Please bear with me if some of the thoughts here appear as just a rehash of the existing knowledge (especially the 18 use cases by Ray Wang and Jeremy) and a bit theoretical. The idea is to start putting the extant ideas into a structure which will hopefully bring the key aspects in better relief.
Definitions
First, a few definitions (in addition to Paul's SCRM definition) ... (again, this is just to string together the ideas. These can be easily reworded.)
- Social Media Building Blocks: There are two basic characteristics of any social media – Community and Content-Sharing. These can be used to model any social media.
- Social Media: Specific groups of participants optionally based on common interests and goals e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Support Forum for a company, even a company’s website, etc. These can either be owned by the enterprise or external to it. These are characterized by one or both of the social media building blocks. The participants of this social media can again be internal or external to the enterprise.
- Social Tools: Tools allow building/harnessing one or more social media to allow the Enterprise to have the social conversations.
- Social Stream: A specific instance of a conversational channel geared towards one or more social media and with a specific business objective. Enterprises can tap into these streams using Social tools or natively.
Topology
The layering of these can be visualized as below:
Social Media Building Blocks
The two key building blocks for all Social Media and their key attributes are as follows:
Community
These are formed as collection of individuals who usually have a common goal or interest in forming/joining the community. The communities and their capabilities/behavior are characterized by the following key attributes: (These attributes will be the basis of feature lists / interfacing requirements for the technology components.)
· Ownership· Membership (Only Customers, Partners & Customers, Open, Referrals-only etc)
· Participation Mode (Registration required etc)
· Individual Profiles Maintenance
· Member Relationships
· Moderation and Administration
· Subscription Model
· Access Control Methods (e.g. Registration, Invitation, Special Interest Groups)
· Access Levels
· Ratings for Individuals and Posts
· Private Rooms
· Private Messaging
· IP Ownership
These community attributes determine the type of roles the enterprise can play and the value that can be derived from the conversations in a specific community.
Member Relationships: The community members have relationships with each other. These relationships can be modeled in ways which are relevant to the enterprise using Social Network Analysis (SNA) models. Some of the key SNA parameters that can be derived based on member relationships are (see twinfluence.com for more):
· Reach: Reach is the number of relationships a member has (first-order relations), plus all of their relationships (second-order relations).
· Velocity: Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order relationships attracted per day since the member first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that member has accumulated their influence.
· Social Capital: This indicates the average first-order network of a member’s relationships. It's essentially a measure of how influential are a member’s relationships. A high value indicates that most of that member’s relationships have a lot of relationships themselves.
· Centralization: This is a measure of how much a member’s influence (reach) is invested in a small number of relationships. Centralization scores range from 0% (completely decentralized) to a theoretical 100% (related to only one other member). In social network analysis, a high centralization indicates dependency of the network on just a few nodes to maintain the connectivity of the entire network. Members with low centrality networks would not have their reach greatly reduced if a few high-profile members disconnected from them.
Content-Share
This provides a way of sharing content with others through a central repository. Key attributes that determine the characteristics of a content-share network are: (again, these attributes will be the basis of feature lists / interfacing requirements for the technology components.)
· Ownership· Membership
· Participation Mode (Registration required etc)
· IP Ownership
· Content Type
· Ratings for Individuals and Content
· Content Searchability
· Access Control Methods (e.g. Registration, Invitation, Special Interest Groups)
These two building blocks facilitate understanding the social media and formulating specific strategies based on the attributes of the building blocks.
Social Media Typology
The typology will help in forming strategies specific to the Social Media types. The extant Social Media are built using one or both of the building blocks. Based on the effectiveness of the two blocks, the following types of Social Media emerge:
1. Social Networks: These are mainly used by members for sharing updates (both personal and work-related) with their connections. These are self-forming / regulated networks (both members have to agree to be connected) and hence the connections can be considered fairly influential in one or both directions. These networks do allow content sharing to some extent but mainly in the form of URLs and brief status messages.
Examples: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Buzz
2. Content Stores: Different kinds of content items (Video, Webcasts, Podcasts, Presentations, Wiki’s) are stored for public viewing. Even if these Social Media have rudimentary community features, the emphasis is on content sharing, tagging and rating.
Examples: YouTube, SlideShare, Wikipedia
3. Content Share Portals: These allow publishing, promoting (through a viral effect) and bookmarking popular links which are visible to all. Again these portals can have minimal community features, but the emphasis is on URL sharing. URLs are bubbled up based on popularity and viewership. These portals provide a glimpse of the issues which are currently being most discussed about.
Examples: Stumple.Upon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg
4. Discussion Groups: This is a variant of the Content Store but the emphasis here is to encourage discussions among the participants. Also, the community aspects are stronger in this since participants share a common interest and/or background. This also presents an excellent medium to present viewpoints and thought leadership.
Examples: Blogs (Company, Analyst, External), eGroups (Yahoo/Google Groups), Industry Fora
5. Company Website / Microsite: This qualifies as a separate type since this is the official online persona of the enterprise. This can provide content and also a community for customers.
6. Support/ Review Forum: Issue-based discussions are predominantly carried out in these. The scope of these issues could vary from product/company reviews, product-related support requirements and even prospects asking for advice on products/solutions. Enterprises can also use these forums for customer co-innovation and collaboration.
Examples: Epinions.com, ConsumerReview.com {Review], Oracle Mix, SAP Community Network, [Enterprise Forum] TechNet {Third-party Support Forum]
7. Search Engines: Even though these do not qualify as Social Media per se, they are an important starting point for many prospects to search for information in the online world.
The current Social Media (with their typology) can be mapped across the effectiveness dimension of the two building blocks.
The most effective Social Media (from an enterprise perspective) is one which scores high on both community and content share effectiveness. Such a Social Media allows the enterprise to serve multiple CRM pillars by mining & leveraging the member relationships, interactions and content from the same Social Media.
Community effectiveness is measured by the strength of networks formed, the level of activity over the network connections and the size of the networks.
Customer Journey via Social Media
The following depicts the journey of a customer through the first and subsequent sales:
In the subsequent posts, I plan to take a look at the technology components.
Your thoughts and feedback will be highly appreciated.
Disclaimer: The ideas expressed here are strictly personal and do not reflect the views of Oracle in any way.
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