Page 118 - Social Media Marketing

c h a p t e r 4 : ╇ T he S ocial B usiness E cosystem╇ ■ It is exactly this kind of smart approach to social media marketing and the
larger area of social technology applied to business that makes obvious the way in
which the Social Web is maturing. While Web 1.0 was typically implemented as “com-
peting islands”—large portals going for traffic dominance in the hopes of selling ad
space—Web 2.0 brought shared experiences and mashups to the table. Savvy marketers
picked up on this by building applications that connected their brands to the existing
communities where their target audience spent time. The Social Web, the subject of this
book, continues the shift toward shared versus competing experiences by integrating
the audience and the business through a set of applications that facilitate collaboration,
knowledge exchange, and consumer-led design.

Using Brand Outposts and Communities

It’s time to connect the basics, to put in place the beginning of a framework for a social
business. Chapter 1 covered the basics of engagement, Chapter 2 covered the new role
96 of the customer as a potential participant in your business. Chapter 2 also touched on
the social graph and social CRM, highlighting tools like BuzzStream that help you
identify and build relationships with people who are talking about your brand, prod-
uct, or service and influencing others in the process.

Chapter 3, “Building a Social Business,” framed social CRM and social applica-
tions in the context of a social business, a firm or organization that is being run based
on the direct collaboration between itself and its customers. The basic interactions—
creating relationships between community members and creating shared knowl-
edge—come about through specific, replicable actions that can be designed into the
organization itself.

In this section of Chapter 4, the social behaviors described so far are applied in
specific social spaces—think online communities here—where the actual interactions,
discussions, and conversations take place.

Recall from Chapter 3 that communities are built around things like passions,
lifestyles, and causes, the big things that people choose to spend their time with. Very
often, a brand, product, or service by itself does not warrant a community of its own:
Even when it does, that particular community is typically only participated in by a
fraction of the total potential audience. For most businesses and organizations, the
places where customers willingly spend time—often engaged in conversation about the
business or organization—is a social network or online community that is dedicated
not to brands, products, or services, but rather to other people like themselves, with
interests like their own.

So how do you participate as a business? Even more pressing, how do you get
your customers to spend time doing real work with your team, contributing ideas and