Time Normalization In Social Media Is A Fallacy
April 5, 2010 
Author 
In Beware those obsessed with time normalization and comparing efforts to others. There is no blanket right or wrong answer to how much time you should spend for your digital PR and marketing. Those attempting to normalize numbers or seek blanket answers really don’t get it and are looking at the wrong things.
Communications firm CloudSpark decided to put together an altogether unscientific survey about how much time it takes to use social media weekly in an attempt to answer the normalization question.
If you are at all versed in social media, web strategy and/or statistical analysis you’ll find their post completely meaningless. The fact that the commenters on the post blindly sing the praises of the survey data says a lot about our industry and the fact that almost no one digs into details. That’s why I’m here.
They started with the following statement:
Here’s what we know: It takes at least 65 hours a week to maintain 4 social media channels for 1 brand.
Okay – take a moment to consider the absurdity of that statement they proclaim to “know.” From surveying nearly 40 people. Without providing any context. Aside from the inherent flaw of conducting such a survey: their data, results and conclusions are all questionable. Let’s go through the rest of their post and their methodology:
While social media channels are considered “free,” the time you need to create, develop, and maintain those channels is anything but free.
Well, of course not. Did anyone actually think that was the case? In what reality is time ever free?
How’d we get the numbers? This spring we surveyed nearly 40 SM practitioners and asked about their hours invested in social media for their brands or the brands of their clients.
That was about the extent of their methodology? “Nearly 40?” Nice – lots of context there. Also they don’t bother to break down who these people are. Despite the statistically irrelevant sample size, we have no context if they are working client side or agency, small business or large corporation, etc. It’s just poor presentation of methodology and can’t possibly be taken seriously. In fact this agency only succeeds in me taking their corporate blog as a whole less seriously.
The rest of their methodology:
In our survey, we defined the following:
- Creation means setting up the page with initial content (does not include creative design team hours)
- Development means attracting followers, initial promotion/launch
- Maintenance means listening, responding, posting, messaging, inviting
First, I cleaned up their paragraph to be readable. They could have made a list instead of writing that impossible to read sentence (you would think a social media consultancy would know how to make content, well, social).
Second, CloudSpark calls the use of social media channels “development” and “maintenance.” My problems with these terms aside, you have to love that they think these items are in different silos and attempts to segment them. Just re-read what they define each term as and you’ll see what I mean. They think, for example, that attracting followings and creating content are in different buckets. Social media spammers much? This is why many in social media hate marketing and PR folk. Just FYI.
The average ranges depended on the potential for the community size, initial promotional pool, campaign goals, etc.
That’s helpful, except they don’t bother to give us any range to provide context for the survey data making this sentence meaningless.
It’s not even worth listing their results, because:
- Their sample set lacks context and is statistically insignificant.
- There is no normalization for good social media marketing because use, application, strategy and approaches all differ and are unique to each brand.
- Look at those who are defining the next generation of PR and what they are doing. It’s closer to being fluid and improvisational than as part of a rigid hours spent weekly. They are doing it because of passion, not payment. The “goal time spent” totally misses the point.
- Their corporate blog barely has 10 posts over the last year (and in total). Do we really think they have enough experience to to package survey questions about this space?
The framing of the question/results misses the point
For the math challenged, that’s a full time job for 1.5 people.
Yeah, social media takes time, that’s obvious. But if you get all team members on board and work together you can, as a brand, get social. The fact that this consultancy sees it as the responsibility of one single person in the company or a single consultant shows almost a total misunderstanding of this.
Jen @cloudspark replied | Apr 5, 2010 (1 comment)
Hi Adam,
I appreciate the post linking back to our informal survey of SM practices. I’d be happy to send over the methodology and full results. I agree with your main point – this is merely a small survey of dedicated SM practitioners – with the intent of creating a better understanding of just how many hours it takes to create, develop and maintain various SM channels. Granted it varies by skill, scope, and goals, and this is why on the post you’ll see ranges of hours invested. This survey was not a university-backed full-fledged scientific effort: as we cearly state it’s a small effort on our part to help better understand the time those in social media invest in their efforts.
I’m glad you’ve challenged us to think further, and hopefully others will take on the full rigors of a more comphrehensive survey or in-depth study. Again, please let me know if you’d like to see more of the specific results or how we went about our informal survey. Certainly let me know if you see more scientifically-accountable efforts to better define social media budgets – we’re all for learning.
Regards, Jen
Adam Singer replied | Apr 10, 2010 (597 comments)
Thanks for coming here and responding Jen – I’m glad you’re open to discussion. Hope your next survey gets another response from me – in a sense, you’ve succeeded there.
Jeremy Victor replied | Apr 5, 2010 (5 comments)
Nearly 40 people — I think she needs to take a statistics class… the post is really doing more harm than good positioned as the results of a survey. A different approach may have enabled Cloudspark to share the information in a way that would be helpful and useful.
Maybe the problem is that Cloudspark is following the survey data for the “maintenance of a blog” – 5 hours a week. As you know, if you use that as a baseline, you are frankly setting yourself us for failure.
Even more interesting in the definitions, no where to be found – were “Writing, Editing, and SEO Optimization” probably the most IMPORTANT elements of a successful blog.
I could go on, but I won’t. I believe Cloudspark probably had good intentions, however as Jen says in her comment, they needed to “think further” on the subject to make it useful.
Kris C. replied | Jul 5, 2010 (1 comment)
I find no fault with the study. Jen stated what it is: social media practitioners were surveyed, and this is the result of all their answers.
The reason I like it Adam, is be it right or wrong in regard to numbers aligning with individual use cases, the consideration of “time spent” is a very valid one. You say “The fact that this consultancy sees it as the responsibility of one single person in the company or a single consultant shows almost a total misunderstanding of this.” I don’t think Jen ONLY considers social media as the responsibility of a single person, at all – but the reality is many companies do, and in fact won’t even ALLOW employees who aren’t “social media authorized” to communicate on their behalf or about them. I know a bit about that, we have one very big brand who is a client, who has these stipulations, and I have heard of hundreds of other companies using this approach. Obviously that is not the ideal approach to take, but people have to learn at their own speed.
Highlighting the reality of managing multiple channels even close to well, is the point I took from Cloudspark’s survey and why I found it interesting.