Social Media’s Dark Side

Social media and networks, even after all the positive spin given over the last 5 years, has a dark side. We have seen this in its everyday personal use (many mediums are a predatory gateway), but now the dark side is casting shadows on the business world as well. In their recent article, Defeating the Dark SIde of Social Networking, Joseph Hughes and Chris Boudreaux write how businesses are being victimized by social media and their slow response to the attacks.

Hughes and Boudreax 6 recommended actions useful when engaging your community about your brand:

>> Develop a “social customer management” strategy that includes technical and business process components designed to engage customers in conversations.

>> Automate as much interaction with customers as possible, so call-center workers can put the best approaches to work repeatedly.

>> Reduce the time it takes to respond to Web postings from weeks to hours, or even minutes.

>> Connect marketers with product development staff to build a bridge from the conversations happening on the Web to the goods and services your company produces.

>> Balance your resources between fielding customer phone calls and responding to what’s happening on the Web.

>> Prioritize which customers demand the most immediate attention, and come up with a plan to ensure a timely response based on how valuable they are.

These are all excellent actions, but there are a couple of additional ones that should be considered as well:

— Develop a Social Media Value Chain so that you can coordinate your branding activity throughout the entire business and partnerships

— Have quantitative brand amplification metrics in place so that actions can be measured and rationally assessed (vs. empirically discussed in an emotional manner).

— Align business strategies with operations in a manner that recognizes the necessity of transparency in business activities.

Nobody in their right business mind would ignore customers in their lobby complaining about their products and services. Ignoring your customers in the social media/networking lobby, just a virtual extension of your business, is a action that will only bring shadows of the dark side to your doorway.

Read Full Post »

7 Deadly Sins of Social Media

Social media and computing is not immune from its share of problems and abuses. YouTube is walking away from its social video project after a fairly significant investment and Chatroulette seems to be a possible gateway for predatory behavior.

The sins of any emergent capability, however, need not be incurred. With a little forethought, enough insight into how and why good things go so bad can help up identify those characteristics that need to be avoided.

Here are an initial set of seven such sins that if believed and followed, will certainly result in realizing some level of adverse effects.

1. Social networks, and its respective social media, are defined by the tools and/or the technology used to establish, create, and manage them (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc). Social networking more that any one technology, it is a codified by a set of behavioral patterns within a community.

2. Transparency of information and knowledge is an option in social networks (social media communities). Believing that you can hide in or from a community in a social network is the quickest way to exposure.

3. All social media is created equally, is equally important, and is of equal value to social networks. Your community is not a collective and is represented by individual and unique needs.

4. Assuming the average return on investment (ROI) for social media is equal to the ROI associated with the average demand of a social network. This is the Flaw of Averages as applied to social media and networks.

5. You define and control your social networks and the social media of value to them (social media communities). This could be the sin of ignorance in that believing one can control any large complex entity is a sign that one lacks understanding of how things work.

6. The future behavior of a social network is just like the behavior it has today. The only certainty about a social network and the persistency of it social media is that there is nothing certain about it.

7. Believing that there are only six deadly sins. The seventh of the seven deadly sins is being lulled into a sense on complacency, believing you know all the insidious effects of social media.

This concept of the Seven Deadly Sins… is based on the work of Sam Savage at Stanford University, as written in his book “The Flaw of Averages.” Please take the time to check out this work as well.

This is work in progress. Please let me know what you think and add your own Deadly Sin to the list.

Read Full Post »

Social Networking – The Third Dimension

Social media, based on emerging social networking principles and social/cultural psychology, has taken root and is becoming a more dominant part of our live. While there are no official industry statistics yet, Ben Parr has been tracking social media for some time and has noted an exponential growth in the usage of the term over that last three years.

Side Bar: If you want to follow this industry, there are many Googlable (I thought this was a real adjective, why is there a red line when I type) sites. Mashable is one of the sites I follow (Kindle and Web) for my weekly dose of vitamin “W/S”. They follow Web 2.0 and Social Media news across all industries, providing insights into technology as well as business trends.

Social media is a vertical and horizontal – it is both a “what you do” and “how you do it.” Unlike tradition verticals (first axis) like Financial and Healthcare or traditional horizontals (second axis) like SOA and Cloud computing, social media is both. System developers will build on top of social media platforms (e.g., Facebook apps) as well as build out social media capabilities (e.g., realtime analytics) – the third access.

Mashable contains many examples of this emergent third dimension. In a recent article “Facebook Platform Live Status Make Life Easier for Developers,” explored the impact on development. This tool provides an indication of the system health across many functions. Ask yourself this, “Should every system have this ability?” How often have you been frustrated with a system only to find out that it wasn’t you. Having access to this capability could make like easier and happier customers.

What about Real-time web – RT collaboration, analytics, search, Ecommerce, etc? It seems to be a necessity for many users, ask FaceBook, SAP, and Wise. Delivering realtime web content is very different, both architecturally and operationally, from delivering semi static content. So, as this trend becomes more mainstream, will you be ready/prepared to delivery it? Interesting implications to both sales and architects.

Social media is here and will most likely stay and continue to become a dominant force in our lives. A humans we want to be social, but the systems we have development in the past have been a barrier to this. Social media could be the catalytic that reorganizes not only the way we look at industries, but how we go about working in them.

Read Full Post »

Social Networks – Definition Redux

Wherever your travels take you, there’s a lot of chatter about social networks. You can find streams of thoughts in Twitter, ramblings of ideas in blogs, and deep dissertations in books and texts. However, they all seem to miss the mark when it comes to defining social networking in a way the is meaningful to most CEOs and CFOs. Take, for example, the following codifications; while pithy, they are too practical:

>> Wikiopedia – A social network is a social structure made of nodes that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, sexual relationships, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade.

>> Screen Actors Guild (SAG) – are online communities where people meet, socialize, exchange digital files, etc.

>> Chatmine – A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals, ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds.

If you’re like most CXOs out there, your response is similar – “huh?” Or, “with that definition and $4.25, I can get a cup of coffee.” A quick side bar – history books tell us this use to be a slim 25 cents at one point in the not so distant past. The good old days! Not only are these widespread definitions confusing, they lack elements of operational practicality.

Specifically, they lack three fundamental characteristics necessary to motivate management: group identification, goal identification, and monetization identification. If you want to get the attention of your CEO/CFO, just tell them who the market is, why they are there, and how you are going to get money from them. They will listen to you any time.

With that stated, let me get out my sharp #2 digital pencil and try to give a more meaningful definition. While not perfect, it may be practical enough to get us to think different (as Apple was say):

Social Networking is a self-forming group of people gathered to deal with issues that result in meaningful value, that can often be monetized.

There are several examples of social networks that can be used to test this definition. Ebay, for example, is a collection of buyers and sellers that from groups around specific tangible items to create a beneficial transaction, exchanging money for goods. While the number of participants in Ebay grows at a steady annualized rate, the number of transactions (groups) is growing exponentially. Each of these transactions has value to not only the buyer and seller, but economic value to the intermediary Ebay as well.

FaceBook is another social network, but one composed of people in a mutual relationship exchanging information that supports the welfare of others in the network. The meaningful value is not only the development of caring and intimate (quisi-intimate) feelings needed to directly sustain us as human beings (without these feelings we die), but the implied economic realization that doing so through FaceBook is far cheaper than any previously available means. This is a very powerful network since it ties directly to a core sufficiency of life, while at the same time economically monetizing it.

While definitions come and go (I hope this one will hang around a while), the value of social networks is indisputable. They bind us together in ways that few have described (e.g., Dr. Reed – Group Forming Functions). They allow us to function in ways that few have delivered (e.g., Facebook, Ebay). In all cases, however, social networks are the definition to the question of why we are what we are. They a means through which we can be human.

Read Full Post »

Why This Social Media Blog?

This is a journey to explore the Impact of social media on our society. A few weeks ago, I met MC Hammer at the Wharton Business Technology Conference 2010, where we both were speaking. He impressed me quite a bit – he is very smart and has a refreshing perspective on social media. This initial encounter inspired me to start a twitter microblog series – 101 Practical Aspects of Social Media – Inspired by MC Hammer’s ongoing discussions on Social Media. Every weekday I will post some practical aspect of social media, following which it will be blog about here and commented on by the forces to be.

Read Full Post »