Your Semi-Social Visitors

Posted on May 26, 2009
Filed Under CSO, Future, Musings, Social Web, Strategy, Uncategorized, community, social media marketing, social viral | Leave a Comment

A lot of people won’t ever use Twitter, Facebook, Digg, or (insert your favorite social networking site here). Don’t piss them off. They’re visiting your website, watching your television show, or visiting your location. And they, like all of us, bring their own expectations about social experiences.

The reasons behind being what could be called “semi-social” are varied, and include:

Desire to be different
Fear of (using) technology
Not enough desire to socialize online
Not enough time to socialize online – information overload
Most friends or relatives not using online social websites
Desire to cut back on online social activities

So, your choices on how to handle these miscreants – um, miscellaneous users – include:

Acknowledge them – Show that you know that not everyone “gets” it and tone down the geeky/chic-y plug-ins and social media campaigns
Help them – Provide work-arounds so that semi-socials can partake of your website’s offerings
Ignore them – Don’t slow down the speed at which you use every possible social media tool to expand your reach, while risking alienating people who are semi-social.
Invite them to socialize – Take a chance that you may find their moment to start socializing via one of your preferred methods. (This invitation can happen along with the first bullet point above – after acknowledging them.)

We’re all semi-social and even non-social during the course of a given day. So, it is easy to understand the mindset of someone who is routinely less social online. That is, if you can stop posting for a moment and ponder about them.