I recently had a great opportunity to speak with Mark Hall at Computer World. If you haven’t already checked out his blog, you should. Mark’s blog is always filled with unique topics and great insight. When I spoke with Mark, we discussed the impact of communities built around social media as it relates to consumer and business brands, products and services. Marketing professionals are trying to better understand the impact of these communities on their overall brand and many wonder how they can control them. Others are taking it one step farther, asking the question: should I try to create a community of my own? Very interesting material when you really dissect it…which is what I am going to do right now. To read an excerpt of my conversation with Mark, click here.
Building Social Communities ~ Risks vs. Rewards
It’s no surprise that communities of people talking about products and services already exist. In fact, you can probably find an online community that will rate virtually any product or service out there, from sites that focus on vacation spots to restaurants to you-tube material. More and more businesses are beginning to realize the reality within these communities: people will talk and no one can stop them. Again, no surprise. Because everyone has an opinion, you can count on people talking about your product and service.
Where it starts to get interesting is when you decide to build your own community. This approach is much different than simply viewing a message board about your industry, using blog monitoring tools, or seeing how your hotel rates on Trip Advisor. When building a community of your own, you are actually creating the message board and letting all of those opinions, good and/or bad, filter into the center of your business brand. Again, we know people will talk, but should we encourage it?
I know what you are thinking; this sounds too risky. What if someone lies about my product? What if that one customer that had that one bad experience decides to talk about it? What happens when an unethical person decides to pollute the community? These are all very serious concerns. I would argue that in a world where controlling the message is almost impossible, and the opportunities associated with creating a community so great, all we can really hope for is the discussion about our product contain truthful and accurate information.
You CAN handle the truth
But will the truth be told? The answer is yes, but only when certain criteria are met. At R2i we refer to something we call the “Good Person Phenomenon.” This governing principle is simple: the majority of people ARE truthful. Most people are honest and genuinely passionate about imparting their positive and/or negative opinions and experiences for the general good of others. They may not say nice things about you. But they will tell the truth.
The Good Person Phenomenon tells us that people do tell the truth but it doesn’t mean your community information will be accurate. In order to achieve accurate information you need a combination of good people and many of them.
Bigger is Better
The truth will come to the surface, but only when the community is large. Size of the community (we often refer to this as sample size) is critical. Here is a very simple example. If you had two people rating a restaurant and one liked it and the other didn’t, you’d be confused as to whether it was a good restaurant. In fact, one of those people could be lying about their experience. The sample size is not large enough to determine accuracy. If that same restaurant had received 50 reviews and five of those reviews were negative, you could safely assume that it was a decent place to eat. After all, there were 45 positive reviews. Would all those people go to the trouble of lying about their good experience? The Good Person Phenomenon says they would not.
How large is large enough? That varies by industry, demographics etc. Our SEO team (they love algorithms) is having fun trying to determine how large the sample size needs to be for self cleansing (accuracy in user generated content) to occur. Think of it as the accuracy “tipping point.” More importantly, we need to understand that businesses run a greater risk of inaccuracy due to smaller sample sizes in their communities.
The key to accuracy and the number one objective for a business considering creation of a social community is this: LARGE SAMPLE SIZE. And remember, if your product stinks, the truth will come out. Anytime you are building around social media and leveraging communities, bigger is always better!