Followers, Fans, and Friends
Those three words, followers, fans, and friends, have deep and wide meanings in real life, but online sites using those terms for subscribers will not always see all the actions they’d expect. We’re all still people, offline or online, and businesses on Facebook want to know what you’re doing as a fan. Are you just showing it on your status line once? Or are you spending some time with the links on the fan page? Are you sending more and more of your friends to become fans? All of these actions may have a particular value to a company, depending on their goals.
We’re working on ways to look at the people behind their online titles. Similar to Social CRM, which is an extension of CRM that enables listening and interacting on several social channels or sites, our approach is about relationships.
I found a great explanation of practical approaches to Social CRM in this recent blog entry, How Comcast Approaches Social CRM.
Comcast monitors pretty much every social media channel that is relevant to them. In other words, they exist where their customer and conversations exist. They also understand that various social media channels require a different approach. For example, Twitter requires a fast response time directly from Comcast, whereas in forums Comcast pays attention to the conversation but realizes that the value comes from the peer-to-peer connections.
Understanding the difference between a fan and a forum guru is at the heart of our value proposition. When you have the data, you can better understand the underlying “true” community.
While writing up this blog entry, I found a book with the title, Fans, Friends & Followers by Scott Kirsner, a journalist for Variety and the Boston Globe who has written for Wired and the New York Times. It sounds similar to the book we’re working on at LugIron, collecting interviews with community managers and social media strategists. It looks like a great book with examples for creative work. My hope for our book is to contain great examples for community work. Please send in your suggestions for people to interview, and let us know what you think of your followers, fans, and friends.