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c h a p t e r4 :THE SOCIAL BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM■extend beyond that, into social activities. By delivering a service and then encourag-
ing the sharing of results, interpersonal relationships are created. In this way social
applications drive their own longevity and usefulness. This is a very beneficial attribute
when you are trying to encourage repeat visits and you don’t have an unlimited supply
of funds to make up for organic interest and participation.
There is another aspect of social business and social application design that war-
rants attention. A utility-oriented application by itself is not social. This means that
unless you design your social application to be a part of the larger social framework—
the ecosystem—in which your audience spends time, you’ll end up with an island.
What makes the “social application” social is its connectedness to the communities
in which participants are also members. For example, if someone is a member of
Facebook, Orkut, or LinkedIn, or uses Twitter regularly and has built up 100, 1,000,
or more real connections, the larger value of your social application comes when the
application itself, or whatever it is that it produces or does, is shared and pushed out
through that person’s social graph.
Think back to the laundry soap site, and set aside the media-driven awareness
uses of the site. How might this site look if it were to be built as a social application?
The typical laundry site probably has a stain removal chart, right? There is
clear utility value in knowing what types of pretreatments are effective on what types
of stains. To this end, there are literally dozens of these types of sites. The problem
is, specific products can be “recommended” for all sorts of reasons, and among them
is “because someone paid for the recommendation.” This is of course the underlying
issue with traditional and marketer-driven communications versus social or collective/
consumer-driven communications. As a consumer, the only thing you know is that the
marketer is trying to sell you something. The rest is based on the combination of brand
reputation, your experience, and the shared experience of those you trust.
Enter social media, part one. The first element of the social application—and the
first use of the engagement processes associated with it—is curation. Consumers are
often more candid (issues of transparency and disclosure noted) in their reviews than
marketers. Reviews are part of the solution, and the reviews of reviews go further and
help others interested in the specific product or service to sort out and make sense of
specific reviews by identifying those considered most helpful.
The contemporary social application takes it one step further: Building on the
connectivity afforded by Web 2.0 technologies, the social application makes its results
available to others, outside of the social application itself. In the context of the present
example, where the basic consumer-driven reviews on the laundry site makes relevant
information available to people who visit the site, the well-connected social application
makes the results of trying a specific solution available to everyone to whom the person
posting that specific solution is connected. This can dramatically impact the spread of use-
ful information (and sometimes not-so-useful information from the brand’s point of view).