Social Media Marketing

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SOCIAL
A
PPLICATIONS
Here’s an example of how this might work: Suppose someone discovers a par-
ticular stain removal technique to be useful and posts this onto the stain-fighting social
application. The application then sends a message to Twitter—with the contributor’s
explicit permission—alerting the contributor’s followers that an effective stain-removal
technique has been found. The member’s social graph takes over from there, spreading
and amplifying the underlying consumer-generated content.
In this example, not only has the social application shown the customer how to
better use a cleaning product, it has encouraged the customer to post a new review and
then facilitated its sharing through that customer’s larger (online) social community. Now
those “friends of friends” have this information, and if confronted with a similar stain,
or queried by someone they know, they can point back to the original source and benefit
from it. This is how information traverses the social graph and adds value to participants.
Central to social business is the act of sharing, facilitated by the connectedness
of the application to the communities around it. This is what creates the real value to
a marketer. Sharing has a significant impact on the spread of positive (or negative—
watch out!) information that amplifies and drives marketing at no cost beyond the
construction of the application and its maintenance. Miss out on this aspect of social
applications—build a social application that is more like an island than a shared
space—and you will surely decrease the potential return on your investment.
The “Good Guide,” shown in Figure 4.2, is a customer-driven, shared, and
socially connected shopping application, available in Apple’s app store for installa-
tion on the iPhone. (It is coming as well for other smartphones.) The Good Guide is a
great example of how the Social Web is beginning to exert an impact on business units
within the enterprise outside of the marketing department. The Good Guide is a social
business application. Read on to see how it works.
Figure 4.2 The Good Guide