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c h a p t e r4 :THE SOCIAL BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM■ecosystem and supports the very specific behaviors that you want to encourage. By
“ecosystem,” I am referring to the larger set of online services, tools, communities and
more that your audience is participating in and using. It’s rare, for example, that a
long-lived support community operates in a vacuum: More likely, the support forum is
connected to one or more membership communities whose participants are interested
or dependent on some aspect of the support they receive in the forum.
Dell’s “Take Your Own Path,’ the community built for entrepreneurs referenced
in Chapter 3, is part of one such ecosystem. The entrepreneur’s community itself acts
as the central hub of the ecosystem: It can do this because being an entrepreneur is a
lifestyle, a passion. Surrounding it are the Dell support forums, Dell’s IdeaStorm and
a host of external social networks including Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
All of these work together to provide a complete environment for entrepreneurs. In so
doing, they ensure that awareness of—and support for—Dell small- and medium-sized
business products is readily available (good for marketing) and more importantly that
the community’s participants remain engaged based on their own needs and passions
(which is good for the entrepreneur’s and good for Dell since their success is dependent
on the the success of their customers.)
Looking deeper into the platforms and social applications, beyond commu-
nity and support forums, there is the growing area as application of “Social CRM.’
Not surprisingly, CRM is the newest connection between social media and the Social
Web: I’ll cover this extensively in Chapter 9, “Social CRM,” so for now just recognize
that who the influencers are, and how they relate to your potential customers, can be
tracked and managed in the same way that you’d manage relationships with your exist-
ing customers. In other words, you can grow your business leads and influencer base—
discovered on the Social Web—in a manner analogous to traditional enterprise CRM.
The combination of support applications, CRM, social networking, and sharing
mechanisms like Twitter, along with the activity streams in Facebook and Orkut can
be quite powerful. When compared with building a stand-alone community around
a brand, product or service—go back to the toothpaste or deodorant community
examples—these highly integrated social applications result in much more widespread
and more free-flowing interchange of information between consumers. This, of course,
brings up one of the aspects of the Social Web and its use by consumers that causes
some marketers sleepless nights: The prospect of negative conversations circulating,
outside of their control but very much visible to potential customers.
Unfortunately, there is no easy answer when negative conversations arise,
unless you consider “fixing the problem at its source” as being easy. Do reference the
“Responding to Social Media Mentions” sidebar in Chapter 1, though, as you develop
your basic response process.
Here too, however, social business concepts provide relief: Support forums—
properly managed—can go a long way toward improving the customer service experience
(lowering the incidence of negative conversations in the process) and reducing the costs