Social Media Marketing

(^103) ■
THE S
OCIAL E
COSYSTEM
Social
Ecosystem

Map the Social Graph

Social

Communities

Social

Applications

Extended Functionality

Who is Connected
What is Happening Now

Shared, Member-specific

Social Activities

Figure 4.7 The Social Ecosystem

Social applications—extensions to the core capabilities of the social platforms
and software services that support social networks—provide the additional, specific
functionality that makes the larger community and platforms useful to individual
participants. The Aircel voicemail application and Slide’s Top Friends application that
extend the functionality of Facebook are examples of social applications.
Social applications enable the extension of relationships between a brand, product,
or service to the individual level by providing very specific, member-selected function-
ality. Interested in supporting cause-related organizations through the traffic to your
Facebook? Install the SocialVibe application. No need for voicemail in Facebook? Don’t
install the Aircel application. This flexibility allows members to create a functional envi-
ronment that efficiently delivers the specific services they want: Imagine if Facebook had
to provide all of the applications available itself? It’s not a hypothetical question: this was
Facebook prior to the opening of its API. As evidence of the value of social applications,
consider that if there was a defining event that ramped up Facebook’s growth, it was the
opening of its API in May of 2007 and the proliferation of applications—some 12,000
created in the first six months alone—that resulted.
Social applications are also important in that they facilitate the overall growth
of the network: By incorporating specific applications in a larger social network, that
network becomes more useful to the members taking advantage of that application,
increasing the value of the network itself to those members in the process.