During the 20-plus years I’ve been involved in on-line communities (a/k/s “social media”), I’ve been involved in several kinds of “support” communities. Some were technical support, with a simple primary goal – solve customer problems at the lowest possible cost. Others have had fuzzier purposes. After a friend’s son was diagnosed with brain cancer, he and I became involved in on-line cancer support groups, whose intent is quite different. This crystallized for me when I joined another kind of medical support group recently, with the goal of doing some conversation analysis. The signup page asked me to identify myself as a patient, medical professional or former medical professional. I’m not a patient or a medical professional, but many, many years ago I was a paramedic, which gave me some familiarity with the illness in question, so I chose “former medical professional.” In response, I received an email that included this gem:
“Unfortunately, we have had some bad experiences with some who believed they were here to teach or lecture. I would like to make it clear that while we welcome you and your medical expertise as well as your input, we are not interested in a forum where questions are asked and the medical visitors are quick with a medical answer. Such a forum has a tendency to stifle input from those who need to express themselves the most. “
Fascinating – people who are quick to provide medical answers tend to stifle the conversation. This makes no sense in the context of technical support, but it makes perfect sense in crisis intervention. When people go through a trauma, it can be counter-productive to try to make things better. Okay, that probably sounds crazy, but the reality is that trying to “fix” what’s wrong often leaves people feeling unsupported even when it is the “right” answer. What people in crisis also need is a safe place to tell their story, which is very much what crisis intervention is about. ”Safe,” in this context, means that their story will be accepted as it is, with no criticism or quick fix. Trauma changes people; medicine doesn’t change them back. Instead, they need to figure out how to live with their illness, which quick fixes ignore.
So yes, it makes sense that in a support community whose primary purpose is human, not technical, support, the kind of response that is totally appropriate in a technical support community is wrong. Here’s the short version of what I believe this implies: “new” social media – Facebook, Twitter, blog comments – are lousy platforms for emotional support, because they are really not good for story-sharing, at least not the kind of sharing that people do in support communities for serious illnesses and other trauma. Web forums, mailing lists and Usenet (is Usenet still working? haven’t looked in a while) are much more appropriate. Twitter and Facebook are fine for sharing factual tidbits, pictures and videos and so forth, but not for holding conversations that really help people get to know each other in a way that is meaningful to the challenges of illness, etc. Facebook, Twitter, etc., are much more about digitally enabling your existing relationships, not creating new and deep ones.
The new social media also fail to offer the kind of desirable compartmentalization that a support community does. The default behavior is to post items in public. That doesn’t create a safe environment for telling your story, if only because many of those friends and acquaintances just can’t relate to your need for a supportive community. If the topic is my cancer (hypothetically, I’m not sick, thank heaven), I want to talk to other cancer victims and survivors, perhaps some medical professionals and allied health people… but not everybody I know. I may not want my illness to be a complete secret, but there are likely to be people who I’d rather not share it with, even though they are “friends” in social media.
The next time somebody talks to me about a “support” community, I’m going to be thinking, is this a community where people want to tell their stories to get a quick answer, or is is it a one where they mainly want be in a place where the others know what they’re experiencing.
Tags: community, illness, social media, support, trauma
To anybody who has been measuring social networks for long, the “90/10/1 rule,” subject of recent buzz, is nothing new. I don’t just mean online social networks, I mean social networks in the real world, long before computers became a social networking medium. Mark Williams, a community manager, asked the right question in his blog, what is it good for? It is a guideline, Mark says – a way to set reasonable expectations with clients who might imagine that a far larger percentage of visitors will become deeply involved in the community.
Mark is right – that is certainly the primary purpose of the rule, but it is just a start. When you think of it as a way to segment community by a particular kind of behavior, you’ll quickly recognize that there are other behaviors that are worth examining similarly. Call it a “contribution” behavioral segment, since it is is based on how much each visitor contributes to site’s content. There are many other interesting behavioral segmentations:
- Responsiveness – which of the community’s interactive features do visitors use and how often do they use them?
- Retention – how often do visitors come back?
- Churn – what is the turnover rate for visitors?
- Topics – do people participate equally in the community discussions?
One of these days, perhaps we’ll all know what is normal segmentation for various types of communities (e.g., a support community will be quite different from an affinity community).
For deeper insights, compare the different segmentations and look for disconnects. I would be especially concerned to find disconnects between contribution and the first two examples, responsiveness and retention (my “R&R” of engagement). If the major contributions aren’t using interactive features as frequently as they contribute, that might reveal a design or even more fundamental problem with the features. If they aren’t returning to the site at a normal rate, that suggests trouble ahead.
Side note: I suspect that behavioral segmentation is a good way to find communities within communities. One of the challenges of community management is to figure out when a group needs to be split into two or more. Discovering cliques that are naturally following the normal patterns might be candidates to spin out. In other words, I’ll bet behavioral segments are somewhat of a fractal phenomenon. And if nothing else, they give us more ways to generate pretty visualizations, eye candy for that next conference or sales presentation.
Tags: community, Engagement, R&R, Segmentation
Traditional advertising has been described as “selling eyeballs to advertisers, priced according to how many pairs of eyes see the ads. I came out of that business; my first media job was as a writer for an all-news radio station, where ratings ruled. I later joined American City Business Journals, where I helped start several local business weeklies. That’s where I became very aware of a principle that every web analyst knows – some pages are worth more than others. Each week, our papers featured a “Top 25″ list, which consistently was the most popular page and thus had the most expensive advertising slot on the facing page.
In an email exchange today with Robert X. Cringely (which is a little weird to say, since many people wrote under that name at InfoWorld, including me), I was reminded that social media isn’t quite so simple. Bob asked me if social media analytics could tell him what he’s worth. My answer? Yes, but nobody can agree what the numbers mean.
Even when the outcome is objective – sales revenue – nobody agrees on the value of community because there is no objective way to determine the value of people who influence others to spend money. A community has a sphere of influence that goes well beyond its own boundaries. Even primary research – buyer surveys – have a tough time figuring out what the community contributed to the buyer’s decision. But this is nothing new. People have been writing about the problem since social networking got hot.
I’m going to suggest here that we are often are looking in the wrong place. The game-changer in social networking is the fact that it has opened the door to new points of view, not just more eyes. Many years ago, the founder of Dow Jones News Retrieval got me started in this direction. When others were putting financial data on-line, DJNR beat them by putting opinions on-line. This is supply and demand – when people have access to lots of facts, the value of facts drops and the value of point of view about those facts rises. The Internet has created enormous amounts of data, and as a result, value is shifting to viewpoints about the data. The big challenge is figuring out how to organize, filter and prioritize all these points of view for people to get the most value out of them. That’s why something like Twitter can matter; it neatly packages and distributes points of view, even if it just that so-and-so thinks X is worth his attention.
This truly is a new paradigm. Traditional advertising aims to get people to behave similarly. When a community does that, we call it brainwashing. The real value of a community is in its diversity, the sparks that leads to insights or the serendipity of discovery. Serendipity – I like to remember where that word comes from. It is from a story about a prince of Serendip, the old name of Ceylon, who never got where he was going because he encountered so many interesting things along the way. In other words, aim high and prepare for surprises.
Tags: advertising, community, pov, ratings
