The world I work in goes through phases of interest in a variety of themes (you could call them ‘fads’ but they’re not), services, or trends. In 2007 it was Second Life, in 2008 it was Facebook, in 2009 it is Twitter.
These phases of interest have a lifecycle:
- low adoption, early interest – we start playing with something and start to speculate on what its potential might be
- it goes mainstream inside the industry and we and a number of leading brands take it seriously and start generating value from it
- it becomes ‘Conference-fodder’ and we start celebrating its potential in public
- the press (either industry-specific or mainstream) get hold of it
- we broadly understand it, and how to use and not use it, but by no means have we established the ‘rules’ or what is ‘best practice’ or what the specific measurable value is, but intuitively most of us can see it and have a good feel for how to do it and not do it
- everyone wants to be an expert in the field, and suddenly we are overwhelmed with ‘experts’ in the medium because it’s obviously the trending topic that is about to go mainstream. We get dedicated conferences, even though we’ve already talked about it endlessly already, but of course we need these to help educate those who are just coming to it and want to understand it.
- it becomes more widely understood – we and our customers understand clearly what its value is, how to do it well, and how to measure that value, and we find something else new to talk about.
At some point in this, the thing either goes mainstream, or it goes back to its former audience. Example: Facebook went mainstream, Second Life went back to its old community.
Where are we with Twitter? Well, we’re at stage 6. Everyone is a social media expert. Everyone still seems to talk about Twitter, even if there’s nothing new to say; but we do need to talk about it because there are still business as usual marketing and brand teams who don’t fully understand it and want help in establishing what ‘best practice’ means for them. So we should be moving from internalising our talk on Twitter within ‘the industry’ to externalising it to the people who need to know, and we should begin to define our specific expertise, are we behavioural experts, measurement experts, brand messaging experts, tools experts, or are we simply Twitter experts, who know all the tools, all the latest developments of the API and the latest on how people are using it?
However, we’ve missed some vital stuff out;
1 - We’re not helping brands establish ‘best practice’ - we’re just still harping on about how great, or frustrating, or inspirational it is. Twitter conferences are attended by the Twitterati, and we aren’t helping brands make sense of it, and people who have never used Twitter before are suddenly social media experts who want to help big brands despite the fact that they are only a couple of pages ahead of those brands (this is a huge area to claim expertise in), and their advice is largely based on intuition or casual observance. This means that the brands we work with are prone to influence by anyone who seems to be an expert regardless of their real credentials, and without an understanding of the value that they are expecting from that expert’s advice.
2 – Measurement – aside from an intangible brand affinity, and building emotional ties to a brand, what is the value of doing Twitter well? We haven’t yet sat down and isolated whether or not a good Twitter engagement will affect someone’s propensity to buy, or recommend or advocate a brand. We need this measurement to back up the advice we give clients, and real experts need this to provide evidence that they have given good advice.
So, what am I going to do about it?
Here’s my social media for the (brand) masses manifesto:
We will make Social Media ‘Business As Usual’ - Well, first, I’m never going to call my self a social media expert – instead I’m going to continue to be an Experience Director at a digital agency (my day job), helping design and create user experiences that flow seamlessly from channel to channel. Why wouldn’t that extend to Twitter? Well it does. A few years ago we decided that it was just as much our responsibility in the Total Experience Design philosophy, to consider customer interactions in store and in the call centre, so these other digital channels should be simply part of business as usual for anyone working in digital media; and it’s their job to understand them. We will still get specialists, in the way that we get usability, SEO and accessibility specialists, but the mainstream of agencies need to know a good deal more than their clients on any of these topics, and social media is included. (Interestingly, I have met some call centre experts, but I’ve never seen them on Twitter. Nor for that matter have they cold-called me on my home phone… )
We will go in pursuit of best practice – We did it for SEO, accessibility, usability, why won’t we do it for social media? Yes, there’s a bunch of Top 10 ‘how to’ tips out there, but they’re full of subjective advice like “a sure fire way to lose followers is…” How do we know that? What’s the trade-off? Does losing those particular followers matter if we have certain objectives? We’ve got to evolve industry-wide advice, that it is accepted is based on good solid fact. Most of today’s social media experts rely on a single case study. One thing they did well, probably when Twitter was in its earliest days to drive their credibility. Now that the Twitter user base has changed, its usage profile has potentially changed, and our ‘experts’ need to be a mix of ethnographic observers of all social media users, they need to be statisticians and coders, able to use the API to find and predict patterns and behaviours, and they need to be brand and copy experts (NLP experts even), skilled in language, tone of voice and the art of emotional engagement and persuasion. My part in this? I will see what I can distil out of the ether, and our own more scientific studies of Twitter trends and behaviours, and industry behaviours, and contribute that to the mix in an open forum. Which means I’m going to need some of the following…
We will find measurement strategies and evidence – We’ve got to come up with some hard solid facts that back up our advice and the behaviours of the brands we work with. Measuring the value of engaging with users in social spaces is key in reassuring an Executive board that the advice we are giving is sound business sense, and not just because it will be a laugh! My part in this? I hereby commit to producing a solid, statistically sound study that puts a monetary value on Twitter users for a well known business; and I commit to doing that before the end of the year (well, don’t want to overdo it do we? Hopefully it will be sooner!)
We will not Tweet on… – Twitter conferences need to be for our clients. We have to show them best practice, measurement and tools. We have to give them evidence on what works and what doesn’t. If we as an industry talk about Twitter, it should be about driving best practice, measurement or tools. Let’s keep our own Twitter Tweeting between us, and aim and shape it constructively rather than trying to compete for followers against each other. Who knows, perhaps Twitter will never go truly mainstream and we’ll all be pondering why we spent so much time and effort talking about it, but equally it becomes inside our industry, the most powerful networking tool we have….
Ok, must go and read that Tweet Hugh Mcleod sent out yesterday titled “The Death of the Social Media Expert” – you might see this post revisited! :)