The Botox Effect: Five Ways to Cope with Online Silence

I met Jen, a beautiful young woman who had just been promoted to a senior creative role at a major consumer goods company, at a quintessentially New York cocktail party. She had a generous smile and animated way of speaking when she talked about her company and her job. Then she asked me about my job, and as I started talking, Jen’s face fell flat and her sparkle faded. I panicked a little. Was my discussion of online strategy really that boring? I found myself rambling through a perplexing conversation that produced sparkle when she talked, but nothing when I did. I left the party baffled.

Months later, a mutual friend mentioned she had just returned from Jen’s birthday party: her fortieth. “Jen is forty?” I asked, astonished. “Oh yeah,” my friend assured me. “She’s just a big Botox user.”

Suddenly, the cocktail party made sense. Jen wasn’t uninterested. She was cosmetically compromised, made passive by anti-aging injections.

In a way, your online audience is like a Botox user. Even if you have an enthusiastic audience for your blog, your Facebook page, or your Twitter feed, the enthusiasm is invisible. The audience is mostly non-responsive and hard to read. In the absence of feedback, it’s easy to make the same mistake I made in my conversation: I panicked. I strayed from my message (rambling), looking for something, anything that would spark a reaction.

Since my encounter with Jen, I’ve developed practices that can help you communicate effectively even when you’re talking to a Botox audience, on- or offline:

• Picture your audience. It’s easy to feel like you’re talking to yourself when you blog or tweet without getting a response. That leads to carelessness — or even to writing hurtful or counterproductive content. Picture a person that your message is aimed at, whether it’s someone you’re e-mailing or a single user among your 100,000 Twitter followers. Keep this person in mind, perhaps by literally looking at their picture or avatar as you type. It will make your message more personal, authentic and compelling.
• Hope for feedback, plan for silence. The point of social media is it’s social. You’re hoping for some kind of response. But you can’t count on one, particularly when you’re just starting out. Craft your plan with this in mind, and seed your social media presence with content that works whether or not you get a response.
• Ask for feedback in a few forms, but not too many. Online silence may result from inappropriate requests for feedback. If you ask your customers to engage with your new web site by submitting their thoughts and experiences, essentially asking for full-length blog posts, you probably won’t get too many takers. Offer a range of lower-effort mechanisms that appeal to different levels of interest and capability–voting in an online poll, submitting links of interest, submitting homemade videos. But don’t go overboard. Launching with too many calls to action (say, more than five) will make the audience feel over-solicited.
• Talk to the curve. Your online audience, like any audience, is part of a normal curve: a handful of rabid enthusiasts at one end, a sprinkling of persistent grumblers at the other, and a big pile of modestly happy folks in between. In your hunger for feedback, you’ll be tempted to play the ends of the curve, either catering to big fans or fending off critics. Focus on that big middle ground of lukewarm participants (while thanking and encouraging your persistent fans) and you will gradually move them up the curve, and they will naturally contribute more actively to your site.
• Don’t shout. THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO MAKE PEOPLE PAY ATTENTION. Nor is your caps lock key the only way to shout: excessive e-mail reminders (3 days left in our contest! 2 days left in our contest! 1 hour left in our contest!), repetitive tweets, and spammy blog comments (come and visit our site!) are all forms of social media shouting. Resist the temptation to talk more and louder in order to get your message heard above the online din, and trust that you will build a better relationship with your audience if you can offer consistent, useful communications.

If this sounds like a balancing act, it is. Engaging with a quiet (or silent) audience takes confidence, creativity and a lot of hard work. Just don’t mistake a lack of response for a negative response. Your audience is there, even if it’s as inscrutable as a face full of Botox.

Alexandra Samuel is CEO of Social Signal,
a social media agency. She helps companies and organizations increase
revenue, build brand and strengthen team relationships by creating
compelling online communities and social web presences. She holds a
Ph.D. from Harvard University. Follow Alex on Twitter at twitter.com/awsamuel.