FreshNetworks Blog

A simple social graph

The social graph is not a new thing. The concept has been spoken about since at least the 1960s and is simply a way of representing (drawing) all the connections between people. Imagine a small island community of three people with no links to the outside world; you could represent this community as a social graph – showing all three connected to each other. As well as people we might add on other things – places, events, animals – and so use a social graph to show the connections between all of these objects rather than just between people.

The concept of the social graph is not a new thing, and it is not unique to social media. But what social networks do provide is a systematised way of storing these objects and these connections. Facebook is currently the largest social graph in the world but any social network builds a social graph based on what you tell them about yourself, who you connect to and the actions you do.

An example of Facebook, the biggest social graph

Facebook, for example, knows who you are friends with (and who they are friends with). It knows when you and a friend are connected by an event (that you both attend) or by a photo (that you are both in), or by a film (that you both ‘Like’), or by some music (that you have both listened to on Spotify). It then stores this data in a systemised way and so has structured data on you, your life and the way all of the things around you connect. Think of it as a mass of data that can be used to help to define an individual. And Facebook gives brands access to this through their ‘Open Graph’ API.

Benefits for Facebook

For Facebook the benefits of building and storing these social graphs is obvious – the more they know about an individual, the more they can tailor and personalise their experience and the more useful Facebook becomes to them. They can use this data to monetise the network – mainly by selling targeted advertising. They currently earn almost $1.20 a year from every individual Facebook member, and the more data they collect the better then can personalise the experience and the more they can earn. Finally, the quicker they build an individual’s social graph, and the more information they capture in it, the bigger the barrier they build to others being able to come in and compete with them.

Benefits for Facebook members

For the individual members of Facebook there are benefits too. Whilst personalisation can be difficult to get right, there is no doubt that a personlised experience can be much more useful to an individual than a more generic one. It helps you suggest things that they might actually want to read, things you might actually be interested in, and even show you adverts for things you might actually want to buy. The more data you share with Facebook, the better they can personalise your experience and more useful you will find it. Of course, you need to remember to be informed about what you choose to share and why.

Benefits for brands

It is probably fair to say that brands so far have not taken the most advantage of the social graph. Partly this is because many are still experimenting with social media and many think of it just as a way to engage and build their own communities and networks, rather than exploring the pure data benefits that they can get. But applied correctly, brands can use this data to provide a better targeted and more personalised service, and even to help shape products themselves. Whether you are Amazon, using Facebook’s social graph to help you choose products for your friends’ birthdays, or KLM using Facebook and LinkedIn social graphs to help you choose who to sit next to on the plane, there are opportunities across sectors and audience types. In fact the biggest barrier to brands using the social graph effectively is their own creativity and ability to explore how the data they can get from social graphs (including Facebook) can help your business. And the biggest opportunity is to explore ways that data from these social graphs can be combined with a brands own proprietary data to build a bespoke data set that can let you develop products and personalise services for customers.

All brands should be exploring and understanding the different social graphs out there (including Facebook’s) and the data that these can offer. Social media is much more than just a means of communicating to and engaging with people. In fact the possibilities that this kind of data offers can often be much more interesting.

With seven in ten brands saying they plan to increase their presence across social media in 2012 (according to a recent survey by Awareness) we thought it would be a good idea to take a regular look at the current social media landscape.

So here’s a quick run down of  what we think has been hot in social media this January:

1. Farfetch.com – the future of social retail?

2012 looks set to be the year of the social online retailer. Luxury retailer farfetch.com announced that it saw a 73% rise in traffic from Facebook in the second half of 2011 and it recently raised a second round of funding to the tune of $18m.

And it’s not just luxury online retailers who are seeing the value of social. As part of its strategy to encourage social shopping, fab.com launched its live feed for members to easily check out what others are buying, liking, tweeting and sharing – all in real time.

Just 7 months since launching, fab.com already has 1.4m members – over half of which have joined as a result of social sharing, so it clearly makes business sense to encourage this channel.

2. KLM and Scandinavian Airlines encourage social flying

Following on from their popular ‘Surprise’ campaign, KLM are getting even more social by launching their ‘Meet and Seat’ campaign. The idea is that when customers book flights, they have the option of creating a public profile and then choosing who they sit next to on the plane. Romantic stuff or creepy as hell? You decide.

Scandinavian Airlines has also got in on the act by encouraging members to use their air miles by booking flights together. Their ‘Couple up, to buckle up’ campaign shared QR codes with members who had to put their phones together in order to access a unique 2 for 1 booking code.

3. Soundcloud gives Instagram a personal touch

It looks like sound hosting just got interesting with the launch of Soundcloud’s new slideshow app, ‘Story Wheel’,this month. The idea behind ‘Story Wheel’ is that members can look through their Instagram photos and record an audio description to go with them. The effect is an old-school slide-show with a personal soundtrack – you can see the founders of Soundcloud’s own version here.

Audio-hosting platform Soundcloud has grown by about 1 million members in the last couple of months and is now fully integrated with Facebook. This month, it reached a milestone of 10 million users, so diversifying their offering is a smart move to show that sound can make images that bit more personal.

With such a large audience behind them, perhaps now may be the time for brands to think about how they can use audio-hosting as part of their social media strategy.

Image via Wikipedia

January has seen a spate of people tweeting things they shouldn’t – from Diane Abbott to Ed Miliband in the UK to countless people working for brands across the world. We’ve also seen a renewed debate in the UK about how the professions should use social media – notably about teachers befriending their pupils on Facebook. One way that many organisations deal with this is to create social media guidelines but even more important than any guidelines you might right is the internal culture change needed to real to make yours a true social business.

Surveys in the UK last year consistently showed that between 35% and 40% of UK firms have no social media guidelines in place. And even for those firms that did, many employees claim that they do not know what they are. Guidelines are useful, but really they are just the starting point, something every firm should have in place. Much more useful than any social media guidelines is the cultural change you need across your business to really take advantage of the opportunities social can bring.

This change is broadly in two main areas: bringing your staff closer to your customers, and building your staff as your biggest advocates. Both of these are important tasks and done properly can start to have a real impact on your organisation.

1) Bringing your staff closer to your customers

In any organisation some employees are customer-facing and some are not; and only a few of those that are customer-facing really understand what a range of your customers are thinking. This often leads to a real gap in understanding between what your customers think about you, your brand and products, and what yous staff think that they think. Maybe your staff think that customers are more critical than they are. Or that some things are more important to them than they are. Or even that customers like you a lot more than they really do. There are always gaps in understanding, and social provides a way to close this gap.

At the simplest level, all organisations could benefit from using real-time comments and discussions as part of internal comms. Show what people are saying about your brand on screen around your office or on computer desktops will begin to connect people to conversations. Analysing this and showing positive and negative trends and the topics of conversation will being to let people understand the weight of discussion and opinion online.

You can go much further than this. Rather than just showing real-time information to staff you can start to really connect them to customers. Develop an advocate programme not just for the external benefits that they will bring but also to bring information into the business. Have a formal mentoring relationship where customer-advocates mentor your key staff gives them a real role in the business and allows you to use your most connected customers and contacts to support your business. On a broader level encouraging each employee to build their own networks and connections onine (be that through Twitter or through specialist forums and groups) will help them to be more involved and engaged and will help them to solve problems – giving them an extended team of people from which to source ideas and support.

Connecting your staff (be it passively or actively) will help them be more informed and help to focus your efforts on what really matters – the customer.

2) Building your staff as your biggest advocates

Your staff should already be your biggest advocates and you should be encouraging them to use social media to help them project this advocacy and support for your brand.

Many organisations develop comlpex and valuable advocacy programmes for customers and influencers online, but fail to develop similar programmes for their biggest advocates – their staff. Your staff care about the brand, and your products and are often emotionally involved in what you do and why you do it. Sharing this externally is valuable; getting them to share it even more so. Encourage your staff to build networks that are appropriate to them – if they work in product development they could build contacts through forums and groups with people who could help them. If they work in sales they could use Twitter as a way to build their own brand and reach out to people to fill the top of their sales funnel. And everybody across your business could connect with people using your products, in your industry or customers looking for help and advice.

You staff will be doing this already (whether you know it or not) and encouraging and training them to really use social tools will help their efforts benefit you more. Rather than them leaving a review on a product of yours saying it is great, imagine how much more powerful it would be if they went in and said “I was part of the team that worked on developing this product. We’re really proud of it and hope you like it too”. Encourage and enable them and make sure your guidelines are more about setting boundaries and providing support for this.

For many brands reach of your messaging and engagement is important. Your staff provide the single best vehicle to do this. Empowering, practically encouraging, your teams to all engage in social media will be good for their development and also good for you.

When people ask me to explain what social business is all about, I’ve found that describing it as an alternative to email for internal communication and collaboration is an easy-to-grasp starting point.

What makes this explanation even more interesting is that last week Thierry Breton, CEO of IT services firm Atos announced his intention to have a “zero email” policy within the next 18 months. This statement has been seen by many as controversial, but some believe this will be viewed as normal rather than exceptional in the not too distant future.

Breton highlights that internal emails are becoming increasingly demanding of time. As users accumulate more and more data in their inboxes  (which may or may not be relevant to their job) searching for key information becomes more difficult and time consuming. Thus Thierry is suggesting that eradicating internal email will make his internal team more efficient.

Let’s be clear – email is not going away any time soon and Atos would still use it for external communication. However, transforming the internal communication model in this way this way is a definite move towards becoming a social business. In fact, Atos would not be the first multinational company moving towards a social business model and IT companies are ideally placed to pioneer this change as they have the in-house resource to implement these systems and the desire to be leaders in the field.

Here are just  a few areas where moving away from email for internal process can be beneficial:

For the workforce of the future

In an interview with the BBC, Breton highlighted how “most of the young people that we were hiring were not using email anymore after graduating from universities. They were instead mainly using instant messaging tools and social networks like Facebook – and for most of them, when they joined Atos it was first time they had ever worked with internal email tools like [Microsoft] Outlook.”

I expect that much of the criticism of Breton’s desired policy has arisen from a confusion as to what tools will be used – “Facebook/Twitter-like” may be misleading, causing people to imagine an informal or very short-form discussion. Social business tools will be purpose built for enterprise, but retain the familiar user experience of the major social networks. The adoption of these platforms will come naturally to younger recruits and is only going to become more prevalent over time.

Stop attaching, start collaborating

The ability to work on documents collaboratively is perhaps what excites me the most about social business. Tools such as Chatter or Confluence (see our list of collaboration tools for social business for other examples) offer secure environments for documents to be shared and worked on simultaneously. Freedom from the need to track, revise and merge changes into a single document is a great boost to efficiency.

It goes beyond the sharing of documents, though, as pooling skills and knowledge will be another benefit. In a large enterprise, the ability to quickly identify others who may have the skills or knowledge you need for a project will be invaluable. Individuals will be able to tag their areas of expertise, or even topics that they are interested in and so be able to contribute even if they are from different departments or countries.

Top down change

Successful transformation to a social business requires senior buy-in, and so I hope that Breton is successful in proving the value of alternatives to internal email. If this is the case then Atos will be a valuable example for others looking to demonstrate the benefits to management.

Today I went to IBM and SugarCRM‘s “Get Social” social business and social crm roadshow.

Some of the key takeaways from the event include:

Social Business

Roy Lee, Marketing Director at IBM gave the following tips about social business:

• Social business should tie together processes and departments. The IBM definition of social business is a business that is engaging, transparent and nimble.

• Social media v social business – Lee believes that social media is about communication mostly  for marketing and PR. Social business, however, embraces social media but brings the tools and techniques inside an organisation, aligning goals across the organisation as a whole.

• When it comes to social business, Lee believes organisations have to set an AGENDA:

A – Align organisational goals and culture

G – Gain social trust

E – Engage through experience

N – Network  your business processes

D – Design for reputation and risk management

A – Analyse your data

• The most successful way to adopt social business is from the top down, via the senior executives and the board. Then you need to establish a digital council, community managers, a centre of excellence for continued learning and development, content management, guidelines and standards, reputation and risk management and metrics and measurements.

• Lee believes that social gaming is critically important for engaging and IBM themselves have 2 social games internally – “IBM Innovate”, which is a business process management game which involves sharing final scores both internally and externally, and “City One”, a city planning simulation game.

Social CRM

The key take home from Tom Schuster, VP and General Manager of SugarCRM Europe, session on getting started with  Social CRM was as follows:

1. Don’t know where to start with Social CRM? Start with the customer.
2. Next, choose and open source CRM system that allows you to keep up-to-date with changes online.
3. Ensure the CRM has a flexible Cloud infrastructure to allow easy data migration and alignment.
4. Integrate collaborative processes into gathering data and merge all existing data with new data that is gathered to give a holistic picture.
5. Allow users to connect to the CRM using their own tools and platforms.

While the session was very interesting, it didn’t offer any ground-breaking advice or case studies about  social business or social crm. However, it was good to see that social business is finally becoming a key objective for business leaders and owners on a global scale.