“WHAT YOU KEEP HIDDEN FROM OTHERSIS WHAT CAUSES PEOPLE TO FRIEND YOU. IT BECOMES ADDICTIVE.”

By Jyothi KiranDigital Anthropologist

www.peppersquare.com

Why users seek the anonymous limelight & how you can exploit the busy landscape to your business advantage

Anonymity in social media sites continues to thrive and sharing experiences occupies a big chunk of social media networks where it results in therapy for some, power for others, and an opportunity for businesses to take advantage of. Social media trends indicate that the market is expected to burst at the seams with activity in 2010.

THERAPY

They pour their hearts out in anonymous voices but are heard sympathetically. They confess about their sexless lives, infidelity, loneliness, depression, helplessness, and also about where they derive their inspiration from. The freedom to speak anonymously is a great advantage says Mello, a member of Experience Project, a network that promotes anonymity, in socialmediabiz. Those bottled up feelings that get expressed anonymously on the social network sites become the currency for relationships. “What you keep hidden from others is what causes people to friend you,” says Mello, “It becomes addictive.” The Experience Project reported 3.5 million users as of November 2009.

People genuinely need a channel to express their thoughts instead of carrying it around with them. Purging emotions and ideas anonymously is legitimately therapeutic and presents a powerful opportunity for businesses. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, on the Six Social Media Trends for 2010, David Armano, Vice President at Edelman Digital, predicts, “Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced).” Anonymous or not, these are real people, waiting to be addressed.

POWER

According to a Forrester report released in January 2010 called “Introducing the New Social Technographics” a third of adults post at least once a week to social sites such as Facebook and Twitter; a quarter of adults publish a blog and upload video/audio they created; nearly 60% maintain a profile on a social networking site; 70% read blogs, tweets and watch user generated video.

Of all the social media networks, facebook seems to be the most popular where as Twitter is for the tech savvy. According to facebook, there are 325 million users but many claim that the numbers are a little exaggerated because as one user puts it, “20% at least of the profiles on facebook are fictive used by scammers (that we set up a group to hunt) perverts and other idiots that either have no idea what they are doing or just those who forgot their password”.

Anonymity is by choice. As an anonymous user succinctly puts it ‘very often, our name is our identity and with it come pre-conceived notions about how we are supposed to think, act. Honesty is a by-product of anonymity! For the confessional, the screen offers privacy and is very conducive to soul-baring! Thought about in a different way, it is the armor of the modest and meek.

But not all of them bare their souls and honesty is the last thing on their mind. For them it’s not about soul-baring in privacy; it is about empowering their identities and playing games to reclaim the macho selves they seem to have lost in the urban haze of reality.

An anonymous user says he has at least 20 online avatars and when the network fails, it amounts to a great deal of pressure that he ‘feels lost, gets aggressive and ends up smoking just to relieve the stress of not being connected.’ In a convoluted way, anonymity, the ability to take on any avatar at will and play the role you want, offers power to users.

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES

So there’s the slice of social media landscape with people actively participating in it for a variety of reasons but admittedly very addictive users. How do we leverage this network of faceless users into revenue opportunities?

Earlier, Internet users used social media for emailing, creating homepages and updating their blogs. This has changed as users now gravitate towards services that offer the environment of a social hub. They use social networks to sharing videos, photos, blog postings, their shopping lists, current mood, their likes and dislikes, and to bolster their career and for dating. Hence, there are business opportunities to seize upon these websites where traffic is not merely transaction oriented but driven by social and psychological needs.

Understanding these demographics, and analyzing the trends and time spent on the kind of content users are seeking opens up a large pool of opportunities for businesses to anticipate and address user needs. Social media today presents an opportunity to not just seed open platform conversations with your brand and service, but also listen to what consumers have to say about your business. They offer insights that previously took time, money and effort. Today, top line understanding is there for the picking. And for the really smart businesses, it is an opportunity to engage directly with consumers who are speaking their mind.

Unfortunately, there are (as yet) no reliable metrics to measure the key outcomes of social media: influence and engagement. But the way forward is to measure everything you can. This way you will be able to sift through the metrics that matter the most in your business or in achieving your goals – which, as we know, is different for different businesses. Additionally, because of the vast diversity of social media and its changing relevance to different businesses, there are no Must-Track Metrics and neither is there a prescribed process for measurement. Engagement is proof of success, but how do you define engagement and how do you track it?

About pepper square

It’s understandably frustrating, but social media is too tantalizing an opportunity to miss. If engagement could be measured what would it be: number of minutes spent to read a tweet? Number of times a video was viewed? Number of comments left behind for a picture? As much as we would like to believe that the truth is hidden somewhere behind those numbers, these methods are specious. Influence and engagement are too subtle a process to track.

According to yourstory, a popular social media site, “The words to watch this year will be “professional validation” and “measurements” if 90% of businesses are to transition from being busy with social media to being effective.” How these two key facets will pan out is not important at the moment. It is however critical to recognize that social media is not the “new, new thing” anymore. It is normalized life. If your business is not looking at Social Media Optimization within its marketing function, you are falling behind the curve.

Ready to take your business where you want it to go pepper square is a full service digital interactive services company offering interface design, content, e-commerce, technology, marketing and social media solutions that combines market insights with creativity to deliver engaging experiences that will power your business and help you succeed.

Click here to connect with us .