Clark's Spot

Just wanted to take minute to clarify this post from earlier this week.

I think social networking is a wonderful and entertaining tool to get in closer contact with people. I’ve personally learned about so many people who now have children, homes, and spouses that I wouldn’t have known about before – people who I had lost touch with years ago. I’m really happy for them, and it’s great to get that chance to catch up with people who had inadvertently fallen from my list of colleagues.

Just as I can get more done with a word processor than hand writing everything, I expect programs can help me know a bit more about a larger number of people. But I don’t think I’ll truly know hundreds of people – I think I’ll have trivia about most of their lives.

The larger point behind that entry is that social networking is an interest for some people in the same way that I have a passionate interest in genealogy. Some folks will be really connected and plugged in to the newest sites. They’ll move on when too many other people join the site and it loses its hipness. And if they’re not coming back, were they truly engaged with – and listening to – your message? Or were you just playing in the right medium for a few months?

It’s a question for a communications professional who believes social networking is The Solution. It might only be one tool to get one segment of people. It’s a service – not a strategy.

I’ve got a dirty secret. I’m not sure that social networking is The Next Big Thing.

This isn’t something that I want to say too loudly. A large component of my job entails going on social networking sites and blogging platforms to update information and exchange messages with people. Almost impossible not to have some version of a social networking strategy today.

I remember geocities, tripod, and angelfire. When’s the last time you visited one of those sites? (Millennials: Do you even know what they are?)

Somebody new started following me on Twitter yesterday. I took a few moments today to check out the guy to see whether I wanted to follow him. As I write this, he’s following 47,947 people. He has 48,302 followers. Made it easy to decide. I’m not following him. Nothing important will come from him. And he doesn’t really care what his nearly 48,000 people are saying to him. He’s in a room full of people and nobody’s listening.

LinkedIn had to limit connections to 30,000 users earlier this year. Which, obviously, cramped the style of the people who really actually network with 30,001 people.

Count me as a skeptic of the more is better idea. I think meaningful online conversations and relationships have a limit. At some point, information overload is simply human nature.

50,000 followers is nothing if they aren’t listening. And if they aren’t listening, they’re able to walk away from the network – and your messages.

I’m approaching a period at work where we’ll be able to tear apart and remake what we’re doing online with our social network programs. And as I’m scratching out my thoughts before the planning sessions, I’m thinking about being effective – about the difference between being busy and being productive. I want the people who friend and follow us to think about us.

There’s a lot of clutter out there. Until we get past the more-is-better phase and look-how-important-I-am mentality, social networking will remain a fad rather than part of the answer.

Thanks to M. Keefe on Flickr for the photo.

I stumbled across a post on doteduguru about a week ago that discussed bringing all of the departments and divisions of a college under a social media brand presence. The basic theme: marketing departments and webmasters should take the lead in creating social network profiles. They can use this lead to advise or discourage individual departments from pushing into these programs.

I work at a place that’s pushing itself into many of these networks. I’ve helped to shepherd and create our own little area with the idea of being part of the conversation, and I’ve been approached with questions about how other offices can do what we do. I – and a few other folks (who get it) in other departments – spend time checking in on unofficial pages just to monitor. But there’s no institutionally organized (or if there is, there’s no lead dog).

There’s too high a cost to not be a part of these conversations – to not standing in these rooms. We’re trying to figure out who grabbed some of the branded real estate and created some of the initial pages and profiles. In a way, this really forces us to be part of the conversation – to be respectful of the community norm of not being over the top in our promotion.

Rachel wrote about the merit of becoming the go-to office for other departments interested in creating profiles on the various networks. The larger gain is in creating the dominant profile. Some of our profiles that weren’t the first created on a site are lost beneath the initial profiles. This hasn’t been a problem, and we continue to watch for any issues. But we’re faced with creating a series of profiles that tie together under one theme – something that takes time and the focus of a handful of people in disparate offices.

One of the overstated new rules is the need to give up control. Don’t think you’ll pull everyone under your page. But do be as friendly and as helpful as possible – a good community member – to get others to look for leadership. You can run as lead dog, but you can’t rein in others unless the executives decree it. That’s the easiest way to get someone to set up a spoof page – one that you can’t control and one likely to draw lots of attention.

Stay dominant by being open to others and making it easy for everyone to contribute to your work and profile.

It happens every day during my commute. I don’t take a highway or expressway during my drive, but I cross the interchange of an expressway at the edge of downtown. A few blocks from the expressway is a bridge construction project that’s taken out one another way into downtown.

Between these two inconveniences (they’re minor – this isn’t a major metro region), you’ll a dozen drivers jockeying for position. You’ll have traffic heading on and off the expressway. There’s always a truck from a distributor pulling out to block traffic. You’re likely to hit a parent stop in traffic lane to let a child out for school.

The rest of the drive is fairly empty. All of the congestion is in a really small area. That small patch of roadway determines whether I’m early, on-time, or late. The majority of the trip has no impact on the final results.

I was thinking about that as I drove to work yesterday. I knew that I’d spend the day writing and coding a monthly e-newsletter.

Research might suggest that e-mail is losing effectiveness. It’s too easy to delete (if it isn’t marked spam). The addresses in your list eventually go out of date. The information is scanned and discarded compared to interactive websites, social networks, and online communities.

(Disclaimer – we don’t spam, everyone has prior relationship with us, we process unsubscribes and opt-outs, etc.)

I’ve found our monthly e-mail is the largest driver of traffic to each of these other channels. The website hits go up. The blog views skyrocket. The clicks on Twitter and Facebook pop. It’s the reminder to our stakeholders to check in – using whichever program or format you’d like – to the institution where I work.

In other words, the three-day window of e-mail opens has a huge effect on the month traffic. What have you found?

Thanks to lynac on Flickr for the photo.