Declining personal returns in social media

This year, I am going to try to stick to one of my New Year's resolutions: to post here every other day at least, and to respond to comments much more regularly that I have been. As someone who's been blogging for years, I know the basics as well as everyone else. If you participate in the conversation, you get much more out of the blogosphere than otherwise.

But this presents an interesting dilemma, because participation in social media conversations results in exponentially increasing demands on one's time. If I respond to every comment here, and many of the comment that refer to here on blogs elsewhere, I'll be spending a lot of time doing nothing but commenting. Then, of course, I want to comment on other's people's posts, and these are conversations I'll want to track as well, so I can continue to contribute.

I also write a private blog for my staff internally, and I do an update for a circular that goes out to all the people in our programme every week.

On top of that, there's the flow of private emails that arrive from each and every post I write, and though it might take me a week or two, I try to respond to all those as well. Forgive me, by the way if you've written to me and not had your response. Sometimes I have to declare email bankruptcy just to keep up.

This has lead me to consider whether there might be declining marginal returns on my time the more I participate in social media. Might it be the case that the more you do, the less you get out of it?

This is counter to what most commentators are saying about social media, of course. But most of their arguments seem to assume the point of social media is social media. In their world, time is a utopian free resource: it is a public good that is in infinite supply. They can afford to spend all their free time being on blogs and friendfeed and twitter and all the rest.

I doubt that is true for those people who don't "get" social media though. They, like me, are severely time constrained. Every task one undertakes has to be balanced against the opportunity cost of doing something else.

The opportunity cost of doing social media tends to rise the more I do. For example, I could do so much commenting on blogs that I am no longer doing what I am paid to do by my bank. That will result in me losing my job, of course, which is a very substantive price to pay for participation in social media.

On the other hand, the posts I write here and the comments I manage now are value additive to what I do. In fact, this blog has been one of the most rewarding things I've done. The problem is getting anyone else to quantify the value to my day job.

The basic issue is this: those of us engaged in this kind of activity in addition to our day jobs have faith that there is an economic benefit from doing so. That doesn't cut it when you have to go into your annual review and explain you've written 60 essays on a blog and written 1000 comments in 2008, because the relationship between output and value is inherently unclear.

The fact of the matter is that if it were possible to ascribe such an economic value to this kind of work, bankers the world over would have teams and teams of us doing social media full time. Because then, truly, there would not be declining marginal returns on the effort.

I doubt there is much chance of getting to a reasonable resolution to the problem. In 2009 we'll all still be living on faith that doing this adds real – as in cash – value to our enterprises. And we'll all still be trying to justify our faith to our management.

But I don't want you to think I am complaining. For banks, social media is still quite the bleeding edge. It's very exciting, as long as the edge doesn't turn into a knife.

Comments

[FredericBaud]

And you did not mention the writing of "Future Proofing". Which hopefully will bring you hard cash - I'll be one of your first customer - but probably more importantly also some other anticipated intangible value.

But back to your point, I believe that in an era where an idea has less and less defensible value, the differentiating advantage goes to those who can integrate and implement it - those who "get it" and can do it. Isn't conversation in the end the best way to really "get it"?

[wazaroff]

Hi James. I was speaking to a social media consultant yesterday who assumed that I was going to launch a bunch of new social media experiments and initiatives this year. Nope, I have two: ChangeEverything.ca and monitoring the blogosphere for comments about us. That's it. Why would I spread ourselves too thin. I want to do less things and do them well.

Thanks for this post, I await your comment back!

[Brad J Garland]

Hello James. I'm a big fan of 'less is more' but with social media it depends on your business goals and who you want to engage.

If you have many markets to tackle, you want to stand back and see where they are having conversations. If they are only in one or two places, lucky for you, but probably not often the case. If they are in lots of places, it's true you can only extend yourself so far so then you have to decide what is the best moves to make for your business goals. Notice I keep referring to business goals because as I like to preach, it isn't about the technology.

[James Gardner]

@William: that is a very interesting point: "why would I spread myself to thin". I think it summarises my points nicely. There are indeed declining returns, even if you're the social media guy.

@Brad: agree it abou business goals, but is it reasonable that any busins goal would be "be dominant in social media" except for a media firm?

[James Gardner]

@Frederick: Futureproofing. Yes, that was a huge thing and big consumer of time. It may bring hard cash, but other athors I've talked to have indicated that for busiess books the amount is relatively small. Perhaps some things you have to do for love :-)

[Susan Abbott]

"participation in social media conversations results in exponentially increasing demands on one's time"
Yup. We should call it Gardner's Law.

[James Gardner]

I have always wanted a law all of my own. Thank you so much Susan.

[Richard Knudson]

Interesting article. I haven't read your blog before, so forgive me if I'm missing something fundamental, but from what I can see neither you nor your employer are positioned to capture any economic benefit from your content. That is, it doesn't look like it's the blog's purpose to generate returns for you or your bank. No ads, no mention of which bank you work for, no link back to your web page, one subtle LinkedIn link. And there's nothing wrong with that: from the article I just read I assume your other posts are as interesting as this one is, and that you get lots of traffic. And from the comments it's obviously interactive and you have devoted readers.

It's no wonder you're seeing diminishing returns: your blog's primarily designed to benefit readers; any benefits you or your bank get from it will be hard to measure at best.

If you want to see economic benefit, put it up on your own WordPress blog at your own domain, put adsense up there, and have your bank be a premier sponsor. Or approach their major competitors first, maybe :-)

It's all about the purpose of the blog. Blogs like yours treat content like a free good, and since you don't capture any of the benefit, you're under-incentivized to write.

But like I said, that's based on 5 minutes experience with your site, soi I could be missing the boat entirely.

Excellent article; thanks for writing it.