The Question
Social Experiment: It's 10:20pm in Toronto on Thursday night...when did you read this?
The Results
This very non-scientific experiment was intended to test a few theories about online groups I have been reading about. Given the comments and pattern of comments, I was pleasantly surprised. Here are my top four results...there are plenty more we could deduce...feel free to add/comment!
Key Assumption: For every comment I am assuming there are ~10 additional people who passively followed along during the experiment. This ratio is based on common feedback best practices.
The Parameters: The Steve Report group had approximately 323 members last Thursday and this question elicited 17 comments in total. Thus, if you follow my assumption, 170 members viewed this discussion or approximately 53%, a number I'm very pleased with.
#1 - Email Still Works
3% of members saw this discussion in their LinkedIn news feed - your home page "wall" - thanks to Tammy Carey at Frischkorn. The balance of the group, or 97%, saw the discussion via email when LinkedIn deployed group discussion updates. Regardless of time zone, most members took relatively immediate action as a result of receiving the email: opening it, clicking on the link and taking some action (in this case posting a comment).
I have read dozens of expert opinions that email, as a form of marketing, is already going the way of the dinosaur. These results (at least for our group) demonstrate that email is still very effective. And thanks to my good friend Duncan Payne at DX3, he proved that sending multiple emails with the same message are important as Duncan missed the first email around Friday lunchtime (in Toronto) and reacted to the second email on Saturday (24 hours later).
To further show that email marketing is still very effective, the analytics that power Blogger (the platform that I use to house The Steve Report and are Google owned) also verify that the group gets the most traffic after a LinkedIn group email deployment.
#2 - Content...King?
Anyone who knows me has heard my speech that content is king. What's interesting about this experiment is the discussion had no real content or strong opinion that would elicit a comment. The question provided no value to the audience. So why did 53% respond? My answer is two-fold,
(A) Guarded Socialization - the seemingly unassuming question was not personal or professional in nature and answering it allowed members to participate in the conversation without any real commitment of themselves.
(B) Opportunity - in the absence of a content direction, members will add their own content. Thanks to Sandy Biback if Imagination+, we had an embedded conversation about the Big Bang TV show.
#3 - Conversation
One of the pillars of any community, online or face-to-face, is conversation. If your community can engage in conversation - regardless of how mundane - then you truly have a community. I would challenge you that if your business event(s) are not generating conversations, then your business event(s) will become the proverbial Dodo birds of your industry.
Mad Scientist Footnote...These results may be skewed as the first email wave hit mid-day on a Friday in August...a time when many folks are already thinking about the weekend and possibly more likely to be enticed by an online discussion!
#4 - Commitment
The real reason I think 53% of members followed this discussion is a direct result of commitment; in this case my commitment to the group. I would hypothesize that members answered the question with blind faith knowing that I am committed to the group...and I would not waste any one's time by starting a discussion (or conversation) that I am not prepared to follow up and see through to the end.
In today's economy, without commitment, your value to any partnership/conversation is very low or zero. If you are going to have a Twitter feed, a YouTube channel, a blog, or any form of "engagement" with your audience around your event, you need to be totally committed to it 365/24/7.
Thank you for everyone who posted a comment or passively followed along, I truly appreciate it. I hope you've enjoyed our little Social Experiment and that there are some insights you can apply to your organization.
Until next time!
Steve
thestevereport@gmail.com
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