ShoZu are describing theirselves as “is the leading provider of mobile social media services that connect mobile consumers with their online social networks, personal blogs, photo storage sites and other Web 2.0 properties from the handset.”
So far, I’m just very impressed with what they are doing and how to use it!
Content:
Quality content is a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping will to help build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask yourself. 1. Where will the content come from? 2. Does it provide indisputable value? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre Web 2.0 initiatives such as beinggirl.com, a community for female teens grappling with relevant topics have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.
Something to think about!
Context:
Context means understanding how to meet people where they are up and serving up the right experience at the right time. Well designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context. For example, Facebook’s recently updated iPhone example is perfectly designed for contextual usage in the go. It’s my favorite way to stay in touch with my Facebook community which I prefer to do while away from the PC. Context means investing time in knowing how your users will want to engage with their community—then enabling them to do so.
Connectivity:
Communities thrive on squishy, hard to measure activities that are relationship based at the root. It’s not about a mass communications but more about the micro-interactions which I’ve talked about at great length. Designing experiences which support thousands of micro-interactions means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder. Communities can in theory be the new CRM (Customer Relationship Management), but require people to be minding it. This should tell you that if you’ve invested in building a community framework, you need to play host if you’re lucky enough for guests to arrive.
Continuity:
Communities which thrive often evolve over time to meet the evolving needs of users. Communities needs to be flexible to evolve over time while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained over time.
It this days where everybody is talking about new social technologies, ranging from blogs to profiles on social networking sites. But almost all of these efforts are one-off technology deployments, instead of being part of a master plan on how to engage customers and employees on a strategic level.
Some ideas on how and why companies need to build their social strategy:
People: You have to understand how your target customer uses social technologies today—and in the future.
Objectives: Given how your customers use technologies, what business objectives can you realistically meet with social technologies? We believe there are five objectives companies can meet better and faster because of Web 2.0 technologies:
1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting, and
5. Embracing.
Strategy: After identifying your business objective, what is your strategy on how you are going to achieve it? A deep understanding of which Web 2.0 technologies and approaches work for which objectives is essential.
Technology: Once the other steps are done, then, and only then, should companies focus on which technologies to use. All too often, we have companies asking us “Which blogging software should we use?” when the question should be “Why should we have a blog at all?” Knowing your objectives will make winnowing and selecting the right technology vendors a much easier process.
One of the things that I ca me across lately is the idea of making/having your own TV-channel, besides just putting your videos on YouTube.
Instead of Twittering, which I from a business point of view, doesn’t find to have any ‘usp’ (If you have some, please let me know, I curios!), why not use the the TV media to stand out amongst all this social networks. I think it’s an easy way of communicating and really have to use the TV-media for what it’s worth. I know that TV is usually is a passive way of communication, but doing it the proper way, together with an rss-feed for example to downloads and notifications.
Ideas and business cases, let me know.