The Social Media Participation Cycle
April 28th, 2010
If I were a different type of person, or maybe if I had more spare time, I’d illustrate this post with a graph or some SmartArt or a chart with circles and arrows and a paragraph explaining what it was. But the post title will have to do, and the Gilda Radner shot will make sense in a moment.
I’m sensing something in the social media ether that makes me wonder. It goes like this:
It takes time to participate properly in social media networks. I’ve blogged about this before, mainly around the notion of Social Media Fatigue (SNF).
But for a lot of business professionals, even those of us who participate regularly in social media, the level of participation waxes and wanes and ebbs and flows based on our own personal triage level.
So, for example: I might spend an hour on a given day commenting on articles I’ve read on industry sites, tweeting links to those articles, creating LinkedIn discussions about the topics in those articles, posting material to Facebook about the articles, adding the article links to my Delicious account … well, you get the idea.
All good social media stuff.
But then work gets in the way: Three potential clients need to receive presentations next week, a current client has a marketing fire drill that needs to be addressed, that hour-long conference call runs two hours and created a 12-item ToDo list … well, again you get the idea.
So what happens to the social media hour? It gets pushed to the back burner while the work issues get addressed.
Thinking about this dynamic in aggregate terms raises a lot of questions, foremost among them being this:
If the quantitative value of social media participation by the smartest and most in-demand professionals decreases, does the qualitative value of the social media network in question necessarily decrease?
It would seem obvious to say yes. But that leads to a whole host of other questions, such as:
Are the most active participants in social media those people who aren’t necessarily the most in-demand professionals? Is it that the most in-demand professionals simply don’t have time to participate in social media? Or don’t need to anyway? What does this dynamic say about all the self-proclaimed social media “experts”? Or about the nature of heavy users of social media? What implications does this dynamic have for B2B social media marketing? Does this dynamic help explain why mom bloggers have become so influential in social media? Does a down economy necessarily mean increased social media participation?
To paraphrase Roseanne Rosannadanna: Yep, I gotta lotta questions.
I don’t have many answers, though, but it feels like there’s some there there. I’ll leave it to greater minds than mine to figure it all out; I gotta get back to work.