But We Like Our Comfy Place Thanks. Sorry Seth.

We’ve conducted research on Social Media usage for over 80 companies now, from health care to engineering to non-profits. No, I’m not tooting our horn here; bear with me a moment. We’ve covered Europe, Canada, the USA and snippets of Asia and southern Africa in our wanderings. One thing we’ve learned out of examining over 780 Million (or so) bits of data? People like where they hang online and they don’t really like to change – with a few caveats. Of course.

When it comes to Social Networks (i.e. Facebook, MySpace or Bebo) citizens (I hate the term “user”) become rather attached to those brands and services. Once entrenched and engaged there, they tend to stay there. In monitoring brand and product mentions and discussions over a 6 month period for several brands – people mentioned the brand in a channel where they initially hung out. Less than 1% of over 240,000 people left their initial Social Network to engage in conversations or make comments elsewhere.

In usage patterns, we found that out of the 240,000 sample group monitored, 78% also used a separate photo service and would have an account on YouTube or another video service. Less than 5% of the sample group (Canadians, American and Brits) had more than 3 actively used accounts. Okay, a caveat here, we sampled these 240,000 people where we found the same “user name” being used – but we do estimate a less than 4% margin of error here.

To Seth Godin’s new project with Squidoo “Brands in Public” we are very interested to see what happens. Brands in Public offers brands the chance to engage with people when they mention their brand by creating a portal that sucks in any mention of their brand across Twitter on blogs etc.

The upside is that the brand can then “go” to the channel(s) where the issue is being discussed and engage with people. For the most part. I like it for microblogging services like Twitter or Plurk, but suspect it will fail when it comes to newsgroups, usergroups, the BB and Usenet etc., all areas some (like ours) services can monitor, but Google does not. Nor would this tool. It’s a great concept, and it will have a positive impact. But.

At the end of the day, citizens like the online home they make. They’ll rarely venture out and away from the services they start with, since that’s where they’re comfortable. Seth has changed the game here for many monitoring services like Radian6, RTGI or Trackur and for Microsofts proposed solution. The good side of this project is the ability for the brands to reach at least most of the services where the conversation may happen that affects them, if not all.

Key is that Seth et al have recognized a key fact; a brand in Social Media has to go to the audience, don’t expect them to come to you.

Did we miss something? What do you think?

(Author: Giles Crouch a.k.a Webconomist)