Social Media Framework - What Is Social Media?

Despite common notions—and hype—to the contrary, social media is not purely about marketing and PR. And while some social media content can leave you scratching your head about its utility or interest to anyone, social media as a whole can provide many benefits to you and others throughout your organization.

But the starting point for thinking about social media shouldn’t be what you are trying to get out of it, but what your customers are trying to do. By beginning with your customers’ objectives (their customer scenarios), you can identify which tools from the “social media toolbox”—forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, idea engines, reviews, ratings, rankings, tagging, leader boards, and more—can help them successfully reach their goals. Then, by mapping your business unit’s objectives into this picture, you can identify those social media tools that can make you successful.

Social media does bring a new set of challenges to businesses, from its impact on organizational culture to the difficulties in finding the useful information amongst all the clutter. This report discusses these and other challenges, and provides five key recommendations to help you leverage social media throughout your organization.

What Is Social Media?

We humans are social animals. Social interactions among people have existed since the dawn of mankind, long before (to bound ahead by several millennia) the dawn of business and commerce, which we’ll loosely define as the exchange of goods and services between individuals and groups of individuals. As we are social creatures, business has always had an intrinsic social component. In business, we communicate with others, we learn from and about others, we buy from and sell to others, we barter with others, and we help and are helped by others. Supporting the flow of these interactions is information. Business has at its foundation the connection between people and information; how we get it, when we get it, what we do with it.

Social media is this information, this content, in whatever format, created by and shared with others. But, because technology and the Internet are so intertwined in the continuous development and distribution cycle of this content, we use the term “social media” to describe the whole shebang. Social media involves the connecting of people to other people (both individually and in groups), people to information created by other people (individually or on aggregate), and the processes by which all this happens.

Note that the ubiquitous phrase “social networking” falls within the social media umbrella. Social networking is a specific use case of social media, for connecting with others for personal or professional reasons.

What’s Not Different about Social Media

Despite the current hype around social media for transforming the world, certain things remain constant. Perhaps not surprisingly, these are centered around people and business.

• Human Nature / Human Behavior. Social media may amplify certain aspects of human nature and help or hinder our behaviors, but it doesn’t change them. We have our individual and personal goals, needs, and motivations. We care about many things, act in some times rational, sometimes irrational manners. We care what other people think about things and about us. All the technology and connectivity in the world doesn’t alter the fact that people are still people.

• Business is (Still) Business. The fundamentals of business still apply: provide good products and services that fill a need, make them easy to purchase and use, and make them available at a reasonable price.

• The Importance of Relationships. Business is all about relationships, whether the particular interactions are face-to-face and synchronous, impersonal and asynchronous, or somewhere else on this spectrum. Social media may enable a company to manage more relationships per cubic inch than ever before (see “Scale” below), but it doesn’t change the fact that relationships across the customer lifecycle are fundamental to a successful business.

• The Right Tool for the Right Job. Every useful tool does at least one thing well. But there is no tool that does everything well. Social media tools are no exception. The various social tools have their advantages and disadvantages. What will be useful to you will depend on the business hat you wear.

What Is Different about Social Media

Just because something is hyped, it doesn’t mean there isn’t something potentially game-changing about it. We see four major things that social media brings to the business table.

• Scale. Through the ages, technology—and new forms of media supported by new technology—has changed the ways we interact with each other and with information in our personal and professional lives. Witness the printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, CDs, and DVDs. But the relatively recent one-two punch of the computer revolution and widespread connectivity via the Internet has dramatically changed this landscape. The degree and speed that we are able to know what’s going on around us, that others are able to know what’s going on with us, and that we are able to have an effect on each other, is today unparalleled in human existence. This immense scale is what enables so many of today’s social phenomenons, such as viral marketing, crowdsourcing, and online communities.

• Speed. If news traveled fast before the Internet and in its early days, it’s at hyper-speed when today‘s customers and social media tools are added to the mix. Not only does the scale of social media mean that information— both good news and bad news—reach more people more quickly, but people expect quick turnaround times, whether you’re dealing with issues around service, support, or brand image. This is especially true to those in PR, brand marketing, legal, and service and support departments.

• Democratization of Information and Individual Empowerment. As social media tools are about collaboration (i.e., working together), they make it easy to place (and keep) information in the open, or at least in shared spaces. Information hoarding is out; information sharing is in. The push toward social collaboration within the enterprise takes those bits of knowledge stored in individual heads and inboxes, and puts them into wikis and other tribal knowledge repositories, making them accessible to others. Social tools also make it easy for people to do things for themselves that would have previously required the intervention of skilled technologists. Have a new project that involves people from several different departments? No need to make a request from IT; go the DIY route by setting up an appropriately permissioned discussion forum or wiki by yourself. Want to include partners from your supply chain or members of your customer advisory group? Add them to the group, again with the proper levels of access. In essence, social technologies enable non-techies to take on (certain) system administrator roles.

        Outside of the enterprise, social media empowers customers to have an impact both on the company and the industry. Through blogs, microblogs, and online communities, for example, customers and their points of view can be heard far and wide. Social media enables persuasive customers to have some input into the way you do business, it enables insightful customers to have a voice in the development of new products and services, and it enables influential customers to extend the reach of your brand.

• Breaking Down the Walls Between “Us” and “Them.” What we find especially exciting about the social media revolution is that it is helping to break down the traditionally rigid walls that have long separated those inside the company (employees) from those outside of it (customers and partners). Increasingly connected employees are not only more aware of how their customers, for example, are using their products, but social media tools make it easier than ever to engage directly with them.

Comments

Nice article about Social media!!!!!!!!!
social media can help you listen to, learn from, and engage with customers through the filter of your own business role.
Business has at its foundation the connection between people and information; how we get it, when we get it, what we do with it.

[Matthew Lees]

Thanks, Gentlerain Marketers. We're certainly on the same page about what's at the foundation of business.
Nine exclamation points! High praise, indeed.