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c h a p t e r2 :THE NEW ROLE OF THE CUSTOMER■The New Role: Social Interactions
The “social” in “Social Web” implies more than technology, more than the networks
where people post photos and review books: It’s less about the “what” and more about
“how, why, and among whom” that distinguishes the Social Web from earlier, trans-
actional online technologies. The term “social” refers to the ways in which people
connect—friends, requiring a two-way acknowledgement of a relationship are different
than more casually associated followers, for example. The term “social” also provides
insight into why they are connecting—perhaps to learn something, to share an experi-
ence, or to collaborate on a project. As such, a great place to start learning about the
Social Web and its connection to business is with the basic relationships that are cre-
ated between participants in social networks and social applications, and to then look
at the types of interactions between them that follow.
It is the relationships and interactions between participants that connect com-
munity members and define the social graph, a term of art that means simply who
you are (e.g., your profile), who you are connected to (e.g., your friends or followers),
and what you are doing (e.g., status updates). The social graph is to building relation-
ships what ordinary links between websites are to building an information network:
They define the social connections. Without the social graph—without the profiles and
friends, followers, and similar relations that form between them—online social com-
munities are reduced to task-oriented, self-serve utilities much as a basic website or
shopping catalog might present itself.
A quick way to see this is to think about a site like Yelp. Yelp provides review,
ratings, venue, and schedule information...all of the things needed to plan an evening
or other outing. This is the kind of activity that an individual might do or an individual
might do on behalf of a small, known group of friends with a specific personal goal in
mind: Find a good restaurant and then see a show, etc. That’s the basic utility that Yelp
provides, and by itself it isn’t particularly social with the allowance of the shared rat-
ings and reviews that Yelp offers.
Go one step further, though, and Yelp becomes a social site as well. When some-
one builds a Yelp profile and connects with other Yelpers—that’s what people using
Yelp call each other—the transactional service becomes a relationship-driven commu-
nity. Rather than “What would I like to do this evening?” the question becomes “With
whom would I like to do something this evening?” This is a distinctly social motive,
and it is the combination of utility value (information and ratings) along with the other
Yelper’s own profile and messages (the social elements) together with whom they are
connected that makes the social aspects of Yelp work. It is the social—not transac-
tional—tools that power Yelp.
By encouraging the development of relationships within a collaborative com-
munity—or across functional lines within an organization or between customers and