The usage of social media by individuals and organizations is creating three different levels of satisfaction for the audience being pulled into engagement.
The "pull" is becoming less of a voluntary act to one which has become more of a "push". Everywhere consumers turn all this social stuff is front and center in the spheres of attention influence. Television, print media and every kind of on-line media is pushing their presence and selling engagement to their viewers using this thing we all call social media.
The massive pull is resulting from the overwhelming push. Yet the many who push and pull rarely think in terms of the satisfaction of the engagement by those pulled and pushed into designated spaces.
Engagement Satisfaction
User satisfaction with social media is defined by expectations. The expectations for experience can be defined into three distinctive categories.
There are three categories of user satisfaction which are:
- "Must Be's": a minimum set of performance criteria (features & functions) users have in their minds based on past experience or influences from their friends
- "More is better" certain features, functions, content and behavior which establishes a mindset of expectations that defines things an audience likes and wants more of.
- "Delighters": These are features, functions, content and behavior that an audience didn't expect but when given they become awed by it because in some way it creates a delightful user experience. In most cases an audience doesn't usually create the delighters rather careful study of the expected and more is better gives "creators" insights as to what could be delighters. Leaders constantly focus on producing new delighters and leverage the process to attract the larger audiences.
The premise of this model is that progressive organizations study their audience preferences in each of the above categories of satisfaction and manage accordingly. The challenge of any organization is that once it creates a "delighter" experience it isn't long before it becomes an expected experience and if missing creates dissatisfaction.
For the many using social media today gaining an understanding of the audiences expectations and delivering experiences beyond the expectations is the difference that separates the leaders from the followers.
Over time expectations from an audience become fairly high and when dissatisfied the audience becomes a collective voice of negative influence. It would be wise for companies to apply the above model to their thinking processes and focus on the vital few issues which affect the functions,features, content and overall experience. After all, audience satisfaction is the primary influence over results.