Aptus Consultants

Is your organisation contemplating social and digital media?

Have you seen the horror stories about big brands getting it disastrously wrong? Have you seen the long lists of do's and don'ts?

How do you chart a safe course through dangerous waters of social media?

It's really not that difficult. Here, have a set of water wings.

There are three core forces that drive the emerging etiquette of all social media:

• The Attention Economy
• Relevant Content
• Trust

 

 

 

The Attention Economy

There are lots of Social Media tools and environments and new ones appear all the time, making ever greater demands on people’s time.

The content these tools offer are in competition for people’s attention and their time. We’re in an attention economy. The currency is time and attention, the commodity is 'relevant content'.

 

Relevant Content Not Spam

People are looking for value from their time online, and they do not want their valuable attention distracted by irrelevant content, or spam.

So people are looking for valued content, and enjoy finding new or unexpected content that is relevant to them. Of course, what is value to one person may be spam to another. This drives the personalisation and specialisation of online content.

Because different social media tools offer different types of content or can target different interests, people using these tools expect to find certain types of content.

By 'content' I don’t just mean text versus video or photographs – these are just the media. It’s the content of the text, videos, messages, photos, personalities, conversations that interest people.

To get the best value out of their time, people use different tools to find different sorts of content. They bring an expectation of the content that should be available via those tools, and this is an aspect of emerging etiquette.

Content that does not fit this etiquette will be seen as spam, devaluing the tool because it wastes valuable time and attention.

Of course not everyone using a tool will make the same judgement over spam vs value. This is something that evolves with time, as well as varying from tool to tool. Sometimes pushing the boundaries of what is expected on a tool will be welcomed by the audience.

You need to engage with your audience through the appropriate tools to discover the acceptable evolving etiquette, perhaps pushing at the boundaries to stand out from the crowd and add more value.

Ask yourself this: will the audience I reach through this tool value my contributions? If the answer to that question is not mostly 'yes', then your audience will probably view you as a source of spam, breaching etiquette, wasting their time, and this will reflect badly on their perception of you and your brand.

Twitter is a great source of examples etiquette breaches, and Habitat UK provide a good case study. Google 'habitat twitter' and you can see just how long these mistakes hang around

 

Trust

How do people judge the value of content?

A very important factor is: how much do they trust the author or the source of the content?

This trust judgement is very nuanced, it is rarely a case of trusted vs untrusted.

When someone expresses an opinion, the audience considers different factors about the author in coming to a decision about how much value they put on this opinion:

• Does the author share the values and aims of the audience?
• Does the author have a vested interest that may give them an incentive to mislead the audience or misrepresent the value?
• Is the author knowledgeable about the subject?
• Do they have a valued reputation amongst others that the audience trusts?

Consequently, knowing the author of content and knowing something about the nature of that author is necessary in order to judge the value of the content: identity is very important to trust.

However, an audience cannot make this judgement if they do not know who the source is, or if the true source masquerades as someone else, or fails to reveal vested interests.

People make trust decisions based on who is talking. Concealing the true nature of your identity undermines this, and will be seen as dishonest.

Concealing vested interest when contributing will also be seen as undermining trust, and as dishonest.

So, be open about identity and declare interests where failing to do so would risk misleading the audience.

For an example of how not to do it, check out the story of the Honda Crosstour on Facebook. What I love about this example is the time it took for the community to pounce on the infringement: 2 minutes!

 

Water Wings

Etiquette differs for different environments or tools. Conform to the audience's expectations or risk being dismissed as spam.

There are few hard and fast rules. Sometimes straying outside the etiquette can stimulate greater interest. Often, though, it backfires.

The most important rule is to add value. If you don't add value, you are spam, and your audience will not waste its time on your content.

Adding value takes many different forms. You can google 'social media etiquette' and you will get lots of articles with long lists of do’s and don’ts.

At the root of it is the attention economy:

• Add value
• Be honest