For a social network, community, or website you may be trying to grow, sometimes it helps to determine your goals for growth, and the reasons behind these goals.  This analysis may help in better planning for social media marketing campaigns & engagements. 

The objectives may include one or more of the following:

1. Participation – If your site has social features, having more visitors and/or members generates the multiplier effect: more people, ideas, and conversations pollinating for increased social participation.
2. Sales – in addition to promoting a product or service, a site that sells what it is bringing awareness & engagement to has a built-in goal.
3. Competitive advantage – sometime competition is fighting on other levels, and by claiming the online social audience, or mindshare, you get leverage that may be hard to unseat.  Just as the top social network platform in a particular country has an advantage due to its many members, your online social community can provide a balance of social power if you’re either first, or best, in growing the community in your niche.
4. Customer Interaction – beyond customer service, you want to interact with your customers and alongside them as they interact together.  A natural for this goal is to also provide standard reference information via social media so the interactions can link to the common questions and issues.
5. Attention / Traffic / Visitors - Do you want more people to visit your site?  Common reasons for more usage includes to promote a product, service, idea, or brand.  The side-effects can include:

• Online reputation impact – more attention and knowledge about your image, brand, or reputation (linkbait tactics included).

• Organic search traffic increase – from content alone, or adding in the benefit of many links to your content

• Viral information spread – your message is spread by others for you.  (and sometimes a different or negative-seeming message is spread… and that is another story).

There are many ways to present goals such as shown above, including tying social media marketing to long-term growth.  But there is still confusion among those who would be using social campaigns.  Chalk some of that up to ambiguous “buzz-speak” for a new technology.

Intended or otherwise, your own use of the pages & web properties does affect the measurement.  That usage would be minimal in most cases.  But want about the use by people who are not plain users… by users who know their actions are not transparent?

First, a well-established and well-known quantum physics idea – the Heisenberg uncertainty principle – says that measuring something happening can alter what it is that you are measuring.  A simpler way to envision it in a related way, is that by pouring ketchup into thimble to measure it, and then pouring it out, you would reduce the amount of ketchup that you end up with… because some would stay stuck in the thimble. 

This change means your measurement is off and your cooking might suffer.  Fine for ketchup because you can see it, of course, and work around this to some extent.  But getting down to the level of tiny particles such as electrons means you can’t see that your measurement-taking changed what the electron was doing.

Whew – totally boring science club stuff, yes? 

Not if you think of people as electrons, as then maybe things start to come into focus.  Under the social microscope, some of these electrons know that they are being watched.  They know and believe that their actions – their visits, their votes, their comments, tweets, social bookmarks, clicks - are observable, and also in many cases permanent records of their actions.

Everyone online *knows* they are being observed.  Well, most people do, anyway.  Especially the people who are involved in online marketing. 

So, let’s bring in another aspect named the observer effect, which separate from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has a related aspect: the impact that even observing something can change it.  The actions of animals at night can’t be observed very well without light, and shining a light on them will change their actions.  Taking your temperature with a thermometer actually lowers your temperature because a small amount of your heat is transferred into the thermometer.

Now we’re cooking…

… because we all know that behavior of most people can be affected by observation.  That is, if they know they are being observed, many people will change behavior as a result.  One humorous example relating to this is that people are more likely to wash their hands in a restroom if someone else is there to notice the act.  This wonderful truth was measured via experiments over the years (with another truth being that people often say they washed when they didn’t… maybe 25% were liars).  It could be true that “Self-awareness… may be enhanced by being watched by others.”

So, now what does this theory stuff have to do with anything social online?

Hmm…  in the old days, people consumed media such as newspapers and radio and tv, and it was one-way.  Online new media now has people creating and consuming media, with a touch of competition thrown in.  With sites such as YouTube, by putting all this media in one place, people go to see what’s popular… knowing in many cases that by watching a video they are also voting it up in popularity.  So they tell their friends and others to watch their stuff so it might go viral by rising in the charts. 

And of course, with deep-packet inspection going on, even more observation is happening that what was revealed with the release of private user data in recent times by some major online web properties.  What happens as more users realize that they may not be anonymous, and thus have to think of their next click: ”What will someone else think about my activity?”

Wrapping up, there may be some value to exploring and understanding the play between people’s activities on an individual basis, in consideration that they may be acting differently just because they know they may be watched.