Social Media Marketing

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c h a p t e r

4 :

THE S

OCIAL B

USINESS E

COSYSTEM

■

It is exactly this kind of smart approach to social media marketing and the

larger area of social technology applied to business that makes obvious the way in

which the Social Web is maturing. While Web 1.0 was typically implemented as “com-

peting islands”—large portals going for traffic dominance in the hopes of selling ad

space—Web 2.0 brought shared experiences and mashups to the table. Savvy marketers

picked up on this by building applications that connected their brands to the existing

communities where their target audience spent time. The Social Web, the subject of this

book, continues the shift toward shared versus competing experiences by integrating

the audience and the business through a set of applications that facilitate collaboration,

knowledge exchange, and consumer-led design.

Using Brand Outposts and Communities

It’s time to connect the basics, to put in place the beginning of a framework for a social

business. Chapter 1 covered the basics of engagement, Chapter 2 covered the new role

of the customer as a potential participant in your business. Chapter 2 also touched on

the social graph and social CRM, highlighting tools like BuzzStream that help you

identify and build relationships with people who are talking about your brand, prod-

uct, or service and influencing others in the process.

Chapter 3, “Building a Social Business,” framed social CRM and social applica-

tions in the context of a social business, a firm or organization that is being run based

on the direct collaboration between itself and its customers. The basic interactions—

creating relationships between community members and creating shared knowl-

edge—come about through specific, replicable actions that can be designed into the

organization itself.

In this section of Chapter 4, the social behaviors described so far are applied in

specific social spaces—think online communities here—where the actual interactions,

discussions, and conversations take place.

Recall from Chapter 3 that communities are built around things like passions,

lifestyles, and causes, the big things that people choose to spend their time with. Very

often, a brand, product, or service by itself does not warrant a community of its own:

Even when it does, that particular community is typically only participated in by a

fraction of the total potential audience. For most businesses and organizations, the

places where customers willingly spend time—often engaged in conversation about the

business or organization—is a social network or online community that is dedicated

not to brands, products, or services, but rather to other people like themselves, with

interests like their own.

So how do you participate as a business? Even more pressing, how do you get

your customers to spend time doing real work with your team, contributing ideas and