Social applications combine the attraction of social objects, the power of the social graph, and the natural tendency for people to gather and converse. Because social applications connect, enable, and coordinate the interactions of participants, they offer a straightforward way to realize a powerful business presence on the Social Web. This chapter wraps up Part III with a look at how to evaluate, define, and implement successful social applications as the core of your social customer experience effort.

Chapter contents

• What is a social application?
• Social applications drive engagement
• Plan your social customer experience platform

What Is a Social Application?

Social applications, simply, are software components that facilitate interaction between members of a social network or community. Social applications are built around social objects—lifestyles, passions, and aspirations, along with myriad talkworthy smaller objects such as short posts (tweets, for example), photos, videos, and more. Social applications are driven by the connections embodied in the individual social graphs of participants, and as such they act as efficient conduits for the spread of information within the network. Skype’s member community, shown in Figure 12-1, is a nice representative of the class of social applications that connect customers for the purpose of enhancing the social customer experience.

Throughout this chapter, the term social application refers to social software and embedded or installed applications within a social context that facilitate social interactions between participants within that network.

The central idea that a social application combines group interactions and capabilities “important to running your business or organization” is related to the focus of this book: the business use of social technology. Suffice it to say that if a particular social activity is not relevant to your business, it’s probably not a good candidate for your social media and social business programs.

A second point to consider with regard to the effectiveness and usefulness of social applications is that they often depend on the treatment of identity. Recall the discussion around identity and the work of J. D. Lasica in Chapter 4, “The Social Customer Experience Ecosystem.” Without identity in at least a general or contextual sense—and with the exception of specific applications that for a variety of reasons appropriately allow anonymity—sharing and collaboration are much less likely to occur, if they occur at all. For typical business applications of social technology, sharing and collaboration are among the primary goals. Identity—and details like profile completeness—really matter. On Facebook and Twitter, for example, there are no guarantees of claimed identity (“verified” accounts aside). However, with friends or followers in common across participants, it is fairly simple to assure yourself that users are who they say they are.

What kinds of social applications appropriately relax their identity requirements? Think about a nonprofit, for example, that might encourage participants to share stories about cancer survival, corporate noncompliance, or physical abuse: While identity (and protection of identity) is clearly important, enabling otherwise hesitant participants to take a first step by posting is also important. So, anonymous posts may be allowed with the caveat that prior to more substantive action a complete profile must be created. As well, a sporting goods company or one of its retailers may want submissions of experiences using its gear, but it may provide the option of not publishing the names of those submitting these stories. Social apps come in a variety of forms, and not all of them require that a full personal identity be provided. Of course, on the flip side, how much trust customers place in anonymous reviews or posts matters too.

How much needs to be included in order that your social application encourages participation by and among members? One way to answer this is to ask participants how much they are willing to share, taking care to explain the benefits of providing such information as well as exactly how it will be used.

What this all comes down to is the realization that the combination of identity and functionality supports high degrees of social interaction within a social application. Profile completeness and reputation management are important aspects in the design of social applications, right along with specific functional tools including those that support content uploading, friending, sharing, rating, tagging, and more. If participants don’t know with whom they are sharing—or can’t curate or share content easily—they are less likely to share at all, shutting down the higher levels of engagement like content creation and collaboration that are central to realizing value through the business applications of social technology.

Taken together, it’s the combination of these that is important to your business or organization. Consider this within the context of a social network that involves participants and in so doing create the opportunity for highly specialized social applications that enable collaboration and content sharing. This is the overall approach that defines the successful social application in the business context.

Social Applications Drive Engagement

Examples of social applications that drive higher levels of engagement include Skype’s member community (mentioned in the opening of the chapter), the use of Foursquare (a location-based social application) for location-based advertising as well as Foursquare’s mayors program that rewards frequent visitors, and HP’s use of Twitter as one of its many brand outposts. Twitter is itself a social network, made more useful with clever applications built on Twitter’s API that facilitate business development and customer care applications: Twitter enables two-way interaction between a business and its customers (and between customer themselves). Dell’s Small Business group, Comcast’s customer service team, and Australian telecom firm Telstra all use Twitter as a conduit for information that connects their respective business programs with their customers. The majority of the cases and examples presented in this book have been, in some form or another, a type or instance of a social application.

Given the encompassing nature of social applications, how then does one segregate the various functions and uses of these tools for planning and design purposes? Clearly, lumping together Dell’s IdeaStorm, a member community for support, and Foursquare’s mayors program and saying “I want one of those” isn’t likely to produce a successful outcome. What’s needed is a way to categorize the various types of social applications so that they can be connected with business objectives. Business objectives, after all, drive the specification and development of social applications.

Important to note here is what is meant by a successful outcome. Josh Gordon, president of Selling 2.0, published a whitepaper in Social Media Today titled “The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications: Separating the Biz from the Buzz.” Josh points out the split between the use of social technology in business for branding (about 60 percent) versus collaborative applications (about 40 percent). While lots of businesses and organizations are using social media—recent CMO surveys have put adoption at something north of 80 percent—the majority of these uses are still rooted in a traditional approach to marketing. Given the numbers of people who collect around social sites, the appeal of marketing programs that are intended to push a message into these sites is understandable, but it misses the larger gains in engagement that come about through social applications that support content creation, sharing, and collaboration. Using social applications for awareness can provide a starting point, but more can be done.

For social-media-based marketing, the beneficial impacts to branding efforts, increased lead generation, and buzz are all success-oriented objectives. To be sure, however, these applications barely scratch the surface of social technology. What is of interest here—and what defines success—is the degree to which collaboration as a result of the implementation of social technology is achieved. The degree to which collaboration between participants is achieved is, therefore, one of the primary indicators of a successful outcome, again with the note that success is always measured within the context of the underlying business objectives.

The take-away from the discussion around defining successful outcomes and the use of social technology is this: Social technology deployed in a business context drives higher levels of engagement (content creation and collaboration). Social applications serve as connectors between participants, as extensions of built-in social network functionality, and as crowdsourcing and content publishing tools within the communities they define or the social structures in which they are implemented. Sure, social technology can be used to drive awareness, but so can a dozen other channels. What social technology and social applications in particular are uniquely great at is driving participation—sharing, creating, and collaborating around content rooted in lifestyles, passions, and causes.

As an example of social applications driving engagement at higher levels like creation and collaboration, consider New Belgium Beer, makers of Fat Tire amber ale and other beers. The team at New Belgium laid out its business objectives:

• Engage New Belgium’s existing fan base on Facebook and reach out to their friends.
• Pick up on the style, vernacular, and creative assets already used on the New Belgium website, and then reflect through the fans’ voices.
• Create contests and similar engagement applications that fit the brand image and appeal to the underlying passions and interests of the fans.
• Ultimately, further grow New Belgium’s Facebook fan count by attracting true fans, not just those looking for the next brand giveaway.

Working with Palo Alto–based Friend2Friend, they put an engagement program in place that connected New Belgium fans with the brand ethos by building around the passions and interests of those fans. Disclosure: Dave is an advisor to Friend2Friend.

Dave talked with Friend2Friend CEO Roger Katz about the New Belgium engagement program. When asked about the origin of the program, Roger described it like this:

New Belgium wanted to increase the number of fans on its Facebook Fan Page through entertaining social activities while staying true to the brand image. They also wanted to preferentially attract authentic New Belgium fans—real beer drinkers who enjoyed fine beer. The program team includes Backbone Media (agency of record for New Belgium) and Friend2Friend.

Dave then asked Roger about the Friend2Friend social application and what it was intended to do. Roger explained:

Friend2Friend picked up on the vernacular of the New Belgium website and created “What’s Your Folly?” a contest where Facebook members can become a fan and describe their folly—their passion or interest—and thereby enter a weekly drawing for a limited edition New Belgium cruiser bike. The bicycle is also a part of the New Belgium brand ethos.

As fans read of others’ follies (content consumption) and then declared their own personal follies (content creation), the interest in the contest grew, spreading through Facebook via the Friend2Friend social application. Roger added:

The resulting Folly Gallery of over 6,000 follies gives New Belgium a base of branded user-generated content to jump-start their next promotional programs.

Simply put, New Belgium’s customers are, as a result, collaborating with the company and its agency to design the next round of engagement campaigns.

Now for the hard question: “What happened, and how was it measured?” Roger’s response:

In a five-week period, almost 7,000 users downloaded the social application and submitted personal follies, generating over 1 million social impressions through news feeds, wall posts, and Fan Page visits. New Belgium gained 10,000 new fans. Contest participants spent an average of four minutes creating their entries and reviewing those of others.

Compared with a 30-second spot, that’s a big gain in attention.

In summary, New Belgium built its engagement campaign around Facebook, using an existing social application (Friend2Friend) that was customized for this particular use. Higher levels of engagement were clearly seen, and the results were measured and successfully tied back to the original underlying business objectives.

As you look for ways to use social applications in your business, consider the specific type of applications that you can choose from. The New Belgium example of contest-driven engagement and fan recruitment is but one of the choices available to you. Following are the primary buckets into which social applications can be organized to simplify the process of creating a strategy that links your business objectives with the many types of social applications that are available or that can be built.

Social Applications Connect People

Social applications connect people. That much is obvious. It’s what happens beyond the basic connection that matters, especially in business applications of social technology. Consider Twitter: It’s possible—but rarely recommended—to buy followers (literally, for money). Prices run a hundred dollars, give or take, for a few thousand followers. The question is why—beyond looking popular—would you want to do this? We sure don’t have the answer.

Instead of buying followers, what generally makes more sense is to introduce into a social network the tools that make following happen naturally and spontaneously. Think back to touchpoint analysis: What is it about your brand, product, or service that makes it talkworthy? Now apply this same thinking to your social presence: What about it would make someone want to follow your brand on Twitter, join your business page on Facebook, or offer up their own ideas through an ideation application? Combining the answers to these questions with specific tools or applications that make it easy for the participants in your social application to connect will grow a stronger network than will buying one.

Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and similar social applications around the globe have functionality built into the platforms that encourages friending or recommends interaction between friends, both of which drive additional connections. A definite best practice offers an overt profile completeness indicator: A higher percentage of relatively more-complete profiles encourages more connections between social network participants. When planning and building a social application, it’s a best practice to include explicit indications of profile completion—for example, indicating the current completeness level and advising members as to what else needs to be done to fully complete individual profiles.

Whether you choose to create a social application of your own or join one that is already in place, the extent to which connections are actively encouraged and can be efficiently managed are important considerations. Look for tools, functions, and processes—along with the ability to build on them or modify them in ways that make it more likely that participants will create connections with each other. Not only will this result in increased use and stickiness of the community or larger social application, but it will also help participants create richer social graphs that facilitate content sharing and the general spread of ideas between people.

As you look at the ways in which you can encourage connections, consider adopting and trending specific metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) that reflect the degree to which connections and two-way relationships are being created. These KPIs can help you evaluate the effects of connection-oriented tools that you may use, create, or add later. In addition, insisting on a focus on measurement right from the start puts your social business program on a solid base.

Social Network Extensions

When building a social network, whether from scratch or through a ready-to-use software as a service (SaaS) or proprietary platform, or instead building onto an existing social networking platform, there will be a set selection of prebuilt components and functions that you’ll use to define your core participant interactions. Typical of these prebuilt functions are content ratings, member reputation, content uploading, blogging or posting, and similar functions. While these will likely cover the majority of what you’d like participants to be able to do within that application—creating a profile, friending, uploading content, and so on—there will also be a set of more specific activities driven by your business objectives that may not be immediately available. You’ll have to specify and implement these features yourself.

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 business 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 web page or blog and clicks the embedded Like button, that person is simultaneously (assuming this person is a member of Facebook) sharing this content with friends in Facebook. In Figure 12-2 you can see how this works: When Dave visits colleague Gaurav Mishra’s blog, clicking the Like button results in a posting to Dave’s wall in Facebook that his friends see, exposing them to Gaurav’s posts.

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 secondary (unless that aspect of these kinds of social applications directly conflicts with your brand values). What matters more is that it’s becoming an acceptable way to spread content. As much as we all pride ourselves on being individuals, a lot of what we do (and therefore purchase) is driven by what we see others like ourselves doing.

Finally, through the basic best practice of ensuring that everything you produce is easy to share, be sure to include links to the obvious: Content-sharing applications can make a big difference in the visibility of the content created by participants within your social applications. Include links to these services in everything you do and by extension to everything that is created in your applications. Be sure as well that you create your own presence, where appropriate, in existing social networks, especially if your customers or stakeholders spend time there. Known as brand outposts, these networks are an easy way to extend your presence into the places where your customers spend time.

In the previous examples, the firm’s business objectives (being more relevant to more customers to drive more sales) and social technology strategy (being more relevant in the places where customers are already spending time) are what lead to the implementation of the respective applications. Extending the functionality of an existing social network in which you create an outpost or creating new functionality for a white-label or SaaS social application that you are building around can be an important aspect of a business or cause-related effort to both build (awareness) and activate (collaboration) customers and stakeholders.

Importantly, as you review and consider the examples presented throughout this book, do so with your own business objectives and the behaviors of your own audience in mind. Unless a specific example or social technology application was called out as something to avoid, you can assume that if it’s in this book (or being talked about elsewhere on the Web) it is or was a good idea for someone. However, don’t be led into the trap of chasing others’ good ideas. Instead, link the applications you see here and elsewhere with the underlying business objectives that gave rise to them and then see if your business objectives (and the behaviors and capabilities of your audience) line up with them. If so, you have a potential match. If not, note the idea for possible future review (perhaps creating an entry for it on your internal “future ideas” application) and then move on.

Content Publishing and Sharing

In addition to outright social networks and the more tightly defined extensions and functional tools that enable participants to accomplish very specific goals, social applications include more generalized software services around which some form of social interaction takes place. Examples of these types of social applications include YouTube for general media sharing, along with services like Scribd, Google Docs, and SlideShare. Scribd and Google Docs, for example, both support publishing and sharing nearly any type of document; SlideShare is specific to—and therefore particularly good at—sharing slide presentations. SlideShare and Scribd are excellent places to publish thought-leadership content that your business or organization creates. You’ll benefit from the social interaction (commenting and reviewing) and increased visibility (sharing) that these social sites provide.

YouTube offers the immediate usefulness of posting content (rather than hosting it yourself) and sharing it from that point both within YouTube and by embedding that video content elsewhere. YouTube is an ideal place to post content that is then shared through your other points of social presence (making content easier to manage, since you don’t have copies floating about). YouTube also provides the built-in benefits of sharing and exposure in its own social contexts. YouTube offers branded business channels, for example, something you can use to organize and share sequences of related content.

What else can you with YouTube? A lot, as it turns out. Conduct interviews with customers and employees and then post them. Chapter 3, “Social Customer Experience Management,” noted Freescale’s use of YouTube for employment videos and product announcements. You can show customers using your products, offer testimonials, and provide coverage of your own presentations as a part of your outreach and thought leadership efforts. Figure 12-3 shows a video of a presentation with Intuit CEO Brad Smith, as he talks about what Intuit has learned as it embraces social technology as a business. You can find the video on YouTube by searching for its title, “User Generated Unemployment at Intuit.” This video is definitely worth watching: Brad describes his firm’s coming to grips with some of the very challenges that any organization implementing social technology is likely to face.

While the benefits of sharing content through social applications like Twitter and YouTube are largely self-evident, there are additional applications for content-sharing social sites. If your business objectives include establishing a position as a thought leader or if you are looking for collaborative input around early ideas that are appropriate for sharing publicly, consider using applications like Scribd, Google Docs, and SlideShare. If you’ve hosted a webinar or developed a research paper around a topic of general interest, consider publishing it on these sites.

SlideShare and Scribd are particularly useful for small businesses, consultants, and anyone else regardless of the organization size or vertical specialty interested in thought leadership. Combined with a corporate blog, for example, SlideShare can be used as a sharable publishing point for past presentations as well as presentations created specifically for SlideShare to explain the use of a software service or impact a legislative debate. Figure 12-4 shows the use of Scribd in sharing the owner’s manual for a Sony Ericsson mobile phone, along with a SlideShare-based presentation on healthcare, authored by Dan Roam and C. Anthony Jones, M.D. This presentation won SlideShare’s World’s Best Presentation of 2009 contest. It has been viewed more than 200,000 times, and it has been embedded in more than 600 other online locations.

Social applications like YouTube, SlideShare, and Scribd offer simple ways to extend the reach of your existing content, and they provide a ready-for-sharing platform for your ideas, presentations, whitepapers, and similar content. YouTube, SlideShare, and Scribd support embedding—meaning others can place your presentation into their online site, with full credit automatically extended to you—and as such are excellent vehicles for a component of a thought leadership or similar program in addition to simply getting the word out about your brand, product, or service.

As you set out to plan and implement social applications, make note of the ways in which content-publishing sites like YouTube can be used. You don’t have to reinvent content uploading, video storage, and streaming, nor do you have to build your own community to distribute thought-leadership materials. Take advantage of existing social applications like YouTube, Scribd, and SlideShare. Save your money (and time) for creating the very specific social applications—such as Aircel’s Facebook-based recharge application or Penn State’s Outreach platform for employee collaboration and knowledge sharing. And if you haven’t already done so, develop and implement your social computing policies. Instead of reinventing what already exists, build on it and use your resources to fill in the gaps or bring unique value to your customers and stakeholders.

Curation and Reputation Management

So far, the social applications and tools covered have centered on extending the functionality of social networks, facilitating member connections within them, and using these platforms to publish and share content. In a simplified view, these applications have involved or enabled (further) content consumption, setting up the content-sharing process that leads to collaboration. The next sections cover the applications that you can use, build, or subscribe to in order to move site participants to these higher levels of engagement, to contribute their own thoughts and ideas, and to facilitate collaboration among participants and with your business.

The previously mentioned Facebook Like button is a simple implementation of a more sophisticated class of social applications that encourage curation, the basic act of voting something (or someone) up or down, rating, reviewing, and so on. For nearly any type of content, in nearly any application, one of the new realities of the Social Web is that people generally expect to be able to rate it, review it, or otherwise share it and indicate their own assessment of its worth in the process. This is a subtle but very important insight: Where not too many years ago a web page or online advertisement was largely assumed to be a one-way message, the expectation now exists for the option to participate. Posting an article without providing an easy way to rate it or comment on it effectively screams to your audience, “We’ll talk, you’ll listen.”

Curation applies to social interactions—liking someone’s wall post, for example—and to content itself. For these types of applications, there are as many choices for plug-ins and curation tools as there are platforms. In the general application of ratings and reviews as applied to commerce (the items being placed into a shopping basket), a common choice among online/offline retailers (for example, physical retailers with an online presence) is Bazaarvoice, and for good reason. Not only does Bazaarvoice offer a proven, easy-to-implement platform, they also provide a rich set of metrics that help their customers tune their online and offline commerce programs. In June 2010, Bazaarvoice introduced SocialConnect, a platform capability that integrates customers’ comments between social networks like Facebook and the brand’s own websites. SocialConnect supports the Facebook Like functionality as well, all of which adds up to enhanced engagement, potential gains in sales, and importantly a reduction in product returns. Best of all, it’s measurable.

Social technology providers offer plug-in modules for use in almost any application, as well as specific components for use with DIY favorites including WordPress, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, Joomla, and other social software platforms. For nearly any online social platform, there is an associated curation solution. If the platform you are using does not support curation (again, most do), strongly consider moving to one that does.

Absent the ability to curate, the progression to higher forms of engagement is effectively stopped. In nearly any act of sharing, for example, there is at least an implied sense of rating: “If I didn’t think some particular piece of content was worth your time, then I would not have shared it with you.” Beyond the polar share/don’t share as a surrogate for curation, more finely grained ratings and reviews, testimonials, and other forms of direct, overt curation provide participants in social business applications with a direct pathway to collaboration. Providing the ability for customers and stakeholders to publicly comment and share opinions is essential in drawing people into your social applications and thereby moving participants ultimately toward collaborative involvement in your business or organization.

Crowdsourcing

Covered in Chapter 7, “Five Key Trends,” crowdsourcing is a social activity that directly drives collaboration. Like ideation, presented separately in the next section, crowdsourcing not only makes everyone a participant but does so in a way that provides public credit for this participation. In doing so, crowdsourcing encourages future participation and builds stickiness with regard to that social application.

That crowdsourcing applications have the ability to grow and develop an audience over time is a significant plus. Crowdsourcing applications can be used as a part of a larger social business program not only to pull participants in but also to keep them involved over the longer term. This is especially helpful when your objectives include both the need to solve a problem or challenge that is suitable for crowdsourcing and to simultaneously build and sustain a community or similar social structure in the context of your business.

In business applications, crowdsourcing often takes the basic form of publicly asking for ideas or suggestions against a specific business objective. Building on consumption and curation, crowdsourcing is a viable method for accomplishing specific types of tasks that appropriately involve your customers or stakeholders. The development of confidential or proprietary processes, for example, is clearly an internal matter, so in these cases consider an internal crowdsourcing application: Dell’s EmployeeStorm and Ford’s use of the Covisint ideation and collaboration platform across its supplier network are solid examples.

Directly involving customers, stakeholders, potential customers, and others in appropriate collaborative activities conveys to these participants a sense of ownership and control—a stake in the brand, so to speak—that is not possible in a read-only context. Not only does crowdsourcing offer the potential of better outcomes—as defined by those who participate in such programs—but it also further moves these same participants up the engagement ladder, ultimately toward brand advocacy.

Ideation

Ideation is a derivative of crowdsourcing built around generating, organizing, and applying fresh ideas to a specific set of business or organizational challenges. Unlike the promotion-oriented applications of social technology, ideation is often oriented toward operations and product development, where insights into process and product improvement can be translated through action into improved customer experiences.

Ideation platforms are a powerful class of social applications that lend themselves to both business management (again, for process, product, or service innovation) and the quantitative assessment of outcomes. Customer-driven ideation—the specific practice of pulling customers into the business-design process—is important on at least two fronts. First, as noted it is a source of innovation and competitive differentiation. When you’ve been making the same thing for years and years, certain established practices begin to shape every decision. Getting fresh eyes—and in particular the eyes of the people buying your product or service—applied to rethinking these accepted processes can be really beneficial.

Second, by opening up at least part of the responsibility for collective thinking outside of the current thought leaders, the entire pool of ideas is expanded, driving not only product and service-level change but also process change. Along with better things come better ways to make those things. These are exactly the results noted by Starbucks, Dell, German coffee retailer Tchibo, and Intuit’s Small Business community, all of whom are using the ideation platforms as ways to improve their respective businesses by forging collaborative relationships with their customers.

What really makes an ideation platform work is not the idea solicitation per se. After all, how many people really believe that anything actually happens as a result of an anonymous note dropped in a suggestion box? The problem with the classic suggestion box—anonymous or not—is that the suggestion acceptance process and any actual outcomes are not visible to the person making the suggestion. In other words, there is a lack of transparency, a lack of accountability (on both sides), and therefore a lack of significance. “Why bother?” is the most common response, and the opportunity to gather real feedback is lost.

By comparison, on-domain ideation platforms—communities that you create for the purpose of gathering customer feedback and ideas that drive innovation—bring transparency and accountability to the suggestion and feedback processes. Ideas are publicly submitted where they are visible to everyone (content creation and consumption). Next, they are voted up or down by participants at large (curation). Finally, the business stakeholders—a product manager, for example—selects from the highest ranked items and offers various versions for implementation, which are then reviewed again by the participant community (collaboration). The resulting innovations become additional bonding points for customers as credit is given back to them. The entire process is visible, and the outcome—the actual disposition of any given suggestion—is clear to everyone.

Note that ideation comes in many forms. In addition to large-scale ideation platforms, small groups of personally invited participants can be very effective. As an example, consider the specifically invited LEGO fans who helped influence the design of LEGO Mindstorms or impromptu feedback sessions with larger groups as a part of existing industry events. Ideation, while it is the formal name given to this new-style transparent suggestion process, does not itself have to be formal.

The result of extreme transparency around ideation and innovation, combined with a clear process that steps through the engagement ladder—consumption, curation, creation, collaboration—is that rough ideas are readily provided and turned into solid product and service enhancements with credit flowing right back to customers. That is a powerful loop. Check out the My Starbucks Idea site or even better visit a store and look for “Inspired by You” No-Splash sticks or reusable Via cups or the recycling program piloted in the Seattle market or Dave’s favorite—one-click Wi-Fi—and see for yourself how the brand is reconnecting itself with its customers by listening and implementing the ideas they gain as a result.

In addition to the benefits of new ideas, there’s also the practical reality of customers being less likely to complain when their own ideas are put into practice, something that extends beyond the idea itself. Because they see their own ideas reflected in the brand (or, equivalently, other ideas from the ideation community to which they belong), actual credit is bestowed on these individuals and/or the community groups that drove the innovations.

Finally, when customers are also collaborators in the brand, product, or service, they are more likely to recommend it and defend it. They have ownership for the innovation, and they act accordingly. As they take “ownership” of the brand, instead of complaining they join with the brand and go to work on making their own experience better. See the sidebar “Building Competitive Advantage” for more on how ideation combined with touchpoint analysis can be used to drive competitive wins.

Support Communities

If ideation is the fresh-thinking business application built around the practice of crowdsourcing that delivers ideas into business and organizations, then support communities—again, these are social applications—are the analogous tools that deliver needed information and solutions back to customers, based on the combined principles of crowdsourcing and direct customer empowerment.

Customers are often experts—at least as regards their use of a product or service—and as such are in collective possession of a sizeable body of knowledge. Properly applied, this collective body of knowledge can radically change their support and service experiences as customers. The problem is that this knowledge is largely unstructured, and it’s distributed in ways that make actual bits of knowledge hard to spot when they are really needed.

Enter the support forum: Organized by topic and driven by the allure of brand support and the elevation in personal status (a form of social capital) for providing correct answers—in public, to other customers—support forums make it easy for customers to tap the larger collective, to self-serve and quickly solve their own problems. Customers can subscribe (typically via RSS) to specific topics—mobile applications or service issues for their particular laptop or TV set—and ask questions and/or offer answers as they are so moved. Over time, that extensive body of knowledge contained in the minds of customers is expressed in the support forum discussions where it is curated (“this solution works/this solution doesn’t”), organized, and made available to customers seeking this information.

Participant-driven support forums provide the possibility of both improved service and the actual determination of ROI. Service may be improved, for example, because the support forum is available 24x7, including all day on gift-giving holidays when the need for support typically spikes, and because the larger body of participants will often have more answers for more issues. Customers themselves often possess a deep body of collective knowledge about how to fix, extend, or simply get more out of the products and services they buy—think about social applications like Skype’s Customer Community, HP’s Customer Support Forums, or LEGO’s Mindstorms Community, where enthusiasts hack the internal control programs and publish their findings for use by the larger Mindstorms community. Each of these applications directly empowers users to get more out of the products and services offered by the respective firms: Support forums are now central to the redefined, collaborative customer experience of leading brands.

What about ROI? Support calls have a known cost. Support incidents that are fully resolved in a support forum represent a call-center cost avoided, leading directly to formal ROI measures and standards to which even the CFO will give two thumbs up.

Plan Your Social Customer Experience Platform

Active, participative engagement means that your customers and stakeholders are buying into your business or organization in ways that transcend any actual purchase or transaction. They are aligning around values—established, perhaps, through advertising but then proven through social applications like The Good Guide and Barclay’s Your Bank ideation forum, part of Barclay’s overall social technology program referenced in Chapter 2, “The Social Customer.” In addition, your customers are offering their contributions freely as to how your brand, product, or service can evolve beyond the satisfaction of basic needs and wants and further align with their personal values, passions, and causes.

Closing the loop, the higher levels of engagement possible through social applications can be tapped as drivers of your business objectives. (If not, what’s the point of any of this?) What’s required is a planning methodology that at once recognizes the connection between business objectives, customer or stakeholder desires and behaviors, and the cross-functional nature of your internal collaborative teams to whom the task of delivering talk-worthy experiences will fall.

The Planning Process

The planning process leading to the successful deployment of a social application necessarily begins with business objectives. Along with them, it defines acts in service of customer and stakeholder behaviors. The planning process uses these same factors to shape the organizational preparations that precede the implementation of a social business effort.

Beginning with social-media-based marketing—for U.S. brands in particular, typically the use of Twitter and Facebook as outbound channels, for example, or the implementation of a corporate blog and similar outreach activities—the required tools and skills can all be managed to great effect solely within the Marketing and Communications departments of nearly any organization. Social applications—and the collaborative processes associated with the higher forms of engagement—require a more developed strategy for customer involvement, and as a result an elevated response capability, and in general an organization that is able to act holistically rather than along functional lines (aka, silos).

This does not, however, mean that massive organizational change is required to make effective use of social applications. What it does mean is that you need to pay specific attention to the portions of the planning process shown in Figure 12-5, wherein your larger working teams are defined. Simply put, when customers begin talking to you, you need to be ready to respond. Among other things, this will directly raise implementation decisions as to how to best use an agency or other intermediary as a blogging or response partner. Customers expect a timely, genuine response, and one way or another you’ll need to staff for that.

Business Objectives and Audience Definition

The application of social technology is best anchored in business objectives, for several reasons:

• Throughout your firm or organization, while people may not agree on the virtues of social media and collaborative technology applied in business, they do agree on business objectives. If not, you have larger challenges that need to be addressed prior to implementing social technology. If you’ve ever witnessed a family feud in a restaurant, you have a good idea of what a business that doesn’t know why it’s in business looks like on the Social Web.
• By tying to business objectives, the likelihood is far greater that any social technology implementation will produce measurable, beneficial results. Experiments are fine—but then call them that and tie them to a business objective like “being seen by customers as innovative.” Identifying an objective like the one in this example isn’t a trick—it’s a start down the best-practices pathway of always tying to business objectives.
• Understanding your business objectives and organizing your social technology planning process around them ensures that your approach is “business challenge and expected contribution first, choice of technology second.” Note that this bullet item has an ROI of its own. If you doubt it, add up the costs in your own organization of technology implementations that failed because the chosen technology never matched the business. Cost avoidance—in this case, not making that mistake with social technology—has a knowable and legitimate ROI.

On this last point, in the 12 chapters of this book there have been references to a large number of technology platforms, partners, and solution options, all of which do basically the same thing: They support the development of conversations and ultimately encourage collaboration between participants in a defined network that is important to your business. Starting with business objectives ensures that you will correctly identify the technology best suited to your specific situation. When it comes to social technology, given all of the unknowns, there is one thing that is certain: You have lots of choices.

Right along with business objectives, consider next the participants (or lack thereof) that you expect to interact with or learn from. While the use of ratings and reviews is nearly a given across all age groups in nearly all global markets, this is not always the case, particularly in markets where technology adoption itself has a pronounced age factor. In India, for example, while there is a very important (and large) component of the marketplace that is using social media in substantially the same way as any other marketplace, the difference between those connected and those not connected to the Social Web is significant and therefore must be considered. When Godrej (a respected Indian manufacturer of a wide range of consumer goods) announced its plans for its online community called GoJiyo (meaning “Go Live”), Godrej patriarch Adi Godrej described the effort at a conference Dave spoke at in Bangalore as being intended to reconnect Godrej with the emerging Indian youth culture. The insight is this: Godrej has a much larger marketing effort supporting its entire marketplace. GoJiyo is one component, tied to a specific business objective and created for a specific (and growing) customer segment. That is smart thinking at Godrej, and it’s the right approach anywhere.

Internal Readiness: Workflow and Your Response Plan

Coincident with your external social technology plan, begin early the process of identifying and recruiting colleagues across business units for the development of your cross-functional social technology team. Need help getting started? Go back to the identified business objectives: Who has profit responsibility associated with those objectives? Those are good people to start with. Add representatives from your legal team. They can help you create effective social media policies that are consistent with the culture of your firm or organization. HR and Finance/Compliance are part of this too: Sarbanes-Oxley, in the United States, and the unfettered employee use of social technology—including by employees when outside the workplace—can be a troublesome mix, to say the least. Customer Support is as well a great potential partner in your social technology planning process.

Workflow is an important factor in your implementation, so look for intelligence tools (for example, social media listening and analytics platforms) that offer robust workflow support, including automated prioritization, routing, and tracking. If this sounds more like a call-center requirement than it does listening features, that’s not an accident: robust engagement requires the same attention to workflow and productivity measures as do call centers. Refer back to the flowchart (see Chapter 1, “Social Media and Customer Engagement”) developed by the U.S. Air Force for systematizing your response efforts. In particular, consider who will actually respond, and create estimates for the amount of time a response to a tweet or blog post will require and then build this into your cost and effort plan for the upcoming period. Attention to details like this will pay huge dividends as you ramp up collaborative social media programs.

Social Web Presence

With your business objectives and audience(s) defined and a thought-through plan for how you’ll manage conversations directly involving customers and stakeholders—for example, responding to tweets, managing and participating in comments on your blog, or keeping a Facebook business page updated—you can complete a basic specification for the kinds of activities you’d like to engage in.

Listening is always a great starting point (see Chapter 6, “Social Analytics, Measurement, and Business Decisions” and Chapter 7, “Five Key Trends”), especially for inputs to your planning process. You can estimate the workload associated with your response efforts by studying what is being said about your brand, product, or service in current social channels. Add to this your basic outreach channels—a business presence on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn—and then ask the bigger question: Given your business objectives, audience, and current social media programs, what needs to happen to move customers and stakeholders to higher levels of engagement, and what is it that you specifically want to accomplish as a result?

The higher forms of engagement—content creation and collaboration—are essential elements of contemporary marketing. Business objectives relating to the development of brand ambassadors and advocates, enhancing the value proposition of your product or service, inspiring and guiding innovation, and the improvement of brand image are parts of this planning process. Comcast uses Twitter not only to address its critics’ negative posts about the firm’s perceived lack of visible care for its customers but also to call attention to its own positive adoption of social technology and improved response capability in a public forum so that (offsetting) credit rightly flows to the brand as it works to build value in the eyes of its customers.

Initiate Your Plan

Once you’ve defined your goals and identified your audience, you can look at what applications make sense. Table 12-1 connects the broad classes of social applications to common objectives for social media in business.

Table 12-1: Social applications and tactical objectives

In selecting applications, think about which applications your customers might want and use. If you’re considering an application on a social network, the first question is how many of your customers use that social network? A good conservative proxy might be the number of people who have liked your brand page. If you are considering an application for your community, how many people have joined your community to date? How many participate on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis?

If your community is small or new, you might consider general applications like forums and blogs, which can be used for many purposes, providing flexibility as you build your social customer experience platform. If you have an in-place community that is larger or more mature, you might consider specialized applications, for example, an ideation app. These specialized applications are optimized for one purpose—sharing ideas, for example—that not all people want to pursue.

Adding new features to an existing platform works the same way. A general feature like ratings or comments can be used for many purposes. When a user gives something a positive rating, it can mean a wide range of things, including “I like this content,” “I like this user,” “I found this funny,” “I found this relevant,” “I share this problem/opinion.” By comparison, adding tagging, that is, enabling your customers to finely label and curate content, is more single-purpose—and therefore fewer of your customers will use it. Unless you expect thousands of customers to be using your community every day, it’s best to start with generalapplications and then work into the specialized applications as your social customer experience program takes hold.

Building on the basic planning process, and with your internal workflow and response programs defined, the first step up from social media marketing—toward the higher levels of customer engagement like content creation and collaboration—depends on connecting your online presence socially into the communities and social activities of your customers and stakeholders. If you’ve taken—or are ready to take—the relatively hard steps of preparing your internal operations for the collaborative involvement of your customers, suppliers, partners, and stakeholders, you’ll find that implementing and thereby benefiting from social tools is relatively easy by comparison.

Review and Hands-On

This chapter tied together the concepts of higher-level forms of engagement—content creation and collaboration for the purpose of driving advocacy—with the basic best practices around the use of social objects and the social graph. The discussion of social applications centered on enabling the kinds of activities that lead to conversation, new ideas, and innovations and provided suggestions to guide your continuous improvement programs.

Review of the Main Points

Review the main points covered in Chapter 12, listed here. Consider these as you begin to develop your overall plan for the integration of social technology in your business or organization.

• Social applications tie social objects and social graphs together. Simply put, people connect with other people around the things that interest them in order to accomplish tasks that improve their lives.
• Internal readiness—the capability to respond and to address business challenges holistically rather than functionally—is an element of your social technology implementation effort.
• Social technology begins with business objectives. Don’t let the technology guide your implementation, but instead let your objectives guide the technology selection.

In summary, unless you are ready to tackle Enterprise 2.0 (or you are working in an organization that is already doing this), the starting point in applying social technology to business is connecting your customers and stakeholders through collaborative processes that link business objectives with the higher levels of engagement. You can speed this process within your own functional area with the assistance of informal cross-functional teams. Take the time to build support in other parts of your business, and you’ll find the entire process significantly easier.

The typical starting point—after the implementation of a listening program—is generally connecting your business presence into the existing social spaces where customers spend time, setting up an effective listen-understand-respond process. This is followed by the implementation—as driven by your business objectives—of collaborative tools such as support and ideation platforms to drive a basic business norm of Listen, Understand, Evolve.

Hands-On: Review These Resources

Review each of the following, and then take note of what you’ve learned or gained insight into. How can you apply (or specify the use of) these items in your own projects?

• Visit the tutorials^* and resource pages for the APIs and social plug-ins associated with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Foursquare, and similar platforms. Gain an understanding of the intended uses of each, and then look at the examples of how they have been used to create differentiated social technology solutions.
• Visit the websites of Jive Software, Lithium Technologies, GetSatisfaction, Microsoft SharePoint, Lotus Connections, Socialcast, and Socialtext. Gain an understanding of the intended uses of each, and then look at the examples of how they have been used to create branded social applications.
• Visit SlideShare and search for presentations on “Social Applications.” You’ll find great resources for almost any type of business.

www.slideshare.com

Hands-On: Apply What You’ve Learned

Apply what you’ve learned in this chapter through the following exercises:

1. Articulate your business objectives, and define your audience.
2. Given the discussion of social applications, develop an idea for a social application that serves your business objectives and fits with your audience behaviors. Write a complete brief around its deployment. Include within this your development efforts supporting a cross-functional internal team.
3. Tie this plan to your existing marketing and business efforts and to your accepted business metrics. Define your guiding KPIs and if appropriate the basis for establishing ROI.