2012-01-27 @ admin
The ‘information revolution’ has brought along access to the information from multiple media, as well as previously unprecedented development of peer content and communication, which can even be regarded as a new and distinct kind of (‘social’) media. The interest of electronic media users to produce and consume their own content has been associated to the developments in technology, enabling ‘common people’ to use the World Wide Web applications (i.e. Web 2.0 technologies) as platforms for publishing and consuming peer information. The best examples of companies (and/or nonprofit organizations) making the use of peer information in their business models include Wikipedia (user-generated encyclopedia), Flick, del.ic.ious and other Web sites for photo sharing, collective bookmarking and other forms of online collaboration, SourceForge Web site for the open-source developers, personal ‘Web logs’ (blogs), etc.
However, of all those, the most popular for Internet users (as well as the most catching subject for the causal observers) seem to be the social networking sites. Those services, based on Web 2.0 principles, enable their members to either maintain the existing social relationships, or develop completely new ones, by enabling individuals to communicate, share information about themselves, browse through the list of own (and others’) social contacts and use (other) different online tools. Although the use of such Web sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, etc.) might seem as ‘fun’, it is often also a form of socialization, especially for teenagers. Since they serve both the purpose of the public diary, as well as a source of legally available information to advertisers, government agencies, etc., users of social networking need to be aware that the information they share online is not guaranteed to be private.
In addition, users may have difficulties in exporting their data from one social networking service to another, if they wish to do so, since the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web and the Internet, in general, has been the openness and interoperability, instead of creating private ‘walled gardens’ of data.
In terms of CRM, these new services enable extremely easy collection of information about and from the customers, since the social networking users readily reveal a great deal of their customs, likes and dislikes, and other relevant marketing data. At the other hand, they are creating a social context for the marketing campaigns of organizations willing to use the social networking as a new platform for their KM/CRM initiatives. Namely, knowledge for the customers can be created by their peers, which has been acknowledged by the advertising practice of the world’s largest social networking Web site Facebook.
The most important ‘business asset’ provided to an organization’s KM/CRM initiative is the ‘social graph’, i.e. the structure of the virtual community, created by the online social networking, demonstrating who are its members and what are their social connections.
This creates opportunities for targeted advertising, featuring the all-present Facebook’s ‘like button’, enabling Facebook members to publicly demonstrate their affection toward a cause, product/service, brand, organization, etc. In this way, Facebook has, according to a recent article published in Ad Age, “became the biggest relationship-marketing provider for many brands”.
Effectiveness of Facebook’s approach is further enhanced by the opportunity to report to each of its members how many of one’s social connections ‘like’ a certain offer, which introduces the ‘social metrics’ into the advertising and relationship-building contexts .
To sum up – customers/users/clients matter, more than ever before, but in order to serve them well, organizations need not only to collect and analyze all existing forms of related knowledge in an information system, but also to engage in relevant conversations, which go on in user communities anyway. The development of social networking sites makes these user communities accessible to the marketing departments as never before and, in such a manner, creates opportunities for development of comprehensive and innovative CRM frameworks, such as crm software uk.