Breathing New Life into an Old Social Network

Originally published 7/28/2011

One big question that is eventually faced by all mature social networking sites is, “how do you breathe new life into an existing social network?”  How do you take a site whose popularity and relevance has dropped off over time and revitalize it?  How do you attract new members? How do you win back old members who used to be active but have moved on?

Perhaps social networking can take a cue from a completely different medium for some of the answers: television. In many respects, a social media site is a lot like a television series.  TV shows are created and debuted with much enthusiasm.  A few people try them out for a while before deciding if they like them.  Some shows are wildly successful, but most are not.  Television networks routinely retool flagging shows in an attempt to attract new viewers or bring back viewers they’ve lost over time…which is exactly the same goal of an aging social network.  So let’s examine a few of the tricks that television shows use when ratings begin to decline and see if we can find some best practices that translate to social media.

1)      Change the cast of characters.  Bring in new characters or promote minor characters to major roles.  This allows the writers to think of new and (hopefully) interesting character dynamics and plot lines.  Or perhaps bring in a famous guest star for a few episodes. For the social media analog, this might mean recruiting new bloggers or administrators to bring fresh viewpoints to the site and change some of the existing dynamics of the network’s interactions.  It might also mean bringing in guest bloggers from other sites, or sponsoring AMA (Ask Me Anything) question and answer sessions from luminaries in a field or other subject matter experts. Part of the excitement of a social networking site is finding new and fresh (and valuable) ideas: new blood is always a good way to bring in fresh viewpoints.

2)      Change the location.  Take the old characters and upset the apple cart by moving them to a different country or city.  Again, this is a commonly used plot device that allows the writers of a show to explore new venues in new ways.  For the social media analog, this might mean adding features to the site that it never had before.  Or making a feature that wasn’t used much into one that is far more useful.  Add a chat or instant messaging feature perhaps, if there wasn’t one before.  Allow people to interact in real-time vs. an extended conversation on a forum. Perhaps add a contest or a way for members to play games with each other (hey, it seems to have worked for Facebook).  Changing the way the community members can interact with each other can be a catalyst for increased popularity.

3)      Change the focus.  Perhaps kill off a main character and let the writers focus on a different one. Or fire a character and change the focus from a work situation to a home situation.  Give the audience and the writers a chance to learn something new about a favorite character that they didn’t know before, or see a different aspect of his or her persona.  For a social network, this might mean a shift in the focus of the website.  Instead of being about government change, for instance, perhaps a shift to being about societal change in general might broaden the potential member base.  Or if the current focus is broadly based, perhaps a change to a more narrow focus that would interest a smaller, but potentially far more passionate, community.

4)      Change the show runner.  Let the person (or people) that have been running the show move on and bring in a fresh voice.  Bring in someone who has revitalized shows in the past, or who has a history of creating content that people like.  For social media, this is all about community management. Community management isn’t just about administration and moderation.  It’s about marketing. It’s about finding ways to build excitement among existing members and to attract new ones.  It’s about finding interesting people with challenging viewpoints and recruiting them to be involved in the network.  It’s about promoting the value of the social experience to existing and potential members.

You’ll notice one thing all these ideas have in common: the element of change. Change the characters, change the location, change the focus, and change the people in charge.  And of these things I would argue that the most critical one is the last one.  People with fresh eyes and fresh viewpoints are often the driving force behind the other types of change I’ve mentioned.  And when those people are successful, they are usually given the majority of credit when a show pulls out of a ratings slump.  

As with television shows, not all change in social media is for the positive (i.e., Digg…also known as the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” rule).  We’ve all seen shows that introduced change in such a way that they alienated their original base without attracting enough new viewers to matter. 

One other lesson to take away from all this is that television series, even the most beloved and enduring ones, are all eventually cancelled.  While we are still relatively early into the age of social media, I suspect that lesson will also prove true in the long run (i.e., AOL, Napster, Friendster, MySpace).

Gov 2.0 - Is Anyone Listening?

Originally posted 11/24/2010

There has been a lot written in the last few months about Gov 2.0 and using social media to connect constituents to government.  What happens if governments aren’t listening?

If you’ve been following any of the popular social media outlets in the last few days (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Digg, ArsTechnica, etc.) you’ve seen the online kerfuffle that’s erupted over the new TSA security procedures. Although they’ve been in use for months at some airports with relatively little fanfare, the new backscatter x-ray devices are suddenly the heated subject of social media conversation.  Why now?

On October 30th, 2010 the TSA instituted new “pat down” procedures for those opting out of the new scanners.  Prior to then, the TSA would perform a relatively benign wanding and partial pat down of travelers opting out of the x-ray scans. While annoying, the older pat downs weren’t particularly personal, nor did they take much time.  That all changed a few days ago.  The new pat downs are indeed quite personal (I’ve experienced them first hand…traveling with an artificial knee is so much fun!) and apparently a very vocal part of the public feels we have reached a tipping point with airport security.

I’m not going to get into whether the new security procedures are worthwhile here (although I have talked about it on my personal blog).  What I did want to talk about was the role of social media in influencing government behavior.

Are social media outlets an appropriate place for protesting government actions?  Historically, citizens upset with governments have taken to the streets to protest. Sit-in’s, marches, and mass gatherings in public places (like the Mall in Washington DC) were seen as a peaceful yet visible way to express one’s displeasure with government policies. On occasion, these protests even work (it might be argued that the civil rights movement would not have occurred otherwise).

Does social media have the same political impact? Faced with what many see as a choice between two very personal, intrusive security scans, travelers have taken to the social airways en mass to express their displeasure.  The question is: does government listen?  They’ve certainly heard—the head of TSA and the Director of Homeland Security have both taken to the airways to publicly state that they’ve heard the complaints—but hearing and listening are two different things. Time will tell, but it’s my perception that online actions seem to carry little weight with politicians and bureaucrats.  Phone calls, letters, in-person visits are all apparently much more effective with elected officials than email, tweets or postings on a Facebook wall.  I’m waiting to be proven wrong, but it seems to me that today, social media is more of an avenue for the public to vent amongst themselves rather than serve as a serious conduit to public officials.

Unless governments (State, Local as well as Federal) learn to adopt social media as a valid channel of constituent communication, they will miss a golden opportunity to transform society. And we, the people of an increasingly social nation, will be missing the opportunity to use social networking as a channel for crowdsourcing effective governmental change.  Those of us in the social media industry must keep pushing for this transformation to occur.

Social Media Business Case Final Thoughts

Originally published 11/18/2010

Over the last three weeks (here, here and here), I’ve talked about some key benefits to look for when building a business case for a potential social media solution.  This week I’ll finish up with a few thoughts about what makes a business case successful.

Although the numbers are indeed important, never forget that the business case is about believability and confidence: your audience (the people with the money that you are trying to convince) need to believe the information you provide and need to have confidence that your social media solution is worth investing in.

Let’s talk first about believability.  Let’s say I’ve built a business case and I intend to show you the benefits.  I present you with a link to a web page where you can enter all kinds of metrics: how many customers you have, what the average purchase size is, how long customers stay with you, and so on.  I sit down with you and collect a handful of metrics in 5 minutes, and then generate a 20 page business case with detailed charts, references, spreadsheets, etc. that show that if you invest $100,000 with me, in five years you will have saved $2,304,201.32.  What’s your reaction? Do you believe the numbers and write me a check on the spot? (If so, please give me a call…I have a web site I’d like to walk through with you.)  If you are like most people, you look at the business case with a healthy amount of skepticism: any methodology, no matter how sophisticated, cannot possibly be that accurate with such little input.  What if I spend the next two hours going over the business case with you to show you *why* the numbers are accurate: we look at dozens of research papers published by organizations you trust (or maybe even belong to), we look at the comparison of your numbers with your close competitors and show you what savings/revenue improvements they have been able to achieve with the same solution, and so on.  How do you feel about the business case now? Better?

When modern surveyors first measured the height of Mt. Everest with modern equipment (well, modern at the time) they calculated that it was *exactly* 29,000 feet high.  Rather than have people assume that the 29,000 number was an estimate only accurate to a few hundred feet, they decided to publish the surveyed height as 29,001 feet. It turns out that when measuring mountains and building business cases, credibility is more important than accuracy.  Your numbers can be accurate to a fault, but if you haven’t given the buyer reason to be confident that your numbers are believable, your business case will not be successful. 

One more point I’d like to make. There’s an old saying in sales that “When you’ve made the sale, stop selling.”  If you prepare a business case that presents four or five big benefits and 100 little ones, you are wasting time and effort.  If you can make the four or five big benefits believable (and reasonably accurate), there is no point in quantifying or attempting to justify 100 additional little ones.  In fact, you may be giving the buyer reason to suspect that your four or five big ones might be iffy, since you felt compelled to attempt to justify so many other benefits that, in comparison, really don’t matter much.

Finally in an act of shameless self promotion: if you want to read more about building business cases in general, I’d recommend that you look into an Executive Report on the subject I did for the Cutter Consortium.  I’m sure they would appreciate it (as would I).

Defining Social Media Benefits Pt 3

Originally published 11/10/2010

In the first of this three-part series I blogged about finding benefits for social media solutions.  A brief recap: the most effective benefits you want to look for are 1) opportunities to directly reduce costs, 2) opportunities to improve productivity, and 3) opportunities to increase revenue.  Last week I mentioned a few obvious direct cost reduction benefits to consider.  This week, I’m going to look at some of the soft cost reduction benefits and revenue increase benefits to consider.  As with last week, not all these benefits may be relevant to your particular solution.

Most of the so-called “soft cost” or “indirect cost” benefits involve some type of productivity increase for internal assets, most notably employees.  A benefit may make an employee’s job easier, quicker, or more accurate, enabling them to perform more work or to complete the work they already have at a higher quality.  While on occasion these translate into opportunities for hard-dollar cost savings (if they, in fact, can be used to justify headcount reductions), repurposing employee time usually is considered a soft-dollar savings, no matter how much time is saved.  Instead of “cutting heads,” these productivity increases often come in fractions of a Full Time Equivalent (FTE). So in effect, you’re not cutting heads so much as fingers and toes—which aside from being frowned upon won’t save the enterprise any real money: what’s left of the employee still has to come to work and get paid.  Social media solutions can indeed present multiple opportunities for increasing productivity, and whenever the social media solution you are considering is primarily intended for use by employees, you should define and quantify numerous benefits in this area.  Some obvious examples are things such as Improve Employee Collaboration, Improve Employee Knowledge Transfer, Improve Employee Training, and so on.  Again, usually soft-dollar benefits are not as compelling as hard dollar benefits, but they can still be used to generate a decent business case.

The final category of benefits to consider is those that would result in increased revenue.  In my experience, these are the hardest benefits to build a compelling case for, but it can be done.  The social media solution you are considering might make customers more satisfied, resulting in Increased Customer Sales through additional up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. They might increase the time the users spend on your time, translating to Increased Revenue per Visit (and perhaps Increase Average Visits per Month).  While most people will readily believe some level of revenue increases, the trick to generating believable revenue increases lies in finding numerous (and credible) metrics from similar clients.  If you can find a competitor in the same space as your enterprise that has achieved measurable gains from a similar social media initiative, you are golden.  If you can’t back up your benefit assertion with credible metrics, you are probably better off just presenting benefits you can justify rather than trying to throw in every possible benefit you can think of.

A former colleague of mine made an interesting statement about business cases and finding value that has stuck with me over the years: “If you are solving a real business problem, a business case is always possible.” Put another way: if you can discover a solution that eliminates a major business problem, you can always quantify the value of that solution and present a positive ROI as a part of a comprehensive business case. 

Defining Social Media Benefits Pt 1

Originally published 10/28/2010

Let’s say you’ve been tasked with building a business case for a new social media project.  How does one go about building a business case for a social media solution?  Pretty much the same way you build a business case for anything else: begin by describing the benefits.

A benefit is some quantifiable statement of economic value (i.e., more to the point: a benefit describes how much money it’s worth to do something).  Simply put, all benefits boil down to one of two categories: they are either a) cost savings or b) revenue increases.  I’ve also mentioned intangible benefits in an earlier blog post, so you know how I feel about them: forget intangible benefits. In my experience building business cases I’ve discovered two things about them. The first is that no business case will ever be approved because of an overwhelming abundance of intangible benefits: there are just too many other projects with tangible benefits that will get approved first.  The second thing I’ve learned is that, with just a little thought and effort, intangible benefits can be converted to tangible benefits that can indeed be quantified.  For instance, “increased customer satisfaction” might seem at first glance to be an intangible benefit, but in fact it can translate into multiple measurable benefits such as “reduced cost of replacing lost customers,” “increased average purchase amount,” and “reduced marketing costs” among others.  All of these can be calculated and, more importantly, all of them can be measured and tracked before and after implementation. 

When building a business case, keep in mind that not all benefits are created equal.  Reduced cost benefits are generally more credible (and therefore valuable to your business case) than increased revenue benefits.  If you can show how a solution might save $20,000 you are more likely to be believed than if you try to convince someone that they’ll do $20,000 more business.  Even among cost benefits, those that reduce costs directly are more credible than those that reduce costs indirectly. Let’s say you have a benefit that reduces spending on an item from its current level by 10%: that’s a direct cost.  Another benefit may make it easier for an employee to perform a task, thus increasing their productivity: that’s an indirect cost reduction.  It’s “indirect” in the sense that it may or may not translate to a drop in costs on the bottom line (reducing the amount of time an employee spends on a task may simply allow them to spend more time on other tasks, and not translate into a reduction of dollars spent on the bottom line). 

So the best types of benefits to build a business case are (in order): Direct Cost Reductions, Indirect Cost Reductions and then Revenue Increases. Now that we know what types of benefits to look for, we’ll start examining some of the more common social media benefits to consider.  Stay tuned for part two of this discussion next week.

The Social Learning Curve

Originally posted 10/21/2010

In my last blog entry I talked about a couple of things to consider when starting up a new social media community. It addressed the fact that vibrant social communities don’t come that way out of the box, but that they grow and evolve over time.  In this entry, I’d like to continue that discussion and talk about how to keep that momentum alive once it’s been kickstarted.

Years ago when I used to teach software development methods, one issue we always addressed at the conclusion of the training was the difference between expected productivity gains and actual productivity gains.  The “learning curve,” while somewhat counterintuitive, should also be considered if you are trying to kickstart a social community.

To begin with: why does anyone ever try to learn a new technology? The answer: to be more productive than they can with the technology they already know.  So people often have the perception that the minute they learn a new technology, their productivity will jump up from the level at which they’ve been producing to a new, higher level of productivity.  But guess what. It usually doesn’t. Most of the time (especially if that new technology is revolutionary rather than evolutionary) a person’s productivity goes down for a while after learning something new before rising to a new higher level.  Why?  Lots of reasons, but the main one is that people are better at doing things they know how to do than they are at things they don’t know how to do (yet). As they practice with the new tools, they get better with them and more accustomed to them and eventually can do more with them than they used to with the old tools.

What does this have to do with kickstarting social media communities? A lot, it turns out. When you are getting a community going you have to be committed to trying lots of different marketing efforts: lots of different “kicks,” if you will. Some of these will work and some of them won’t. But regardless, each time you introduce something new to your community (especially if it’s radically new) you have to realize that you might be impacting the learning curve of the community. No matter what you do, the productive output of the community might go down before it tracks up again to a new level.  The problem is, it’s often hard to know if a decrease in participation is simply due to the learning curve or the fact that you’ve introduced a barrier to participation.  Case in point: the new Digg interface that debuted back in August.  Traffic to Digg dropped off noticeably after the rollout of their new interface (26% in the US; 34% in the UK).  Is that just the learning curve in action before traffic returns and eventually exceeds the previous levels? Or is it Digg’s “New Coke” moment and a future case study for social media marketing? As of this writing, the jury is still out. 

If you own or operate a social media site, you have to be prepared to give it a kick now and then. You also have to realize that the learning curve might mean that your kick might not work right away. You also have to be aware of the fact that not all kicks send the snowball down the hill: some can smash it to bits.

Kickstarting the Snowball

Originally published 10/15/2010

In my last blog, I talked about the similarities between social media communities and snowballs. This time I’d like to talk about a couple of ways of getting the “snowball effect” started in a community.

To begin with: think like a casino. If you’ve ever been to Las Vegas (or anywhere casinos have gaming tables) you’ll notice that there is rarely just one player at a blackjack table.  Even if there is a dealer standing by at the ready, most players don’t want to sit down at an empty table and play one-on-one against the house.  It’s more fun (and some would say you have better odds) if you are playing blackjack with other people at the table, so new players tend to gravitate to tables that already have a few players.  So how do casinos draw in players during slow periods?  Shills.  Players, paid by the casino, sit at empty or slow tables so that they look busy.  Busy tables attract other players so they become more busy, attracting more players, and so on until the table is full.  Social media communities can also employ this strategy: while they are small, the organization that owns the community can discretely insert members who are paid to hang out, post comments, encourage other members, contribute representative content, etc.  Of course, you have to be careful to make this a discrete activity: if other members *know* that the shills are there, they might be discouraged from participation.

Another way to attract participants is to offer some sort of reward for participation in key areas of the community.  The reward can be an actual monetary award (or some kind of prize with actual value in the real world) or some sort of perceived award (like Foursquare “badges,” for instance, that may be worth nothing more than bragging rights).  Ideally, you would like to have the community members vote for and select the winning content, but the organization can reward desired behavior just as easily. I had some moderate success with just such a strategy long before the concept of social media crowdsourcing: my company ran a snarky website making fun of stupid things said about the Y2K problem, and generated a ton of email submissions by giving out a small prize each month (of course, the site had limited usefulness after the 1990’s).

Another idea I saw recently was a kind of real-world scavenger hunt leveraging people’s natural curiosity.  QR codes were posted without explanation in strategic areas where potential members of the social community tended to hang out in the real world.  Those QR codes, scanned into a mobile phone, directed curious visitors to an online community.  Visitors there got an explanation of the contest, the rules, and clues to locations of other QR code postings to go hunt down.  Winners got recognition on the web site and a small prize, but I thought it was a great way to show new people the site and to get people who were already registered to visit portions of the site they might not otherwise know about.  Done correctly, this strategy has the potential to be a success online and offline: the scavenger hunt could increase traffic at sponsor locations *and* generate traffic (and members) online.

There are lots of other strategies that might be employed to market the site, and I’ll pass along interesting ones in future blog postings.  One thing we know for certain is that the “Field of Dreams” strategy—“build it and they will come”—doesn’t work. 

The Flip Side of Social Networking Success

Originally published 8/11/2010

An interesting story came to light a few days ago. Presumably you are aware of the social news site Digg.  Well, it seems that a group of conservative members of the site conspired (apparently for months if not years) to drive its member-voted top content towards the right end of the political spectrum. By utilizing multiple accounts (against Digg’s terms of use) and by communicating with each other outside the community (through an invitation-only Yahoo group called the Digg Patriots), this group was massively successful in voting up news items that furthered their conservative agenda, and burying content that conflicted with it. They were also successful in provoking more liberal members of the site to the point where those members became belligerent and insulting enough to be banned from the site.

Now shills and plants were around for a long time before social networking, and some would argue that this group did nothing wrong. After all, Digg is all about crowdsourcing the top news stories (ok, not just news, but whatever bright and shiny web content that attracts the attention of the community). But this is an interesting phenomenon: These (apparently) weren’t paid actors intent on driving people to do more business with a company (or do less with a competitor); this was a group that basically took it upon themselves to hijack a community to further their political agenda. Why did they pick Digg? One would assume because of Digg’s popularity: according to a 2009 study by Social Computing Journal, it’s the #9 top social networking site.  After all, why hijack a site hardly anyone looks at? For social networking it seems, success is a two edged sword: A large group of sufficiently motivated users might make your social networking site an incredible success, but such a group might also choose to bend or break it to suit their agenda. And sadly, the more successful your social networking site the more likely it is that it will attract this type of activity.

Would You Pay For Social Network Content?

Originally published 7/30/2010

We may be about to find out.  Conde Nast, the owner of Vogue and Vanity Faire among other titles, announced that they were going to change their on-line business model from an ad-supported one to one where the bulk of revenue will come from directly charging users for access to content.  Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally) the social networking news site Reddit.com (owned by Conde Nast) announced a new “Reddit Gold” premium service this month.  Despite the indignant outcries from longtime users, Reddit had managed to collect a few thousand subscriptions ($3.99/month or $29.99/year) in the first few days after the program was announced.  Curiously enough, the justification for the fee wasn’t for access to the content, but a promise to use the funds collected to improve the Reddit.com infrastructure.

Apparently charging directly for social networking content is problematic. Consider the following: In a survey published in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism's 2010 Digital Future Study, a whopping 0% of those polled would pay to use Twitter. Nobody. No one. Nada. Now granted, there’s a margin of error in any survey, but statistically predicting that no one would pay to use Twitter is an incredible measure of the worth users perceive for the pleasure of accessing other people’s online content 140 characters at a time.  Other efforts to charge for formerly free content haven’t fared so well either. In the UK, less than 3 weeks after The Times announced a members-only strategy and erected a paywall around their site, online traffic had dropped by 90%.

Steward Brand is famously quoted for saying “information wants to be free” (although that’s not entirely what he said).  It certainly appears that way for social networking at least. Charging people to participate is a monetization model with some serious challenges.