RMM

Recently, Iain posted an inquiry into the definition of various types of social media initiative - making particular note of the need for teleology; that is, to make clear the ends to which a social media initiative in instigated. Not only is it important to identify that at which the initiative is ranged, but there exists the concommitant need for the social media initiative to be related to that end. Thus his example of recruitment: the social media activity aimed at recruiting the best talent ought, as an initiative, to be based around skills and careers-needs matching.  In terms more prosaic: a social media initiative aimed at selling more cake should probably be a social media initiative based around ways of getting more cake (sharing recipes, for example, or mapping bakeries online). We need our means to relate to our ends.

Many of the responses to Iain’s post were concerned further to define ’social media’ or, alternatively, to essay a typology of social media initiatives. Useful and interesting, all - but it’s my contention that a mark may have been missed in all this.  We might profitably focus not upon ’social media’ but upon the notion of an ‘initiative’ and upon what it means to initiate something, to begin.

Projects are, by and large, initiated with some sort of end in mind. The initiation and the putative end have no existence separate from one another: the initiative comes into being only via the desire for the end, and the end comes into being only by way of the initiative itself.

In social media, this mutually-constitutive relationship leads between initiative and end leads, very often, to the confusion of end for initiative. For example: the ‘end’ is posited as ‘having a blog’, when in fact the blog is the initiative, which is ranged at the ‘end’ which is more sales, or better corportate comms, or increased customer communications. Again and again we see the social media initiative (’having a wiki!’) defined as the end aim of the project (’we’ve got a wiki!’). The end is not having the wiki; having the wiki is the initiative by which the end of more efficient, crowd-sourced knowledge sharing within a specified community is achieved.

Let’s take a look at Iain’s (non-exhaustive) list of social media initiatives:

• R&D group
• Ambassador program (using existing/previous customers)
• Product/experience review/rating
• Lobbying official bodies
• Crowd-sourced data filtering/analysis
• Group learning initiative
• Crowd-sourced event management
• Sharing new ways to use a product
• Collaborating to reduce workload
• Group game-play
• Social networking event

Inherent in each of these initiatives is an end, for example the first six are:

• R&D group (developing better products)
• Ambassador program (using existing/previous customers) (direct consumer comms.)
• Product/experience review/rating (sharing useful information)
• Lobbying official bodies (changing legislation/rules)
• Crowd-sourced data filtering/analysis (finding information useful to the Crowd)
• Group learning initiative (increasing the group’s skills)

Yet in each of these cases it is possible to mistake the initiative itself for the end. Merely crowd-sourcing the analysis of vast swathes of data (say, for example, new legislation) is not the end. The end is finding something useful in that data. However, quite often in social media, the ‘product’ we sell is merely the crowdsourcing (or the group learning, or the idea of an R&D group, etc.). We are selling initiatives - but describing them as ends. This is damaging because it actually limits our potential range of saleable ‘goods’. We should be able to market the end - the useful data, the better products, the improved skills - in addition to the initiative.

This is, it becomes clear, a question of ROI. Clients are often wary of social media because the ROI is unclear - a function of mistaking initiative for end. Merely instigating an ambassador program is not a good ROI. But retaining customers, using them to talk to and encourage new customers, and thus increasing sales is good ROI.

I’ve banged on for far too long, and made any number of terrible generalisations, I’m sure. But I think one point stands: that no matter how many ‘types’ of social media initiative there are, they all have an end - and the clearer we make the relationship between initiate and end, the better.