Participatory Economics: Are Companies Budgeting for Social Media?
A podcast summary by David Armano from Edelman caught my attention yesterday. Armano writes:
My theory is that social technologies and the online behaviors they enable leads to more participation from what use to be static audiences and “consumers”. But as a result of this, a demand is generated for participation to be reciprocated from business and brands. If this is true (and I think the needle is moving in that direction) does big business have the supply to meet the demand of participation? (Logic+Emotion: Participatory Economics: The Supply + Demand of Participation.)
In other words, businesses may step into social media to align with web trends. After all, if you don’t have a blog, a Facebook presence, a Twitter account, a forum, and other social media tools, you’re behind the times. But just having a Facebook page or a WordPress blog URL or Twitter ID doesn’t ensure that you also have presence and participation. Participating in social media requires a resource effort that many businesses haven’t budgeted for.
This post rang true because last week I scrambled to keep up with forum posts and other feedback from users after the release of a calendar application. In our release, we included a Submit Feedback link to gather the feedback. Similarly, we have a forum where more tech-savvy users post and exchange information. In the past two weeks, we’ve had about 425 emails and 40 forum responses.
I’m not sure who’s supposed to respond to all this feedback, because no one factored it into the project plan. Users grow frustrated when no one responds to them, but to respond to the barrage of feedback would require a full-time job. I sometimes scan the feedback for topics to add to the help, but we need someone hired as a social media/support specialist to respond individually to their questions and feedback.
I don’t think dedicating full time resources to social media is on anyone’s mind. Most businesses don’t understand the time required to engage in social media. In the past, perhaps users didn’t expect it. But now, if users submit feedback to a business, or post in a forum about a company’s product, they expect a response.
Ideally, businesses will hire a new force of employees to engage and interact in social media. But in my world, social media is a layer of optional participation on top of your regular job. I’m not even talking about raw content creation for social media channels, such as writing blog posts. I’m just referring to responses and basic participation in forums and threads.
The unfortunate reality is that because businesses aren’t immersed in social media channels, they probably won’t even realize the need.
Related Posts
Review of Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation
Podcast: Leading Your Company into the Wikis, Blogs, and Social Networks of Web 2.0
Managing Your Social Media Profiles and Badges
Thinking About a Social Media Strategy: A Few Elements to Consider
The Impact of Social Media on Technical Communication — Podcast Interview with Bill Albing
Can you get more power users handling some of the response load? What do you see as the distinction between how volunteers can help, and what you would need FTEs to do? Apple’s support forums seem to be pretty successfully run by mostly volunteer power users, and many shareware support forums are like this as well.
This discussion has me thinking about how social media helps turn “users” and “customers” or “consumers” into something more like stakeholders–who can be very helpful in expanding a company’s vision for its products and helping develop requirements, use cases etc. for upgrades and new products.
Michael, good point about leveraging community resources for support. We do have that model in place for some forum content. The problem is that volunteers sometimes lack the necessary information to respond to user issues. I suppose we could train people to respond.
Well said, Tom. A lot of companies are trying to get a social media presence “on the cheap.” Time will tell how that’s going to work out. A few dedicated employees might be able to keep things afloat for a while, but eventually I think we’ll see that the best social-media companies are the ones that make a serious investment, in terms of both dollars and people.
Larry, does your company allow or encourage participation in social media activities? It seems like both you and Julio are engaged in the community, and that you’re allotted company time to do it. Is that impression right?
Yes, we’re allowed to blog and tweet on company time — as long as we complete all of our regularly assigned work.
I think we’re allowed to do the same, but that last clause, “as long as we complete all our regularly assigned work” is the killer. There’s no way I can ever finish everything on my plate.
Interesting post, Tom. My company is in the social media/social support/online community business, so I blog, tweet, do Facebook, etc. from work as part of my job (in addition to curating the knowledge base, and writing docs, online help, and anything else that comes my way — talk about never being done!)
The whole idea of a company having a presence on the social web is to engage with their customers. Just having the technology, as you so rightly point out, isn’t enough. Companies need to listen and respond, too.
However, I don’t believe that employees have to do it all. Your customers are perfectly capable of answering each other’s questions and if you give them a chance, they will. They will also tell you (and anyone else who’s willing to listen) what’s right and wrong with your products. With a little care and nurturing, your superusers can become your staunch allies in supporting both your products and your brands.
Susan, thanks for commenting. Another reader made a similar point. Superusers are like gold. I touched upon them briefly in an earlier post (Do Community Efforts Work?). The last section on Superusers contains some thoughts. You’re right that they could help solve this problem.
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