As I’ve made clear (as have countless others), social media is genuinely changing the way businesses relate to their markets and customers. Listening, monitoring and responding to individuals has been the cornerstone of the conversation around social for business, and we’re continuing to evolve the way we get to those tactics. This is all good and well, but we’re just getting started, and there is a huge gap around the strategic approach to social media that is currently not being addressed, or being addressed well: How are we monitoring and talking to groups of people?
Let me put this another way, from what I can tell most of the major social media platforms look at online conversations at the individual level, and aggregate comments and sentiment from a scattershot list of posts strewn across the social web. If you are monitoring your brand for, let’s say, a term like “recall,” then you are likely assembling content from a hundred different twitter feeds, blogs and bulletin boards. In doing so, the reference to “recall” is likely pulled out of it’s native context, which immediately dilutes the value of the comment, since it is no longer being considered as part of a larger conversation.
When you think about it, that is where the true value of the comment or post lies: in it’s source. When scraping the social web for some important business reference, you must be able to identify the context. Is it a one-off comment? Is it part of a dialogue and, if so, how engaged/active is that dialogue? Is the poster some renegade flamer, or a thought/opinion leader in a larger group? In real life, there’s a big difference in how you would react to a person on the street who is clearly out of their mind, and a person giving a talk at a business conference. In the social web, their comments may be exactly the same (i.e. “the recall is a disaster”) but their influence and social contexts are completely different.
We’ll need to bring a lot of focus to this in coming months, and work to develop real insight into group mentalities as much as we’re focusing on empowered individuals. There are several different ways to think about identifying and addressing groups. Here’s a shot:
- Individuals: this is the easy one, and I won’t go into too much detail here. I already wrote a post about this.
- Gangs: these are smaller groups of people who are either in a small, closed social group or who are having a pointed conversation about something esoteric. They may or may not feel very private about their conversation, but all members are likely heavily engaged. Gangs can also form as subsets in Communities or Cohorts. Ten or twelve people actively tweeting about a specific point of the recall (i.e. the auto-makers recall history) are an example.
- Communities: a larger group of people whose members have varying degrees of involvement. Community conversations are more public, i.e. on bulletin boards or review sites. There are probably more readers than contributors. An example: a group that have formed around an author’s work on an Amazon review, or a group formed around a common interest (i.e. hiking, cooking, etc.)
- Cohorts: these are the largest of the groups, and are valuable in diagnosing larger economic, social or political trends. They are found across the social web, and their sentiment is measured over a longer period of time, rather than over daily or weekly increments. ”Technophiles,” “Avid Readers,” “Mothers” are all examples of cohorts. We can monitor these groups to gain insights into large scale strategic efforts, product development, etc.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Bringing a focus on context, and on the larger group sentiments from which we derive this context, are going to start playing a much larger role. The insights gained will be highly valuable, and the ability to address groups will allow businesses to more efficient operationally. Now…can someone write an app for that?
