Are today’s social media tools fragmenting the conversation?
I’m an advocate of having a community for whatever it is that you’re working on, be it a blog, a podcast, a movie, what have you. I like to go to one place where everyone knows your (online) name and you can talk about whatever it is that you want to. Before this social media explosion, there was only one place to go to and that would be the site’s forums. The phpBB forum software still makes it very easy for people to set up forums for discussion. Even all these years later, I think forums are the best form of community discussion on the internet.
Now, there are way too many choices and everyone expects you to support them all. Myspace, Facebook, Ning, Google Buzz, Google Wave, Twitter, blog comments, and the site’s forums are all expected to be there for people to comment on the topics at hand in a space that they feel the most comfortable. The problem is that it fragments the conversations and makes it difficult to read everything.
Over the last few months I’ve been dealing with just that. I focus primarily on the forums, but I have to almost push myself to remember to check Facbook, Wave, Buzz, and whatever else is out there, not to mention blog comments. Unfortunately, there’s no way to funnel everything into one place. The best I could do is use RSS feeds for as much as I could, but not everything has a feed.
I find that Twitter and email are the best ways to get my attention if you want to fire off a note to me personally, but it doesn’t allow a public converation.
The forums are a great vehicle for conversations. Not only are they built to have community tools, they’re moderated and allow people to think of them as a place to hang your hat and chat. From an archive point of view, I own the forums so I can back them up as needed, save them as an SQL table, and import them to new forum software if I need to. I like having that control.
Google Buzz and Google Wave aren’t doing it for me. I’ve tried very hard to embrace them, but I find that they can be noisy and unruly, and the tools to manage them just aren’t in place yet. Also, I don’t own them. If there’s a topic I like, there’s no way to archive them, or move them somewhere else other than a web page archive or a screenshot. They’re owned by Google and there’s nothing I can do about that.
Facebook is convenient, but I find there are times when I avoid Facebook for days at a time because I’m not addicted to it like other people are. When I do use it, it’s usually for a brief period of time and I log off. I find later that there are conversations going on in there which I don’t even know about because I don’t check it. I suppose I should make a conscious effort to.
Blog comments are a good way to have a public discussion as well. They’re attached directly to the post, and people can read them directly off the article.
In my experience, the further you move away from your home base, the more fragmented the conversation becomes. I found that even tweets imported into Buzz make for an uneven conversation since replies are coming and going in two different places. Are these services doing more harm than good? I’d think they are, and I believe that keeping the conversation closest to home is the best way to stay connected to your userbase.
Post where you want the conversation to be. No matter where it is, people will go there if they want to join in on the conversation if they feel it’s that important. Once people see that most have flocked to one place, that’s where most of the talking will be.
Category: Social Media
