Many people feel today that you have integrated social media into your Biz Model because you happen to have a Facebook group or you are on Twitter or you have a blog. To me, this is outbound social media and it is a bit hum drum today. After all, anybody can do it. The air of novelty quickly wore off.
Now it’s true that Facebook et al are ways to (perhaps) get your message out quickly and inexpensively (disclosure: I use all three tools and like them) but the use of the relational data base which was the precursor of social media is, in many ways, far more meaningful for an enterprise and its business model.
For example, Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com, said one of their most important innovations and one that helped Amazon finally become profitable was the introduction of a seemingly simple question: “Would you like to see what other people who bought this (book, CD, DVD, etc.) also bought?” As a result, the average order size increased substantially for Amazon and the utility of the site increased significantly for users.
Any researcher, say, wanting to build a bibliography, could easily go to the Amazon.com site and see (for free) what other texts were bought by people who had bought books that already appear in his or her bibliography. In effect, the researcher could borrow the brain power of Amazon users to extend his or her own—they were exploiting the wisdom of the crowd.
Who would have thought that a simple URL shortener like www.bit.ly could integrate social media (as I am using the term here) into their biz model—and they do it in two ways. First, any user (you don’t even have to create a user account— bit.ly automatically recognizes your IP address) can see how many clicks have taken place on each link they have created, including individual ones used for, say, an individual client (perhaps even to check on whether the client actually bothered to click on a link you previously sent to them. Thanks to a student of mine for pointing this devious application out.)
Plus you can see what links are being created on bit.ly that are the most popular—i.e., you can find out what the latest trends are before practically anyone else just by looking at what links are being created, how many people are clicking on them and where they will take you.
And by keeping track of all the links that you personally have ever created on bit.ly (you can see them all at a glance—where they link to and how many people have clicked on them since their creation by you), bit.ly keeps their users locked in to a site that otherwise could be easily knocked-off by a competitor.
Can you see a way to integrate the wisdom of the crowd/social media aspects into the core of your biz model; that is, can you harness the data you are generating from your website and your operations to extend your firm’s utility for clients and suppliers as well as for your enterprise?
Let me give you another example. Users of Multiple Listing Services in the US and Canada find these websites difficult to navigate and understand—their user experience is somewhat lacking to be sure. But can you imagine the increase in utility that would be possible if we simply asked Jeff Bezo’s question on MLS.com or MLS.ca: “Would you like to see what other listings people who have looked at this one have also looked at?”
Prof Bruce