When social media was fairly new, in the mid-to-late-2000s, we were endlessly told about the 2-way communication nature/possibilities of social media platforms and about the need to avoid using them as broadcast-only and to make use of the conversations they enable.
From those heady, initial days, as the number of people who use social media platforms increased, it became almost impossible to attend to the many, many replies and comments people get. The more followers, comments, and replies, the more difficult it is to engage.
This led to people engaging selectively, depending on the time they have, or the quality or nature of replies/comments that come in, and generally pick and choose who and how many they can humanly respond to.
Most celebrities and politicians, usually with multi-million followers, use social media platforms almost exclusively on a broadcast mode. It is simply the equivalent of a stage from where they ‘perform’ or ‘orate’, and if a million people have something to say in response, that would be akin to one person among a million-strong audience shouting in the din of everyone else shouting.
This is the norm these days anyway and there’s nothing much one can do about it. This also drove more people towards smaller, closed social networks if they were keen to engage in conversations and avoid social media for such purposes.
Given this background, here’s a stellar example, in 2022, of a well-known leader with 400,000+ followers, truly engaging with his audience in as much transparency as one can expect. All this on Twitter, the most open of all social media platforms.
That leader is Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky.
Brian did that first in December 2016, a day after Christmas, and started with a simple question: “If @Airbnb could launch anything in 2017, what would it be?”.
Tons and tons of replies flowed in. But what stood out was the fact that Brian engaged with many, many, many replies! The number of replies from the CEO was staggeringly large, to put it mildly, and completely against conventional expectations of how CXOs behave on Twitter.
Take a look (Twitter’s UI for tweet + reply + reply is broken for quite a few older tweets) – there’s a whole lot more than what I have been able to capture (which you can see by going to his tweet and seeing the replies directly on Twitter)!
Now, on January 3, 2022, Brian posed the same question again, for the year 2022 and he even called it ‘2nd try’ 🙂
As expected, a barrage of replies. And Brian seems to have specially made time for responding to many, many replies as you can see from the sheer effort he has put into it! Here’s a quick snapshot – the reply he got + his reaction/follow-up (I’m embedding only a tiny fraction of the thousands of tweet-replies Brian engaged with; do see the original tweet on Twitter to see more of his replies).
My post continues after the embeds.
As you can see, there is a whole lot of interesting ideas from people given how broad and open-ended the query is. But what is more interesting is the effort Brian puts in to read almost every reply, consider it and then add his response.
Brian’s effort is not very different from ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA) pioneered by Reddit. But a key difference is that on Reddit, it is a time-bound exercise, without a specific guideline on what the questions should be about (ask me anything). Brian’s method, on Twitter was not time-bound (he responded over a few days) and was guided by one specific question about his company.
How would this hyper-interactive action seem offline? It would be the equivalent of Brian seated on the stage and asking this question, and a 400,000+ strong audience starts talking, almost all at the same time. But where the offline version would seem like a cacophonous din, on Twitter, it works differently. Brian could read the replies in small batches when he has time. And respond accordingly whenever he can. This is not very different from how we stagger our content consumption on OTT platforms because the content is at our beck and call, and we are not at the beck and call of the content as it was with conventional/satellite TV. Even if we watch 30 minutes of a show/film, we can pause and forget about it. We simply need to log back later and pick up from where we left the last time.
Similarly, all Brian needs to do is check more replies that may have come in when he makes time for this exercise and indulge with his responses.
But that’s the key – making time. If he’s asking an open-ended question that is bound to invite many responses, he has 2 choices:
- keep it as a broadcast; let people share whatever they want and he could simply take it all in without turning it into a conversation
- keep things interactive; encourage a conversational style actively by engaging with as many replies as is possible given this time and attention limitations
There is no compulsion that he should respond to every single reply – that’s entirely up to him, though I’m sure some who did not get a reply may accuse him of being selective. But that’s the very nature of the noise on social media anyway, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
But the more he replies, the more he exudes the image of being an open and transparent leader, though that may be a sweeping view based just on the time he spent on Twitter for this exercise (and not taking into account more factors that could be meaningfully important to assess this trait). It’s a good indicator, though, to start in that direction.
It may not be possible to put it in practice frequently, but leaders could well allocate time to be hyper-interactive at least once or twice every year, for broad, open-ended queries about their business. And be truly attentive to listen to the many responses they get without judging them or indulging in second-guessing the motivations of those who reply, particularly those who disagree or comment antagonistically/negatively. If possible, as Brian has shown, they could up the ante by responding with humility even to the negative comments.
This could be one of the best PR/corporate communications exercises for CXOs and the companies they manage.