You've likely never seen the most exhaustive and detailed database of the outcomes of social behaviors. It's a collection of experiences and insights covering every conceivable media platform or channel. It's vast, varied, exists in the public domain, and it could forever change the way you look at today's social media opportunities.
It's history.
Societies have been interacting socially ever since civilization began ("society" is based on the Latin word socius for "allied" or "friend"). We were using social media long before we had a name for it, and we did so whether the enabling technologies were clay tablets, parchment, telegraphy, or SMS. Government, economies, art, community, and the other institutions and our communal habits are fundamentally social constructs. Their function can be understood as conversation.
Sure, the format of media changes the messages that are shared, up to a point, but the messages -- from their intended purposes to realized outcomes -- have had a far greater influence, if not overriding control, over the uses of media. New media aren't a phenomenon in culture; rather, every generation adopts new media and puts it to use in service of the phenomena of its culture. The tools are forever as novel as the purposes are traditional.
So what does this 2,000-year or so history of social media experience tell us about the all-time top ways to measure conversation? The picture isn't pretty, but you should probably factor these metrics into your thinking:
#1 Dead Bodies
By far the most common result of social interaction between people who have different opinions is that one of them ends up getting killed. This is especially true at the community-to-community level. After all, war is just an extreme version of conversation. Whether national or religious, the first thing most communities do once they've formed is to engage in conflict with other communities. Quite often this sense of embattlement is hardwired into the very founding of groups. But the track record of conversation is starkly plain if you want to find a metric for how to measure its outcomes. None of the most important themes or phenomena of history are too-far distant from a tally of dead bodies. Killing your opponents is by far the most used tool for resolving conflicts large or small.
#2 Authority
Conversation rarely survives as a truly peer-to-peer experience; structure arises either by an implicit tendency to self-order or its explicit imposition by participants and/or owners of the dialogue. From medieval agrarian collectives to religious visionaries and brand fan pages, the idea that participants are owners is much more happy fantasy than functional reality. "Some animals are more equal than others," as Orwell would put it, and rarely do the voices that speak the loudest or with the most weight in social settings necessarily possess the authentic qualifications to do so. They do, however, possess the power, making most social experiences throughout history examples of establishing authority. This might run counter to your perception that social tools prompt revolutions but even then the truisms of human behavior yield new authority in place of whatever has been destroyed.
#3 Profits
You don't have to be a Marxist or free market capitalist to see the not-so-invisible hand of economics and the desire for financial gain behind most world events. I'd even go as far to say as there's nothing wrong with it, especially if it's transparent to all involved. The problem is that so many conversations have been overtly opaque on this fact. Just consider the world of politics and how it intersects with money. Ditto goes for many of the conversations hosted by commercial brands these days; social campaigns that declare no obvious interest in selling things when the implicit rationale for them is to do just that. There's always been money behind, within, and as an outcome of social experience, and it's kind of funny that we don't more actively acknowledge this fact.
#4 Insularity
People have been joining clubs forever. Membership can satisfy any number of needs, from the tangible (safety and well-being) to the intangible (happiness, spiritual satisfaction). By definition, joining one community means not being a part of another one, at least if membership means anything beyond putting your name on a list. We've known through all of history that human beings can't be in two places at the same time, so living in one village meant you weren't living in another one. The same could be said of your religious community, economic class, cultural interests, etc. For certain things to be true, other things need to be false. Many of the most meaningful conversations are intended to deepen that sense of belonging -- and the worldview/opinions commensurate with it -- versus challenge or change it (see Point #1).
#5 Knee-Jerk Action
Once you're "in" on a conversation within a community, it makes it far easier to reach a conclusion, both in how fast you get to it and how tenaciously you hold onto it. This is not a symptom of our new media; your average Victorian reached snap judgments about people as quickly and ruthlessly as do online chatters today. Wearing the wrong colored button on your hat or simply being the member of the wrong religious club was enough to get you killed on the spot, without delay or question. So the idea of equating "social" with "efficient" or "fair" behavior is laughable. Many of history's worst crimes against humanity were the direct outcome of "conversations."
Conclusion
Great, right? What are you supposed to do with this perspective? Here are five suggestions:
- Don't presume that your audience wants conversation, or that conversation is a tool to change opinions. The track record on this is really, really poor.
- Are there ways to assign and assert authority in social experience without reverting to despotism (or at least admitting it up front)? If you don't do it, it's probably going to happen anyway.
- I think it's time to start giving up the nonsense about commercial brands engaging in conversation for the sake of talking. It's not legitimate and it's not honest, and history says it's OK to want to make money.
- I know the conventional wisdom tells you to develop rabid fans who'll evangelize for your brand, but history suggests that this is playing with fire (and it doesn't usually end well). Thoughtful support is perhaps better?
- Since conversations have always turned on a dime, and often without any warning or rationale, perhaps responding to those twists and turns is less important than the broader outcome of your social effort?
What do you think? Maybe there are better or more conclusions? I just think that we'd get more out of our social experiments if we took the time to review what the last zillion people got out of them before us.