Understanding how social technology works in business isn't just about having a Facebook page or Twitter account anymore. It's about building an entire ecosystem where your customers actually want to participate and help shape your business. This ecosystem includes social profiles, applications, communities, and collaborative tools that work together to create lasting relationships between businesses and their customers.
Why Social Profiles Matter More Than You Think
The foundation of any social business strategy starts with something most people take for granted: the social profile. Unlike the anonymous message boards from the early internet days, today's social platforms center around real identities. People use their actual names and photos because they want recognition for their contributions.
This shift toward real identity changes everything about how business happens online. When someone helps answer a question in your support forum or shares a creative idea for your product, they're not just completing a transaction – they're building their reputation in a community. That's what makes people come back and engage more deeply.
Think about it this way: in a traditional website interaction, someone might download a PDF or add something to their cart. The website doesn't need to know much about who they are beyond basic security requirements. But in social settings, people interact with each other, not just with applications. They want others to see their contributions, recognize their expertise, and acknowledge their participation.
The profile becomes the carrier of that recognition. Without robust profiles that show who people really are, social sharing becomes shallow. People naturally try to figure out social relationships even in anonymous settings – they'll study writing styles or remember usernames to piece together who's who. But when you provide clear identity markers upfront, communities form much faster and become more productive.
Real identity also improves behavior. Just like drivers are more polite when they recognize the person in the car ahead of them, online participants act more responsibly when they know others can see who they are. Flame wars happen less often in communities where people use real names and photos.
Building Trust Through Identity
Social profiles serve two critical functions in business applications. First, they give people something concrete to build relationships around. Second, they create accountability for actions, posts, and the roles people take in those relationships.
This accountability factor explains why social media experts recommend that companies write their own blogs instead of outsourcing to agencies. When customers read content, they imagine a real person wrote it. They want to connect with that person. Would you rather build a relationship with the CEO or head of customer service, or with someone from their PR firm? The direct connection feels more authentic and valuable.
When businesses weigh the cost of direct participation against the value of authentic relationships, the corporate identity consideration deserves serious attention.
Real-World Example: How PGi Used Profiles to Build Community
I worked with Atlanta-based Premiere Global (PGi) on implementing a developer community around their communications API. The goal was bringing independent developers and internal PGi experts together to spur innovation in communications applications.
The PGiConnect Developers Community was built on Jive Software's platform. While these ready-made platforms provide solid foundations for getting communities up quickly, they often need customization for specific business needs.
One feature missing from the standard setup was a way to encourage profile completion. Taking inspiration from LinkedIn, we developed a component that showed members their profile completeness percentage and gave simple "what to do next" prompts to reach 100% completion.
This small addition had a big impact. When you're designing collaborative applications, giving people quick ways to identify each other and establish common interests makes all the difference. Social profiles really do sit at the center of strong communities, and specific effort to get those profiles completed pays off in relationship formation.
How Social Applications Extend Beyond Marketing
While profiles provide the foundation, social applications give communities their functionality. These applications go far beyond basic marketing tools – they create shared experiences that people actually want to participate in.
The engagement process typically follows four stages: consumption, curation, creation, and collaboration. People start by consuming content, then they curate it by rating or commenting, next they create their own content, and finally they collaborate with others on projects or solutions.
Most brands struggle with a fundamental challenge: they can't sustain communities by themselves. Think honestly about the products you use daily. How many of them do you think about enough to join a dedicated community? For most products, the answer is very few.
Despite this reality, plenty of consumer goods companies have tried building communities around deodorants, toothpastes, and laundry soaps. These communities might attract members initially through advertising spending, but they rarely develop the organic growth that sustains long-term engagement. When the ad budget disappears, so does the community growth.
Social applications offer a smarter approach. Instead of trying to build standalone communities around products that don't inspire daily passion, businesses can create useful tools that integrate with the social networks where their customers already spend time.
The Laundry Soap Example: From Product Promotion to Social Utility
Consider how a laundry product company might traditionally approach social media versus how they could use social applications. The typical approach creates a branded website with stain removal charts and product recommendations. The problem is that visitors know the company is trying to sell them something, which limits trust in the recommendations.
A social application approach would start with the same utility – stain removal solutions – but add community curation and social sharing. Customers could rate different solutions based on their actual results. The best solutions would rise to the top through community voting rather than marketing dollars.
More importantly, the application could connect to users' existing social networks. When someone discovers an effective stain removal technique and posts it to the application, the app could share that success through their Twitter account (with permission) or Facebook feed. Now their friends and followers learn about the solution without feeling like they're being marketed to.
This approach creates value for users, generates authentic word-of-mouth marketing, and builds trust through community validation rather than corporate messaging.
The Good Guide: When Social Applications Transform Business
Some social applications go even further by influencing business practices beyond marketing departments. The Good Guide smartphone app exemplifies this broader impact.
Most barcode-scanning apps show pricing and basic reviews. When I needed to choose between dozens of portable toothbrushes at Target, I used my Android phone to scan barcodes right in the aisle. The app provided independent reviews that helped me make an informed decision based on actual user experiences rather than just marketing claims.
The Good Guide takes this concept much further. Beyond standard review data, it provides health, environmental, and societal impact ratings. A score of "10" on society means the manufacturer has responsible investment policies, equitable hiring practices, appropriate philanthropy commitments, and workplace diversity policies.
This information goes way beyond what marketing departments typically handle. Investment policies, hiring practices, and environmental impacts fall under different business functions entirely. But social applications like The Good Guide make this information part of the purchase decision process.
Customers now have access to holistic views of countries of origin, manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, and even taxing entities in their purchase chains. Social applications bring visibility to entire business processes and create entirely new considerations that reach across departments and functions.
This represents the dawn of true social business – where multiple parts of organizations need to participate in creating favorable conversations, not just marketing and communications teams.
Support Forums: The Foundation of Social Business Applications
Support forums represent one of the most practical starting points for social business applications. These forums can be built using white-label platforms from providers like Lithium Technologies, Jive Software, or Salesforce.com, or custom-built using frameworks like Drupal or .NET.
The key to effective support forums is understanding how they fit into larger social ecosystems. Successful support communities rarely operate in isolation. They typically connect to membership communities whose participants depend on some aspect of the support they receive.
Dell's entrepreneur community illustrates this ecosystem approach well. The community acts as a central hub because entrepreneurship is a lifestyle and passion that people think about regularly. Around this hub, Dell connects support forums, ideation platforms like IdeaStorm, and external social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
This integrated approach ensures that entrepreneurs can find support and engage based on their own needs and interests, while keeping Dell's business solutions visible and accessible. Since Dell's success depends on their customers' success, this alignment creates mutual benefit.
Support forums also provide early warning systems for common problems. When issues get identified quickly through community discussions, companies can address and correct them, often by involving the very customers who raised the concerns. This creates more favorable relationships while improving the overall customer experience.
The integration of social applications that connect businesses to larger customer ecosystems provides data, solutions, and relationship foundations that help fix problems and preserve what's working well.
Content Sharing: What Actually Gets Shared
If support forums provide connections between communities and businesses, content sharing tools enable the actual exchange of valuable information. This connects back to the engagement building blocks – people share content primarily during the curation and creation phases of engagement.
The challenge in driving shared content isn't identifying what to share – it's encouraging participation in the first place. Content creation and sharing levels depend almost entirely on how easy the process is and what rewards people get for participating.
By rewards, I don't mean cash payments. I mean social recognition. When someone contributes quality content, moderation systems and community policies should ensure that person gets recognized. Identifying and developing experts and influencers by watching content production and sharing patterns is crucial for building powerful social applications.
Purpose-Built Applications and Widgets
Sometimes the fastest way to add social behavior is through small, purpose-built applications or widgets. Unlike larger community platforms that require significant development time and costs, these focused tools can be implemented in days or hours.
Widgets are small software pieces designed for specific tasks like contests, gifting, or content sharing. They can quickly increase visitor participation when added to existing social presences. Examples include "Share This with Friends" blocks or advertising modules that enable external sharing services.
Companies like BuddyMedia, Context Optional, and Friend2Friend offer ranges of ready-to-use tools for Facebook and Twitter. These solutions support everything from simple photo sharing to complex contest and gifting applications.
One particularly successful example was the Tweet in Klingon application, built for Atari to support their Star Trek video game release. Star Trek fans could generate Twitter posts in the Klingon language. While obviously fun, this application served serious business purposes by connecting an existing passionate community (Trekkies) through an established social channel (Twitter) to generate awareness for the game.
What makes Tweet in Klingon smart is how it leverages existing community participation rather than trying to compete with established platforms. Instead of building a complete community from scratch, it provides a small, meaningful activity for a precise audience within their existing social spaces.
Brand Outposts: Going Where Your Customers Are
The concept of brand outposts addresses a fundamental mistake many companies make: expecting customers to come to them instead of going where customers already spend their time. Author Jeff Jarvis identified this as one of three common social media mistakes, along with talking in corporate voices and trying to control conversations.
Brand outposts are places you create for your brand within existing social networks rather than trying to draw people to your website. Common examples include Twitter accounts, Facebook business pages, YouTube channels, and Second Life islands.
Successful brand outposts meet clear needs for important subsets of community participants who are either part of your target market or influence it. This isn't self-serving when done right – it's about providing something genuinely useful for people you'd like to do business with, on their terms and in their preferred locations.
Coca-Cola's Facebook Success Story
Coca-Cola's Facebook page, which reached about 10 million fans, provides an instructive example. Remarkably, Coke didn't create this page – it was built by two passionate Coke fans, Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski. When confronted with a site built outside their control, Coke chose to empower the fans who created it rather than shut it down or take it over.
Under continued stewardship by its original creators, the page grew to over 4 million engaged fans. The success was so significant that in January 2010, Coke announced it would de-emphasize one-off online campaigns in favor of extended social media efforts built around brand outposts at Facebook and YouTube.
Prinz Pinakatt, Coke's interactive marketing manager for Europe, explained their philosophy: "We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform." This perfectly captures the brand outpost approach.
The Department of Fannovation Campaign
Coke's Department of Fannovation campaign during March Madness 2010 demonstrates how brand outposts can serve community needs while building brand connections. Built on the Posterous blogging platform, this combination outpost and social application asked NCAA fans to suggest ideas for improving the fan experience.
The campaign incorporated all four engagement levels effectively. Fans consumed content by reading through each other's ideas about improving fan experiences. They curated content through simple up and down voting on suggestions. The voting process encouraged content creation as fans contributed their own ideas. Finally, collaboration occurred as fans worked together to evolve the best concepts.
Most importantly, Fannovation wasn't about contrived contests or artificial engagement. It focused on genuine fan interests and the natural role Coke products play in enjoyment and fan experiences. The campaign generated the kind of authentic fan-created content that brand managers dream about.
The campaign also ended properly because it was set up with clear time boundaries around March Madness. One mistake social media marketers often make is treating communities like campaigns. Communities encourage relationships, and nobody likes getting dumped unexpectedly. When you create ongoing communities, there's an expectation of continued support. Fannovation avoided this by clearly setting expectations upfront about its time-bound nature.
The Complete Social Ecosystem
The social ecosystem provides three fundamental opportunities for understanding and leveraging collaborative interaction behaviors: the social graph, social applications, and social platforms.
The social graph includes the connective elements that link profiles and show activities through status updates and content sharing. This framework helps identify relationships, influence patterns, potential advocates, and current activities. Behind the scenes, it supports programming techniques that allow social applications to discover relationships, suggest connections, and help spot influencers.
Social applications extend the core capabilities of social platforms and software services that support social networks. They provide the specific functionality that makes larger communities and platforms useful to individual participants. Examples include voice messaging apps and friend-ranking applications that extend Facebook's basic functionality.
These applications enable relationship extensions between brands and individuals by providing member-selected functionality. Want to support charitable causes through your Facebook activity? Install a cause-related application. Don't need voice messaging? Skip that application. This flexibility lets members create functional environments that efficiently deliver the specific services they want.
Social applications also facilitate overall network growth by making networks more useful to members who take advantage of specific applications, increasing the network's value in the process.
Social platforms and communities built around passions, lifestyles, and causes provide gathering points for individuals interested in socializing and collaborating around activities they enjoy together. These communities, support forums, and related social platforms offer places where businesses can participate and add value through direct sponsorship or by creating branded spaces within existing communities.
These three elements – social graph, social applications, and social platforms – drive each other's effectiveness. Remove any one element and the value of business participation drops significantly. Without social graphs, relationships don't form and communities become transactional rather than social. Without communities built around meaningful purposes, participants lack sufficient motivation for organic social growth. Without social applications that extend core platform functionality, activities remain limited to broad demographic interests rather than engaging specific small groups or individuals.
Putting Social Business Into Practice
Implementing social business initiatives challenges many accepted norms in traditional top-down management systems. It requires rethinking aspects of running a business and often involves the discipline of running your business as if you were a customer.
The key connection points between organizations and stakeholders facilitate knowledge sharing through several principles:
Businesses connect socially to customers through visible relationships and useful, collaborative applications. These connections go beyond surface-level marketing to create genuine value exchanges between companies and community members.
Participation, knowledge transfer, and social activities can be measured and optimized. Unlike traditional advertising metrics, social business provides concrete data about relationship quality, community engagement, and collaborative outcomes.
Relationship building and reputation management are important aspects of social behavior that lead to strong communities. The identity and accountability factors discussed earlier create environments where meaningful relationships can form and flourish.
Effective moderation and clear policies spur community growth rather than restricting it. When people understand expectations and feel safe to participate authentically, communities develop the trust necessary for knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Brand outposts created within communities popular with your audience provide ideal connection points for social business. Rather than expecting customers to come to you, these outposts meet people where they already spend their time and attention.
By recognizing how customers and stakeholders use social web components, businesses can adapt to become more participative and collaboration-oriented. This closer connection comes with obligations – accepting customers as collaborative partners means considering what they offer and acting on their input.
Not every business can make this transition easily, but there's a clear process for accomplishing it. Plenty of globally recognized firms have successfully built their businesses using social computing techniques, providing proven frameworks and best practices for others to follow.
The social business ecosystem isn't just about having an online presence anymore. It's about creating interconnected systems where customer relationships, useful applications, and meaningful communities work together to drive long-term business success through authentic collaboration and knowledge exchange.
