What Are the Five Social Media Business Factors?
Social networking
technologies develop a
momentum of their
own. Momentum
creates motion, but
without direction,
individuals and
organizations can end
up spinning in circles.
The effect of this
momentum eventually
brings individuals and
businesses to a point of
needing to define and
evaluate the value of
participation.
Given that social networks and social media are new phenomena, there is a need to define evaluation criteria from which effective measures and critical thinking can be applied. Our assessment of the issues needing careful examination and subsequent planning led us to five factors for consideration.
These include:
1. Enablement
2. Empowerment
3. Engagement
4. Enrichment
5. Enslavement
While the phenomena of social networking technologies appeals to the basic human and business needs without knowing “how” to properly maximize factors 1 through 4, it can become a detriment by enslaving people and businesses into non-productive and possibly damaging activities.
The Hidden Game Appeal
Many adults are intrigued by the phenomena of social networking and will spend countless hours engaged in the game. It is a game when you consider what operators know and users do not.
Operators understand the appeal of new technology when it is designed around “basic human and business needs for relationships, significance and
wanting not to be left out of the “latest and greatest.” Knowing this, operators launch new technology aimed at targeted consumer and business interest, new features to intrigue the masses, new functions that promise new efficiencies and network growth that promotes being able to reach more people, more markets.
The masses follow the appeal, and the cycle of intrigue is designed to keep the masses engaged. Network operators are motivated to establish technological relationships with their customer aiming at drawing in the masses so the networks economic value increases. The economic value of the network is aimed at satisfying the shareholder, not the users. Networks leave the creation of individual or business value to the imagination of the users.
Technology can become a detriment to our time, our relations and our economic standing if we are not investing mindfully with a view to a financially viable outcome. Technology can also become an enabler of opportunities to leverage the medium for our own individual or professional gains. Our gains must be definable and useful to our individual or professional purposes.
A purpose driven model is designed around defining the value gained by leveraging the intersection of human behavior and social technologies.
The five factors needing consideration come in many different forms, but the basic tenant of possible outcomes remains consistent for individuals and businesses alike.
The Relationship Economy is about leveraging technological advances that enable, empower, engage and enrich personal and professional interacting processes aimed at a purpose.
What Are the Enabling Factors?
Enablement can refer to any
approach, which provides means
or opportunity. Means refers to
unique methods that empower
people and businesses to pursue
and capture unique
opportunities.
Unique methods are new
processes that differ from
traditional methods. In fact,
unique methods may be the
total opposite of traditional
methods and therein lies the power of enablement.
When people use the word “enablement,” it typically implies a new approach to accomplishing something or solving an existing problem. Technology enables people and businesses to create new methods or processes aimed at solving old problems or creating brand new value opportunities.
People are just beginning to learn the power of the social web and how to use it to solve problems or create new value. The learning process enables people and businesses to see things anew and subsequently enables them with means and opportunity.
For businesses, the social web provides a new paradigm of enablement.
Customers, suppliers and employees as well as entire markets are enabled to speak without barriers and share without constraints. Enabled by the power of open and honest conversations, people are learning to create a voice, which is just beginning to get the market’s attention. People are beginning to recognize the opportunities to participate in making existing markets better or the creation of brand new markets when old markets do not respond.
What Is The Approach That Enables?
People enabled to accomplish more and pursue creative opportunities gain significant satisfaction from their efforts. In business, internal and external interactions between people set the tone for outcomes. Whether it is marketing, sales, customer support, production or recruitment, without the people the processes simply will not work. Enablement comes at the intersection of technology and human behavior. The intersection itself re-engineers everything, but to comprehend the outcomes one must first re-engineer their thinking.
If you want employees, customers and suppliers satisfied more than ever before, enable them. You ask how? Enablement is not technology by itself.
Rather, it allows people to think what can be done with technology. When you combined human behavior with social technology, you expand the creative forces of human desire for opportunity and you enable people with the means to capture opportunities.
Technology in and of itself is no longer a proprietary competitive advantage.
What you do with it creates the advantages. The mindset of business leaders must change in order for enablement to work. Letting go of the control and command paradigm and embracing open and honest conversations is the first and hardest step.
This is a major paradigm shift for traditional thinking and a significant power shift. Not enabling people to solve problems or create new opportunities is detrimental to business growth and satisfied people. Businesses cannot
effectively grow with unsatisfied employees, customers and suppliers. It is that simple yet so very complex.
Do you really want enablement to work for you? Socialutions change will be required from the top first. The bottom is already prepared and able to change.
What Are the Empowerment Factors?
Empowerment refers to increasing
the spiritual, political, social or
economic strength of individuals and
communities. It often involves the
empowered developing confidence in
their own capacities.
Sociological empowerment often
addresses members of groups that
social discrimination processes have
excluded from decision-making
processes through - for example -
discrimination based on disability, race,
ethnicity, religion, or gender or
position. Empowerment as a
methodology is often associated with enabling people, communities and organizations to reach their full capacity.
As we watch the “social era” emerge, we are witnessing people feeling empowered to converse, connect and collaborate on anything and everything on a global scale. The conversations are boundless and flow like swelling rivers of interest, strength and confidence.
Is The Web The Enabling Tool of Empowerment?
Today’s web is rich with functions and features able to reach millions, one-to-one at a time. Every week new advances, new communities and new tools enable human expression like never before in the history of humanity. The enablement features of today’s web include:
1. Mass Communications
2. Connectivity with people and communities of common affinities 3. Broadcasting tools for the creation and distribution of user-generated media
4. Freedom to express an opinion or share an experience about anything, anyone and everything
5. Conversational rivers that spread at the click of a mouse from one-to-one to millions
People are feeling empowered to speak out for and against anything and everything. Insulated from having to “speak alone,” people connect with common experiences about life, business and brands. Feeling free, these communications and related media are creating markets of their own. These new markets of conversations are and will continue to influence traditional markets. No one can hide from the impact of empowered conversations.
How Can Business Gain from all this Empowerment?
Traditionally, businesses have talked a lot about empowering people to serve customers, each other and markets targeted by the business. However, business cultures have inherent barriers to empowerment. Power, politics and favoritism has yet to “leave the building” so to speak. Management enjoys power and human weakness, and may use power and politics for selfish gains rather than holistic gains” for all involved in the business, i.e., the people.
People have been constrained from freely expressing opinions or positions within organizations for decades. Human behavior has learned to adapt to the environments of institutional corporate speak while the very fiber of human nature wants to shout out issues, opinions and principals.
Now the curtain has been pulled back and the conversational web has empowered people to do what they have always wanted to do, express freely. Fundamentally, businesses now must choose one or more of the following options due to the newly enabled empowerment of the web. These options include:
1. Ignore it and prepare for the repercussions 2. Try and control it and not be surprised to learn it can’t 3. Ban it and then find it influencing your external market 4. Embrace it and learn how to enable and empower your business to gain more than ever before
Which is the most logical and social choice of preference? Actions or lack of actions will demonstrate the decision. More importantly, words and related actions will show whether an individual really believes in empowerment.
What Are the Engagement Factors?
The social web
promotes and enhances
engagement processes
aimed at relationships.
Four elements define
engagement factors in
The Relationship
Economy. The four
factors are tightly inter-
connected processes
that determine the
outcomes of an
organization’s total
“engagement efforts.”
The Socialutions for any
organization are
fundamentally tied to
these four elements.
The four elements are:
1. Customer Engagement
2. Employee Engagement
3. Brand Engagement
4. Engagement Marketing
Customer Engagement (CE) refers to the engagement of customers with one another, with a company or with a brand. The initiative for engagement can be either consumer-led or company-led and the medium of engagement can be online or offline.
Customer Engagement marketing places conversions into a longer term, more strategic context and is premised on the understanding that a simple focus on maximizing conversions can, in some circumstances, decrease the likelihood of repeat conversions. CE aims at long-term engagement, encouraging customer loyalty and advocacy through word- of-mouth. In this sense “CE is the best measure of current and future performance” according to the 2006 Annual Online CE Survey.
The concept and practice of online Customer Engagement enables organizations to respond to the fundamental changes in customer behavior that the internet has brought about, as well as to the increasing ineffectiveness of the traditional ‘interrupt and repeat’, broadcast model of advertising. Due to the fragmentation and specialization of media and audiences, as well as the proliferation of community- and user-generated
