open to abuse and misrepresentation. For the German speaking (DACH) markets, Xing is the tool of choice, where the hype of Twitter does not deliver in the more cautious Teutonic business environment. Xing competes with Linked In in terms of functionality but conveys the sense of a smaller, trusted environment, ‘a small world’ of business contacts which are more geography specific. Searching for biographical and contact information is becoming easier with the creation of search engines such as ‘123 People’, which display information is a variety of visual representations computing results from traditional search engines, allowing the user to grasp the information in seconds. (Particularly fun is to add ones own name in and see the Cloud tags which result, in case you are bored with just Googling your name on a wet Tuesday afternoon).
So, where does this leave the researcher or marketer? As evinced by Obama’s successful Twitter campaign during his election, Twitter can hold up a mirror or take the pulse of those who Twitter. I would therefore argue, that in a commercial context, Twitter can be exploited at a PR or Customer Service / Experience context where there is an explict need for an instant 2 way dialogue. Or, as in the case of Obama, it can be used for building momentum and brand loyalty. For example, a friend of mine recently sounded off about Dell and within minutes was contacted by a named representative who then ‘owned’ her problem and thus restored faith in the brand due to this proactive resolution. In reality, for all parties concerned, the companies themselves, market researchers and marketers, blogs as opposed to micro-blogs such as Twitter may prove to be a more viable option with their greater longevity and content requirements.
With an estimated 2.4 million tweets a day on Twitter are we all drowning in white noise? How do companies and those with a corporate message to send or receive, make sense of it all? It is now a well known fact that many people have developed a kind of ‘online incontinence’, tweeting, bleeping or pinging or every waking thought – most of which would not even interest their own Mothers. The business challenge therefore is to navigate deftly through the mire and find the nuggets of information which have commercial value. If traditional media will be taking the backseat as is predicted, then this skill and the professional expertise of researchers will be in increased demand.
Twitter and Google are both responding to this quest, albeit in different ways. According to a an article in today’s New York Times, (http://tiny.cc/oZlG3), Twitter is due to launch a Geolocation service. If the benefit to the researcher or marketer is real time information, then this new innovation will allow identify local trending topics in real time. This will be facilitated by the GPS on cellphones so that Tweets can be identified or searched within a precise geographic location. As, “improvements like Geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online.” So, it will be able to access Tweets in a predefined locality to provide a kind of ‘moving picture of information’. Given that many people are searching for information related to specific events, often in commercial settings, this functionality is likely to be valuable.
From a Business Intelligence perspective, the messages from platforms such as Twitter could be described as in military terms as ‘signals intelligence’ or ‘sigint’, as pointed out by the Information World Review(http://tinyurl.com/na5yay).Whilst ‘historical information’ about competitors or companies past strategies and campaigns can be insightful, “those involved in intelligence for government agencies often learn that real-time intelligence is where the early warning signals are best found”. One example is either a sharp increase in message traffic or an equally precipitous decrease.” As with military campaigns, navigation and mapping with social media is key. Hence, tools such as Twitturly, (a Tweet ranking and filtering service in order of priority) and TweetBeep (similar to Google alerts), help structure this requirement.
Google is imminently launching Google Social Search (according to their blog due to be available by the end of today, http://tinyurl.com/yzq3ptu), is further proof, in case we needed reminding, that Google is indeed taking over our lives. The official Google blog explains that it will further personalise the Google search experience by customising your searches by throwing out results which are authored by your broader Social Circle, “With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results”.
The Google Social Search operates through the information which users populate in their Google profile which is the content which they choose to share about themselves with the online world (e.g., links to Twitter & Co.) Once signed into the Google account, Google aggregates information from a user’s Google Profile to build a social graph of information. It adds your social online contacts and contacts from those contacts, (working on the 6 degrees of separation model). It also adds your Google chat buddies and information from Google Reader e.g. blogs which you subscribe to. Google is at pains in its promotional information to state utter transparency and user control… It will be interesting to see how companies try and use this as a vehicle to get consumers to endorse their products to their Social Circle in order to influence buying decisions and thus spawning an additional field of online research in the process.
