The Curated Self: Why Social Profiles Aren’t Great for Customer Insight

Movie promo for Catfish – a 2010 documentary about deception in social media.

If you’re a marketer that has bought into the popular ‘Social media is a game-changer’ narrative (and let’s be honest – who hasn’t? ) then you’ll know doubt be familiar with the popular chorus of social media having made us “transparent” and “authentic”.

In the early days of idio – when we were but a humble personalised music magazine – we were amongst the first wave of sites encouraging visitors to authenticate using their Last.fm, Pandora and iLike accounts so that we could understand their musical tastes and better serve them with relevant music news. The relevance of the content meant site visitors would stay longer, share more content and return frequently.

Since then, the options to authenticate with customer social profiles and for brands to mine them for insight are ever expanding:

That said, although profile authentication (and indeed, aggregate-level social listening with tools such as Brandwatch and Radian6) promises access to all sorts of facets of our customers’ lives, experience shows what we actually portray online – what we say and do on social media – is hardly a fair reflection on what we’re really like.

The problem: The curated Self is not the real ‘You’

As Jeremy Garner has written in his post on ‘The Curated Self’ (read it):

The curated self, however, is an altogether tricker beast. Yes it’s made up of photos, videos, status updates, tweets, blogs, check-ins, comments, likes, emails and texts – whatever form of digital comms a person uses. But there are, I believe, two things that define it: a) it’s harder to read the ‘signals’ from someone’s curated self to get an immediate, instinctive idea about who they really are. (Lots of people project a version of what they want to be into their social channels.) And b) The curated self is, to a large extent, able to be controlled, even manipulated. Simply move the building blocks around a bit, or alter them, and the curated self instantly changes too. Altered perceptions will follow.

The key bit is the parenthesis.

“Lots of people project a version of what they want to be into their social channels”

Did you ever watch the 2010 hit Catfish – a documentary which charted the exploits of a young American who struck up a Facebook relationship with a young woman named “Megan”, who later turned out to be a lonely, mature housebound woman called Angela who had manufactured several social identities (including a prodigious 8yo artist, a half-sister, and older parents) to lure him.

Deception in the social web doesn’t have to be as elaborate or acute as that, but the general point still stands – our actions on social media are merely a contrived image that we want to portray of ourselves, not the real ‘us’.

For marketers trying to get an accurate picture of their community and audience – to communicate in a more relevant and, ultimately, profitable manner – the panacea of using social media data for customer insight is actually more a case of ‘seeing through the glass, darkly’.

The solution: Learn from your audience’s content consumption

So, where then can brands go for a more truthful and more useful reflection of the customer?

Author Walter Mosley once said, “A man’s bookcase will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him”, and it with this in mind that brands are starting to see the value of understanding what customers are reading and engaging with online. By tracking consumer interactions as they browse and engage with content, brands can begin to reveal current and evolving interests, inclinations and needs — sometimes before the individual knows themselves!

Don’t believe me?

Think about your daily browsing habits: the stuff you read online are highly indicative of your current interests and needs. By contrast, Facebook Likes denote a historic interest (sure, I ‘like’-d the Napoleon Dynamite Facebook fan page in 2006 but I haven’t watched that film in seven years now).

If marketers really want to pretarget customers and influence their purchase journey, it’s not going to be through gleaning insight from audience’s social profiles, it’s going to be through intelligently understanding the content they are engaging with and deriving interest data from it now.

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To learn more about how content consumption accurately reveals your customer’s deepest needs and interests, join our webinar on Thurs December 17th at 4pm GMT.

To talk us about how we can help you gain more customer insight from your content marketing – please get in touch – we’re always happy to talk!

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