Well, the spring social media conference season is finally behind us. I had the privilege of speaking at several conferences this spring, including the Social Media 301 Conference at Microsoft, Mount Royal University’s Social Media Shift, and Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference New York. Typically, these conferences feature practitioners sharing case studies, panels taking a deeper dive into some niche topic, or motivational social pundits pimping their latest book. This spring, a new topic seemed to be repeated at every event I went to: a focus on consumer behavior.
The talk that caught my attention the most was from long-time social media veteran Stowe Boyd. Contrary to popular opinion that increased socializing leads to distractedness and inefficiency, Stowe suggested social conversation actually leads to better mental performance.
Stowe mentioned a study by Dr. Reynol Junco of Lock Haven University, in which his class was split into two groups. One used Twitter as a class journal, the other group wrote everything down on paper. The study found that students using Twitter improved their GPAs across ALL their classes by an average half a grade. Dr. Junco’s conjecture was that constant feedback via Twitter led to higher retention. And that Twitter offered a low-stress way to ask questions of other students and the instructor.
Does social interaction — “social touch” — increase performance — or revenue?
Stowe also mentioned that the best basketball teams were ones that had the most physical contact. When people touch, levels of a bonding hormone called oxytocin go up in the brain. This causes the heart to relax, stress to reduce, and performance to increase. Stowe posited that constant, friendly “touch” – even if done over social channels – can produce this oxytocin and rather than resulting in defocus and stress, can actually lead to increased performance.
One growing body of evidence suggests that interacting with a brand in the presence of friends may increase revenue as well. In 2010, Chadwick Martin Bailey produced a study that showed that 51% of Facebook users, and 67% of Twitter users were more likely to purchase from brands when engaged via social channels. And according to a February 2011 study by Leadformix, 1 out of 2 leads coming into B2B websites are coming from LinkedIn. One has to wonder, why is that? Does having the constant “social touch” of friends and family (or colleagues) help relax the wariness we often have toward marketing?
Consider this statistic: in May 2011, Starbucks reported that while Starbucks.com had 1.8 million unique visitors, its fan page had 19 million – a number over ten times greater. Coca-cola reported that its dot-com site received 270,000 uniques…but its Facebook fan page received over 22 million = EIGHTY ONE TIMES HIGHER [via the Wall Street Journal]. Consider the emotional warmth you might feel while looking at asomething on CocaCola.com versus what you would feel within Facebook, with new friend requests coming in, photo uploads from family, or chat notifications from a loved one. While this is primarily an issue with B2C brands, where would you prefer to engage with a brand?
I feel therefore I am
Which leads me to a statistic I use in my talks. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman did a study of cognitive behavior and found that, despite our notions of being reasonable, rational creatures, the vast majority of our decisions, perhaps up to 95%, are made based on emotional drivers and very little from rational decision-making. Kahneman suggested that our perception is that we 1) think something, then we act, and then we feel something about that decision. At least, that’s what we believe. But the reality is that possibly 95% of our decisions are done by 1) feeling something, then acting, and then thinking/post-rationalizing that decision to bring our rational brain into alignment.
Why is that? Because emotional decisions can be parallel processed. We can feel happy and sad at a daughter’s graduation. I can be excited and nervous while speaking to a group. Parallel processing is often chosen because it can be processed more quickly, whereas rational decision-making is serial, linear, and slower. If x is true, then y. If y is false, then z. While emotional thinking is the result of millennia of primate survival, rational decision-making literally takes more time and more caloric energy.
And in our time-starved world, where we encounter endless bits of information demanding our attention, which kind of decision-making do you think we’ll default to?
Because of this, it makes sense that emotional decision-making is more likely to take place in an environment saturated with the oxytocins produced via social interaction as well as the time-demanding firehose of social interaction produced by Facebook.
My final thought: why leave the comfort of our friends to engage with a brand on some lonely dot-com site? Some organizations, particularly those who are consumer-focused, may want to reconsider their investments to shift engagement and content to social sites rather than their dot-com. The engagement provided on those social sites by friends, and the brand, may lead to a more revenue-friendly environment for marketers. As long as we don’t destroy those oxytocins with self-interest, deception or distrust.
