On my ride home from the office I was listening to a radio broadcast where the announcer mentioned that the show could be followed on Twitter. This wasn’t a particularly odd thing to hear, nearly everyone and everything is somehow on Twitter these days. What I thought about however was:
What would be my reason for following the show on Twitter and how has my Twitter usage changed over time?
In the past I might have wanted to “converse” with the shows producers and such but now I would mostly be looking for a convenient way to receive relevant information from them that ties back to the programming they already deliver. You see there is a natural progression that we seem to be following with social media that I think is worth further investigation.
History
Here’s the back story that evolved in my mind as I thought about that shows Twitter stream. In the early 1990′s people like myself learned Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) so that we could create websites. Many of these sites were very nice – most of them however were pretty crude and served as a very text heavy place for our personal stories. Hand coding websites like this wasn’t for the faint of heart even though it was significantly easier than most programming languages.
Then came blogging software. Those of us who were constantly hand-linking HTML pages and trying to keep track of our site-maps now had a nicely packaged solution. Gone was much of the HTML coding – hello WYSIWIG! With this new level of ease came along a whole new level of participation.
With the explosion of new online authors that you wanted to follow and the ability to easily comment on what those authors had to say brought about a need to connect with others; to build relationships between the authors and the readers.
The comments field became a battleground for many authors and organizations who worried about what they might hear from their audience. Unfortunately, if you chose to close the comments option your organization was even more likely to be targeted as old-fashioned and disinterested in what its supporters (and detractors) actually wanted or thought. That was a quick way to losing your support base. The catch-22 was that not having an online presence also has turned into a quick way to lose your support base.
Thus it became the norm that a blog must allow comments and that the comments moderation should be done only in extreme situations and with transparent reasoning. For the most part the users of the comments should self-moderate which didn’t always work out so well.
This was the norm for some time until about a year ago when both Twitter and Facebook really took over as the place to be in a Web 2.0 world. You see, these sites are a million times more accessible to users than even blogging software which means that another user explosion took place on both platforms. Since these are the places most people are having their conversations blogs themselves don’t “need” to have comments sections. By shifting the conversation away from your blog site and onto one of these other platforms you are increasing your possible audience exponentially.
This brings with it a number of other issues but for this conversation those are not directly relevant.
Today
Now frankly I’ve skipped a lot of details in the description above but I think you can sort of get the gist of where we’ve been.
Today we find ourselves in a very immediate stream of information. Just a year or so ago when Twitter was really blowing up there were some rules to the game, primarily that even the most well known organizations needed to be very informal in order to attract audience. Those same players, just a year later, are now able to once again act in a very push-information way on Twitter without suffering any great ill-effects.
This is because ultimately what sustains audience is sharing relevant and interesting information. Similar to traditional media, once you understand your audience (and understand how to track their shifting interests) you can significantly cut back on informal bi-directional communications and increase your push of quality information.
The road map that gets your organization to that point in any new platform appears to be:
- Require very timely and personal involvement on the part of the major players of the movement (e.g. get your staff using the tool very informally),
- Build a foundation for community through little to no administrative hierarchy (e.g. let your staff and close supporters create content without a lot of supervision), and;
- Establish your “true believers”; those participants who will carry the torch as much as, if not more, than your own organization.
- Finally, reward the most engaging participants and move into a more push information format as you migrate to the next platform.
Remember, this isn’t a single beginning to end track. With each new platform the same process repeats and currently only shows success due to a constant re-invention with each next platform. In other words, once you’ve built a successful outpost on the moon you make it self-sustaining and then start sending the harvest to Mars so that you can colonize there – and on and on.
Bridging Between Online and Offline
The most interesting component to all of this is the fact that, as we move into these social media networks that are more targeted like Facebook we find that we have an even greater opportunity to mobilize people locally. This is because of the ability to more easily make physically local connections and to use rewards and events much in the traditional way to further energize (and provide content for) the online networks.
If you’re interested in learning how to use these techniques to bridge the gaps for your organization please contact us at Andrew Miller Consulting and schedule a free brainstorming session.
My friend Dawn over at This Woman’s Work has just posted up an article about how she is using WordPress in the most unusual of ways – as a presentation package.
