Roundtable Recap: January 19 – The Future of Social Media

During this week’s roundtable, we had a wonderful set of discussions on the Future of Social Media.

Black Med-Connect (B-MED)

We first had Dr. Jasmine Weiss from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, pitch the B-MED / Black-Med-Connect mobile app for the Black medical community, a specialized social / professional network idea.

How Can We Continue to Use Facebook Without Facebook Manipulating Us?

The media is currently rife with articles about Facebook’s various nefarious practices and sinister violations of user privacy. Against that backdrop, I would like to invite my readers to a slightly different discussion: How can we use Facebook without Facebook manipulating us?

I am interested in continuing to use Facebook. In various ways, I find the platform useful. However, I have never been big into sharing a lot of personal details on Facebook. You won’t find my birthday listed on the platform, so I do not receive thousands of birthday wishes from random followers. I don’t post a lot of family photos. I will, however, share with you how I use Facebook and my thinking behind those usage models. I am very interested in learning how each of you are using Facebook, what experiments you have conducted, and what conclusions you have drawn.

>>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At that time when you were going through this thought evolution, I imagine you must have done some competitive analysis. All these companies like RightNow and people who came at it from the customer service side were also discovering that they needed to do this. They need to support customer service from the coming out of the social media channels. They were putting in gear solutions for that. How does that impact your thought process?

Joshua March: The prediction that I made using the framework of Innovator’s Dilemma was that all these companies will probably talk about social, but none of them would really invest in it in the way that was needed to create the product. Traditional customer service like email, phone, and live chat all have essentially the same framework and the same work flow process. They’re one-on-one private interactions between an agent and a customer where every single interaction that comes in is a service request. It’s all in platforms that are controlled by the company. Social media comes along and it’s completely different. First off, and most importantly, it’s no longer a private channel. A lot of it is public. It’s on a third-party platform, so it’s not controlled by the company. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did that mean? You wanted to build products using the Facebook API. Did you have an idea what kind of a product you were going to build?

Joshua March: Facebook wasn’t the ruler of the world just yet. Myspace was still big. The consultancy gig that we were doing allowed us to do stuff on Facebook and also on these other social networks. It wasn’t completely clear that Facebook was going to dominate the world. Whilst we were doing these consultancy gigs on the side, my business partner Dan and I had the idea of building this product that would enable you to write an application once and then launch it on all of the social networks at the same time. We started working on that product while we were doing a lot of these Facebook gigs. It wasn’t big money at that time but there was a lot of people who were interested in it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What other things have you seen in the social media performance measurement space in general that are worthy of note?

Clara Shih: More broadly in social media, outside of sales, the easiest is if you’re an e-commerce provider because you can trace directly the fact that someone clicked on a post or a paid ad inside of Facebook or Twitter. That’s the most direct way. There have been correlation studies done between the fact that consumer is a fan of your Facebook page or a follower of yours and on whether that’s an indicator of a more loyal client who spends more. Also, on the customer service side, there’s a number of companies now that handle customer service questions and issues over Twitter. They found that it can be more efficient, and it can actually save in terms of customer call center volume. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: To all of the connections, that’s not necessarily trigger-driven. The trigger is coming from one particular person.

Clara Shih: We can identify patterns across their networks. Insurance agents tend to have peer groups and sell to customers similar to their age range. You see these clusters of people, typically around 30 or 40, who all suddenly get engaged in the same amount of time. If you see many of the same signals in your network, you can share. Then, there’s just good general knowledge content that agents like to share like earthquake readiness, or winterizing your home before the storms come. There’s a general content that’s engaging to a wide population of people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does that naturally break down your business into the kinds of insurance or products that you’re helping sell to? For example, marriage, engagement, or having a baby as opposed to cars or something that has a less pervasive presence on social media?

Clara Shih: A lot of people share photos of their new car also. Maybe, they’re more boastful. As a company, we have chosen to focus on insurance and financial services. I think it’s part of a broader trend that you’re seeing of the rise of vertical SaaS companies. SaaS is becoming a more pervasive delivery model. We’re able to provide much deeper customization for each industry and that allows us to focus and drive greater value to that industry. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on this example a bit. Let me ask you a few questions that will clarify how you do it and how much of this is viable. What is the assumption? Are we talking about running these kinds of trigger analysis on Jimmy’s already connected set of friends or are we running this trigger analysis algorithm on a broader set?

Clara Shih: That’s a great question. On Facebook and on LinkedIn, we run this predictive algorithm on your existing connections. This is due to privacy policies. In a more public social network like Twitter where you can follow people without them having to follow you back, we can apply this analysis more broadly. Part of what Hearsay does is, we train our users on how to authentically connect with more people on their network whether those people are existing customers or not. >>>