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c h a p t e r12: SOCIAL APPLICATIONS■What kinds of social applications appropriately relax their identity require-
ments? Think about a nonprofit, for example, that might encourage participants to
share stories about cancer survival, corporate noncompliance, or physical abuse. As
well, a sporting goods company or one of its retailers may want submissions of experi-
ences using its gear, but may provide the option of not publishing the names of those
submitting these stories. Social apps come in a variety of forms, and not all of them
require that a full personal identity be provided. How much needs to be included in
order that your social application encourages participation by and among members
is for you to decide. One way to answer this is to ask participants how much they are
willing to share, taking care to explain the benefits of providing such information as
well as exactly how it will be used.
What this all comes down to is the realization that it is the combination of
both identity and functionality that support high degrees of social interaction within
a social application. Profile completeness and reputation management are important
aspects in the design of social applications, right along with specific functional tools
including those that support content uploading, friending, sharing, rating, tagging, and
more. If participants don’t know with whom they are sharing—or can’t curate or share
content easily—they are less likely to share at all, shutting down the higher levels of
engagement like content creation and collaboration that are central to realizing value
through the business applications of social technology.
Taken together, it’s the combination of the above that is important to your busi-
ness or organization. Consider this within the context of a social network that involves
identifiable participants (again, as appropriate) and in so doing create the opportunity
for highly specialized social applications that enable collaboration and content sharing.
This is the overall approach that defines the successful social application in the busi-
ness context.Social Applications Drive Engagement
Examples of social applications that drive higher levels of engagement include
SocialVibe’s charitable giving application (mentioned in the opening of the chapter),
Starbucks’ use of Foursquare (a location-based social application), the Foursquare
“mayors” program that rewards frequent visitors, and Dell’s use of Twitter as one
of its many brand outposts. In Europe, Opel|Vauxhall have created a customer ser-
vice built on Twitter using its basic accounts, @opelblog and @vauxhall along with the
hashtags #OpelService and #VauxhallService, allowing customers to easily connect, ask
questions, and make other inquiries relating to these automobiles. Twitter is a social
application with obvious business development and customer care applications: Twitter
enables two-way interaction between a business and its customers (and between cus-
tomer themselves). Dell’s Small Business group, Comcast’s customer service team,
and Australian telecom firm Telstra all use Twitter as a conduit for information that