1to1 Magazine - November/December 2008 - (Page 46) EXPERT INSIGHT industry authority Daryl Plummer, Managing Vice President and Gartner Fellow, and Frank Kenney, Research Director, Gartner Can Your Business Get a Date? Mastering social computing is like surviving the senior prom. Will your company be the royalty or a wallflower? p eople in IT are not unfamiliar with the story of the high school nerd who couldn’t get a date. Well, most of us outgrew that stereotype and now live or work in the real world. But now it looks like we have to live through those days of sweaty palms and nervous stomachs all over again in the relationship-oriented world of social computing. Will it be revenge of the nerds or a whole new game as we redefine the landscape of opportunity for generating revenue? Social computing is a paradigm for interaction and computing that says masses of people working together can generate value that individuals never could. That means that if you get enough people gathered together in a community, you can sell to them, work with them, or get them to do things that no single one of them could do. And the force of all that interaction will create something interesting. Well, it’s true. Just take a look at the parallel phenomena of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. These three social computing “water coolers” have started everybody talking—literally. Facebook is a place to share and meet people who are opening up new opportunities for people to build applications. Sure, I know what you’re thinking: “That’s for kids and layabouts with nothing but time on their hands.” OK, well maybe that is a bit harsh—or maybe not. Here is a test to give yourself if you want to know how ready you are for social computing: • Do you think MySpace is something you keep people out of? • Do you want to block Facebook access in your company to stop employees from “playing”? • Do you think “twittering” and “tweeting” is some new drug craze from Europe? But is that it—just fun games and conversation? No. Social computing is set to change the landscape of how value is generated for business. In the social computing world, your customers are more than just purchasers; they become a part of executing your business model. Your customers need to become your sales force, your marketing arm, your research and development team, and even your product managers. Sound strange? Well, the idea is to create a business where your customers will do most of the work. Look at Craigslist. This is a community dedicated to connecting buyers with sellers on the Web. They let the customers set up the advertisements, facilitate the communications, handle shipping, and enter payment. And through it all, Craigslist has begun to devastate the classified advertisement sections of major newspapers—all of this with approximately 25 employees. Profiting from the new paradigm Social computing is not just for consumers and kids playing around. It is part of a shift in the way people think about using computing and interacting with one another on a global basis. From the gaming environments of xBox Live and World of Warcraft, to Second Life and Facebook, these communities are emerging and the savvy businessperson is figuring out how to mine them. Today, mining these environments and communities happens in multiple ways. Advertisement revenue, however, is central to most of them. If you get a community together, someone will want to advertise to, or sell to, its members. So, you as the proprietor of the social community don’t sell to the members. You sell to those who want to get at those members. The nice thing about this is that you are no longer dependent directly on who your members are or how many of them you have in a given month. Those who want to mine your membership only care about the overall size of the community, which will grow organically and virally. Other ways of mining these communities are associated with the kinds of available applications. A current trend in social computing is the reaction of a number of small applications by the community members themselves. Facebook frequently launches new applications to provide options like playing games, starting affinity groups, or even taking surveys. Now there is an opportunity to direct some of the energy of a social community toward a business proposition. Let’s say you generate a survey application that asks people about the kind of clothes they like to wear. Many community members will be curious about the answers of others in the community. In addition, you can use that information to create demographic profiles, learn product preferences, or just to target advertising. It’s like getting free publicity and free marketing direction all in one shot. So how do you get from nerd to social gadfly in the next wave of computing? Try becoming more social. At the very least, you will get an education on the way the world is changing. And if you hate it, there is always the retirement home. We hear they are playing Nintendo Wii games there. Contact Plummer at daryl.plummer@gartner.com. Contact Kenney at frank.kenney@gartner.com ONLINE EXTRA: Listen to an interview with Frank Kenney about how social networking is changing the business paradigm. Go to www.1to1media.com/links/kenney.html 46 1to1 magazine www.1to1media.com http://www.1to1media.com/links/kenney.html http://www.1to1media.com/links/kenney.html http://www.1to1media.com
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