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[NOTE: This post is a recap of this week's series on the Community Engagement Framework.]

The Community Engagement Framework will contain the definitions of what I mean when I talk and write about community engagement, social business, social media and social governance.

Social Media

Social media can be defined as an ecosystem that consists of three elements:

• People People are the driving force behind social media instead of professional publishers or editorial staff for example.
• Behavior People have to do something, whether it is creating content, interacting with one another or distributing content. Behavior is what boosts social media.
• Technology Technology enables social media to happen on a quick and easy basis by providing the platforms and tools for People and Behavior.

The image below illustrates the definition:

Social media is an autonomous entity. It will take place regardless of whether a random individual or organization decides to become involved.

Once an organization decides to become involved in social media, it becomes a more strategic process. Organizations need to understand and think of what their involvement will be within social media.

Social Business

Social business can be seen as becoming involved with social media as an organization. It is a process of an organization building social capital by creating valuable relationships.

The elements that make up social business are:

• Goals and Objectives Organizations need to understand and define what they are looking to achieve by using social media.
• Strategy The goals and objectives need to be translated into an approach that will lead to positive business results.
• Organization The strategy devised has to be rolled out within the organization. Teams need to be formed, employees need to be informed and educated, and the operational details need to be figured out.
• Integration The organization’s social business should be aligned with other business activities to establish consistency and complementary results.

The image below illustrates the elements of social business:

By addressing the elements above, organizations prepare themselves effectively for engaging in social media.

Social Governance

Social governance refers to the formal and informal rules that are used to monitor and govern social media use. These fall into four categories:

• Laws Local, national and international laws can contain formal rules on how to communicate online and which disclosures need to be provided.
• Rules and Regulations Formal institutes, such as trade or industry organizations, can issue rules and regulations that members of the industry need to adhere to. An example is the blogging disclosure rules that the FTC issued last year.
• Guidelines Organizations can create their own guidelines on how employees use social media. Examples of organizations that have a formal social media policy are IBM, Intel and Kodak (PDF).
• Ethical Codes The unwritten ethical rules on communication should also not be overlooked. These ethical codes are often a good starting point for creating more formal rules or guidelines.

Social governance is needed to make sure that social media is not abused by either organizations or members of the public to deceive others. And abuse has definitely taken place. Examples of Belkin, Whole Foods and Honda illustrate how sensitive the issue is and how seriously governance needs to be taken.

Community Engagement Framework

Social media, social business and social governance come together in the Community Engagement Framework.

For organizations, social business lies at the heart of community engagement. This should be the starting point for organizations to determine their approach for engaging in social media. The operational part takes place within social media where the content creation, content distribution, and interaction take place. Social governance takes place around social media and social business as a guiding factor.

Leading up to today, I talked about social media and social business as part of the Community Engagement Framework. Today, I’ll add the final part of the framework: social governance.

Social governance refers to the formal and informal rules that are used to monitor and govern social media use. These fall into four categories:

• Laws Local, national and international laws can contain formal rules on how to communicate online and which disclosures need to be provided.
• Rules and Regulations Formal institutes, such as trade or industry organizations, can issue rules and regulations that members of the industry need to adhere to. An example is the blogging disclosure rules that the FTC issued last year.
• Guidelines Organizations can create their own guidelines on how employees use social media. Examples of organizations that have a formal social media policy are IBM, Intel and Kodak (PDF).
• Ethical Codes The unwritten ethical rules on communication should also not be overlooked. These ethical codes are often a good starting point for creating more formal rules or guidelines.

Social governance is needed to make sure that social media is not abused by either organizations or members of the public to deceive others. And abuse has definitely taken place. Examples of Belkin, Whole Foods and Honda illustrate how sensitive the issue is and how seriously governance needs to be taken.

Community Engagement Framework

Social media, social business and social governance come together in the Community Engagement Framework.

For organizations, social business lies at the heart of community engagement. This should be the starting point for organizations to determine their approach for engaging in social media. The operational part takes place within social media where the content creation, content distribution, and interaction take place. Social governance takes place around social media and social business as a guiding factor.

Let me hear your thoughts on the Community Engagement Framework in the comments or hit me up on Twitter!

Yesterday, I kicked off the Fundamentals series with an introduction to social media as part of the Community Engagement Framework. Today, in Part 2, I’ll continue with social business.

Social business can be seen as becoming involved with social media as an organization. It is a process of an organization building social capital by creating valuable relationships.

The elements that make up social business are:

• Goals and Objectives Organizations need to understand and define what they are looking to achieve by using social media.
• Strategy The goals and objectives need to be translated into an approach that will lead to positive business results.
• Organization The strategy devised has to be rolled out within the organization. Teams need to be formed, employees need to be informed and educated, and the operational details need to be figured out.
• Integration The organization’s social business should be aligned with other business activities to establish consistency and complementary results.

The image below illustrates the elements of social business:

By addressing the elements above, organizations prepare themselves effectively for engaging in social media. I’ll write more about social business and the important aspects organizations should consider as we go along. For now, this is the baseline for the framework. Tomorrow, I’ll be discussing social governance but for now, your comments—here or on Twitter—are welcome.

Photo credit: Dominik Eckelt

As I alluded to last week, I’d be taking a step back (to eventually take two steps forward) with posts that focused more on the fundamentals. In the first of a three-part post, I’ll outline the Community Engagement Framework, starting with social media. This framework will contain the definitions of what I mean when I talk and write about community engagement, social business, social media and social governance.

Social media can be defined as an ecosystem that consists of three elements:

• People People are the driving force behind social media instead of professional publishers or editorial staff for example.
• Behavior People have to do something, whether it is creating content, interacting with one another or distributing content. Behavior is what boosts social media.
• Technology Technology enables social media to happen on a quick and easy basis by providing the platforms and tools for People and Behavior.

The image below illustrates the definition:

Social media is an autonomous entity. It will take place regardless of whether a random individual or organization decides to become involved.

Once an organization decides to become involved in social media, it becomes a more strategic process. Organizations need to understand and think of what their involvement will be within social media.

I’ll talk more about this tomorrow in Part 2: Social Business. For now the comments are yours or talk back at me via Twitter.

Photo credit: Martin Barraud

Earlier this month, I wrote about 2010 developments on the consumer side. In this post, I’ll focus on developments that I think will affect business the most, particular in regards to social business and social media. These are the topics:

• Rationalization
• Preparation
• Application
• Other developments

Rationalization

• ROI The discussion around social business ROI (return on investment) will become more important during 2010. Not only will measurement and analytics become more complete, they will also become more accurate in allocating return between an organization’s activities, e.g. social media, advertising, PR et cetera.

• Filtering With more organizations and people jumping on the “social bandwagon”, there will be an increased need to filter the signal from the noise. Monitoring and communication tools will become cleverer in processing the information stream that takes place.

Preparation

• Organization Readiness Organizations will hire and educate their personnel about why and how to use social media. Also, more organizations will create a formal social media policy.

• Scalability Related to the ROI issue, organizations will have to deal with the scalability of customer engagement. The challenge lies in the efficient use of human input to effectively engage online.

• Security There will be an increase in third-party application threats and general attacks through social media tools. Organizations will have to be prepared to deal with these threats, both through a social media policy and through close involvement from the IT department.

Application

• Integrated Approach Organizations will become more adept at integrating their social activities with their other business activities, such as marketing and recruitment. This will also help organizations build a more uniform identity, both online and offline.

• Social CRM The social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) will proliferate. There is a large dispersion of contact data on a vast array of social media tools, but the central repository where all contacts are organized is missing. A higher level of integration between social media tools will be necessary to facilitate this development.

• Government Involvement The reach and influence that Barack Obama has achieved has served as an inspirational case for many local and national governments. Governments will become increasingly involved in social media to communicate with citizens.

• Geographic Penetration Asia and Russia are still markets that are open to further penetration from new market entrants. These markets have a high technology penetration, both web and wireless, but are currently dominated by local players.

• Social Enterprise Software Enterprise software will become more social to capitalize on the benefits that adopting Enterprise 2.0 offers. In addition, making enterprise software more social will help adoption by users because it will have a familiar look and feel to what they are used to from applications like Twitter and Facebook. In addition, cloud computing will become more prevalent. It will leap from mostly storage services to becoming more application-centric, as demonstrated by the announcement of Microsoft Office Live.

Other

• Regulation There will be more regulation, with guidelines, laws and active governance. This will not only apply to social activities by organizations. It will also apply to those who try to get their hand in social media, like organizations that try to issue certifications.

• Multimedia Established content producers will turn to the Web as an alternative to existing content delivery platforms, with tools like Hulu and Boxee serving as leading examples.

• Green Movement In an attempt to produce a more positive CSR image and also to save on costs, organizations will concentrate on becoming greener. Data centers are a good example of the current activities organizations are undertaking to become greener.

As always, your comments are welcome.

Photo credit: Mike Kemp

This month, I’ll be looking ahead to 2010 and the developments that I’ll be looking forward to. In this post, I’ll be discussing trends on the consumer side and in the next post, we’ll be looking at developments on the business side. The developments on the consumer side I’ll be looking at are:

• Social Developments
• Content Developments
• Technology Developments

Social Developments

• Organizing Contacts Facebook had user groups where members could organize their friends. This year, Twitter introduced a list feature. More social media platforms will introduce a list-esque feature to help members organize their contacts. This will help drive the growth of the social CRM.

• Privacy Privacy settings will become more prevalent. Certain services, like Facebook, have complex privacy settings and more services will adopt similarly complex settings. On the other hand, the information that is publicly available will be found more easily due to SEO (search engine optimization) and a higher level of linkability and context.

Content Developments

• Organizing Content Social media offers a low threshold for people to publish and distribute content. This has, however, produced a large information stream that has overloaded people. People will be looking to organize and filter content more to feed their interests in a more targeted way.

• Collaboration We will see more collaborative content efforts as opposed to content provided by one person, as observed by the advent of tools such as Google Wave.

Technology Developments

• Dust Settling The statistics on social media tools are still hugely skewed. Twitter, for example, has 70 million members. However, only a relatively small subset of those 70 million is truly active. The dust will need to settle on the true activity numbers and monitoring by organizations will help them acquire these insights.

• Real-Time We’ll witness a larger demand and supply of real-time information and services. Consumers will be more demanding on having information available at anytime and any place. Organizations will want to benefit from the information stream that is current and publicly available.

• Geo-Location Location-based services, like Brightkite, Gowalla and Foursquare, will play a more prominent commercial role. With integration becoming more important, these services are able to help local businesses find their patrons and vice versa. These services have the ability to become the new loyalty card, with perks built into the service.

• Augmented Reality AR will take flight next year with more applications that are able to provide more information or an improved user experience to consumers. Organizations can use this to create added value and a (temporary) competitive advantage.

• eReaders As the availability of literature in electronic form increases, ereaders will become more popular with the public. During the year, we might even see ereaders that incorporate some of the other developments mentioned above.

As always, your comments are welcome.

Photo credit: Mike Kemp

Media:

1. Vinyl records / VHS tapes / Cassette tapes / CDs / LaserDisc / MiniDisc and their playback equipment
2. 3.5” and 5.25” Floppy disks
3. Film rolls
4. Standard definition
5. Encyclopedias and atlases
6. Phone books
7. Newspapers and magazines

Hardware:

1. CRT monitors
2. Dot-Matrix printers
3. Typewriters
4. Answering machines
5. Rotary-dial telephones

Software:

1. DOS
2. Command line interface
3. WordPerfect
4. Lotus

Connectivity:

1. Handwritten postal mail
2. Payphones
3. Fax machines
4. Modems
5. Pagers
6. Walkie Talkies

Web:

1. Portals / Search engines like Altavista and Lycos
2. Chat programs like IRC and ICQ

And the most frightening thing that will be forgotten is “privacy”.

Where does the good old travel agency come in? Nowhere, really. Some may have their own websites where they provide a similar search service, but the fact is that any human involvement can be cut to zero.

Of course there will still be people who prefer to visit a travel agency. Some travel agencies will continue to exist, but they only do so because they differentiate themselves by offering more than being able to find the best deal for a customer. They offer knowledge and expertise in a special area, like adventure travel, or specialize in a particular niche/audience.

Differentiate. Improve your skills and knowledge, if only to prevent being replaced by a machine.