The great words of Joel Bauer… “it isn’t about being liked, it’s about being effective.”
Now I would argue that the greatest advantage today is in being both. In a time where our online social world is filled with endless noise, there is a lot competing for human attention. And as wrong as this may sound for some people, the truth is that in order to reach your audience (be them friends or colleagues)… it’s not enough to just be liked anymore, you have to be liked and effective.
We are all brands. We are all community managers.
But, that doesn’t mean that we have the budget or large staff employed at agencies or within brands to manage our online presence. No, we need to rely on useful tools to tell us the information we want to know, we need to know, and when we know it. Unfortunately, those tools don’t currently exist.
Why Social Networks Need To Embrace This
In the great big battle of social networks competing for our engagement time… it will be the networks that give us relevant feedback (who likes our posts, how many forwarded my link onto their friends) that will win our attention.
This isn’t so far off from what Obama discovered in his campaign for president, or what game designers have known for quite sometime: if you show people the progress of their actions, they will become more invested and engage more frequently. People like statistics, people like feedback, and people like to know that they are getting somewhere.
How Facebook and Twitter Can Offer More Value
What they can do immediately…
1. Give users access to the data they already collect. I shouldn’t have to have a fan page to know how interactions on my profile trend over time. What month did I have the most photo comments, wall posts, etc. You are already collecting that data, let me have it!
2. Integrate consistent metrics into the interface. Twitter’s big problem is that metrics are inconsistent and housed outside of their site. It would be nice to have an analysis panel that easily connects together my retweet ratio with the actual content that got retweeted.
What they can do in the future…
3. Base new functionality on what consumers want to know. There is already enough competing for our engagement. Facebook and Twitter don’t need to add more applications or functions. Instead they should help us gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of what we are already doing.
Social sites need to realize that consumers don’t want more widgets and feeds and doodads that add to our everyday noise. It’s time for networks to help increase the relevance of social content, by helping us become more informed party hosts.
Marta Strickland