Much of the social media hype emanating from agencies and consultants is based on an astonishing confusion between cause and effect.

To use the analogy of social media as the ‘water cooler conversation’ of the digital age - People don’t formulate the opinion that Bank A has great service, Politician B can be trusted, or Kyle Sandilands is a goose, purely through the mechanism of a debate around the water cooler. These opinions are formed elsewhere, and brought to the water cooler.

The following assertion, published by a leading agency, epitomizes the confusion between cause and effect.  

“It’s important to note that we found no variations in the responses among the people who identified  themselves as active users of social networks and those who use social media less frequently. In other words, as you study the survey responses, note that social influencers and social media have an impact on the general consumer population – not just a small elite of social media enthusiasts.” Shiv Singh Vice President & Global Social Media Lead, Razorfish Social Media Labs. Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report, 13 July 2009, p 9

Using the fact that research shows no variations in response between those who are active social media users, and those who aren’t, to conclude that social media has a uniform effect on those who use it and (somehow) on those who don’t (by some kind of spooky osmosis?) is wonky logic and wonky science.

Possible explanations for the research observations include -

1. The opinions of those who actively use social media are influenced by their use of social media, and these opinions in turn (by a mechanism unknown) uniformly influence those who don’t actively use social media
2. There is an influencing mechanism, outside of social media, to which both groups are uniformly exposed, and by which both groups are uniformly affected

In the absence of a proven hypothesis explaining the mechanism by which the opinions of social media users influence non-users, the first explanation should be rejected. (Why? Read Wikipedia entries on The Scientific Method and Occam’s Razor).

There we go again - cause and effect.

Social media use is not the mechanism that causes users’ responses. The cause originates in the media in general. What is observed amongst social media users is the effect. The real good news from Razorfish’s research is that the opinions of social media users seem to be a very accurate measure of the opinions of the general population. But more on this in the next post: “Rule 2 – listen”

Before I sign off, one more hype-puncturing factoid.

Dell is one of the poster children for Social Media strategy, especially when it comes to Twitter. Dell have invested properly in their Twitter strategy, and do a very good job at it.

In June Dell announced that Twitter had contributed to $3 million in sales revenue over a 2 year period.

Dell’s turnover for the same period was $122.2 Billion – so that’s 0.00002% of sales.