Venn Heaven: How to map your champions online
- Mon, February 06 2012
- Filed under: Social networking and web 2.0
Tom Webster of BrandSavant Blog had a fascinating post this past week on the overlap - or lack thereof - of 1) your base of supporters and 2) social media mavens. It’s important you understand how much overlap you have, so you know how to use social media effectively to build your brand.
He drew a series of Venn Diagrams, which I am showing here:
So which is ideal?
The first looks good, because you have some overlap between supporters and social media champions. That overlapping area is a great start to a core of online enthusiasts - and it can grow as that group reaches out to their circles of influence.
The second is obviously bad, because you almost no overlap between people who love you and people who spread messages. And if you pay attention on social media only to the people who are talking about your issue but aren’t supporters, you’ll alienate your base because the two aren’t intersecting.
The third one is interesting. It looks great until you think about it as an echo chamber. You just have the same champions zealously supporting your cause to each other, over and over, online. That’s no way to grow a community. Also, if you keep catering to this group, more and more narrowly, you’ll end up with a shrinking echo chamber, pleasing a more and more select group of people.
The trick, as Tom points out, is knowing which Venn diagram you have so you know where you have problems and where you have opportunities. That’s the hard part. You have to listen and engage very carefully to gain this understanding. As he notes:
Two of these Venn diagrams could kill your business – if you make decisions based upon social data and don’t know what your diagram looks like. Luckily for you, it isn’t rocket science to draw your brand’s diagram – if you do the work. This is the kind of work I do for clients every day, but the most important thing you can do to determine these things about your customers is simply to ask them. Only when you calibrate your social data mining with other online or offline research can you know the nature of your two circles. Figuring out the size of these circles – and the extent to which they overlap – is the key to making social media data useful.
Ask you donors and champions if they are online and where - and see how they react to opportunities to spread the word online. Do a little homework so you know where to focus your efforts.
I recommend reading and subscribing to BrandSavant for more on how to draw a picture of your online brand - and how to act accordingly.
It’s good advice.