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.

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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.

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