Managing Social Media's Expectations
Last week guest blogger Liz Strauss had a great blog post about the power of social media to create and build relationships (or not). But when launching your own social media strategy, what sort of expectations should you have? At last week's Conference Board Customer Experience Management show, I found out.
Much of the talk at the show revolved around the power of social media and other Web 2.0 tools to help facilitate relationships and communicate with customers, employees, and others. Cynthia Hester, director of marketing for Hewlett Packard's software group, discussed her company's approach to creating customer advisory boards and working with reference customers.
The key takeaway I found was something both Hester and David Rogers of Columbia Business School mentioned as standards for social media participation. They called it the 1/9/90 rule. With blogs, message forums, user-generated content, or other social media tools, 1 percent of users will be "super users," generating their own content, coming up with new ideas, and constantly sharing their thoughts. Another 9 percent will be "active users" who comment once in a while. The last 90 percent will be "passive users," taking in all the information available, but never commenting themselves. "This is very important because it allows you to set expectations of user activity and even predict ROI," Hester said.
We've found this concept to be true on the 1to1 media blog. We count on power users such as Malcolm Wicks, Miro Slodki, and Tim Trent to provide additional insight and point-of-view to the topics we post. (Thanks guys!) Some posts may have other comments as well, and our average blog traffic is almost tenfold the number of comments. That's why we try to create valuable content for our readers and incorporate polls and other means of interactivity, to allow the passive users an opportunity to participate in ways they are more comfortable with.
Thanks for participating, no matter which way you do.
Related Entries
- Is Social CRM the "It" Strategy of 2010?
- 2009: The Year We All Got Social
- ABC Experiments With Twittering the News
What's going to be fun is if anyone votes that they are a passive user!
In another role of mine online I run a forum which offers help and advice to a segment of kids in pain and the adults they become. I'm often reminding "my" regular contributors that the forum is very much for the lurkers, and that we rely on the posters and commenters to provide material that the lurkers will find beneficial.
Oddly the commenters can find this offensive. "But this is here for ME!"
Well, no it isn't. It's there for whatever its primary purpose is. And in "my" forum that is, with rifle target precision, to help those who will never post a thing.
Oh, nice to be famous for 15 minutes. Thanks guys. And good to see a far better CAPTCHA. It means that commenting is likely to be easier all round