Social Business Ecosystem

The social ecosystem, taken as a whole, provides three fundamental opportunities for understanding and leveraging the behaviors associated with collaborative interaction. These opportunities—the social graph, social applications, and social platforms.

 The social graph—the connective elements that link profiles   and indicate activities through status updates and the like—provide a framework for understanding who is related to whom, who is influential, where to look for potential advocates, and what is happening right now. This is important for participants: The social graph and the applications that rely on it facilitate friending, for example, and the sharing of content and experiences throughout a social network.

Social applications—extensions to the core capabilities of the social platforms and software services that support social networks—provide the additional, specific functionality that makes the larger community and platforms useful to individual participants. The Aircel voicemail application and Slide’s Top Friends application that extend the functionality of Facebook are examples of social applications. Social applications enable the extension of relationships between a brand, product, or service to the individual level by providing very specific, member-selected functionality. 

Social platforms—built around passions, lifestyles, and causes or similar higher callings—provide the gathering points for individuals interested in socializing and collaboration in pursuit of the specific activities they enjoy together. These communities, support forums, and related social platforms are all places where your business or organization can participate and add value (including by direct sponsorship of the social space itself) as is the case with Powered’s customer communities built for Kodak, HP, Radio Shack, and iVillage or any of the developer’s communities built on the Jive or Lithium platforms.