Finding Your Social Media Balance – Part 1

This is the first part in a two-part series about communicating on the social web. In this post I’ll be talking about four variables that come into play when you look to control the depth of your interactions and relationships with people on the social web:

• Motive: The underlying motive(s) for your interactions/relationships
• Focus: The people that you choose to communicate with
• Resources: The amount of time, money and people allocated to communicating through social media
• Value: The level of relevance you’re offering

Finding a balance between these four variables will allow you to communicate the right things in the right way to the right people.

Motive

Motive refers to what you’d like to get out of the communication. There are two extremes: engagement and promotion.

Engagement is about building a good relationship, connecting with people on topics that are within or outside your organization’s domain of business. These relationships lead to trust and confidence in one another, and can be sustained over a long period of time.

Promotion on the other hand is more about putting a message across to people. It’s shorter and more one-directional than engagement and works in a similar way to advertising. Promotion can be one-off or continuous but because of the one-directional nature it’s not perceived as building a relationship and thus it’s harder to use promotion as a way to establish trust.

Neither is per definition wrong. Engagement is appropriate for building long-term trust relationships, but faces scale challenges as it’s more difficult to maintain a high level of engagement with many people. Promotion on the other hand is more suitable for creating awareness and has scale advantages. There’s no immediate trust involved with promotion but promotion can act as a filter to drive the right people to you or your organization. These people may be worth engaging with over time.

Focus

Focus relates to the people you’re communicating with where you focus on quantity or quality.

Quantity speaks largely for itself. It’s scale-related and when you focus on quantity, you’re looking to communicate to as many people as you can or think are appropriate to receive your message.

Conversely, quality has more to do with the people themselves. The exact definition of “quality” will depend on your conversation topic, but in general, you’re looking for people:

• who can identify with you, your organization, your brand or your product/service
• who are (key) influencers who can help spread your message or help defend you or your brand

As with engagement and promotion, there’s no formula for determining what’s right and what’s wrong. There should, however, be a correlation between quantity and promotion and between quality and engagement.

Resources

Communication requires resources, whether it’s energy, time, money or other things. You or your team/organization need to be personally involved with communicating, you invest time in interacting or building relationships with people and sometimes it costs money to use a certain tool to interact.

The amount of resources required as input will vary from one industry to another, but it’s obvious that the amount or level of interaction will depend on the amount of resources spent.

Value

Value relates to the importance or relevance of messages to the people you’re communicating with. If you’re, for example, sending a message of general nature, it doesn’t have high value for every recipient, but if you’re answering someone’s question, then that answer is of high value to that particular person and other people who were wondering the same.

Value doesn’t always have to be high, but because people are confronted with a constant stream of information and messages, low-value communication can quickly degrade into mindless chatter or worse, into noise.

How These Variables Interoperate

The four variables aren’t very interesting on their own, but it is interesting to take a look at how they interoperate. When drawing up the graph below, my initial assessments/assumptions were:

• Motive and Resources depend on you because you decide what the motive for communication is and what amount of resources should be spent
• Focus and Value depend on the people you communicate with. Attributes related to them or to your relationship with them will depend on where people fall in the quantity-quality spectrum and how the value of your message is going to be perceived

Using these two statements, I was able to plot Motive vs. Resources against Focus vs. Value. The result is a four-axis graph that looks like this:

The blue line represents the “balance line”. The balance line is the line you should follow for optimum interoperability between the four variables Motive, Focus, Resources and Value. The balance line isn’t fixed nor is there a formula for the trajectory of the arc. It will depend on your audience and you (or your organization/industry)… or in my case the trajectory PowerPoint gave me :o) but generally speaking, the trajectory will be in the form of an arc and will seldom be a linear one. Finding and organizing communication around the balance line helps you determine the degree of input and the level of value required depending on the type of interaction you’re aiming for.

I hope that a basic understanding of these four variables will help you control the way you communicate on the social web. In part 2 I’ll be discussing the structure by looking at how communication can be divided into four categories based on these variables. In the meanwhile, think about how you are controlling the four variables right now and whether you are in balance.

If you have comments, experiences or nuggets of wisdom to share, feel free to leave a comment!

Photo credit: Richard Kolker

Update: Click here for Part 2