Empathy and latency - Lewis & Carroll

The good Conversation isn’t much talk. It’s Connect with the right people

When we talk about Internet 2.0 we are actually combining two extremely different and exquisitely complementary concepts: Internet, (connect) technology applied to the interconnection between machines; And 2.0 (sharing), energy and willingness of people to put at the service of others what they think can benefit both those who offer it and the recipient.

Today the Network is sharing experiences, and in that path, we will continue to evolve. We’re not going back.

A Conversation must be interesting.

And the key to success is, again, in the combination of two very different but not distant concepts: Empathyand Latency.

Let’s define success as achieving the targets set in a percentage as close as possible to 100. By defining this, let’s see how Empathy and Latency combine to build emotional bonds with our Community.

Empathy
We can interact a lot, but if there is no empathy the intensity of the dialogue will be turned off. Or worse, people will end up talking about something else, regardless of the brand, product or company in whose space they are.

The conversationis based on affinity, on the connection of interests, feelings and expectations. We can generate conversation, relationship, with our users if we have previously defined what we want to talk about.

If the conversation with a brand can become interesting is because the brand proposes and energizes a topic of conversation that people, a certain profile of people, are interested in. It’s not enough to raise a “corporate conversation,” just because there’s nothing interesting about that.

The responsibility for an interesting conversation depends on the proponent, and participants will or will not enter based on many variables, but the main one is that there is enough empathy for the participant to feel that “this goes with him”.

Latency
By moving the concept of latency to the Social Media environment, we can say that, even if we are able to establish an empathetic relationship with our users, if we do not talk fluently, if we are not fast and constant in responses, interactions and proposals, we will no longer be interesting.

Latency is a determining variable, for example, in the success of networked gaming. When video games jumped from the closed environment of the video console to the Network, when a player went from playing against the machine to having the ability to play with, or against other players, then certain factors altered its importance.

Spectacular 3D graphics, an exciting adventure, well-designed gameplay, became important but not enough for the experience of playing on Red to succeed.

The most successful games are not the most spectacular, but the ones that, being spectacular, allow the networked game to be fluid, almost instantaneous, almost “real”.

For this it is necessary that the time between the player sending an order from his keyboard, his joystick or his command, that order is processed and the response arrives in the form of action of the character (move, hide, run, shoot, get on a ship, fly, transform, etc…) is the least possible. That is, networked games, for the player experience to be optimal, need a “low latency” (minimum possible response time). That makes networking dynamic and exciting. If the waiting times are long the experience declines and it is no longer interesting…

The objectives, each one will have marked their own. Quantitative, qualitative or a weighted and reasoned combination of both. Whatever they may be, and whatever strategywe have implemented to achieve them, in the Social Media environment we cannot talk about success without participation, interactivity, Engagement, complicity, trust, interest, ultimately, those we have set as the target of our business.

If the Community that forms around our social media presence is not consolidated, then there is no success. Consolidating not only means growing in quantitative terms, not because our fans, but members of our groups or readers of our blogs also are necessarily on the right track.

We can grow by using accelerators to attract more people to our Community (supporting with Mass Media the call to social media, for example), but we will lose them if we don’t find them interesting and feel that we don’t pay attention to them.