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Hype, Anxiety, and Hope (HAH!): How To Do Social Media Wrong (and How To Do It Right)
By Michael C. Gilbert, June 22, 2009
I'm teaching about Blog Networks and other social media this week and I've realized a blunt truth:
There is a wrong way and a right way to approach social media. The wrong way results in anxiety, blind risk, expense, low-value list building, and empty lessons. The right way results in clarity, methodical growth, managed risk, network effects, husbanding of resources, high-value organizing of influencers, and ongoing learning.
The Wrong Way: HAH!
Almost every organization is pursuing social media the wrong way. It's easy to understand why this is the case. We have been playing catch up for years with new communication technology. New words and brands come flying at us every time we turn around. Vendors and others who are themselves anxious about the wagons to which they have hitched themselves keep telling us that we'll "fall behind". (That destructive pattern has been going on for almost twenty years!) We are insecure about our ability to make decisions in a field that seems dominated by the language of "experts".
What that means is that our "strategic" approach for social media is basically a combination of Hype, Anxiety, and Hope. You can remember this by its abbreviation: HAH! (You're right. I don't think much of this approach. There is just too much at stake.) The symptoms of this approach are widespread. I'll describe three.
The first key symptom of HAH! is found in the language used to focus our social media projects. Very often, projects are defined like this: Develop a Facebook Strategy. Invest in Twitter. Start a Blog. The questions involved are similarly phrased: In which social network (defined as a branded, commercial, walled garden of online communities) should we develop a presence? (Should we put time into MySpace or LinkedIn?) There is a theme in all this language. Do you see what it is? The framing language is on the medium or the tool, not on the people, relationships, or outcomes.
A second important symptom of HAH! is what might be described as fashion consciousness. Before you skip over this paragraph because you think it can't possibly apply to your organization, ask yourself these questions: How often do you wonder what your peer organizations are doing and how your practices do or don't fit in? Do you find yourself concerned with whether Twitter is a flash in the pan or a long term trend? Are you tickled in any way by the "coolness" of a particular tool or site? When you ask about "best practices", do you really mean what the organizations you respect are doing? Do you worry about "falling behind"? Any of these can be justifiable questions, in a narrow context. But when taken as a whole they show how much you are being guided by the crowd. And the crowd in this case is not your stakeholders, who are the ones that should in fact guide you, but rather the organizations that you consider your peers. However professional the veneer, that is still a herd mentality.
The last major symptom I'll mention here is about who we are really trying to please and influence. Often, even though we can't really talk about it this way, our real stakeholders are internal. This has been going on for years and shouldn't come as any surprise. You're not building a website for your stakeholders; you're building a website for your board. You're not building an email newsletter to empower the people who receive it; you're building a great portfolio piece. There's nothing inherently disingenuous about this; it's that we're not all that candid about it most of the time. Thus, when we discuss our communication projects, we muddy up the waters when it comes to clear criteria for success.
The Right Way: Relationships
Although they are seemingly intangible, as individuals and as organizations, relationships are what matter to us most. Relationships among our stakeholders is the defining characteristic of social media. Relationships are the building blocks of all our social assets. And when it comes to raising money, mobilizing activists, recruiting volunteers, building community, serving people, bringing in visitors, and so on, social assets generate all the rest of our assets.
Focusing on relationships is easier said than done. In fact, we talk about it all the time, but we usually don't operationalize it. Although I've built a lifetime of professional work around trying to develop the practices for doing just that, I still feel like I am just scratching the surface. That said, in pursuing social media, there are a few key practices I want to mention here to help pull us away from HAH! and back toward a focus on relationship building.
First, follow your stakeholders. Social media is about everyone being both an ear and a voice, both a consumer and a producer of information. Thus it is the ears of our current stakeholders who will help direct our own listening and it is the voices of our current stakeholders that we should first empower. This means working from the inside out, building on your assets, rather than just going where you think there are new people, which is grasping from a place of weakness.
Second, you must know who speaks and who listens to whom. To begin with this means a thorough, well-designed inventory of every voice in your networks - the bloggers, the bookmarkers, the forwarders, the speakers, the commenters, the social networkers, and so on. It's an inventory of every blog, bulletin board, social network, mailing list, profile, website, that have voices aligned with your communities of practice, starting with the voices of your stakeholders and working your way out.
But that inventory must evolve into a sustainable practice as well. I call this "systems for scaling up listening", but you can call it aggregation, ongoing network monitoring, or paying attention to your communities of practice. What you do with these systems is much more than just passive observation. You use this knowledge in your own outbound communication, using your influence to strengthen the bonds of your communities and to grow their size through the influence of your stakeholders.
Third, you have to keep working to make relationships as tangible as publications. One of the best ways to do this is through new metrics and you can get a lot of those from your inventory and listening systems. Measurements of how many people in your networks are speaking up, how robust the conversations are about your common causes, how much reach your stakeholders have, and how richly interconnected they are with each other are all useful places to start.
But you can also build tangibility in other ways. Use network diagrams to explain things to each other. Have the paths of engagement of your stakeholders defined visually and make a poster out of it. Honor stakeholders, even if it's just internally, with weekly or monthly memos about who stands out as most building connections. Name your projects after relationship goals and people strategies, rather than after commercial tools or technologies.
Finally, set forth on a course to think about social media as social media. Study social network analysis and communication centered technology planning. Develop a culture that thinks of your stakeholders as producers.
Changing Course: Five Simple Actions
However simple they may be, there are some big ideas here. If you're not prepared to do an inventory, to take listening systems seriously, to develop new metrics, to make relationship building tangible, or to commit to network and communication centric thinking, then what you need to do is keep the door open to change in some fashion. I have five suggestions.
- Go through all the projects and strategies that touch on social media. Rename them in terms of relationship goals. Rewrite their objectives in a similar manner. Try to expunge every mention of tools and websites until you are absolutely sure that they're not what's guiding you.
- Get together with your colleagues and craft a principle of network and relationship building based on these ideas and the best of your own personal experience. Steal something of mine if you like or come up with something better. Put that principle on the wall in the office.
- Assign a person to keep you honest. With the full knowledge of other colleagues and the support of their superiors, give someone the job of bringing up when they notice a process drifting away from (or never even starting with) relationship building.
- Find peers who are doing it right. Not the peers who have the "best" Facebook page or the ones with a robust Twitter feed, although those things are the most visible and tangible. Rather, seek out those peers who are finding ways to measure the things that matter - the empowered voices of their stakeholders, the richness of their network, and so on - and ways to manage from those measurements.
- Finally, reduce your listening to the experts who are sending the wrong messages and seek out those who are sending the right ones. I'm as addicted to news about new tools as anyone, but it's a thousand times easier for experts to expound on the tangible aspects of one tool or another than it is for them to help us get grounded in the relationship and community fundamentals that are what social media are all about.
Do it right.
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