Page 348 - Social Media Marketing

c h a p t e r 1 2 : ╇ S ocial A pplications╇ ■more specific activities driven by your business objectives that may not be immediately
available. You’ll have to specify and implement these features yourself.

The starting point when building (or specifying) custom social applications
and components that extend the base functionality is your stated business objective.
For example, when Dell built “Take Your Own Path,” its entrepreneur community,
the objective was creating a connection outside of the brand that was attractive to an
important segment of its small business and entrepreneurial customer base. Using this
connection, those participants are able to learn more about how other similar business
owners and technology managers are using the kinds of hardware that Dell provides.

In the “Take Your Own Path” example, connecting with customers was the
business objective. When Indian mobile operator Aircel wanted to simultaneously dif-
ferentiate its brand—its business objective as a newer telecom firm being development
of market share and awareness—it chose an application that gave current customers an
identifiable reason to talk with friends and family about Aircel and its unique (within
the Indian market) and highly simplified approach to pricing and marketing its Internet
326 (versus voice) services: Aircel created a voicemail application inside Facebook, where
Aircel knew that a significant number of its mobile customers spent time. By creating
a voicemail application within Facebook, Aircel effectively said to its customer base,
“We understand that you like to socialize and stay in touch with each other online:
Having to check your voice mail is a distraction from these activities. So, we’ve inte-
grated the conversations that happen on our network into your network, where you
and your friends already spend time.”

Beyond creating a community or implementing an extension of the available
functionality within a social network, how else can you use social technology to extend
your own social points of presence—your blog or your website, for example? If your
business objectives include expanding your presence, spreading awareness of your busi-
ness or organization, or similar objectives built around visibility and participation,
then one approach might be to link your current online content and popular presence
points that are relevant to your customers or stakeholders. For example, using the Like
plug-in, you can connect your website or blog content directly into Facebook: When
someone visits your (external) web page or blog and clicks the embedded Like button,
that person is simultaneously (assuming this person is a member of Facebook) shar-
ing this content with friends in Facebook. In Figure€12.2 you can see how this works:
When I visit my colleague Gaurav Mishra’s blog, my clicking the Like button results in
a posting to my wall in Facebook that my friends see, exposing them to Gaurav’s post.

How else might you connect to a wider audience via the social graph and social
applications that are built on it? Pandora uses Facebook’s social graph applications to
connect members who are also friends around shared interests in music: one member
will be prompted to listen to a particular artist because the friends of this person are
also listening to that artist. Whether or not this seems a bit “Big Brother-ish” is sec-
ondary (unless that aspect of these kinds of social applications directly conflict with