Clark's Spot

In the world of magazines, designers view readers as members of a tribe. Consider your social networking the same way.

It has to do with knowing your audience. There’s a big difference between the audiences of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You wouldn’t write a press release when you want a billboard. And you wouldn’t produce a short video if you want the local newspaper at your press conference.

Share the book that you’re reading on goodreads and the news you’re reading on Digg. It’s the basics: Pick the right medium to send your message to the target audience – so identify your target audience.

That means that your profile – or your profiles on different networks – each talk to a different tribe. You might meet people on Twitter but reconnect with old friends on Facebook while networking on LinkedIn. Build a separate audience on each profile or at least understand what your connections want when they connect with you on different networks. Don’t send direct mail when a phone call will do. And don’t treat each network as a chamber for your same words to echo around in. Find a way to make each profile useful and unique or save your time and just use one spot.

One of my friends posted advice handed out on The Today Show during the weekend: “Build something meaningful and choose friends wisely.” It’s a good thing to keep in mind – focus on your audience. Do it online and offline. That way you’ll encourage your tribe to listen to its chief – you.

What do you do when you build a strategy around something that won’t work?

Twitter is getting a lot of buzz, but there are also recent reports indicating that it isn’t getting return users. That’s led some to suggest that Twitter’s future is limited.

I smile when I see people who believe Twitter will magically generate a community – a real community with meaningful conversation, stave off newspapers dying of attrition, or let a politician to show his or her real side to his or her constituents. Twitter: the magic pill that solves all of your problems.

Here’s the problem: People are looking at Twitter as a tool unto itself. Twitter’s usefulness is being driven by a number of extensions, widgets, websites, and other programs that make the system easier to use. Twitter The Website simply won’t be useful to tens of millions of people. Even augmented by all of these utilities, Twitter will struggle to be useful once its fad phase is over.

It’s simply a chat room without walls. You select who you want to private message. You sort through the noise to hear them back. Following is just how you select who you’re exchanging private messages with. Except that you don’t private message. You write an endless stream of thoughts that are posted to the world to see and hope that people find you interesting enough to subscribe to your brain’s witty thoughts or to the articles that you promote. (If not, you’re talking to yourself.)

Sure, I use Twitter. You can see the recent updates in the Lifestream on the side of the front page. If you peruse my whole history of tweets, you’ll see a lot of junk in there. Some of it is idle chatter and noise simply because I hadn’t posted in a few hours. (How sad is that?) The truth is I’m continuing to play with Twitter the same way I’m playing with accounts on Flickr, Goodreads, and Digg. Each network specializes in something – they each have their own niche. And none will be the single solution. You’ve got to learn to drive each one.

These sites work best when you break down the illusion that you do everything on one network. In my job, I’ve seen our success where we’ve broken down the imaginary walls that divide social networks into individual rooms. Otherwise you’re trapped in a room where there may be nobody to listen.

It’s frustrating to build a room – or a profile – that you spend a lot of time developing, but that can’t a solution. Don’t look for a lasting audience on a site with so many people who don’t come back.

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.