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c h a p t e r4 :THE SOCIAL BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM■Taken together, the signifi cance of the profi le is its central role in establishing
who is participating. When people have that basic information, they will more readily
enter into functional relationships and share or transfer useful knowledge. This is, of
course, the primary objective in building a social business or supporting application.
By connecting the organization with its stakeholders—whether a business and its cus-
tomers or a nonprofi t and its members—social profi les form the basis for an account-
able, productive relationship.Corporate Blogs and Identity
Understanding the importance of the social profile makes clear why social media experts will
generally recommend that corporate blogs are written within the company and not by an outside
agency. Challenges of time pressure and writing skill aside, the issue worth noting is the relation-
ship between identity and trust.
At the center of the relationship with a reader is the identity of the writer: When humans read
something, they imagine that someone—not something—wrote it. They connect with that
person, so it’s important that the personality and voice be both genuine and consistent.
Ask yourself: Who would you rather build a relationship with around a product or service: The
CEO or head of customer service or a project engineer...or someone at the firm’s public relations
agency? Understanding what the firm is doing—the kinds of things you can learn by reading
the PR communications, for example, is worthwhile. At the same time, if you want to engage the
business when suggesting an alternative product or service policy, it is more satisfying to do it
through a direct link to the company rather than through its agent.
When weighing the cost of direct participation against the value of the relationships created,
consideration of the corporate identity is worth more than passing thought.
Premiere Global: A Practical Example of Profi les
In my experience working with Atlanta-based Premiere Global (PGi) on the implemen-
tation of a community, the role of the social profi le in activating and sustaining the
community is particularly instructive as regards the role of the profi le in a community
application. This particular project—a developer’s community built around PGi’s com-
munications API—was intended to bring independent developers and internal PGi
experts together in a collaborative venue that would spur the development of new and
innovative communications applications.
The PGiConnect Developers Community, shown in Figure 4.1, was built on the
Jive Software community platform. When communities and social applications using
ready-made platforms such as Jive are being created, it is important to recognize that
while the core elements needed to get a solid program up and running quickly are present,Corporate Blogs and Identity