In the final scene of David Fincher’s ‘The Social Network’, Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg), just after he was told, ‘You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying really hard to be’, by a sympathetic lawyer, goes to Facebook and finds his ex-girlfriend’s profile…the one who almost started the idea of Facebook in Mark’s mind, through Facemash.
He looks at her profile and clicks on the ‘Add as friend’ link. And just keeps refreshing the page…as the film ends.
It’s interesting to see that Mark assumes that people are online and on Facebook all the time, regardless of what time it actually is, in the physical world (in a clock, I mean).
I’m sure we’ve all gone through the cycle of non-stop refresh of some page – Gmail…a forum/blog comments page where you’re expecting responses…or even Twitter. In those cases, time seems to move painfully slow while you await some kind of response online, while for the other person, who may be unaware that you are waiting for his/her response, time is moving perfectly normally, as it should!
Steve Rubel’s recent Forbes piece talks of ‘digital relativity’ and he says,
Space on the Internet is infinite. Time and attention, meanwhile, remain finite. Therefore, â??Digital Relativityâ? will become a major challenge.
Taken in context, when you do the math itâ??s easy to see that itâ??s going to be harder than ever to reach people. On the one hand, social networking sites like Facebook consolidate audiences. (The average user spends five hours/month on the site.) On the other hand, social media is forcing us to make hard choices every day â?? Bieber vs brands, Forbes vs families, business vs. babies.
The new law of digital relativity (e.g. the relationship between time and space) means the end of scarcity. This was the currency that, for years, powered marketing budgets, filled media coffers and drove the information economy. Now that scarcity is gone, however, we will need to adopt a new set of skills.
Let me take a different tack to explain ‘digital relativity’.
I’ve always taken real life examples to explain some online events. For instance, the Facebook protest against Nestle would be akin to people entering a physical room Nestle created for public discussions and start shouting slogans against Nestle. Nestle’s Facebook community manager lost his/her cool and behaved in a high-handed manner. That would be similar to the Nestle representative in the room shutting up a slogan-shouter.
It is amazing to note that people/brands seldom imagine the real life equivalents of online acts before making alarmingly strange choices.
Why?
The answer is ‘immediacy’.
One of Einstein’s famous quotes went, ‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity’. Without getting into the technical aspects of relativity, let us use that simple explanation to probe further.
A letter received via snail mail was considered fast, till telegrams happened. Telegrams were cumbersome when telephone happened. Fax was seen as urgent, till email happened. Email seems outdated when instant messengers happened.
All these were primarily one-to-one communication and they started to seem relatively slow when one-to-many/many-to-many communication happened on platforms like Facebook, blogs and Twitter. Till they happened, there were only 2 factors in the digital relativity scenario – time and space – the former (it’s digital equivalent being ‘attention’) is limited, while space (digitally, ‘content’) is infinite.
With one-to-many and many-to-many communication online, a third factor enters the relativity scene – perception.
And ‘perception’, by nature, is a PR domain. More than advertising, where people have evolved, to a large extent, to understand that it is about controlled messaging, PR aims to impact perception through relatively more authentic and influential tactics.
Let me explain it in a simple way.
Your brand has a Facebook page. You see a customer posting a complaint on it. The same customer has also emailed you the complaint. Would you act on the complaint faster because others are viewing it too, on Facebook? On the contrary, if the complaint was only via email, would you take some extra time in handling that complaint?
So, while online one-to-many/many-to-many communication platforms negate time and space, and bring forth the importance of ‘immediacy’ more than ever, they also bring the third part of the equation, perception, that adds to the immediacy and makes it more compelling for brands to take note.
The strange thing is that perception cannot be measured, ideally. It remains a feeling…a sense…until ratified by others. So, in the example above, if 3 more customers ‘Like’ that complaint and add their woes to diss your brand further, you start getting jittery. The perception that your brand may not be really customer-centric has just been ratified by four customers…and you are left wondering what effect these could have on other members of your Facebook page and others, in general. (See more on this, in an earlier post of mine – ‘From ‘attention economy’ to ‘opinion economy‘).
How does all this help? You may say that all this sounds like high-strung theory of jargon. It is not! Let me explain a few actual use cases where understanding the interplay between the 3 factors of digital relativity – time (attention), space (content) and perception – is useful.
Content framework
For example, Twitter, by nature, is seen as a real-time platform, but given the sheer volume of data, not all tweets are read by all followers. Time plays a huge part, as much as the number of people you are following. So, if you’re planning a Twitter profile to communicate with your brand’s fans/followers, it would be prudent to ascertain the right amount of tweets for any given day. Merely tweeting as if there’s no tomorrow is not going to help you become a darling of your customers online – they may even complain about tweet spam, however relevant your tweets are. Again, consider the real life equivalent – 100 tweets a day may be like you telling them what your brand feels by sitting next to a follower in real life. The point then is to know how much attention your followers are generally willing to give and arrive at a number that finds a balance between what they are willing to listen/assimilate and what you want to convey.
Content management
The classic complaint perspective, again! The other day I noticed a tweet that said, ‘I complained to <brand of telecom service provider> on Twitter. It’s 5 minutes and I’m yet to get any response’! Interesting, isn’t it? Twitter is almost equated to a phone call – people complain that they have been put on hold and this seems like a similar story. But, on Twitter…or on Facebook, you have an opportunity to negate the immediacy that people assume for themselves and set a process that strikes a balance. This can happen by design, or by practice. There are brand-run Twitter channels that mention in the bio clearly the time they are online (if there is international-level communication, as against country-specific communication) and the average time for response, so that there is a clear guideline. A brand can also showcase this by practice – maintain the time of response consistently across customers so that other see that as an implied guideline.
It’s not just for social media platforms – take the example of a blog too. A brand-run blog may elicit comments and it is up to the brand to identify the best conversation time-spans to ensure that it’s audience remains engaged. There are intelligent ways to manage it as well – assuming a post gets a lot of comments, a brand could also take time in responding (and not respond impulsively) and perhaps communicate via other modes to thank the best commenters and add on to that discussion. The larger idea is to get it’s audience to stay engaged and interested and brands need to find the right balance between what it can reasonably manage and the expectations from it’s audience.
Investment decision in corporate social media
How do you decide the team size to handle your brand’s social media effort? A classic start, from what we, at Edelman recommend, is to first understand your brand’s objectives vis-Ã -vis the kind of buzz online about your brand, your industry and your competitors. These are usually presented in a social media audit. I have written previously about the low engagement/involve vs. high engagement/involvement brands and how they may impact online buzz – the same rule applies for digital relativity too. When your brand falls in the high engagement category, you’d mostly have a high amount of online chatter and your audience’s expectations too would be high when you start engaging online. The role of a social media/digital strategist includes making a reasonably close estimation of the kind of engagement that is likely to happen based on the audit and help you make appropriate investment decisions.
Beyond that, even online advertising can gain from understanding digital relativity. Have a short time frame to popularize/spread the word about a new campaign/concept? The amount of advertising you may require may be a direct result of understanding the kind of content you have (space), the amount of time your target set spends online/time they have to consume both your promotional/actual content and the kind of impact (perception) your promotional content is likely to evoke.
Crisis communication/management
Most online crisis spin out of hand because someone did not make an informed decision on two things – the kind of response and the timing of response. An experienced digital strategist should be able to understand, from the tone and words of online content, the possible direction a potential crisis could take. It comes from experience and awareness of the kind of people who instigate such messages, their friends circle (followers) and the time in which they operate.
Digital relativity is a tough task – people interacting with brands have assorted ideas and perspectives about responsiveness and immediacy. It is almost impossible to satisfy them all. The key is to focus on the larger picture and show them how your brand intends to interact so that a natural, manageable and mutually-acceptable conversation occurs, with as less perceived delays as possible.
Illustration via Andy Smith, on Flickr.