Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

How Transient Is Social Media? Should You Respond To Everything?

January 6, 2010 – 12:31 am | by Daryl Tay

Sometimes, being involved in socia media, it seems everyone is talking about the same thing and that it’s being amplified over many people and over time.

It’s even scarier if you’re an organisation and you wake up to see 10, 20, 50, 100 tweets about you one morning and rush to come up with some sort of response by the afternoon.

But how “sticky” really are these conversations – or are they actually rather transient?

Let’s look at two relatively “big” occurences this year: United Breaks Guitars and the JK Wedding Dance and their search trends on Google (click for larger image):

Though there was certainly a surge, they both lasted for about six weeks each and given that they happened at about the same time, it could have been possible to miss one or the other due to noise.

Let’s add in two more events: Kanye West at the VMAs and Google Wave’s launch.

Three immediate observations:

1. Kanye’s search volume – while through the roof, is also shorter than any other story, lasting less than a month (looks like two weeks from the scale). And let’s face it, without the comment from President Obama, it would have been even shorter.
2. Kanye’s search volume immediately dwarfs that of JK Wedding Dance and United Breaks Guitars – again this comes back to noise. How long can your story (positive or negative) hold the attention of the social media sphere?
3. Google Wave doesn’t create a spike but does have the longest sustained interest over time – obviously good news for a product launch, bad news if this is a PR fiasco.

Finally, let’s add Tiger Woods to the fray:

It peaks as high as Kanye but has sustained itself pretty well. Bad news for Tiger – or any brand that finds itself in that unfortunate position.

So what’s the takeaway?

I generally wouldn’t encourage it, but there might be certain situations where it’s okay to keep quiet and not respond. Take Kanye for example. If he kept silent and didn’t go on numerous talk shows – it’d be over in a week or two. Erased (or at least embedded pretty deep) in our collective consciousness. To some extent same for Tiger. If another “Kanye” happened two days after Tiger, I think both stories would have fizzled out.

The social media eco system is fickle and riddled with attention-deficit disorder. Everyone want someone to bash but that could change from one day to the next. It’s easy to say that in retrospect of course, but the next time you get that feeling you absolutely need to reply or your company will lose millions – think about whether that story will really be around in two weeks, of if the pirahnas would have moved on to new meat.

Tags: amplification, google trends, google wave, jk wedding dance, kanye west VMA, social media, tiger woods, transient, tweets, united breaks guitars