2020 Social: Because Business is Social

What Are the Biggest Use Cases For Corporate Online Communities?

Posted on 07. Mar, 2010 by gaurav in Ideas, Reports

My post on the biggest Social CRM (SCRM) use cases set me thinking about the biggest use cases for corporate online communities.

A company can build and host ten different types of communities to serve different business objectives:

1. Communities of Interest: to connect customers and influencers around a lifestyle, an interest or a cause that is related to the company’s or brand’s values.

2. Communities of Practice: to connect customers and influencers around a profession, a skill or an industry that is related to the company’s offerings.

3. Evangelist Communities: to connect customers who are passionate about the company, its products or its brands and energize them to drive advocacy and referrals.

4. Employee Communities: to connect the company’s employees, in order to build an open culture, improve collaboration amongst distributed teams, or enable knowledge-sharing.

5. Partner Communities: to connect the company’s employees and partners, in order to build an open culture, improve collaboration amongst distributed teams, or enable knowledge-sharing.

6. Talent Communities: to showcase the company’s work culture and employees and attract prospective employees to the company.

7. Ideation Communities: to solicit and select product and process improvement ideas from employees, partners, customers and influencers.

8. Research Communities: to identify trends and user behavior related to the company’s industry or products to use in product and process innovation.

9. Social Marketplaces: so that customers can help each other select and purchase a product or service that is most appropriate for them, with some facilitation from company employees.

10. Support Communities: so that customers can help each other solve problems and use products or services in the best way, with some facilitation from company employees.

Each of these ten types of communities differ from each other not only in terms of the business objectives and the business function that owns them, but also in terms of the types and numbers of members, the type and frequency of editorial and user-created content, the functionality required in the community platform, the integration of the community platform with existing social networks and, finally, governance, reputation and reward systems.

Some of these communities are native to B2B or B2C contexts, while others can work across business contexts. Some are public or private by default, while others can work anywhere on the public-private continuum. Some of these communities are built around one primary driver — insights, response, activation, or crowd-sourcing — while others incorporate elements from all four.

The State of Community Management report from the Community Roundtable touches upon some of these aspects in its strategy section, then goes on to discuss the hands-on aspects of community management, based on its Community Maturity Model:

A particularly insightful comment relates to the 1:9:90 rule –

Unlike a commonly held belief, all communities do not develop a 90-9-1 pattern – i.e. 90% lurkers, 9% contributors, 1% authors and they should not necessarily be built with that expectation. That profile is a good benchmark for large consumer brand communities and product support communities, but is not such a good profile for market research, employee, innovation, or customer advocacy communities.

While the report is thorough and packed with practical tips, here are three ways in which Rachel Happe and Jim Storer can make it even better:

- Include case studies from the Community Roundtable members to bring alive the tips.
- Provide a how-to-guide for the organization to move from the Hierarchy stage to the Emergent Community, Community and Network stages.
- Provide tips by type of community, starting with the ten types of communities I have listed above.

Here are some of my other favorite resources on online communities:

- The Art of Community by Jono Bacon
- The Tribalization of Business report by Beeline Labs
- Building and Sustaining Brand Communities by Radian6

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

What Are the Biggest Social CRM (SCRM) Use Cases and Market Opportunities?

Posted on 06. Mar, 2010 by gaurav in Ideas, Reports

Altimeter Group has recently released a white paper in which analysts Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang have identified 18 use cases for Social CRM, based on conversations with almost 100 users, influencers and vendors.

Roughly, most of these uses cases can be classified across five business areas (Marketing, Sales, Support, Innovation, Collaboration) and four dynamics (Insights, Response, Proactive, and Crowd-Sourcing). I like this simple action-oriented classification better that coming up with names for each use case combination.

Owyang and Wang have further classified these 18 use cases based on market demand and technology maturity. Market demand reflects the urgency by organizations to deploy a use case while technology maturity reflects the market readiness and maturity of the available solutions.

In this matrix, Evangelizables present the most immediate market opportunity, for both product and consulting company, while Early Movers presents the most important marketing opportunity for product companies.

- Evangelizables (high market demand and high technology maturity): Dominated by insights, response and proactive uses cases for sales, marketing and support.
- Near Tipping Points (low market demand and high technology maturity): Dominated by crowd-sourcing use cases in collaboration and innovation.
- Early Movers (high market demand and low technology maturity): Dominated by response uses cases in sales and marketing.
- Early Adoptions (low market demand and low technology maturity): Dominated by insights use cases in collaboration and innovation.

Finally, Owyang and Wang define the 5M’s, foundational processes that cut across all these uses cases:

- Monitoring: to track social media conversations.
- Mapping: to link up social graphs, including profiles and relationships.
- Management: to tie back systems to business processes and priorities.
- Middleware: to define workflows across social and enterprise platforms.
- Measurement: to analyze metrics related to business objectives.

Here’s the Altimeter report on Social CRM:

At 2020 Social, we spend a lot of time thinking about how the Social CRM toolkit is coming together and how it can help organizations design a talk-worthy experience ecosystem.

On one hand, we are trying to put together a toolkit for marketers who want to use social CRM, but we aren’t quite there yet, as the tools don’t quite connect with each other as seamlessly as they claim to.

On the other hand, we are speaking with the product teams of some Indian CRM solutions providers, to help them extend their CRM solutions by incorporating social and community elements in them.

The trick is that social is public, many-to-many and emergent, while traditional CRM is private, one-to-one and rule-based. Social CRM lies at the intersection of social and CRM worlds and I’m not quite sure if we have figured out how to use the best from both the worlds into Social CRM.

By the way, here’s a 70+ slide deck we use for workshops on Social CRM: Decoding the Social in Social CRM. Do share your feedback.

Here are some other useful perspectives on the Altimeter Social CRM report:

- John Lovett, Prem Kumar Aparanji and Brian Solis praise the report for its pragmatic and thorough approach.

- Clo Willaerts and Jacob Morgan point out that few, if any vendors, provide a solution that works across the 5Ms highlighted in the report.

- Stefano Maggi, like myself, tries to reclassify the use cases in a way that is more action oriented, by linking them to the five objectives in “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technology“, by Charlene Li (@charleneli, at Altimeter Group) and Josh Bernoff (@jbernoff, at Forrester Research): Listening, Talking, Energizing, Embracing and Supporting.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

Social Media News Stories Last Week

Posted on 09. Feb, 2010 by Hardeep Kaur Rai in Media, Reports, Reviews

It’s been a super-busy first week of February in the Indian social media space. A wrap-up of the news stories that made headlines is given below.

1)      Business Line carried an article ‘Websense unveils security application for Facebook users’ on 3^rd Feb that brings a sigh of relief to Facebookers. The article quotes Mr Surendra Singh, Regional Director (SAARC and India), Websense, ‘While other  security offerings are designed to clean users’ computer after it has been infected, we worked with Facebook to create Defensio so customers are protected from emerging threats  and malicious  content before  they spread beyond the social Web and become a broader security concern’. The article describes the mechanics of the application, ‘Defensio would analyze the links on the social web before users try to access them and gather intelligence of the site as well as the content and embedded links on it.’

Comment- This is surely a good sign for all Facebookers. With more and more people using Facebook,  the site is increasingly posing a security risk and the application helps protect Facebook users.  The application would also lessen the occurrence of online crimes such as hacking, phishing, credit card frauds. Truly, it would prove to be a boon.

2)      Economic Times quoted IT research major Gartner in its article ‘Microblogging may replace email: Gartner’ on 3^rd Feb. The article states Gartner predicting, ‘by 2014 social networking will replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for one in five businesses across the world. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts.’

Comment- Technology is fast evolving, bringing with it some new application, phone, game or software every day. The very concept of social networking is the ability to maintain the interest and loyalty of users by continuously expanding services. A case in point being platforms such as Hi5, Myspace etc reduced to ghost websites after being unable to offer more to its audience in terms of something faster, cooler and more exciting. Thus, the insight made in the Gartner report should come as no surprise. Corporates already have begun to build internal social networks and it won’t be long before businesses allow for the mingling of personal social networks with one’s professional counterpart.

3)     How vocabulary has undergone a sea-change due to increased adoption of social networking sites is discussed in the article ‘Networking sites influence lingo’ by Nivi Shrivastava published in Asian Age on 3^rd Feb. The author writes that the maximum new words recorded in the Oxford University Press were related to technology and ‘some words were even inspired by the micro-blogging giant Twitter like- Tweetup, Tweeple, Tweetaholics, Twitterati, Twitterverse, Tweet’. Other new words mentioned were unfriend, defriend, freemium, Facebookarrhea and Facebookazzis, blogebrity, bloggage,blogosphere, blogademia and blogathon.

Comment- What this means for the English language is something resembling a face-lift.  Modern times call for modern language, after all as the famous proverb states- Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.

4)      The Hindu printed an article on  ‘Efficiency in everyday work brings laurels’ by K.V. Rajasekhar  on 3^rd Feb. The author discusses at length on lessons in management exhibited by the flawless functioning of the taken case in point- Mumbai’s famed Dabbawallas. The article states, ‘The fact that 85% of the dabbawallas are illiterate and the rest have studied only till ClassVIII but form part of an organization that is in existence since the last 125 years and has notched up a Six Sigma certification and delivers lunch boxes to over 2, 00,000 people across Mumbai city in which out of 6, 00,000 deliveries only one mistake is made but that never really happens as the misplaced box is sooner or later traced and returned to the owner.’ The author then identifies the management lessons one learns from the unique functioning of this famed organization also acknowledged as ‘management guru’ to corporate India and others across the world.

Comment- The author has taken an outstanding example that inspires individuals with their simple and yet efficient management process. A simple color coding system, strong internal HR policy also translating itself into commendable CSR policy and the adoption of the latest technology, here being utilizing social media to reach out to customers is just some of the lessons the author talks about at length. But there are more lessons here like- passion and empathy for customer needs and not just robotic execution being the most glaring of all. Another lesson is overcoming one’s limitations and utilizing available means to achieve goals. The fact that most of the dabbawallas are not educated and those that are do not possess even a graduation degree or an MBA but are yet invited to give guest talks on management at well-known business schools is simply due to the business acumen to utilize available means of transport like bicycles and trains to build a distribution chain that never fails to deliver on time in the densely populated city of Mumbai. Therein lies the lesson that corporates can surely learn.

5)      Mail Today published a shocking article on ‘Facebook is No.1 security risk-site’ on 3^rd Feb.  The author reveals how a high level of activity compromises the user’s Facebook account. The article quotes IT security firm Sophos claiming in its annual IT security investigation report that ‘instance malware affliction and span rose 70 percent on social media sites. Twitter, the micro-blogging site is next after Facebook.’ The report provides stats to back its claims and also blames Linkedin to be another culprit in its IT security risks survey.

Comment- This comes as a great surprise and shock to the millions of social media enthusiasts.  But it again wakes up the reader to being more cautious and vigilant whilst online.

6)      Another article appeared concerning Mr Shashi Tharoor’s tweets albeit in a more positive instance for him. Hindustan Times published an article by Jayanth Jacob on ‘Tharoor’s tweets have a new follower: Twitter’ on 3^rd Feb. Hailing Mr.Tharoor as the only politician in the world outside the United States to have 600, 000 Twitter followers, the articles states, ‘Twitter wants Mr. Tharoor’s inputs on how public figures can use it to keep in touch with followers and get their grievances redressed’.  Mr Tharoor’s tweets have led him to be considered a case study  of effective use of the new medium  by Twitter and also gained him a recommendation as ‘leader to follow’ along with the likes of Australian PM Kevin Rudd and Sheikh Mansour bin Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoumi of Dubai on Twitter.

Comment- While a lot of hue and cry has been made in the corridors of the Indian government over Mr Tharoor’s tweets, it cannot be negated that today’s youth identifies more with the tech-savvy Mr Tharoor along with Rahul Gandhi and Sachin Pilot.

7)      How the SRK-Shiv Sena controversy conducted itself was watched out on mainstream media by all. However, Hindustan Times brings to attention the support SRK received on social media in its article ‘Twitter votes for SRK @MyNameIsMumbai’ on 4^th Feb.  Twitter lent itself as the medium where support poured out in favour of SRK. The article states, ‘The words Shiv, Sena, Khan and @iamsrk were the most tweeted words in Mumbai and New Delhi this past Wednesday. Also trending widely was the hash tag MyNameIsMumbai started by actors RanvirSorey and Konkona Sen’. The article also mentions people being encouraged on Twitter to buy tickets for SRK’s latest film My Name is Khan that the political party has been threatening the launch of.

Comment- What one witnesses through this article is the collaborative voice of thousands of people in favour of their shared beliefs, the case here being the right of an individual, albeit a celebrity yet an Indian, to express himself in line with his constitutional right, without being harassed to compromise on values or opinions.  Another reason why social media in India is fast gaining ground since it provides people an opportunity to express and quickly leverage support in matters even political.

8)      Deccan Chronicle elaborated on the changing face of marriages with most partners choosing to connect online to strengthen their bond.  The article ‘City couples connect online for fun, comfort’ published on 4^th Feb quotes relationship expert and psychologist Meenakshi Venkateshwaran, ‘Keeping in touch through emails and social networking sites helps to build a sense of security around the couple’.

Comment- Giving each other space is important but it is also essential to maintain contact with the partner. And social networking sites offer a perfect medium to maintain contact when time constraints do not allow for video calling and emailing.

9)      Hindustan Times published an article on the changing job criteria in its article ‘Want a job? Get on Facebook’ on 4^th Feb.  The article states, ‘In fact having a specified numbers of fans, friends or followers on these sites are now a hiring criterion. These active netizens are hired by companies who wish to use social networks, online communities and other online mediums for marketing, sales and public relations’.

Comment- Whilst there are still firms that object to employees using social media at office hours, there are yet those who support it and even encourage employees to tweet or blog to their advantage since it brings more visibility to the firm. The article does establish that more and more corporate visit social networking sites before hiring a candidate.  Whether this is to determine a prospective employee’s character or his social circle is largely dependent on the firm’s activities.

10)   Asian Age published an article on ‘Networking in the real world’ by N.Kartik Rao on 5^th Feb elaborating on how a certain section of youngsters prefer to be ‘disconnected’ in favour of real-world meetings. Such youngsters consider social networking to be ‘boring and a waste of time’.

Comment- Youngsters must be taught time management to balance both academics and extracurricular activities, whether offline or online. In most cases, youngsters become addicted to their online activities mostly at the deterrence of their academic goals. In such cases, choosing to stay offline does seem the right way forward. However, online networking enables maintaining contact where physical presence is not possible.

11)   Financial Chronicle published an article on ‘Social Netizens need privacy’ by Varun Dutt on 5^th Feb that elaborates on online privacy on social networking sites and measures to strengthen it. The article states, ‘If someone steals information by faking a relationship on a social network then they may harm the individual as well as their close contacts’. The author sheds light on how ‘some social systems collect names and email addresses of people who have sent messages and also collect the ‘cc’ information in emails sent to users’.

Comment- Online privacy is an important issue to be understood by every netizen. Social networking sites in particular hold utmost responsibility due to maximum information being uploaded on them. To be precise, users must be kept in the loop-hole on all actions undertaken regarding the use of their data and supreme freedom granted to them to make decisions pertaining to their information.

12)   Deccan Chronicle published an article on ‘Egypt: Fatwa against Facebook’ that reported on a top Egyptian cleric banning the social networking site due to divorce rates rocketing and marital infidelity increasing. The announcement termed Muslims using Facebook as ‘sinners’ and describes it as ‘an instrument that destroys the family because it encourages users to have relations with other people which break Islamic Sharia law’.

Comment- Social networking sites are intended to open communication between like-minded people and for businesses to build one-to-one relationships with their clients or customers. Whilst such networks do prohibit posting offensive information, yet user activities beyond that are not monitored for the purpose of allowing users freedom to interact amongst their social circle. Thus, it translates into individual sensibilities and responsibility to be mindful of one’s activities and not indulge in behavior that may not be un-permissible in the fabric of their social circle.

13)   The Pioneer featured an article ‘Facebook a virtual memorial site’ on 5^th Feb talking about the trend of setting up memorial pages on Facebook to mourn the death of those who might otherwise be forgotten. The article quotes the example of a Facebook page for Henio Zytomirski- the six year old Holocaust victim, with other examples of pages for each of the 27,594 Allied soldiers killed in Belgium during WWII, The Auschwitz memorial site and the Anne Frank page.

Comment- Such pages bring to light the horror of tragedies committed during war-torn times and to remember the heroes from yesterday who might otherwise have been forgotten by the generations today. These pages also give a chance to millions who may have otherwise never heard of them to pay their homage and respect.

14)   The Hindu reported the adoption of social networking sites by a new section of audiences- senior citizens.  The article ‘Senior Citizens take to social networking websites  in a big way’ by Liffy Thoman published on 6^th Feb elaborated on how sites such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter are a big rage amongst  the older audience and helping them connect with other like-minded audience whilst making them rediscover their zest for life and learning.  The article states, ‘For a majority of people post-retirement social networking  sites have become a  good way to stay connected, reminisce memories, get rid of the boredom or simply to  play games  form the many features and applications’.

Comment- It is heartening to see that social networks are providing the older audience with a zest for life and to fulfill their hobbies or simply renew old contacts. It allows for a stronger bond between the youth and the senior citizens since each knows the basics of what the other is talking about.

15)   DNA featured a story on ‘Facebook marks sixth year with new home page’ on 6^th Feb. The article elaborated on a new home page on the popular social networking site which included a simpler menu bar and applications dashboard along with a games dashboard.

Comment- The new home page is simpler and cleaner and certain to make it easier for a new user to understand the mechanisms of the website.

16)   Economic Times published an article charting the competition between Facebook and Orkut to emerge as the most popular Indian Networking site. The article, ‘Facebook may elbow out Orkut as top Net hangout’ by Harsimran Singh was published on 6^th and predicts that ‘Facebook could well overtake Orkut in India in about seven months’.

Comment- It seems like Orkut may well be in danger of becoming another ghost website like Myspace and Hi5 if Google does not take drastic measures in a country that forms 20% of the global traffic.

That’s all from last week. Do watch this space next Monday for more productive but immensely interesting last week with novel social media happenings

Forrester Report on Social Technographics in India

Posted on 23. Jan, 2010 by gaurav in Reports

Steven Noble from Forrester interviewed me some time back for Forrester’s Social Technographics in India report. Forrester released the report last week and sent me a copy.

The Social Technographics profile is based on in-person interviews with 353 SEC ABC online adult respondents in metropolitan India (including Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, and Chennai) between March and April 2009.

Using the top Indian website in each category (as per October ‘09 data from Vizisense) as a reference, it’s easy to see that these numbers cannot be right, especially for Joiners –

- Overall Internet Population: 42.9m

- Creators: No estimates
- Critics (Mouthshut): 0.8m (2%)
- Collectors (Digg): 0.9m (2%)
- Joiners (Orkut): 15.5m (36%)
- Spectators (YouTube): 10.9 (25%)
- Inactives: No estimates

I had earlier tried to estimate the Social Technographics profile of metro India using public data. Since then, I have revised some of these estimates, based on Vizisense data and discussions with the JuxtConsult folks.

Incidentally, Forrester also released its new Social Technographics in the US report last week and added a new category called Conversationalists, to factor in the increased importance of status messages on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

Based on back of the envelop calculations, with Vizisense data as the starting point, here are my broad guesstimates for each category:

- Creators: 3m (7%)
- Conversationalists: 5 (12%)
- Critics: 5m (12%)
- Collectors: 5m (12%)
- Joiners: 20m (47%)
- Spectators: 20m (47%)
- Inactives: 15m (35%)

What do you think? Do the Forrester Social Technographics numbers resonate with your experience with social media in India?

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

How to Create a Talkworthy Experience Ecosystem: The Social CRM Toolkit

Posted on 11. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in How To Guides, Ideas, Reports

The Experience Ecosystem

Companies are beginning to realize that their brand is now realized on the Social Web, in conversations between strangers, who amplify, quash, or otherwise reshape each others’ opinion on the product or service, often based on first-hand experiences. These messages play off against marketing messages pushed by advertising agencies in the mind of the customer, and increasingly, customers are listening to their peers, instead of marketing messages.

The Social Web exposes any misalignment between implicit or explicit expectations set by the CMO in marketing messages and the actual experience delivered by the organization run by the COO. It is therefore critical that the CMO and COO be in absolute alignment, so that the organization (over-)delivers on what the brand has promised, leading to customer delight, loyalty and advocacy.

At the core of this approach is the idea that conversations are driven by experiences. If you want to drive positive conversations about your brands, you should start by creating an experience that is worth talking about.

The Experience Ecosystem provides the framework for creating talk-worthy experiences. It consists of all the touchpoints between the organization and the customer, including products, services and partners, sales and support channels and interactions, and the values for which the organization and its individual brands stand for.

At 2020 Social, it is our belief that the best way to create an experience worth talking about is to design it collaboratively, with your customers, employees and partners.

Deconstructing the Experience Ecosystem

So, the obvious question arises: How do you collaboratively design an Experience Ecosystem that drives conversations and results in close-knit communities?

You start by listening. Your customers, partners, and employees are talking to each other about you, often in public, and their conversations include a treasure trove of feedback about your Experience Ecosystem, along with ideas to improve it. In short, they offer clear signals as to how they will take ownership for the experiences and conversations that will drive your brand.

However, listening is only the first step. You also need to respond to these people and participate in these conversations, not with the intent to direct them in one direction or another, but with the intent to engage them and learn more. Over time, as you track these conversation threads, you should seek ways to build profiles for the people who are participating in these conversations, and identify which conversations, and which people specifically, are the most valuable to you.

Some of these conversation threads will involve responding to and converting prospects who are considering your products or services. Other conversation threads will relate to supporting existing customers seeking an explanation or a solution. Still other conversation threads will be about customers, prospects, partners or employees giving you feedback on your Experience Ecosystem.

In each of these cases, you should try to tie together related conversation threads to unleash the power of collaboration. A prospect considering your offering may benefit from the reviews and experiences of other customers. An existing customer might find that other customers have already shared useful tips on how to solve common problems. Finally, your customers, partners and employees can collaborate to find the best ideas to improve your products, services, and sales and support processes, or design entirely new ones.

Once you have collaboratively designed a talkworthy Experience Ecosystem, you should build community platforms to catalyze the formation of communities, and transform customers, partners and employees into evangelists.

The Social CRM Toolkit is Still Evolving

The toolkit to create an integrated talkworthy Experience Ecosystem is still evolving, but it’s already possible to connect the various activities described above, as my colleague Dave Evans recently pointed out in his October 2009 ClickZ column.

Social media monitoring tools like Radian6 and Visible Technologies already incorporate workstream elements. Not only that, Radian6 connects with Salesforce CRM, apart from Twitter. New tools like Buzzstream are designed for profiling and responding to influencers, and not just listening.

With Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial and now LinkedIn offering robust APIs, it’s now possible to find or build powerful social applications that connect with other solutions in the toolkit and make sharing easier than ever before.

Collaboration solution vendors are an integral part of the mix because they enable your customers, partners and employees to collaborate and co-create innovative products and processes. I expect enterprise collaboration solutions like SocialText and Cynapse and ideation platforms like Accept Ideas and WebStorm to start offering integration with other applications.

Social commerce solutions like Bazaarvoice play an important role in the ecosystem by converting and cross-selling to customers and we should see such solutions offering more integration too.

CRM tool vendors are also expanding in both directions and introducing social media analytics and community features. Salesforce and RightNow now offer a full suite of community features including ideation, support and knowledge sharing and even connect with Twitter and Facebook. Apart from the integration with Radian6, Salesforce also supports integration with the Lithium community platform and customer support applications like Helpstream.

At the other end, community platform vendors like Jive, Lithium and Neighborhood America are also aggressively introducing social media analytics and social CRM features.

Update: Social CRM Resources

Since I wrote this post in October 2009, I have come across several interesting conversation threads about Social CRM. Here is a selection of some of the most useful resources I have found so far:

- Paul Greenberg puts a stake in the ground on Social CRM.

- Jeremiah Owyang starts a list of Social CRM vendors.

- Fabio Kipriani explains the benefits of social CRM.

- Lithium’s Chief Community Officer Joe Cothrel gives a great overview of the evolution of Social CRM.

I’ll be grateful if you will help me understand the Social CRM space better by sharing your favorite Social CRM resources in the comments.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

Are Indian News, Media and Entertainment Companies Social Media Savvy?

Posted on 11. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in Reports, Reviews

Most companies see social media as a part of communications, sales and marketing. Some, with a little help from us, realize that social technologies have implications for diverse business functions beyond these functions: from market research and product innovation to customer support and process redesign and even to partner relations and organizationsal development.

However, social technologies are a part of the core product for few companies, apart from the tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, standalone social networking firms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and social tool vendors like Jive, Lithium and Salesforce.

I believe that social technologies are becoming a part of the core product for news, media and entertainment companies, because an increasing amount of the content available online is now consumer generated content. As the boundary between content companies and technology companies blur even more, all news, media and entertainment companies will need to become technology companies.

In the US, the ubiquity of the internet has forced news, media and entertainment companies to become early adopters of social technologies and experiment with all the five underlying drivers of consumer generated content (CNN iReport), conversations (NPR Community), collaboration (Al Jazeera War on Gaja), community (NYT Times People) and collective intelligence (CNN News Pulse).

In India too, news, media and entertainment companies are increasingly becoming social media savvy.

NDTV is ahead of the pack with NDTV Social and the video player Tubaah. CNN-IBN has blogs, podcasts, conversations and a citizen journalism program. Star TV is slowly catching up with the Star Player.

The Times Group is persisting with its social network iTimes and experimenting with niche social network iDiva and aggregator Hotklix. Hindustan Times has started Talk to HT, an ideation platform. Hindustan Times, Live Mint, DNA, Economic Times, Business Standard, India Today and Outlook also have journalist blogs, while Indian Express has user blogs.

Everyone has links to Twitter profiles and Facebook pages proudly displayed on their homepages. All the entertainment focused TV channels and movie production houses have done consumer generated content contests.

Elsewhere, Bollywood group blog Passion for Cinema is doing well and Bollywood focused talent search community Desitara is shaping up well. Several Indian celebrities have their own blogs now and so many celebrities are on Twitter now that there is now a Twitter app called Bollytweet for tracking them.

So, yes, Indian news, media and entertainment companies are indeed experimenting with social technologies. The jury is still out on how strategic and successful these experiment have been, and they are two different things.

In a series of posts in December, I’ll explore how Indian and international news, media and entertainment companies and individual celebrities are using social technologies. I’ll then separate out the wheat from the chaff and identify best practices. Expect case studies of successful and unsuccessful campaigns and communities, graphs that give context on what is really happening and scenarios for how Indian companies and celebrities can really become social media savvy. Stay tuned.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics: Social Media and Social Change.

New Research on Facebook Pages: Top Three Insights for Brands

Posted on 03. Dec, 2009 by gaurav in Reports, Trends

Sysomos, the company behind social media analytics products Heartbeat and Map, is quickly becoming my favorite source of research on how we use social platforms.

Sysomos had put together an excellent report on Twitter users in June 2009. Now, Sysomos has followed up with an equally useful report on Facebook pages: Inside Facebook Pages.

Sysomos analyzed nearly 600,000 Facebook Pages to investigate usage patterns related to popularity, amount of content posted, number of fans, and categories. Here are the most interesting findings and the insights they translate into for brands:

Finding 1: The average Facebook page has 4,596 fans while the median page has 218 fans. 4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans, 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans, and 0.05% of pages (or 297 in total) have more than a million fans.

Insight 1: These numbers can serve as a good starting point for setting targets for branded Facebook pages: a big brand should aim for between 10,000 to 100,000 fans, but is unlikely to attract a million fans.

Finding 2: Pages with more than one million fans have nearly three times as much owner-generated content as the average Facebook page (70 against 27), but nearly 60 times as much fan-generated content (587 against 10). The frequency of administrator wall posts remains constant as the number of fans increases (about twice a month).

Insight 2: Facebook fan pages reach a tipping point (at about 5000 fans) after which the fans start creating more content than the page owner. Brands should try to reach this tipping point earlier by actively encouraging fans to create content through contests and giveaways.

Finding 3: Amongst Facebook pages with more than one million fans, the most popular pages are for musicians/bands (16.7%), celebrities (16.0%), products (11.9%), television shows (8.5%), and films (3.4%). Michael Jackson is the most popular page on Facebook, with 10 million fans.

Insight 3: Entertainment and pop culture driven Facebook pages have the highest number of fans. Brands should encourage their celebrity brand ambassadors to create and promote their own Facebook pages and use them to cross-promote the brand.

For more details, see the excellent Inside Facebook Pages report from Sysomos.

Community Platforms: What makes a good one?

Posted on 18. Nov, 2009 by karthick in Reports, Reviews

How do you categorise and cherry pick the best community platform? What would be the baseline that you would target? This the purpose of the post and what follow sis an analysis of what we have put together.

The breakdown.

First a definition is in order. What is a Community platform?

A community platform refers to the community platform “tool”. This is a tool (open source or otherwise) that enables people to build their own community networks or groups. So if I wanted to start a community for Kawasaki Bikes or Micheal Jackson dance moves club, what is the community platform tool that I should look into?

That’s my purpose in the series of blog posts that will follow. I plan to analyse a bunch of various tools, each bringing it’s unique features to the table, and then see what would broadly fit your (and well mine too) needs.

The Methodology of Analysis.

When one looks at a community platform, there are a range of things that comes to mind almost immediately. The first and foremost guiding principle in all of these platforms is the vision of the platform. To allow for user engagement and to do it seamlessly. That’s the broad picture, however , there are a lot of things that have now almost become standard (thanks to the large social networks like Orkut and Facebook) for communities in terms of features and new companies entering the market (for community platforms) as well as the ones already existing have to introduce them as basic options. So these features would be bundled in one area and then we have some features that we need to look at. Without further ado the 10 points that we are looking at.

1.User Features
This would be a no brainer. If a community cannot provide features that allow for sharing within a group of people, there’s not much to look into. Features I would say are important to look at? Here’s a quick check list of other features a community platform should look at incorporating.

* Detailed profiles (adding avatars and information)
* Formation of Groups
* Addition of friends and members to the group
* Relationship types between profiles (choose person as friend/buddy/casual acquaintance)
* Gallery option – Photos, Videos, Audios upload and download options
* Forums or Message boards for community discussion
* Blogs (individual and group authorship)
* Instant Messaging or offline messaging.
* RSS feeds – importing and exporting from groups or profile tracking updates.
* Search – within the community and specific groups.
* Widgets to enable display of relevant information
* Wikis and collaborative document sharing options.
* Tagging of posts, blogs, communities and threads.
* Event organisation and reminders.
* File Sharing for all types like .ppt, .doc, .xls, .pdf, .zip
* Email notifications for new users registered and any personal interaction.
* Polls to curate content or discussion within members.
* Bookmarking of discussion threads, profiles, updates etc.
* SEO’ed URLs of posts or groups (to a public community)
* Embedding options for content from other social networks.

Pretty exhaustive right? I’m sure you can add to that list to let me know what I missed out on. You’d also be amazed as to how quickly all of those points mentioned above are becoming benchmarks for good community platforms.

Functionality
Every community platform should have good functionality and should be enabled. Broadly this means the framework they are built upon and the availablility of that framework. Would open source frameworks then score higher than all? Not necessarily. We need to see how functional the community is once it’s set up. How easy are the interpersonal relationships between various groups. What is the cross flow of information? Can it be scanned easily?

Admin Controls

Good administrator controls allow for moderation of groups and communities and sharing and keeping access controls that help the community to be moderated well. Broadly these are some of the features I would look at.

OpenID/Social integration – One easy access login to the community.
Facebook/twitter API integration- the rage is to use your facebook and twitter logins making the integration necessary.
Theming/design – Any good community needs to offer users the chance to build custom themes and design.
CMS extensible functions – Allowing the platform to act and enable content management.
Network privacy settings – Everyone wants a secure network don’t they?
Advertisement display control- What ads can you filter, what sizes can you display, can you turn them off?
Portable Data – If for some reason we want content to be bundled and posted elsewhere.

Cost of the package

This hardly requires an introduction and it is a reason the public has taken a love for open source platforms – because they are free. But when one would like far more options than what’s put up and doesn’t have the time to personally wait for others to offer them solutions, one has to invest in a platform that offers custom service at a price. The price should justify the features offered. The other factor related to price is the bandwidth or spacing offered by the platform. Some self hosted platforms offer limited space for files and content to be uploaded while others seem to offer large enough storage spaces for media. Other smaller factors would be what is the file size limit for sharing and uploading and whether access controls are provided to make them public or private.

Popularity
Who is using it? How many people recommend it? What is the user database. All valid questions to ponder over and consider as a measurement factor.

Extensibility.
Cross API integration/management is something that fast requires looking into. With many different functions required out of a social network and new terms like lifestreaming coming into the picture, a robust community platform would have to provide or have a vision of what the future might be like and model their platform to incorporate that. In keeping with the times and technology, one ensures users don’t migrate as soon as something new comes out.

Analytics/Tracking at the backend
Almost a given pre-requisite to monitoring member usage and traffic to a website hosting the platform, analytics give us a good flow of information, tracking and statistics on user behaviour. This also lets us know what features are relevant, what aren’t good enough, what must be enhanced and the like. While powerful analytics tools like Google Analytics are available, a custom made one measuring not just the traffic but many other things would prove very useful.

Mobile, web, desktop clients.
I predict that in 5 years time, we will have almost no need for the computer and everything we do will be in our hand held mobile systems which would be powerful mini computers in themselves. A community platform that lets people stay connected with a mobile enhanced version so it works across browsers of the mobile OR allowing for a mobile version of the download would most definitely push them up the points ladder in the community platform rankings.

In the course of the next few weeks, we’ll take all the tools we have found (a large number giving us an extensive view of the space) and categorise them broadly on these parameters. We are eager for comments as well and sharing your experiences with various community platforms too!

Social Business Strategy: A Simple Framework

Posted on 12. Sep, 2009 by Dave in Announcements, Reports

With attention turning to social business Gaurav and I developed and validated a logical, step-by-step approach to the application of social technologies in business.

Building on core business concepts–creating experiences that customers love and will talk about–we”ve extended the prior social concepts to include the COO and the Operations side of the house.

You”ll find the whitepaper here ‘Social Business Strategy: A Simple Framework‘.