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SOCIAL
A
PPLICATIONS
of customer service delivery in the process. At the very least, support forums can be used
to quickly spot common problems. Once identified, the issues can be addressed and cor-
rected, often by involving the very customers raising the objections and creating a more
favorable relationship in the process.
Here again you see the larger connection between the Social Web and business:
Beyond social media marketing and the monitoring of conversations, the integration of
social applications that connect your business to the larger (customer) ecosystem pro-
vide you with the data, solutions, and basis for relationships that can help you fix what
needs fixing and preserve what’s presently working.
Much of what was just covered sounds simple—and in theory it is—but beware:
Stepping up and actually doing “social business,” exposing your engineers to your cus-
tomers through an authentic blogging program, for example, so that they might learn
first-hand the pain-points of customers is likely to be challenging if not outright diffi-
cult within your organization. That said, getting it right creates both a barrier to entry
and a competitive differentiator that is difficult for slower-off-the-mark competitors to
counter. If you move first, you get the advantage, and that can pay measurable benefits
down the road.
Content Sharing
If support forums and similar social applications provide the connections between
communities and your business, what is it that is actually shared? This is where the
content creation and sharing tools come in. Recall the engagement building blocks—
consumption, curation, creation, and collaboration. Sharing first emerges in the cura-
tion phase of engagement as people rate the works of others in a public setting. Content
creation is almost universally undertaken specifically for the purpose of sharing.
Given this, social applications as well as social communities are typically built
with the idea of members creating and sharing something. “Something” might be a rat-
ing, a photo, a solution, or any number of other things. Expert communities are exam-
ples of “sharing,” wherein the content being shared relates to a specific problem posed
by the community. On a different scale—and typically serving many times the number
of people— support forums operate in this same way.
Where the challenge in building a compelling social application is identifying the
purpose of the application, the challenge in driving shared content is encouraging par-
ticipation in the first place. The degree to which content is created and shared is almost
purely a function of how easy it is to do, and in the rewards for having done it. By
rewards, I don’t mean cash: I mean social recognition. If someone is contributing qual-
ity content, ensure (as a moderator or through moderation policies or your reputation
management system) that this person is recognized. Identifying and developing experts/
influencers by watching content production and sharing is one the keys to building a
powerful social application.