What matters more: what people say or what they do?
It’s not just an adage to live by – I’m thinking about how this applies to managing a social business.
Over the past few years, the brand monitoring market has been steadily growing and maturing, with hundreds of companies adopting solutions from companies like Scout Labs, Nielsen Online, and Radian6. Not surprisingly, the first step in any strategy – social or otherwise – is to “listen first,” i.e. research and understand the landscape. This gets us a sense for what people are saying and necessitates short-term response.
In the long-term, these insights can presumably be used for planning, and setting business direction. Should companies really be listening to these people who are telling the world their opinions? Status updates are carefully crafted to create a particular image, perhaps with the intent of getting a new job, settling an old score, or selling social media advertising. Is this really unbiased, valuable data?
Maybe companies should also step up their efforts to pay more attention to people’s behaviors and predictive models of the outcomes? In some ways, that which isn’t said – but rather demonstrated by applying personal resources, whether time, money, energy, or all the above – might be exponentially more valuable than just chatter.
Perhaps the answer isn’t either/or, but both. However, solutions for the latter aren’t in abundance today as far as I can tell – feel free to leave suggestions I should investigate in the comments below. Jeremiah Owyang calls this “The Intention Web” – what do you think? As we enter 2010, I see the potential for a new cliche to come to life: “an action is worth a thousand words.”
Hey Peter,
It is a great question. Certainly, most people would agree that actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes.
The powerful thing about the social web is that the medium itself records actions as well as words. This is very different from traditional/mass media where it contains only messages. The actions are not visible or recorded in the medium itself.
Whether we realize it or not, in social media, we use the recorded actions as queues to help interpret the words all the time. For example, everyone is familiar with the United Airlines brand crisis around Dave Carroll’s video “United Breaks Guitars”. But what made this a story? Was it the words or the actions? Would CNN have covered the story if the video only had three comments and 35 views? I doubt it. Yes, the content was important, but CNN covered the story because the video had over 1 million views and thousands of comments (it has ~6.4 million views now). So the actions or “deeds” became the real story: the fact that everyone jumped in to add their support, share the story, etc. Why did this happen? Well, because Dave Carroll stuck a chord that everyone resonated with – the deeds, in this case, tell the real story.
That’s why it is just as important for a brand to monitor the social metrics, the “deeds” of the social web, as it is to monitor the words.
I love the quote at the end!
Cheers,
Marcel
CEO, Radian6
I think the point that keeps getting missed is the ladder of involvement. We know from reports that a small minority of people comprise the chatter on twitter and sites like Facebook have begun to see a descent in terms of growth of overall activity. what companies need to envision is a way to create tools that bring more life to each of these very useful platforms besides the novelty items that continue to dominate. Until then, we will fall very short of the true power the social space offers, which is content controlled programming.
Hey Peter – great question!
For me, it’s not which matters more: what people say or what they do? For me, it matters that’s there integrity between what people say and what they do.
I think the congruence / alignment of speech and action is a really important measure, especially in the transparent world in which we now live.
Speech, action and behavior need to be aligned.
Thanks,
David