Your hosts - Scott, Randy, and Marc discuss recent very public changes to Facebook reach as an indicator that companies may be looking in all the wrong places to connect with their community. Or is it audience and what’s the difference anyway?
- Crystal Coleman (@thatgirlcrystal), from Ning.com started the episode off, and was the editor and graphic layout artist for the white paper mentioned in today’s episode.
- The Five Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform is available from the Cultivating Community Blog.
- Sponsor your Page posts (April 23, 2012)
- What if Everything You Know About Social Media Marketing is Wrong?
- Ducking Responsibility: Marketers and Agencies Playing a Shameful Facebook Blame Game
- Facebook Doesn’t Suck, Your Strategy and Attitude Does
- An Apology to Brands on Behalf of Social Media Experts Everywhere
- A Brand and Person Offer the Same Post with Very Different Results
- White Paper: 5 Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform, by co-host Randy Farmer
- Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters by co-host Marc A. Smith along with Lee Rainie, Ben Shneiderman, and Itai Himelboim
- Part 2: Conversational Archetypes: Six Conversation and Group Network Structures in Twitter ibid.
Transcript
Crystal:This is Crystal Coleman from Ning, and you’re listing to the Social Media Clarity Podcast.
Marc:…platforms like Facebook are going to tax audience, but are going to discount access to community…
Randy:Welcome to the Social Media Clarity Podcast. Fifteen minutes of concentrated analysis and advice about social media, in platform and product design. Welcome to episode 16 of the Social Media Clarity Podcast. I’m Randy Farmer.
Scott:I’m Scott Moore.
Marc:And I’m Marc Smith.
Scott:By now, you may have heard of the reports that social networking giant, Facebook has severely reduced the chance a Facebook Page will show up on their members newsfeed. Furthermore, Facebook announced it was doing more to reduce like-baiting, recirculating content and spammy links from Pages. While this news has caught many by surprise, the writing has been on the wall for a very long time.
Scott:In 2010, Facebook revealed a little about how it calculates EdgeRank, the algorithm that determines what shows up on a newsfeed based onthe affinity between the user and the edge creator, past user interactions with similar content, and how current the content is. And in 2012, Facebook specifically called out that Pages reach only 16% of their fans on average in a post titled “Sponsor your Page posts”.
Scott:The bottom line is that using the Facebook newsfeed to reach fans, audience and potential community members has always relied heavily on solid relationships and Facebook’s preferred shortcut to relationship-building has been to pay them for access. The most recent squeeze to organic reach was inevitable.
Scott:The reaction this reduced Facebook reach from many social media professionals reminds me of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance. Let’s go through each.
- Denial: Poor organic reach has been the norm for years. We have been denying this and trying to push for more likes and more shares instead of building relationships.
- Anger: Facebook lied to us! They charged me to advertise to get likes for my page and now they are charging to reach those same fans. It just isn’t fair!
- Bargaining: We can fix this! We promise not to post as much and make ‘em better quality. We promise to stop begging for likes and shares a-and have them contribute to a contest. If you don’t let us keep using Facebook for free, we will go to other social networking sites.
- Depression: Everything we knew about social marketing and communities is wrong. We’ve been lying to ourselves and brands. Brands are not humans and it’s impossible build relationships with brands.
- Acceptance: Well…. We have to admit that we are not sure what acceptance will look like just yet. So we’re going to explore based on our experience.
Scott:Today we will dive into the fundamental question: If you are engaging a community, where are they and how do you reach them?
Randy:Today, the main body of our discussion is derived from our news item. If you are engaging a community, is Facebook even the right tool? Is this where they are? And if not, where are they, and how do you reach them?
Scott:Where I’m seeing that mostly is Jason Falls is kind of hitting this drum where he thinks what’s happening is that marketing professionals personal reach is huge, and they think that the way that they’ve done their personal reach, they can automatically do the same thing for brands, or they’re telling brands, “Do what I do and you’ll get my kind of reach.” His argument is, “No, because people make relationships with other human beings and not necessarily with brands.
I know in the past I’ve talked about brands having authentic voices, but again, that’s all marketing. What it really comes down to is, we don’t have the same relationships with brands as we do with humans. I think that’s the gut of this. Facebook seems to be attempting to underscore this idea of actual relationships as opposed to this light form of relationship that brands can only engage in.
Randy:You mean, so likes aren’t relationships?
Scott:Yeah, likes are not relationships. A share is not relationships.
Marc:Consumption is not conversation.
Randy:Right. So likes are not communities. I think part of the confusion has always been brands, companies, and people. Community, to me, has always been membership, someone specifically joining. Joining means, "I am contributing myself to this discussion or group or function, in exchange for receiving back from the community.” A like is not a join. Liking is a lazy form of membership. I think people thought for a long time that a like was a subscribe, meaning if I liked it I would hear all about it. But as the channels became noisier and noisier, other parties, whether it be Facebook. This also happens on LinkedIn. It’s also starting to happen on Twitter. Need to filter attention, because it’s just not possible to return everything that everyone does. So now likes are not membership. You have to go somewhere if you want to see everything that’s happening. My news feed is not my mailbox. Certainly, there’s a lot of personal opinion about the utility of various types of feeds, whether they’re raw, filtered, or lists. But what I’d like to look at, for our listeners, is the person who is trying to engage with a community around their brand, their organization, and they’re the kind of people … Like even us. We have a Facebook page for this podcast. It’s got 300 followers, and its engagement is in the single digits when we post. What that tells me is something that I new was true when we formed that page, is that in fact our audience isn’t on Facebook. Increasing our reach on Facebook actually won’t help this podcast succeed. It begs that question. Where is my community? How do we engage them?
Scott:From our perspective, we don’t even look at Facebook as far as how many people are liking or sharing. It doesn’t mean anything. To us, the most important thing for us is, are people listening?
Marc:There are 5 or 6 social media repositories that I routinely deliver content to. But the idea that any 1 of them is the one and only seems misguided, because depending on your market, if you’re global, it’s almost certainly the case that Facebook is not Facebook in China. Facebook is not Facebook in Russia. Facebook is not Facebook everywhere, which is to say, not the dominant social media platform. It sounds to me like our larger point is related to the build/buy question, and the idea of owning, or having some autonomy around the nature of the relationships that you want to form using digital media or social media. The issue of autonomy is that often you can’t trust the platforms that promise to do it for you, to help you assemble your audience. The minute you do effectively assemble your audience, they try to mediate your relationship with it. Perhaps the larger theme that we’re discussing really points to Randy’s recent review of social media platforms, particularly things like Enterprise and white label social media platforms, where maybe you really have to own it, or rent it under contractual terms, where you really own the data and control the interface.
Randy:You can break that into two parts. One, I did help Ning write a platform-independent white paper, which will be in the tip of this podcast, that talks about how to evaluate the things that are important, the questions you need to ask, if you are going to form a community online or engage an existing one. The other is finding them, which I’d like to hear a little bit more, both from Marc and Scott, about the tools and the techniques you guys have used to find the community and/or audience, if they’re the same or different, around a topic, a meeting, or a group.
Marc:I think you’re raising a really good point, the distinction between audience and community. I often point to that in the social network diagrams that I make, that some parts of the network resemble a hub and a spoke, where the ends of the spokes connect to the hub, but they don’t connect to each other. This is potentially a large group of people, but it’s not a very dense group of people. It’s very much like the network structure audiences in a theater or a movie theater might make. The fact that you’ve come to the same theater as somebody else doesn’t mean you actually have a relationship with them. It’s just that you share a relationship with the screen. That’s different from community, where there’s a lot of people all connecting to each other. It’s not clear that one or the other is necessarily good or bad, but they are different, and they may be good for different things.
What I’m hearing is that platforms like Facebook are going to tax audience, but are going to discount access to community. One strategy might be to create something that resembles community so as to avoid the tax. On the other hand, I guess I would argue when I look at places like Twitter and the kinds of of networks that are created, I see both audiences and communities, and I think both are legitimate, and it’s not clear to me why one would be tax-free and the other taxed. If they’re going to be taxed on these hosted platforms, at what point does the tax grow high enough that it becomes sensible to just pay to host your own? That choice is becoming more attractive as we see businesses demand taxation for access to your audience or your community.
Scott:I’m interested in people who are having conversations with each other. So I’m looking for places where they might already be conversing with each other, and it could be online, and it could be offline, because I’ve worked with potential communities in the past that were not yet fully online. How I go about it is, looking for the topics of conversation, and casting a very wide net across any number of social platforms. When I did this with the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, there were already some established communities: there were some that were purely organic and there were some that only existed offline, as local paper newsletter networks.
We had the intention of building ourselves, and we were working to try to bring people into the conversation. When we were looking for people to join our community, we actually did not go out and poach from other communities. We felt that was not an ethically responsible thing to do. We wanted to play within all the different communities, and be a community among communities. We reached out to conferences and local networks. The website itself had a lot of content that it was trying to market, and so it was already reaching out in that way, and then we just started to collect people who would be interested in community, into the community, get them starting to talk to each other so that there was a there there, that when other people came they would actually see what was going on and get a better sense of, hey, here’s an actual community.
That’s largely how I go about it is, casting a wide net, looking for where the community might already exist, regardless of whether it’s a social network or not. When I go looking for community, or I am building a community, there’s an idea of the purpose of that community already, and it’s not based on whether or not people are liking each other, or retweeting each other, or sharing content with each other. There’s going to be something else, and it’s usually independent of any specific engagement mechanism that exists within some platform.
Randy:I’d like to share from the preamble from my paper on selecting platforms, the 8 steps I list to bring a community online. It very much reflects a lot of what you’ve both said.
- Describe your community’s purpose and goals.
- Identify potential members.
- Pick a platform or service.
- Identify a moderation strategy and resources.
- Build and initial deployment.
- Bootstrap content, members, and model content. (That’s making good examples.)
- Import, invite, and market to new members.
- And then, an ongoing process of nurturing your community.
These touch on things you’ve both said that I’ve found are essentially in specifically a community that’s either distributed already and doesn’t really have a central hub, or, like you said, Scott, is offline, and can definitely benefit from being able to collaborate with other members of their extended community online.
Marc:When I look at my network data on social media and message boards and discussion groups and Twitter hashtags and the like, many topics that are clearly thriving, active discussions are also fairly fragmented, low density, sparse, in some ways not what we might traditionally think of as a “community,” which I think may be a network that would necessarily have a higher density where most people react with most people. In the Pew report, I guess there’s the distinction between the broadcast network and the support network, but I’d actually draw your attention to within the broadcast network example.
We’ve identified 6 distinct types of networks, one of which is this hub and spoke pattern that appears when somebody is essentially a kind of broadcaster. They speak and many people repeat what they say. In this example, and the link is in the show notes, we have an example of a broadcast network, and we can see that there is this hub and spoke part, but there are these secondary clusters that are much denser, a lot of people connecting to a lot of people. I’m arguing in this report that the dense cluster, well that’s the community, which is to say the group that’s actually talking to itself. This hub and spoke cluster, well that’s the audience.
Randy:It’s no doubt we’re going to have to record an episode about that Pew report. It just keeps coming up.
Marc:Oh, yeah. Give me a hammer and the world is a nail. Give me the Pew report and the world is 6 types of social media networks.
Randy:Today’s tip is targeted at folks who want to bring their community online, or relocate from the current platform to a newer, or more appropriate one.
As we’ve already discussed, there is more to bringing a successful community online than just going to Facebook and creating a page, or filling out the new group page at Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo. Literally, millions of people have started this process with an idea or good intentions, only to have their community die before achieving critical mass. I personally have started several dozen professional and personal communities, only to have a handful survive to this day.
Ning.com asked me to write a vendor-neutral guide, designed to help you sort through the myriad of online tools and platforms available to bring your community together with the features that are right for your group now and into the foreseeable future. It’s called, “Five Questions for Selecting an Online Community Platform,” and is posted at the Cultivating Community blog.
Now, we’ve already touched on the key questions every community operator should ask themselves when evaluating a platform:
- What is the community’s purpose? - What is the central theme? Why would they gather online?
- What is your community and personal goals as a group? Engagement? Happiness? And how will you measure them?
- Who and where are your potential members now? Will you move them online from another place, or engage them where they are now?
Those are the questions you need to have ready before you pick a platform.
The questions you need to ask when picking a platform are probably not the ones you first think of. You don’t need to think about likes, favorites, social graft types, comments, or ratings. Those aren’t the most important things.
The most important things are:
- Who can read, reply, and create top-level content?
- What is the least incremation members must provide to identify themselves?
- What is the optimum size for your online community?
- How much can you spend on software and hosting?
- How much community site customization will you need?
Once you have answered these 5 questions, I provide a table of platform providers with several examples of each kinds of platform: forums and message boards, groups and e-mail lists, blogging platforms, and community platforms.
This white paper is free, and I hope you find it useful.
Scott:These are ongoing issues that we’ll be circling back to again and again. We invite you to come back, and we thank you for listening to this week’s Social Media Clarity Podcast.
Randy:Yeah, thanks a lot.
Marc:Thanks for listening to Social Media Clarity. See you next time.