The Irony Of Social Media

Conversations come in many forms. Whether 140 characters, a long article, a skype chat or a phone call conversations are the foundation of commerce.

Commerce comes from building market relations through numerous forms of media. Media provides the means of awareness, attraction, affinity with specific audiences that relate to your business and decide to act on your media.

The cost of communications is reflected by the effectiveness of technology and how your business uses the technology to create relevant and relative communications. Today communications technology is exploding at profound rates of change. The changes in technology provide the pathway for any business to increase its ROI from communications. The ROI is largely determined by whether a company knows how to effectively communicate using every technology available to do so efficiently and effectively.

What Is Your Return On Chatter?

A recent article explored new new research showing the success of live chat services in improving B2B sales conversions. Meaning that when potential leads were inquiring about a product online and had the option to have a live chat the follow results occurred according to Forrester:

1. 305% ROI from proactive sales chat with a payback period of 6 months (when using paid chat services)
2. 120% ROI from customer service chat with a payback period of 6 months (when using paid chat services)
3. Chat assisted application completion rates 138% higher than self service

Social media regardless if it is Twitter, a blog, or something else aims to solve problems and build relationships and that is what live chat does as well, so it seems pretty easy to connect the dots.

Social Media = A Ironic Transparency of Knowledge or Lack Thereof

I use Google Alerts to track numerous conversational topics throughout the web. In the last year the rate of interest in social media topics has gone up over 500% according to the rate of change indicated by my Google alerts. This rate of change is indicative of a rate of interest relative to topics surrounding this thing we call “social media“. The threads of news, blog post, video’s, Twitter chats, Power Points and articles in major publications grows daily. The irony of all the content in all these threads is the context is the same, how people are using social media for multiple purposes.

Irony is defined as meaning hypocrisy, deception, or feigned ignorance) is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is an or between what one says or does and what one means or what is generally understood. Irony is a mode of expression that calls attention to the character’s knowledge and that of the audience.

Given this definition the irony all these conversations about using social media are ironic because the very nature of social media is relational while much of the content around social media is aimed at a channel to market messages, media and a mesh of non relational content. Those that use social media for whatever purpose are expressing themselves which calls attention to the character’s knowledge and that of the audience. In other words in most cases the use of social media is expressing the characters lack of knowledge and a lack of understanding the audience.

How would your spouse feel if your communications reflected a lack of understanding of the relational issues that bond you together.  If you don’t have the knowledge to understand then you are likely to create stress in the relationship. The same rules of engagement apply to use of social media with your audience.

What say you?

Tagged as: blog marketing, brand marketing, business disruption, business relations, business transformation, Conversational Currency, innovation economy, Relationship Economy, social commerce, Social Media, social media roi