The Down Side of Listening
Berkeley BreathedIf you know me, you know I love to talk. I find silence uncomfortable. Nonetheless, I often write on this blog about the power of social media for listening.
When I hear folks talk about pushing their message out through social media channels, I cringe. To me, social media isn't a channel, it's a cocktail party, where different kinds of conversations require that you LISTEN.
Of course, as any party host knows, when the party gets big enough, you have a problem: you simply can't listen to everyone. 2009 NTC keynoter Clay Shirky talks about this in Here Comes Everybody:
On the Web interactivity has no technological limits, but it does have strong cognitive limits: no matter who you are, you can only read so many weblogs, can trade email with only so many people, and so on.
In an email world, we can grow our lists exponentially and still communicate with our stakeholders without adding an exponential amount of capacity. 500 or 5,000: it's almost the same when it comes to email.
But the difference between 500 and 5,000 in social media is huge.
Josh Bernoff talks about the listening challenges the Obama team faces during the transition on the Groundswell blog. Allison Fine does a great job of identifying the even harder task -- turning listening into action.
All this has me thinking about how we do things as nonprofits. Before social media, conventional wisdom held that the bigger your list, the better. If you did a reasonably decent job managing it, you could expect -- according to the eNonprofit Benchmarks Study -- a 17% open rate, a 1.2% click through rate, and a .17% response rate. .17% of 100,000 will give you a heck of a lot more donations than .17% of 1,000, right?
But maybe, if we get really good at social media, numbers won't matter as much. We won't need giant lists if we're really listening to and conversing with the stakeholders we CAN reach. Maybe we can get a 50% response rate from 1,000 people. That would be even better.
Call me crazy, but I think this is all somehow related to the end of the Opus comic strip. Berkeley Breathed, Opus' creator, weighed in on his reluctance to take the comic strip to the online world:
Breathed said his readership was 60 million to 70 million people in 1985, when Peanuts had a readership of 200 million to 300 million and Calvin and Hobbes, 200 million people. "That will never happen on the Web. Your readership drops to a couple thousand people - maybe, if you're lucky, 10,000."
The Web is a dedicated viewership, he explained, meaning a reader has to type in the name of a strip to go to it that day. "You are no longer a found delight," he said. "You are a dedicated delight. And that's what changes the readership."
A "dedicated delight" may not work for mass media, but isn't that exactly what you want to be to your stakeholders?
