Social Technology Quarterly (Volume 1| Issue 2)

Social
Technology
Quarterly
July - September 2011
Volume 1 Issue 2

Overview
Welcome to our second issue of the Social Technology Quarterly. The Social Technology Quarterly is
Kuliza’s research publication aimed at educating brand and product owners on how they can engage
their world better using social technologies.
As usual we cover the latest research, trends and developments in social technologies and examine
how their potential can be leveraged for businesses. The Quarterly is divided into four sections: com-
merce, campaigns, collaboration and CRM. We will show how social technologies add value to each
area.
Along with contributions from Kuliza, Gautam Ghosh, who blogs at www.gautamblogs.com and is
among the top 10 most influential bloggers on Talent Management, HR and Enterprise Social Media,
contributes a guest article on talent communities.
We hope you enjoy the latest issue. We will look forward to hearing your views.
Team Kuliza
Social
Technology
Quarterly

Contributors
Achintya Gupta
| @achintya85
Marketing enthusiast and Brand Manager at Kuliza. Writes
on commerce and CRM.
Kaushal Sarda | @ksarda
Technology evangelist, serial entrepreneur, Chief Evangelist
at Kuliza, and an advisor to HashCube. Writes on
commerce and CRM.
Diarmaid Byrne | @diarmaidb
Psychologist and interested in behaviour change and
gamification. Chief People Officer at Kuliza. Writes on
communities and collaboration.
Gautam Ghosh | @gautamghosh
Marketing Lead and Platform Evangelist at Brave New
Talent, a career social network that enables companies to
build talent communities. Blogs at www.gautamblogs.com.
Nitin Saboo
Solutions specialist at Kuliza. Writes on campaigns
and commerce.
Aram Bhusal | @phoenixwizard
Writer, blogger and technology enthusiast. Developer at
Kuliza. Writes on emerging trends.
Kshitiz Anand | @kshitiz
UI designer, photographer and Design Strategist at Kuliza.
Writes on design and interaction.

Contents
Commerce
How are Social Platforms Powering Mobile Commerce 5
Achintya Gupta
Social Shopping: The Changing Agenda of Shopping 9
Kaushal Sarda
The Social Media Construct: A Case of Remediation 12
Kshitiz Anand
Campaigns
Augmenting Reality: A New Age Shopping Experience 15
Kaushal Sarda
Social Media Marketing by Travel Brands 19
Achintya Gupta
Social Media for Political Campaigns 21
Diarmaid Byrne
Pricing Your iPhone / iPad App 24
Nitin Saboo
Collaboration
Talent Communities: The Future of Social Recruiting 26
Gautam Ghosh
Building Smarter Cities with Social Technologies 28
Diarmaid Byrne
Enterprise 2.0 for Creating a Fun Work Culture 31
Achintya Gupta
Growing Online Communities 34
Diarmaid Byrne
CRM
The Designer’s Challenge to Social CRM 36
Kshitiz Anand
The Evolution of Facebook Privacy 39
Aram Bhusal
Not Just Another Google+ Article 42
Achintya Gupta
Contents

July - September 2011 |
Social Technology Quarterly | Volume 1 Issue 2 5
How brands are using Facebook
apps for contests and campaigns
The world is increasingly becoming mobile. The
technology creators of today are creating goods
for the SoLoMo consumer – people who are so-
cial, location and mobile savvy. The social giants
realize this. They know that social networking of
tomorrow (and by that I mean in the next 2 years)
will move largely to mobile phones and that the
social web will be heavily accessed with a loca-
tion layer. Here are a few stats to get a better
idea:
• Research shows that one-third (33 %) of
Facebook postings are made from mobile
devices
• Americans spend nearly 2.7 hours per day
connected to the mobile web, and a vast ma-
jority of their time goes into social networking
with mobile phones
• Mobile users tend to be more ‘social’ than the
traditional desktop users. This can be seen
from a study that showed 91% of mobile
phone users go online to socialize compared
to only 79% of traditional desktop users
The numbers above, together with the increas-
ing mobile penetration predictions, clearly show
the future shift in social giants towards mobile
and the social networking giants, especially the
big 5 – Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Foursquare
and Google. They understand this, and it is not
surprising to see that almost all of them have
come up with their own set of mobile strategies.
Moreover these platforms also know that in order
to generate revenues in the fast growing mobile
world, to attract brands that want to go mobile,
and to boost their own revenue models from a
mobile consumer they will need a heavy focus
towards m-commerce.
Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to
see how the mobile strategies of social giants are
powering m-commerce. This article will tell you
how each social giant is coming up with mobile
Written by Achintya Gupta
How are Social Platforms Powering Mobile Commerce
Commerce
strategies and how their mobile strategy is
impacting the mobile commerce of today and
tomorrow.
Scope
I believe that m-commerce has a greater mean-
ing than just monetary transaction using mobile
phones. In this post I have tried to derive and
work upon this greater meaning of m-commerce
and not limited myself to the transaction part of
mobile commerce. Hence, I have tried to use
m-commerce in the context of marketing, com-
merce, sales and CRM - basically the use of
mobile to move a consumer across every aspect
of the sales funnel.
Facebook
The social network is seeing a heavy shift in its
traffic on to mobile phones. Here are few of initia-
tives for powering mobile commerce.
Facebook launched Facebook Places in the USA
and Europe. With this initiative they partnered
with a couple of brands that offered discount
deals to consumers on checking-in at various
places. The idea led a lot of brands to create
marketing campaigns using Facebook Places.
Starbucks offered free filter coffee to those who
check-in; Mazda offered free cars and cars on
discounts; Dallas airport offered discounts from
hospitality brands inside the airport on checking-
in; and Jet Blue launched the go places cam-
paign and a Facebook app that rewarded people
who checked-in with badges and real gifts.
You can see some of the most creative Facebook
Places mobile marketing examples in this Mash-
able article. (Update – Facebook recently ended
its deals initiative after testing it in 8 cities.)
Another mobile commerce initiative taken by
Facebook is to facilitate Facebook credit pur-
chase with mobile payment. This means that you

6
Social Technology Quarterly | Volume 1 Issue 2
can buy Facebook credits and the charges would
be reflected in your mobile bill. Facebook has
partnered with mobile payment companies Zong
and Boku to help consumers buy credit through
mobiles. If you are wondering how you can do
this, visit the help post by Facebook Help Center.
You can see some of the most creative Facebook
Places mobile marketing examples in this Mash-
able article. (Update – Facebook recently ended
its deals initiative after testing it in 8 cities.)
Similarly, Facebook’s seriousness about m-com-
merce can also be seen from its HTML5 efforts. It
appears that Facebook is creating a platform that
is fully mobile compatible so that users can ac-
cess Facebook apps through a mobile browser.
With this, Facebook can sell credits via mobile
browsers and keep complete control of the plat-
form to itself by bypassing the Apple and An-
droid appstores. This will greatly help Facebook
increase its revenues from the credit purchases
made by mobile phone users who will buy virtual
good while using the Facebook apps.
Twitter
For Twitter, having a mobile strategy is even
more important than Facebook as 43% of Twitter
users access it from mobile while 9% access
is through tablets. Moreover, Twitter’s mobile
focus is obvious, especially as it started with an
SMSing service. Twitter’s decided on 140 char-
acters so that they can fit within an SMS. Twitter
too has created tools to help brands in mobile
marketing. I find the FastFollow tool the most
fascinating. It allows users to SMS the Twitter
handle of a brand in order to get its updates on
your mobile by sending ‘follow (Twitter handle)’
to 40404 in the US. Similarly, using the ‘Get’ tool
you can get the latest updates from a user even if
you do not follow him [SMS ‘Get (username)].
Another Twitter mobile strategy that is interesting
for brands is location tagging. This feature, with
which you include your location when you tweet,
can be enabled if you have a browser that sup-
ports HTML5 and geo location, or with iPhone
or Android phone. Your followers can then see
where you are tweeting from.
The mass popularity of Twitter clubbed with
location tagging and SMS features makes it a
great marketing tool for brands. However I am
yet to see some interesting mobile marketing
campaigns with Twitter. The only campaign that
comes to my mind is by Kogi Barbeque that uses
Twitter to update users about the location of their
food truck. Customers can constantly check the
tweets on their mobile phones to know the exact
location of the food truck.
Foursquare
When it comes to mobile strategies for social
networks I have realized from my research that
Foursquare has the smartest initiative for brands
to power mobile marketing and commerce.
To begin with, Foursquare has a lot of partner
brands that reward customers for checking –in
to their store (something like Facebook places
deals). Customers can exhibit their loyalty with
frequent check-ins and brands get to know and
reward their most loyal customers.
But it does not end here. Foursquare has another
offering of Foursquare Pages for businesses.
With these pages, businesses can add tips for
their consumers at various locations. These tips
can be brand’s way of sharing its expertise with
its followers or engaging them around something
more interesting.

7
Brands have made good use of Foursquare
pages for innovative campaigns to increase sales
and gain promotions. For example, the New York
Times partnered with Foursquare during the 2010
Winter Olympics to guide visitors to the best
tourist’s spots across Vancouver. Similarly, Four-
square partnered with restaurant reviewer Zagat
to help users find the best reviews and ratings for
restaurants in their vicinity. You can see some of
the best Foursquare marketing campaigns at the
following articles (1) and (2).
Another Foursquare feature that has great mar-
keting and sales potential is Foursquare lists.
With Foursquare lists consumers can create tips
for their networks, such as the best restaurants
to eat, top things to buy or places to visit in a
particular city by tagging brands. Brands can use
these lists to generate advocacy, know who their
evangelists are, and engage their customers
through an effective CRM program. I look forward
to some interesting mobile marketing by brands
using Foursquare lists.
Another interesting aspect of Groupon’s mobile
commerce strategy is Groupon’s attempt to be-
come world’s largest mobile advertising network.
Groupon is partnering with big mobile apps and
app makers to run real time promotions of Grou-
pon’s deals from its clients based on proximity.
Hence, the next time you use an app like Loopt
and are near a Groupon deal, you will get a notifi-
cation on your phone.
Google
With the recent launch of Google+ and the inte-
gration of search with social, it is difficult not to
call Google a social giant.
Google has some very interesting mobile com-
merce tools in its arsenal of mobile strategies.
The Google Shopper app helps users simplify
their everyday shopping experience. The app
can be used to scan barcodes or book covers
to get more information about the product. The
app can also be used to find products, the best
prices from online stores, or even information
about nearby stores. Some versions in specific
locations also give you daily deals and deals in
proximity.
Groupon
Groupon’s mobile strategy is more like a location
layer above its deals model. You get the usual
Groupon experience but with personalized deals
based on your location.
Groupon’s mobile apps help users purchase
deals from their mobile phone, bypass the step
of printing the proof of purchase, and see the
deals near their location. Moreover, with Groupon
‘now’, mobile users do not even need to wait for
the deal to get activated. They can check the
deals around their location and purchase them
immediately at the touch of a button.
Groupon has some great ideas to facilitate
mobile commerce. Their mobile apps are adding
a location layer which is greatly improving the
consumer experience of purchasing deals.
Google Catalogs, a free app for tablets, makes
catalogue browsing and product purchasing a
very engaging experience. Users can browse
across multiple catalogues, get rich media infor-
mation like videos and high resolution images
that greatly enhance their product research expe-
rience. The app helps users share their findings
with friends and even purchase them online or
find nearby stores.
Google Wallet is another path breaking initiative
by Google to make payments quick and simple.
Google Wallet will hold credit cards details that
currently are kept in wallets. The app uses NFC
(near field communications) to make the fund
transfer really simple. All you have to do is just

8
tap your phone on the reading device in stores to
complete payment. The eventual aim of the app
is to sync loyalty card, receipts, boarding pass,
tickets, etc all in one mobile app. Google even
plans to use this for customers to avail of Google
offers.
I hope this research helped you understand the
various m-commerce strategies by the social gi-
ants. There is a summary of this research on our
slideshare channel.

Businesses are transforming their
customer engagement strategies to
flourish in the era of social shopping
The mass adoption of social media has resulted
in one fundamental change in the way business-
es function. This form of media, unlike traditional
media (i.e. tv, radio, newspapers), is not one way.
Hence it is not really governed by any business
or institution. It provides end consumers a scal-
able way to share their opinions, and genuine
popular opinions tend to bubble-up.
What this has done, is completely change how
people are making purchase decisions. They
now have a mechanism to get a true opinion
about a product or service from people they know
or are influenced by. These social dynamics have
transformed the purchase funnel into viral loops.
Written by Kaushal Sarda
Commerce
Social Shopping: The Changing Agenda of Commerce
Here are some statistics that confirm this trend:
• 90% of all purchases are subject to social
influence
• 90% of customers trust the recommendations
of people they know
• 67% of people spend more online after rec-
ommendations
Most commerce firms have already started to
make investments in solutions that will help them
leverage this change in purchase behavior and in
turn drive more sales. However, what they must
realize is that we are going to witness a
transformative change in how commerce hap-
pens. We will be moving from a world where cus-
tomers find products to a world where products
find customers at the right time and place.
We are going to witness commerce change
around four key aspects:
Availability
Go where your customers spend time as op-
posed to expecting them to come to you. As a
result a lot of commerce companies both online
and offline are investing in the ability to be closer
to where their customers spend time. Two key
platforms where they seem to be investing are
Facebook and mobile. Here are some of the
reasons why
Why Facebook:
• It has a clear top of mind recall - 48% of
18-34 year olds check Facebook when they
wake up
• Americans spend the equivalent of 101,000
years on Facebook in a single month
• 10,000 - the average number of sites inte-
grating with Facebook every day since social
plug-ins were launched
• 56% of Facebook users click through to a re-
tailer’s website because of a Facebook post
Why mobile:
• 81 minutes per day is the average time a per-
son spends on their mobile phone
• Smartphone penetration in the US - 40%
(iOS 28%, Andrond 40%)
Hence most commerce firms are investing in
Facebook promotions, storefronts, and also
Facebook connect on their sites. The next phase
will be to make all of these tools synchronize to
get integrated analytics.
Traditional retail firms are looking to connect with
their member community through mobile apps to

10
Example: Tripadvisor uses Facebook open graph
api to personalize the experience on the site by
prominently featuring a user’s friends’ reviews.
Customers will also be able to see where their
friends have traveled so they can know who to
ask for advice.
Interactivity
Commerce firms need to merge best aspects of
online and offline shopping to give a much better
experience to their customers.
Online Shopping
Online shopping allows for easy social interac-
tions but does not provide the feel or experience
of shopping in the real world. There is a lot of
investments in building virtual trial, virtual fitting
rooms, personalized closets to try stuff, mix
match, and get the real experience of shopping.
have the ability to engage with them throughout
the whole shopping experience. This is where
mobilizing loyalty programs is going to gain mo-
mentum. Some statistics on the value brands are
getting from such availability:
• 1000: Number of diapers PG sold on its
f-store in under an hour
• 6 hours: Time it took for the Rachel Roy
Facebook jewelry store to sell out
• 1m+: Starbucks customers using their e-
commerce-enabled Facebook CRM loyalty
program
Personalization
It is no longer enough for commerce firms to rely
on generic demographic data or basic personal
information they have about their customers. The
goal is now to have the ability to leverage infor-
mation from their customers’ social network. This
means that commerce companies not only need
to connect with their customers on their favorite
social network, but to also mine information from
their customers’ profiles and their social interac-
tions to understand their preferences, how they
are influenced by their network, and the prefer-
ences of their friends.
This gold mine of information along with loca-
tion information helps them achieve the following
objectives:
• Local demand forecasting: The ability to
estimate product demand of people living in
the vicinity of the store to manage inventory
more effectively
• Personalized outreach: The ability to know
which deals and offers are of true relevance
to each customer
• Gifting: Leverage social graph of customers
and information about their friends’ interests
to suggest gifts
• Customer experience: Strong understanding
of customers’ needs and influence informa-
tion can help transform the in-store shopping
experience
Example: JCPenney used metaio’s virtual
dressing room software to enable shoppers to
automatically try on clothing within the live-video
stream. To shop in JCPenney’s virtual dressing
room prospective buyers have to activate their
computer’s Webcam and enter the dressing
room. They first select what item interests them
and then position themselves within a silhouette
that pops up on their computer screen. They
have to wave their hands to adjust the clothing
for a proper fit. If they like the item they can take
a screenshot of themselves wearing it and send
it to friends, post on Facebook, or move on to the
JCPenney online store to complete the purchase.
Offline Shopping
Retailers are using augmented reality, mobile
apps and gestural interfaces for engaging cus-
tomers, store finding, personalization, product
details and comparison, learn in real-time about
their friends preferences, and get their sugges-
tions.
Example: Ben Jerry’s used Unifeye Mobile
SDK to roll-out the AR application “Moo Vision”
on the iPhone. By pointing the camera at select-
ed Ben Jerry’s carton lids, a 3D world is

11
experience. Wallmart’s acquisition of Kosmix to
create @walmartlabs seems to be a strong step
in this direction.
Image credits: tripadvisor, nytimes and metaio
Social Layer
Companies will invest in creating a social layer
which runs across their entire purchase funnel.
This will help them provide their customers with
a true social shopping experience and in-turn
increase purchases
Some Statistics to justify investments in creating
a social layer:
• 57% of people talk to other people more
online than in real life
• 75% of shoppers spend more online after
receiving friend recommendations
• $5 billion of physical good will be bought on
social networks in 2011
To be able to create a social layer businesses will
have to invest in the following areas:
• Social promotion engine to introduce various
new retailing techniques for social shopping
like group deals, sneak peeks, tryvertising,
etc
• Social recommendation tools like Kaboodle
and This Next
• Synchronized online shopping through
toolbars like Shop Together and Do Together
where customers can bring their friends into
the shopping experience
• Social purchase sharing capabilities like
Blippy and Shwowp
• Asking advice around purchases like Shop
Socially
• Customer support communities for post pur-
chase interactions like Get Satisfaction.
We think that very soon we will start witnessing
large retailers coming up with integrated solu-
tions that combine all these capabilities with
integrated analytics across the entire purchase
revealed which can be viewed from different
angles by moving the phone around the lid. This
provided customers with a fun and engaging twist
to sharing in-store product details.

12
They say that social media technologies are the
in thing right now. Some call is fashionable, some
call it a necessity to keep up with the times, and
others see a real value add in it. While many
companies adopt it, not all understand it com-
pletely. It is now well accepted that social media
technologies (SMT) are an integral part of the
marketing budget of any company. The adoption
of SMT should be tied down to a business need
and assist with the business processes. Apart
from the usual goals of increase in sales, the one
thing that social media technologies have done
is to make the consumer more informed and help
them in taking decisions that are influenced by a
gamut of reasons. Come to think of it, the advent
of SMTs follow a similar pattern, resulting in the
way audiences are exposed to media. We con-
sume information in a different way than we used
to in the days prior to the SMTs. To support the
claim of social media technology being omnipres-
ent in many people’s lives one has to understand
where this comes from.
Over the course of this article I will do a construct
of the notion of social media technology as a new
kind of media. I shall refer to Bolter and Grusin,
amongst others, to understand why the notion
of the social media technology is a new media
that plays out on the notion of remediation. I
will social commerce as an example case study
and how the notion of media and social media
is changing and will continue to change the way
commerce works.
Marshall McLuhan, one of the greatest writers on
media, said, “We become what we behold. We
shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” It
is in this context that I will analyze the social me-
dia technologies construct. SMTs have changed
our lives and that is a fact that we accept. But at
the same time it has also resulted in a lot of us-
ers (or consumers) leaving the traditional media
forms. I realize this from numerous discussions
Reflecting on the rise of a new kind of
media through media theory
The Social Media Construct: A Case of Remediation
Written by Kshitiz Anand
Commerce
I have with present internet users, who claim to
do just about anything, from watching movies to
hearing music to writing to painting to socializing
to entertainment, over a social media platform.
This article will provide an argument for the rise
of this phenomenon and I use the notion of Re-
mediation to provide an argument of why SMS is
nothing but a construct of the traditional.
Bolter and Grusin in their landmark book, ‘Reme-
diation: Understanding New Media’, talk about
the basis of the creation of a new media. The
broad claim is that every media re-mediates
itself and it does so through a series of other
concepts in the form of ‘Transparent Immediacy’
or ‘Hypermediacy’. They term this as the ‘double
logic of remediation’. We as technologists and
designers are constantly looking to remediate to
create something that could be exciting, engag-
ing and has an awesome user experience. The
same argument can be applied to social media
technologies.
“Remediation is the process whereby computer
graphics, virtual reality, and the internet define
themselves by borrowing from and refashioning
media such as painting, photography, televi-
sion, and film.” This is an important note, as the
context of SMTs is an online system. We take
the notion of the existing mediums of media to
re-create and as a result re-mediate the existing
into a new technological framework. The rise of
the usage of Facebook (almost over 800 million
users) to do almost anything is just a testimony to
that. Americans spend close to 101,000 years of
time over Facebook in a single month! We have
more and more people checking their social me-
dia presence updates first thing at the start of the
day. This suggests that the boundaries are blur-
ring. The real world becomes analogous with the
online world. This phenomenon is also manifest
in the fact that there is a significant increase in

13
not stop only at the transparent immediacy, but
goes a step ahead and makes the user aware of
its presence. So the usage of words like tweet,
blog, wall, share, likes are a testimony to the act
of hypermediacy. The meanings of each of these
are signified differently than the original mean-
ing of the words. In the context of social media
technologies, it is constructed in a hypermedi-
ated manner and the moment these words are
used, the users are aware of the presence of the
media.
the conversations about the virtual life on the real
life and vice versa.
Analyzing a medium through a semiotic theory
viewpoint, we know that there is the notion of a
signifier (the one making the claim, and in this
case the media which is the audio, text or the
video) and the signified (the meaning of what is
implied through the signifiers). The earlier chan-
nel for this relation was traditional forms of media
viz, television, radio, etc. Now it is social media
technologies. This notion of “Transparent Im-
mediacy” is the perfection, or removal, of the gap
between signifier and signified, such that a rep-
resentation is perceived to be the thing itself. The
intent therefore, is to design and build a medium
that aims to do just that.
Transparent Immediacy is at play the moment
you think about engaging an audience with
a strong online presence, where you expect
the user to spend more time online. You wish
to make the viewer forget the presence of the
medium and believe that he is in the presence
of the objects of representation. Because of the
extent that social media has taken over our lives,
we are no longer aware of confronting a medium,
but instead stand in an immediate relationship
to the contents of that medium. The principal of
transparent immediacy refers to users’ desire for
immediacy in access, understanding, and inter-
action. This is to say, users want an immediate
connection with the medium. This is also true in
the present context when we want everything at
the tip of our fingers and responses to be faster.
For e.g., we write a mail, post on Facebook, or
tweet and expect a reply, likes, or re-tweet or a
reply to tweet almost immediately. We forget the
presence of the medium as a medium and as-
sume it to be present right there in front.
The other concept is the notion of Hypermediacy,
which is the opposite side of the spectrum to
Transparent Immediacy. Hypermediacy is a “style
of visual representation whose goal is to remind
the viewer of the medium”. Hypermediacy plays
upon the desire for immediacy and transparent
immediacy, making us hyper-conscious of our act
of seeing (or gazing). This means that it does
Let us take the example of social commerce. In
the ideal situation of a perfectly remediated envi-
ronment of the social commerce world, that tries
to remediate the instances of the real life physical
shop, there should be no difference between the
experience of seeing a product in person and on
the computer screen. Designers and technolo-
gists have the challenge to strive towards that. To
make things simpler, let us take the example of
an online storefront.
Let us do a small comparison of what aspects an
online storefront remediates in order to provide
the same shopping experience as a real store.
1. The availability of a product brochure and
ability to experience the product in its full form.
In the ideal case the businesses should also be
able to give the tactile experience to a store too.
The haptic feedback provided to the user would
be the missing cog in remediating the experience
of the store entirely and the physical representa-
tion of the product catalogue. The detailing of this
experience, which is possible through existing
available technologies, would be an interesting
thing to work on.
2. In a store you ask questions to the sales per-
sons. In an online storefront, having the feasibility

14
mediums that we are accessing the information
in. It is thus opaque and often juxtaposed over
the virtual-real, which the immediacy had set out
to bring about. Unknowingly it forces a repeated
contact with the interface and as a result it
becomes an integral part our lives. Social media
technologies are repeatedly doing that. What
was once thought of to be completely immersive
and “real” eventually comes to be explored as an
aesthetics of a particular media format and the
only authenticity lies in the experience that the
media sets out to achieve by virtue of the things it
has to offer.
The arguments will continue that this form of new
media is doing exactly what their predecessors
have done, i.e. presenting themselves as refash-
ioned and improved versions of other media. In
the times that we live in, a medium can never
operate in isolation, because it must enter into
relationships of respect and rivalry with other
(and often traditional) media. It is only when we
understand the above, that we can get a better
understanding of the new social media we talk
about these days and develop an appreciation
for it.
of being able to talk to anyone at any point of
time, during the course of the surfing through
the store, would be remediating the notion of the
sales persons.
3. Man is a social animal. We choose to shop
with people. We take feedback from people. We
call others whilst shopping and we immediately
take feedback when we try clothes on. In the
remediated experience of the online store, allow-
ing the users to experience the same notion of
feedback is essential. It is this particular notion,
of people relying on and getting influenced by the
feedback, comments and suggestions of oth-
ers, that makes social commerce so much more
interesting (and challenging).
4. The ability to provide recommendations and
push promotions through a channel that is easy
to access and connect with the customers.
5. Post-purchase people always provide feed-
back about something, irrespective of whether
it is good or bad. Recommendations are made
after the usage of a product or service. Post-
purchase engagement is a key part when look-
ing at a shopping experience. Remediating this
important experience is essential for the success
of any social commerce avenue.
While the above could be applicable to just about
any online presence, it is the social part that dif-
ferentiates a social commerce platform such as
a Facebook store when compared to any other
online commerce avenues. Thus in my opinion,
a social commerce platform is the only platform
that can remediate as close to the real life shop-
ping experience.
The Challenges
What I have mentioned here is remediating the
experience more than the media. The challenges
however come more when it comes to remediat-
ing issues for which there is no real remediation
possible. Remediating the notion of trust, or the
issues of privacy is something that continues to
remain a challenge to the designers of social
media platforms.
In conclusion, social media technology can be
seen as a construct of the Transparent Imme-
diacy and the Hypermediacy. We are adopting
social media technologies in a way to remediate
the lifestyle we live-out and the life-worlds we
live in. The key is to make this experience more
immersive and interfaceless when we talk about
immediacy. On the other hand, hypermediacy al-
lows us to remain cognizant of the platforms and

How businesses are augmenting real-
ity to make every stage of the shopping
experience more exciting
Written by Kaushal Sarda
Augmenting Reality: A New Age Shopping Experience
In this era all commerce businesses are really
compared on their ability to provide an engaging
shopping experience. So really the explosion in
smartphone sales coupled with the advances in
augmented reality provides us with a unique op-
portunity. Indicatively, according to ABI research,
the market for augmented reality in the US alone
will be around $350 million in 2014 as compared
to just $6 million in 2008.
Businesses can leverage augmented reality and
mobile apps to engage and enchant customers
through creative ways providing information in
the context of promotions, store locations, prod-
uct launches, product details, etc. The objective
is really to take advantage of these technologies
to give customers a unique and talk-worthy cus-
tomer experience.
This article delves into examples of how busi-
nesses are using augmented reality based
solutions to enhance almost every stage of the
customer’s shopping experience.
The various aspects of the purchase experience
where these augmented reality is having an
impact are:
• Driving customer awareness through en-
gagement
• Creating excitement around product launch-
es
• Driving in-store traffic
• In-store product information
• Making product trials more fun
• Enhancing in-store engagement
• Ensuring continual post purchase engage-
ment
Driving Customer Awareness
Through Engagement
McDonalds launched a game-based interactive
billboard campaign in Sweden. The concept
Campaigns
of the campaign was that players use their cell
phones to play a game of pong on the billboard.
If the player was able to complete the game in 30
seconds there would be a reward of coupons for
free food of their choice.
This campaign was able to effectively use aug-
mented reality to excite people on getting food
promotions by engaging with the brand. One
key advantage of the solution was the user did
not have to download any app on to their mobile
devices, hence reducing the upfront effort to get
started.
Unilever created a concept “share happy” vend-
ing machine that they launched at Cannes 2010.

16
to create a memorable and fun experience for
customers. This results in rapid adoption of such
apps and coupled with their location sensitive na-
ture will result in more customer visits to stores.
The facial recognition system in the machine
was able to detect gender, age, mood, and even
how much a user was smiling. The machine’s
“Smile-O-Meter” would show how much you were
smiling and give a free ice-cream when the user
could just not smile anymore.
Happiness is a very strange emotion. Unilever’s
ability to leverage this solution to create an as-
sociation of happiness with its ice-cream was a
remarkable brand promotion approach.
Creating Excitement Around
Product Launches
BMW initiated an augmented reality campaign to
promote the launch of the BMW Z4. The online
application was in sync with the TV ad where a
BMW car uses its tyres to create a color “expres-
sion of joy” on a large black canvas.
The application used Inition’s augmented real-
ity application magicsymbol to help users create
their own “expression of joy” designs online. The
application allowed users to control a virtual 3D
model of the Z4 to create their own paint trails
using a simple web cam. They could the share
the video on the social web.
Providing users with the ability to recreate their
own version of the ad was a very unique idea.
This would have helped to create a unique and
fun experience with the car, resulting in a strong
recall and aspiration for the product.
Drive In-Store Traffic
Belgian beer maker Stella Artois released a
beer finder app to help users locate the nearest
establishment serving Stella Artois beverage.
The application uses augmented reality to render
Stella Artois logos on top of any building serving
the beverage.
This example shows how brands can leverage
this technology to increase foot falls to stores
where their products are available. The engaging
nature of augmented reality apps makes it easy
In-Store Product Information
Food tracer is an augmented reality mobile
phone application that helps users visualize
information about food. Even though this is just
a concept application it can be very useful for a
shopper.
Consider a scenario where a shopper has to go
to a grocery store to pick up some fresh organic
vegetables. The customer does not find his usual
brand that he likes and has to choose between

17
were considering buying would look like.
The kiosk allowed customers to hold up any Lego
box up to the screen and then it would render a
virtual assemble version of the set on top of the
box. It also allowed the user to move it to get a
360 view of the set. Such apps are not only fun
for kids but also help parents buy something their
kids would really like.
the available choices. The customer can use
the food tracer app to get real time information
about the various vegetables, helping him easily
make a more informed decision based on criteria
important to him.
Ben Jerry’s used Unifeye Mobile SDK to
roll-out the AR application “Moo Vision” on the
iPhone. By pointing the camera at selected Ben
Jerry’s carton lids, a 3D world is revealed
which can be viewed from different angles by
moving the phone around the lid. This provided
customers with a fun and engaging twist to shar-
ing in-store product details.
Making Product Consideration More Fun
Converse created “The Sampler”, an augmented
reality app for iPhones where customers can try
a pair of converse. Converse has a huge range
of option for shoes and the app makes it easy for
customers to make a choice.
All users have to do is select a pair of shoes they
fancy from the digital catalog. Once selected,
they can visualize how they look just by point-
ing the phone camera at their feet. In case users
need a second opinion, they can quickly take a
snapshot and share on Facebook.
IBM teamed up with Israel based EZface to cre-
ate a “virtual mirror” that would allow customers
to see how a particular makeup brand would
look on their face without having to even open
the product. Just by scanning the barcode of the
product the virtual mirror would show the shopper
how it would look on their face. This application
has been used by brands like L’oreal, Maybelline,
Covergirl, and Revlon.
Enhancing In-Store Engagement
Lego teamed up with technology company me-
taio to create an augmented reality in-store kiosk
called Digital Box. The objective of the Digital
Box was to allow parents and their kids to under-
stand what the finished Lego construction they
Ensuring Post Purchase Continual
Engagement
Nestle sold 26 million cereal boxes across 53
countries that allowed customers with webcams
linked to their computers to play an augmented
reality game with the main character from the
movie RIO. The objective of the game was to use
the marker on the back of cereal box to lead the
animated blue parrot “Blu” to a big bowl of cereal

18
3DVIA group of Dassault systems. This augment-
ed reality game is a great example of how busi-
nesses can continue the customer experience
even post-product purchase. Such an experience
will strongly associate the brand with enjoyment
and increase the overall brand affinity and recall
in the minds of customers
Hopefully these examples will prompt businesses
to look at augmented reality more holistically as
a strong engagement tool that can be leveraged
at every stage of the purchase experience. Their
objective should be to use these technologies to
creatively to make shopping more fun, engaging,
and memorable for their customers.
Image credits: Lucerene University of Applied
Science and Arts, Robaid, Inition, Cult Of Mac,
Giuseppe Costanza, Ben Jerry, Highsnobiety,
HPCi Media, and Packaging News

Social Media has always been an attractive
avenue for travel brands. The prime reason is
that travel is a very social experience both as a
purchase as well as an activity. People consult
their friends for travel recommendations and
seek their advice for places they should visit, air-
lines they should fly with and hotels they should
stay in. Moreover, people travel with their friends,
make new friends during trips. Travelling together
for holidays and leisure is always considered
more exciting that travelling alone.
Travel brands are trying to bring this social
experience online for people to get travel rec-
ommendations, share their travel experiences,
and improve their customers’ travel experience.
Seeing the increasing excitement of travel brands
for social media campaigns, I decided to look into
some of the most interesting patterns emerging
in the social media efforts by travel brands.
Scope
In this research I have tried to analyze how travel
brands are using social media for their market-
ing campaigns. I have considered all brands as
travel brands that are generating their revenues
explicitly from customer travel or enthusiasm for
travel (travel guides and travel media fall in this
category).
Research
My research shows that there are broadly 8
social media campaign strategies being used by
travel brands.
You will see that these broad 8 social media
strategies leverage 4 different social dynam-
ics. Social games, social media campaigns and
loyalty campaigns leverage consumer gener-
ated content to thrive, while blogs and advocacy
programs thrive on smart conversations by the
brand or its representativest to the consumers.
Certain forums and social websites leverage the
How are travel brands using social
media for marketing?
Campaigns
Social Media Marketing by Travel Brands
community’s social dynamics where consumers
crowdsource content for their passion for travel
while some other travel brands use social ap-
plications to connect people to improve the travel
experience.
Social Media Campaigns
Many travel brands have explored social media
campaigns to engage its audience and increase
participation and their fan base. One of my favou-
rite examples is the Queensland tourism cam-
paign for ‘the best job in the world’. The organiz-
ers launched a user-generated contest to select a
caretaker for an island on the Great Barrier Reef
who would communicate their adventures and
experiences to the world. The campaign was a
great success.

20
Advocacy Program
Certain brands try to generate word-of-mouth by
providing an advocacy platform to experts to ex-
press their opinions and thoughts to consumers.
British Airlines has created one such platform
called Metrotwin to promote tourism between
London and New York by ‘twinning’ the two cities
and providing recommendations by experts for
the best places to eat, shop, and stay in both
cities.
Some time back the European Travel Commis-
sion launched a photo contest on Facebook
asking users to submit their morphed pictures at
various travel locations.
Loyalty Campaigns
Social Media has given many new faces to loy-
alty campaigns and completely changed the way
brands are rewarding consumers for loyalty. Take
for instance, Jet Blue’s Go Places app, where
Jet Blue is rewarding customers for checking-in
at Jet Blue Terminals using Facebook Places.
Customers unlock official badges and reward
points for real rewards. Tripadvisor has launched
a campaign to recognize its most loyal review-
ers and community members. The campaign
showcases Tripadvisor’s star reviewers and their
reviews / forum posts.
Social Games
With the success of social games like Farmville,
Mafia Wars, etc, brands have realized the power
of games to engage consumers. The Travel
Channel has used a similar idea to launch a
social game called Kidnapped. The game aims
at increasing customer awareness and informa-
tion about various interesting places around the
globe. The game challenges people to kidnap
their friends. To escape the kidnapped person
has to answer trivia related to that city.
Blog
Travel blogs by brands are an excellent way of
communicating the brand’s passion for travel to
consumers. Lonely Planet does an excellent job
of educating consumers about how to make their
travel experiences better. If you visit their blog,
you will see travel showcase, destination, tips
and stories. Similarly Southwest Airlines’ blog -
Nuts About Southwest - communicates to travel-
lers how Southwest Airlines can improve their
travel experience.
Social Apps to Connect
These apps leverage the fact that travelling is a
social activity and people prefer recommenda-
tions from their friends or friends of friends when
making travel decisions. Tripadvisor has a travel
map app that maps places around the world
where friends in your Facebook network have vis-
ited. AirBnB’s Social Connections app helps you
rent places to and from friends in your personal
network.
Crowdsourced Content
It is here that the travel brands leverage commu-
nity dynamics to motivate people to put mean-
ingful content on their websites in the form of
reviews, ideas and comments. This helps other
users with better travel information. Tripadvisor
and Lonely Planet do this with reviews, likes and
ratings to help customers push recommenda-
tions.
Travel Forums
Travel forums have always been a popular desti-
nation for people searching for travel information.
Now brands are hosting travel forums to partici-
pate and support such conversations. Virgin Air-
lines hosts v-flyer travel forum and traveller online
community to facilitate conversations and social
relationships. Lonely Planet hosts the Thorn Tree
forum to empower such discussions.
I hope this article helped you understand the
various social media marketing strategies by
travel brands. There is a summary of the above
research on our slideshare channel.

What can Barack Obama learn from the
Arab Spring?
Social Media for Political Campaigns
Written by Diarmaid Byrne
Campaigns
Campaigns and social media have been in the
news a lot this year – the Republican primaries
and London riots are two examples – and the
exposure will increase as the US heads into elec-
tion year in 2012.
I want to look at how political campaigns have
evolved in their use of the internet and social me-
dia, and see what possibilities exist in the near-
term. For this purpose I’ve looked at two types of
campaigns:
• Campaigns that are centrally organized by
the political party or the candidate’s team.
Here I will look primarily at Barack Obama’s
campaign in 2008
• Campaigns that are organized bottom-up.
Here I will look at how groups used social
media during the Arab Spring
Centrally Organized Campaigns
Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004 had many
of the features of successful campaigns: press
coverage, successful fundraising and exciting
people. He achieved this not just through tradi-
tional campaign strategies but also by extensive
use of the internet. He used his official blog and
Meetup.com to bring people together and orga-
nize fundraisers. This was cheaper than tradi-
tional fundraising and resulted in a hug number of
small donations, allowing him to avoid fundraising
limits. However, his team missed the crucial ele-
ment of converting enthusiastic participants into
active voters. As Clay Shirky points out in Here
Comes Everybody, Dean created a movement
that strongly appealed to some people, but which
participation became more important than voting.
Some of the same strategies Dean used were
taken up by Barack Obama during his 2008
campaign. Barack Obama was called the King of
Social Networking by the Washington Post as he
became the first social media President. His
campaign team was the first to fully understand
and harness the potential of social media to com-
municate his message and energize supporters
to donate and vote.
Barack Obama’s campaign team didn’t invent
anything new but strategically used social media,
the internet, SMS and emails to establish his
candidacy and win the elections:
1. Build his political brand
Obama used social media to lower the cost of
building a political brand. This was essential
because there was very little brand awareness
about Obama compared to his major competi-
tors Hilary Clinton and John McCain, apart from
two books (admittedly best sellers) and his 2004
convention speech.
2. Created MyBarackObama.com
A full-fledged social network, MyBarackObama.
com allowed users to create their own profile
complete with a customized description, friends
list and personal blog. They could also join
groups, participate in fund raising, and arrange
events. This was the centre of his social network-
ing strategy and all pages on other platforms
brought users here.

22
found political power because of the ability to
use social media to mobilize large numbers of
like-minded people. The most recent large-scale
campaign was earlier this year in the Middle East
and North Africa (MENA), especially Tunisia and
Egypt.
There have been a lot of debates on the impor-
tance of otherwise of social media to the Arab
Spring. People make revolutions, but in this case
social media played an integral role as a commu-
nity builder and communication tool. Control over
communication is vital as uprisings gain momen-
tum to provide a common purpose to the commu-
nity, keep them mobilized and updated. Typically
during a coup or revolution the first buildings that
are targeted by the opposition are TV and radio.
In the case of the Arab Spring, social media al-
lowed protestors to both communicate across
the community and determine the media output
beyond their country without having to control the
stations. People were able to instantly self-broad-
cast events, information and ideas, unrestricted
by media and news deadlines and editorial
controls. This contributed to the speed at which
the revolutions moved and the momentum they
maintained, and allowed news networks, espe-
cially Al-Jazeera, to continue spreading informa-
tion and news across the region.
I think there are two major lessons from the Arab
Spring that political parties and candidates can
leverage:
• Citizens and communities of like-minded
people have political clout because of social
networks
• Democratic movements are about political
change driven by social networks rather than
by elites. This is where social media and
social technologies are going to have the
largest impact in the coming years.
What Next?
Obama was the pace-making politician in us-
ing social media but things have changed since
2008. One of the hallmarks of his 2008 campaign
was how email, text messages and the internet
were used to reach voters for organizing and
fundraising. Since then Twitter and Facebook
have increased hugely in popularity and smart-
phones and apps are far more common. In 2012
it looks like Obama will be more expansive in
how he uses social media to mobilize funds and
supporters. Community will still be at the heart of
his campaign on barackobama.com, but addition-
ally he will look at making email, website, texts,
mobile apps and social networks work together
3. Present across multiple social media sites
Obama didn’t use just one platform but ensured
his message was spread across multiple sites
that complemented his message of change. He
engaged people, listened and used not only the
major sites like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, You-
Tube and Twitter, but also more specific sites like
Glee and BlackPlanet.
4. Donations
The majority of Obama’s donations came from
donors giving just $200 or less. He achieved this
by ensuring that on each site there was a dona-
tion widget.
5. Encouraged participation
Traditionally campaign teams and spin doctors
exerted as much control over content as pos-
sible. However, keeping with his change mes-
sage, Obama allowed and encouraged support-
ers to participate by posting videos, photos, and
testimonials.
The effectiveness of Obama’s online strategy
to engage and mobilize people can be seen in
some of the numbers (reference):
• 6.5 million online donations
• $600+ million campaign funds raised, most of
it online
• 13 million email addresses
• 1 billion email sent
• 2 million profiles on MyBarackObama.com
• 200,000 offline events planned
• 400,000 blog posts written
• 35,000 volunteer groups created
Bottom-up Campaigns
These are campaigns that are not initiated by a
political party or a candidate / politician. They are
characterized by groups of people who have new

23
in harmony to communicate his message – “Are
You In”.
Here are three things that he and other parties
and candidates will need to do to run successful
campaigns:
1. Control communication using social media
No politician can control how the media uses and
spins his message. One way around this is using
social media channels to distribute the message.
Also, with a large community eager to listen it is
important to speak directly to them. Obama used
YouTube to announce his reelection campaign.
Twitter is a far more popular tool now than in
2008, and Obama’s campaign team have given
it more importance by setting-up separate Twitter
accounts for all 50 states to target state-relevant
messages to supporters.
2. Adapting to the increasing social integra-
tion and sharing features
Obama’s campaign team have included social
features on www.barackobama.com, allowing
users to log into the site with their Facebook
accounts, making it easier to invite friends and
share updates. The campaign team has also
added an official Facebook app “Are You In”.
3.Smartphones and mobile apps
The official White House mobile app is a crucial
element in building his community and commu-
nicating directly with supporters with alerts about
speeches that can be watched live from the app,
behind-the-scenes photos and videos, and up-
dates from the official blog.
Recently, a great example of using social media
to communicate directly to a community and le-
verage sharing features was by the Social Demo-
cratic party in Zurich. Rather than only broadcast
their policies, the party used Facebook as a
platform for voters to suggest ideas and vote on
ideas that they would like to be put into practice.
Once the candidates got elected they took the
most popular ideas from Facebook and passed
them as legislation. Hopefully this inspires other
parties to try similar campaigns.
Image credits: cqpolitics and giaitri59

24
It has been said that the exercise of pricing is as
much an art as a science. There is no doubt that
pricing is a challenge, especially with iPhone /
iPad applications due to the nascent stage of the
Appstore. iPhone app developers would do well
to carefully examine all aspects of pricing as it
pertains to their product, make careful pricing de-
cisions, monitor and measure sales results, and
make adjustments as needed to maximize their
revenue. To maximize revenues requires spend-
ing some time on the challenging area of pricing.
The goal of successful pricing should be the fo-
cus on delivering value instead of just a low price
app. The right price for your iPhone / iPad app is
where the profits are maximized. Thus the high-
est price you can charge without reducing your
pool of customer should be any developer’s goal.
Here are some questions you should carefully
considre when pricing your app:
• How much does your competitor charge for a
similar application?
• What are the differentiating features between
your app and someone else’s app?
• How would you define your app and the de-
mographic market?
• What were the actual development costs
involved?
• Most importantly - how does my app com-
pare to the free apps available in the market?
Competing against Free Apps
One of the more challenging aspects that iPhone
/ iPad app developers are coming up against
from a pricing perspective is competing against
free. Many developers get discouraged thinking
that their app may not fare so well against com-
peting free apps. However, if your app truly has
functionality that goes beyond what a free app
can do, then you should not worry so much. In
fact, some free apps can help drive sales of your
charged app because the user finds that the free
The art and science of choosing the
correct pricing strategy
Campaigns
Pricing Your iPhone / iPad App
Written by Nitin Saboo
app will only take them so far.
Getting your app to stand out is always possible
against free apps. Carefully look at the free apps
and design your free app to take advantage of
the free app’s weakness.
App Pricing Strategy
After developing the app the big challenge is
monetization and finding the right price point.
There are various misconceptions associated
with pricing. Often developers think that in order
to compete on the app store they must price their
app either very low or at $0.99. The thinking can
be influence by one of the following:
• Developers see a lot of downward pricing
pressure on the App store think they had bet-
ter not price their app too high
• Developers think customers will expect to
pay only $0.99 for an app as this is perceived
as a standard price on the Appstore
• Developers think a low price will attract tens
of thousands of buyers even if they have no
use for the app
• Developers think that pricing their app at
$0.99 will help their app get listed among the
top 100 apps by sales

25
The best strategy to avoid these biased thought
processes is to provide a free version of the app
and let the users try it for themselves, hopefully
resulting in a following for the app. This allows
them to preview the app, test drive it and get a
feel for it, before committing monetarily. This is
a long term strategy, which will take time but if
done correctly will help you realize the truth worth
of your app.
Breakeven Analysis
Developers must conduct a breakeven analysis
to determine how different price points will affect
the breakeven timing.
Let us assume that a developer has spent $5,000
to develop your business application with the
belief of selling 100 apps per day. A basic break
even analysis at different price points for the app
would be:
Based on this table it is better to price your app
a little higher at first and carefully monitor the
results. This also gives room to adjust the pricing
if needed and provides an opportunity to drop the
price for short period to spur sales.
Developers should not undersell by pricing the
app too low to begin with. They can always lower
the price, but it’s harder to raise it. Remember, in
any economy people are willing to pay for quality
at a reasonable price but they are not willing to
pay for poorly designed apps at any price.
Reference : iPhone and iPad Apps Marketing: Secrets to Sell-
ing Your iPhone and iPad Apps by Jeffrey Hughes
Image credit: Marketing Hackz

26
While organizations have been quick to explore
how social media / online communities and social
networks can be leveraged for marketing, sales
and customer service, the other external facing
aspect of a business that has not really been
explored is how recruiting can leverage social
technologies.
Recruiting Now – the Issues and the Chal-
lenges
The last big innovation in recruiting was the
jobsites where organizations could access an
online database of hundreds of thousands of
candidates. Candidates could search for jobs by
function, experience, location, and apply directly.
It improved the earlier inefficient systems of
manual databases residing in spreadsheets (at
the recruiter end) and candidates going through
newspaper classifieds and applying via snail
mail.
However, the problem that technology solved
gave rise to different problems later on. With the
jobsites making it easy for job seekers to “spray
and pray”, recruiters started reeling under what
has come to be known as “resume spam” –
hundreds and thousands of resumes that are not
suitable for the job at all. This leads to a new type
of inefficiency – trawling through all these, which
is akin to searching for the proverbial needle in
the haystack.
Written by Gautam Ghosh
How companies can leverage talent
communities to increase employment
branding and hire the best talent
Talent Communities: The Future of Social Recruiting
Collaboration
The other aspect of recruiting is the challenge
that has remained constant throughout – the lack
of awareness of what the role entails. This leads
to job seekers focusing on only one aspect of the
negotiation – the salary discussion.
The Changing Nature of Recruiting
As the jobsites struggled under the radar, Linke-
din – the business networking site – realized that
a lot of its users who were paying were recruit-
ers, using the site to reach to the so-called “pas-
sive candidates”. The term refers to people who
are not actively searching for a job (and hence
considered more valuable – than active job seek-
ers). Slowly Linkedin added features to focus on
these paying users and started competing with
traditional job boards and has now evolved to a
platform where users (mid-career professionals)
go to search for jobs. With its membership cross-
ing 100 million, it is posing serious competition to
traditional job boards.
Linkedin was amongst the first social platforms
that recruiters embraced. With that some other
startups tried to leverage social tools, but either
could not scale or were before their time, Jobster
in the US and Reffster in India.
Now however, there is an 800 pound gorilla in the
room, and many are trying to ride it to get a slice
of the social recruiting pie. Yes, the 800 pound
gorilla is Facebook – and recruiters as well as
app developers are looking at ways to leverage it
for social recruiting. Internal recruiters are mak-
ing Facebook pages – from basic ones to highly
complex ones which try to mimic the careers
site on their website. Then there are the apps.
BranchOut gained quite a bit of traction, for being
the “Linkedin for Facebook” and then Monster.
com decided to get into the game to prove that
old dogs could learn new tricks by launching their
app called BeKnown. Both of these apps go after
fresh college recruits who haven’t yet openend a

27
3. Community engagement and facilitation
This would consist of building conversations
between external talent and internal experts,
answering questions of talent and triggering
discussions.
4. Development
The focus of the engagement should not be just
to focus on the people in the talent community
who have the skills, but to build the overall skill
levels of all people in the talent community, by
sharing resources with them as well as helping
them learn from each other and from subject
matter experts in the organization.
The prerequisites for making talent communi-
ties a success
To really benefit from talent communities they
have to be sponsored by the business leadership
of the organization that is innovative and willing
to be open and transparent.
• The role of recruitment needs to be focused
on the attraction of talent and building a rela-
tionship with them rather than being reactive
and chasing candidates
• The organization has got to be willing to lift
the firewall and allow real employees connect
with job-seekers without trying to control the
conversation
• A willingness to be vulnerable and deal with
tough questions and not be defensive
If a company is willing to try these they will move
the conversation to things that really matter - the
work, culture and nature of the job - from the
one large aspect that is currently the focus these
days – the salary.
Image credit: Christina Tierny
Linkedin account.
Social recruiting, in the way it is understood now,
is to leverage social networks to “broadcast” jobs.
It is not to build engagement and transparent
communication between employers and external
talent.
Talent Communities – Taking Social Recruit-
ing to the Next Level
Where recruiting can learn from Social Media
Marketing is to start building talent communities
to engage in conversations with people inter-
ested in their firm.
Take a look at the following diagram:
In traditional recruiting the focus has been to
chase the orange circle and spam them. Even
in the current model of “social recruiting” this
remains the focus. However, in a talent com-
munity the organization actually focuses on first
attracting the blue circle and then identifying the
overlap in the two groups to focus on the people
who are really relevant as well as pre-disposed
positively towards the company.
Hence the way an organization would build its
talent community would be very similar to its so-
cial media marketing efforts. It would consist of:
1. Identify and attract
Organizations have two approaches to build this.
First, rely on their own databases to ask candi-
dates to join their talent community. They can
leverage email, careers website, Twitter updates
and Facebook page updates to do so. Then they
can use campaigns on search advertising and
social advertising to attract new talent to their
community.
2. Content
Companies are publishing a lot of content, from
blog posts, to press releases to video uploads,
to tweets and job postings. On a talent commu-
nity platform (that BraveNewTalent provides) it is
possible to integrate all this content to present a
holistic view of the organization).

28
Collaboration
People look for great cities to live in. The Econo-
mist Intelligence Unit, Mercer and others help us
out with their annual rankings of the best cities to
live in based on – amongst other things – rec-
reation, health care, political, social and cultural
environment, education, housing and infrastruc-
ture. In the future, determining how good a city is
to live in will also depend on how smart the city
is. So along with healthcare, education and hous-
ing people will also look at how the city utilizes
physical infrastructure, such as transport and
ICT, and the availability and quality of intellectual
and social capital to improve living standards and
drive urban growth and competitiveness.
There are three defining characteristics of a
smart city:
• A networked infrastructure
• Community intelligence to improve urban
planning, development and innovation man-
agement
• Social and environmental sustainability
through the participation of citizens in city
processes
The concept of smart cities has been on the
agenda of governments and corporations for the
last number of years. Investment is also acceler-
ating. A recent report by ABI Research estimates
that the market for technologies related to smart
cities projects will grow from $8 billion in 2010
to $39 billion in 2016. This will include spending
on e-government initiatives, initiatives to reduce
carbon footprints, waste and recycling initiatives,
intelligent transport systems, and wireless net-
works. There are a number of reasons why there
is so much investment in smart cities:
• There is a limit to how much people and busi-
nesses can be taxed. Budget crises during
the recession of the last few years means
that city governments have to look at long-
term measures to manage and modernize
their services and infrastructure
Community, crowdsourcing and mobile
initiatives to make cities a smarter place
to live
Building Smarter Cities with Social Technologies
• Governments need to cut costs without cut-
ting services so they are using analytics to
understand and improve operational produc-
tivity and efficiency
• There is competition among cities to attract
businesses to maintain growth and develop-
ment and to attract people to live and work
by improving the quality of the urban environ-
ment
• 50% of the world’s population lives in cities.
By 2050 the urban population is expected
to double, further straining city services and
infrastructure
• Cities are major polluters: they occupy 2% of
the world’s geography but account for 75% of
the greenhouse gases
Leaving aside the smart city projects that focus
on infrastructure and energy management, I want
to look at how individuals, communities and gov-
ernments are using social technologies to har-
ness community intelligence, social capital and
improve urban environments and city process.
There are lots of projects and initiatives happen-
ing around the world and I have included a brief
about many others at the end of this article.
SeeClickFix
There are plenty of enthusiastic people who
want to make a difference in their community.
SeeClickFix supports hyper-local, community-
driven activism to empower citizens, community
groups, media organizations and governments
to improve their neighbourhoods. Their online
platform and mobile apps allow citizens to flag
and report non-emergency community issues
such as potholes and graffiti, share them on a
web-based map for others to view and comment
on complaints based on location as well as view
the profiles of people who report issues nearby.
SeeClickFix also have a Facebook page and an
app with game mechanics, giving users Civic
Points for performing actions that engage with

29
is branding itself as a solution finder and innova-
tor in making cities smarter and cleaner along
with promoting their hybrid and electric cars.
There are three apps that BMW has invested in
that use community intelligence and the par-
ticipation of users to reduce traffic congestion,
improve how people navigate their city and life in
their cities.
DriveNow
Running only in Munich at the moment, DriveNow
is a car sharing service that gives users access
to a car whenever they need it. After registering
with their driver’s license, users can reserve a car
online or through a mobile app and use the car at
a cost of 29c a minute, including petrol and free
parking within Munich city.
the app including reporting issues, uploading an
image or taking action in order to get an issue
resolved.
SeeClickFix doesn’t just crowdsource community
intelligence to improve their local environment,
but helps to improve city processes by rout-
ing complaints to the relevant parties such as
local governments and media outlets to resolve
them. SeeClickFix provides community groups
(neighborhood associations, volunteer groups,
business associations) with an online platform to
connect and address the needs of their commu-
nity, governments with a dashboard for tracking
and acknowledging issues, and media outlets
with a platform to stay up-to-date with events
that impact the community. It has been a major
success, with over 200,000 users, more than 30
government clients, and 50% of user-reported
issues resolved.
BMW i
In February 2011 BMW created a $100 million
venture capital fund to invest in mobile apps that
make it easier for people to navigate urban areas
by car, bike, public transport or walking. This is
part of BMW i, an initiative to establish a new,
sustainability-focused sub-brand to integrate the
concepts of luxury and sustainability. Non-auto
motive has not been BMW’s interest, but it is to
its customers and potential customers, and BMW
ParkatmyHouse
ParkatmyHouse is the largest online parking mar-
ketplace connecting owners of parking spaces
who want to earn money renting it out to people
who need a convenient space to park.
MyCityWay
MyCityWay is a real-time, location-aware suite of
mobile apps designed to help users navigate and
explore cities. It can be used for connecting with
other users, finding a restaurant that allows dogs,
locating the nearest wireless hotspot, sharing
tips, finding parking ahead of time, and checking
live.
SignalGuru
Traffic management systems are one of the ma-
jor features of smart city projects, and are offered

30
ground level up
• IBM’s Intelligent Operations Center to moni-
tor and manage city services
• Amsterdam Smart City – a collaboration be-
tween people, businesses and government to
create sustainable, large-scale programs that
reduce CO2 emissions
• Austin’s, Texas, budget allocator to deter-
mine which urban projects to invest in
• City Sourced – a mobile civic engagement
platform that allows residents to report issues
to the local government for resolution
• San Jose Mobile City Hall – a mobile en-
gagement tool to allow residents to report
issues to the San Jose government for
resolution
• Betaville – a collaborative platform for cities
in which ideas for new works of public art,
architecture, urban design, and development
can be shared, discussed, tweaked, and
brought to maturity in context by individuals
and experts
• Cooltownbeta – a crowdsourcing consultancy
• Reset San Francisco - an online community
that brings locals together around ideas and
solutions to improve San Francisco.
by companies like IBM as part of their Intelligent
Operations Center. There are plenty of mobile
apps that try to improve travel by facilitating
carpooling, notifying public transport travel times
and connections, or by route planning to avoid
traffic jams.
One (future) app that sounds promising is
SignalGuru. It was developed by researchers
at Princeton and MIT to reduce congestion and
fuel consumption in cities. It uses GPS enabled
smartphones mounted on car dashboards to es-
timate traffic light patterns. The app informs the
driver how long until the signal turns green and
suggests the driving speed to prevent stopping
at a red light. So far in early testing in Massa-
chusetts the app has successfully predicted red
lights to within 0.66 seconds and reduced petrol
use by 20%.
With so many developments in this space, cities
need a vision for the type of environment they
want to develop and a masterplan of how they
will achieve this that incorporates both large
scale solutions and community-led initiatives that
bring together experts and individuals. As excit-
ing as these projects are, there are some con-
cerns and questions that will need to be debated:
• Each initiative creates a huge amount of user
information and data, which naturally leads
to questions about privacy and how govern-
ments in some countries choose to use the
data to exert control over their citizens
• Who owns the brains of a city? Is it the com-
munity and services like SeeClickFix, or large
companies like IBM and Cisco with their
‘smart city in a box’ solutions?
• What happens when the interests of a large
company and the city and residents are no
longer aligned?
Further Examples of Smart City Initiatives
There are numerous smart city initiatives and
projects underway around the world. I’ve listed
some others that I find interesting:
• Songdo in South Korea – the first city to have
developed the smart city concept from the

If you are a marketer, brand manager or an en-
trepreneur then technically you are not supposed
to know about Enterprise 2.0 tools. But if you
believe that the strongest aspects of creating a
brand start with building the right culture into the
company, then I will recommend you start spend-
ing time understanding this field since enterprise
collaboration tools have the capabilities to not
only increase productivity and handle projects but
also power fascinating company cultures.
Why do you Need Enterprise 2.0 to Power
Company Culture?
As organizations grow the number of layers
between the people who have the enthusiasm
to take initiatives to brighten up the work culture,
the power holders, and others keeps on increas-
ing. It takes more like-minded people to do some-
thing fun in the company and these like-minded
people need to be connected and facilitated with
the right tools. Enterprise 2.0 comes handy as
it has the potential to socially connect people at
work, initiate and participate in conversations
and discover the hidden potential and interests
among people.
How have Some Brands Achieved this?
To make my point I would like to share two sto-
ries of brands and how they have successfully
used Enterprise 2.0 tools to create interesting
work cultures into their companies.
The first company I would like to talk about is
Shopify, at start-up that has tried to gamify the
company culture with the help of their Enterprise
2.0 tool. This tool called UNICORN (created by
Shopify) not only helps employees share infor-
mation and updates but also award points to
each other. Hence employees are using this tool
for activities like posting news, finding hidden
talents within the company, learning more about
colleagues, and even giving performance re-
views. Essentially, with UNICORN, a typical day
Using Enterprise 2.0 tools for creating
an interesting workplace and a fun work
culture
Enterprise 2.0 for Creating a Fun Work Culture
Collaboration
in the company has been gamified and people
are getting experience points from their manag-
ers that can be exchanged for rewards. (Source
– Fast Company)
The second case is IBM, one of the leading
brands in the world with one of the world’s largest
workforces. IBM has made use of some smart
self-developed Enterprise 2.0 tools to create
a culture of idea sharing and innovation in the
workplace. To begin with, IBMers have their own
internal blogs where they can share ideas and
information with the company. On top of this they
also have their own internal wiki that serves as a
hub of information, their own internal bookmark-
ing site like Delicious called Dogear, their own
internal Twitter-like tool called Blue Twit, and a
Facebook-like tool to help employees stay con-
nected called SocialBlue. IBM even conducts
companywide jams, online forums for employee
brainstorming. The seriousness of these pro-
grams can be seen from the fact that the 10 most
voted ideas internally by the employees from
the 2006 IBM Jam were funded and incubated
by IBM. (Sources: socialmediaexaminer, adam-
chirsten.com and beshayer.com.)
As you can see IBM is a brand that despite its
massive size is making use of Enterprise 2.0
tools to power a culture of creativity, innovation
and idea sharing.
How can you Use Enterprise 2.0 to Power a
Fun Workplace?
If the above examples of Shopify and IBM have
excited you to use social technologies to make
your work place even more exciting, then I have
listed down related use-cases and the Enterprise
2.0 tool that can power them:
Gamifying Feedback
As discussed above, Shopify might have devel-
oped their own tool UNICORN to create a game

32
Firstly, it makes communication more effective
within the organization. Secondly, it helps people
share their passion and find like-minded people.
Finally, it cuts down a huge chunk of email junk.
There are many popular tools that help support
this need like Yammer, Salesforce Chatter and
Tibbr. These tools have been designed to initiate
discussion in the company over projects, work,
passions, interests, or anything else. I would like
to describe our own experiments with Yammer
inside my company Kuliza. We realized this tool
was a great way to educate our employees about
social technologies and social design. Once the
tool picked up popularity the head of the design
team and the social media marketing team inside
Kuliza started sharing interesting links about
their respective fields. The CEO started using it
to brief the employees about key company news
and updates, while developers started sharing
news about conferences they attend.
Employee Ideation
Employees have great ideas, and some of these
ideas are really valuable to brands for improving
their business. For instance, sales people for a
business might have the best ideas to improve
business performance since they understand the
real scenario. Many brands understand this and
provide tools to employees to power their ideas.
Dell ran the EmployeeStorm campaign where
employees could submit ideas about making Dell
a better place to work and vote for their favourite
ideas. The campaign was powered by Sales-
force’s Force.com platform.
Intuit also believes in this philosophy and has a
couple of tools to generate employee innovation.
Intuit has built an ideation platform called Brain-
storm to collect employee ideas that are sprout-
ing in the companies and get them noticed by the
relevant people. Inside Intuit around 15-20% of
the people use this tool every month and around
3,800 ideas have been collected since it started
(source).
Creating Internal Thought Leaders
Many brands, especially services or consulting
companies, want to create internal thought lead-
ers and field experts. Moreover, even if you have
experts working with you, in a large organization,
finding the right expert might be difficult. Enter-
prise 2.0 tools like internal blogs (for example
SocialText Collaborative blogs) help employees
showcase their capability and thought leadership
to the organization. People can search topics and
find field experts who are talking on those topics.
One capability of Jive’s ‘Engage Employees’
layer over the company processes, but you can
do that too with tools like Rypple and Get Work
Simple.
Rypple is a tool that helps you track your proj-
ects, manage performance reviews and also
give recognitions to team members in forms
of badges, and all in a manner that is fun and
engaging. You can use Rypple to set your goals,
give interesting badges to your team as the proj-
ect progresses, and also receive feedback from
your colleagues. Apart from real time continuous
feedback, the best part of this tool is that all feed-
back is publie, so if you have a difficult boss you
no longer have to suffer in appraisals.
Here is how a typical day with this tool looks like:
Real Time Rewards and Recognitions
Another tool, love machine inc., also helps you
create an open and continuous feedback culture,
but it has a stronger focus on recognition and
rewards. Managers can set up goals and allocate
reward budgets. The team can then send open
messages to team members recognizing their
efforts and the tool provides cumulative perfor-
mance analytics of each team member that can
be used to distribute the reward budgets.
Knowledge Sharing and Curation
A culture of sharing knowledge and information
with colleagues is a great asset to companies.

33
software is to ensure that users can locate field
experts within the company.
I hope this article helped you realize the potential
Enterprise 2.0 tools have to make your company
an interesting workplace and create a lively work
culture. However, tools are only one part of the
story and getting your employees to use it is
another topic.

34
Collaboration
Social media forms a core element of a brand’s
marketing as it provides a range of tools for them
to connect to and interact with customers. As
Facebook is the fastest growing social network,
brands are using it in ever-increasing numbers
as their primary engagement point with custom-
ers. As part of their engagement efforts, brands
understand that people need a reason to interact
with them, and so offer their fans promotions and
exclusive deals. However, studies suggest that
this is not a long-term strategy that increases
engagement; people often become fans in order
to receive exclusive deals and offers without
becoming more loyal to the brand.
Thus, brands need a reason and strategy to
interact with people, just like people need a
reason to interact with brands. From a sociologi-
cal perspective, shopping gives people a sense
of belonging to a community and allows them to
communicate with others, promote themselves
and validate who they are. This gives brands an
opportunity to build communities of interest with
people around their products and so form longer-
lasting relationships with their customers and
fans after the transaction is complete.
It is about more than having a product cata-
logue or shop on Facebook with a ‘share’ but-
ton. Brands need to understand how to connect
with their fans and build real interactions and
relationships. An effective strategy requires
brands to carefully consider what their custom-
ers are looking for and what role a community
should play. Three companies that have clearly
defined this are Modcloth in fashion, Threadless
in design and Monster Army in extreme sports.
The communities around these brands are not
purely to facilitate QA or customer service, but
a representation of the broader interest of their
members.
Reflecting a community’s shared
interest areas to increase brand
engagement
Growing Online Communities
Modcloth
Modcloth, an e-retailer of vintage women’s
fashion, created a community of fashionistas and
involved them in almost every part of the compa-
ny. ModCloth began asking customers to help the
company decide whether to carry certain items
in its store. Their Be The Buyer program allowed
their community to be virtual members of their
buying team by voting on clothing samples. If an
item receives enough votes ModCloth will sell it.
This helps them improve inventory management,
reduce the guesswork involved in buying deci-
sions, and allows them to engage with and build
their community.
Members can vote and leave comments on cloth-
ing samples and share their views on Facebook
and Twitter. The result is a group of people who
may not know each other but share a common
interest in fashion and a desire to talk about it.
ModCloth however recognize that their commu-
nity has more in common than just fashion and
clothes, so their blog covers recipes , links from
around the web that their members might find in-
teresting, and a book club where members share
books they are reading.
Threadless
Threadless is an international, community-driven
design platform featuring merchandise designed
by and for its fan base of over one million users.
Artists and designers from around the world cre-
ate and submit their designs and the community

35
can vote for the ones they like best and share
their favourite designs on Facebook and Twit-
ter. On average, 1,500 designs are submitted
to the site every week. The most popular ones
are printed on a limited run and sold through the
website and their shop, while the winning design-
ers receive a prize of cash and store credit.
Like ModCloth, Threadless recognized that their
community is interested in more than just t-shirts.
Their platform evolved to reflect a community
center for people to blog, chat and socialize
around design and with design enthusiasts. To
reflect the design interests of their community
they recently moved beyond designs for just
t-shirts to designs for other items such as tote
bags, scarves, iPhone cases, notebooks, and
backpacks. They also established Threadless
Atrium, a meeting-place for artists and organiza-
tions looking for new product designs. It works
similarly to the t-shirt designs: Threadless and a
partner post a design challenge, members submit
their designs and vote on them, Threadless
makes the most popular products.
The current Atrium challenges are listed on Face-
book and on their site. It is not just organizations
such as Griffin and Disney, but also for causes
such as American Red Cross Peace One Day. So
strong is their community that there are regular
offline meet-ups across the world.
Monster Army
Monster Army is an online community of over 1
million members who share an interest in ex-
treme sports. The approach Monster Army took
is it to not just provide an online space for their
members but to expand this into offline activities,
such as sponsorship for a broad range of sports
such as BMX, surfing, skateboarding, and winter
sports as well as sponsoring individual athletes.
This results in a community that is devoted to the
brand with the latest news, athlete updates, pho-
tos and videos from Monster Army events posted
on the website.
Their success is down to building a business for
a community rather than a community for their
business. Monster Army and their extremely loyal
base of members online and offline exist in a mu-
tually beneficial relationship: members have an
interest in growing their sports and the Monster
brand, and Monster has an interest in supporting
and growing extreme sports.
By broadening the scope of topics around which
they engage with their members these sites are
building a more loyal, connected and committed
community that is motivated to ensure the suc-
cess of the site and the growth of the community.

36
Everyday I log onto twitter and I read about
someone complaining about a problem they are
facing with a particular service that they use. In
almost realtime, a lot of others who face a similar
problem simply re-tweet the initial tweet about
the complaint. What this could result in is nega-
tive publicity about the service, and even fear of
losing a customer. In almost no time, there are
representatives from the company replying to the
tweets and assuring of a quick turnaround to the
customer’s concerns. If that is not enough there
are also social channels that people can reach
out to if they do not get a response on Twitter.
This is the new age of customer relationship
management and goes by the term social CRMs.
There is a lot of debate about the legitimacy of
the phrase social CRM. On one side of the argu-
ment there are the believers who think that this
is just another fancy term riding the Social Wave.
On the other side of the argument you have peo-
ple who swear by anything social and believe it to
be of an immense value add. I for one think that
SCRM is here to stay, and it can only promise to
grow with more and more businesses adopting
social media technologies.
I deal with design and through this article I wish
to seek out the challenges that designers face
and should consider when designing for Social
CRM. It may be noted that this is just an indica-
tive list and not a definitive one. With changes
happening almost every day (Facebook intro-
duced the Timeline as I write this), the challenges
can only increase.
In the earlier days of the traditional CRMs, the
engagement with the customer happened around
three domains - sales, marketing, and service
and support.
With the rise of social media platforms being
used for things beyond just customer engageme-
Written by Kshitiz Anand
Dealing with complexity in a connected
world
The Designer’s Challenge to Social CRM
CRM
nt, promotions and post-purchase support, the
notion of social CRM goes wider than the above
mentioned three domains. Amongst all of this
change, the main change is in the role of the
customers.
What has also changed is the increase in the
data load of the systems. One is not just track-
ing and keeping a note of customer feedback
and questions and relationships, but dealing with
more data in an efficient and process-centric way.
The ultimate goal of the traditional CRM was to
have a customer return to buy more products
from the same outlet or retailer. The goal of the
SRCM also primarily remains the same, though
the parameters and the channels have increased.
As Paul Greenberg writes, “Social CRM is a
philosophy and a business strategy, supported by
a technology platform, business rules, workflow,
processes and social characteristics, designed to
engage the customer in a collaborative conversa-
tion in order to provide mutually beneficial value
in a trusted and transparent business environ-
ment. It’s the company’s response to the custom-
er’s ownership of the conversation.”
Social CRMs is more like a design strategy exer-

37
important to take care of. Often the user fails
to understand the legal implications of being
involved in a Social CRM solution and it can often
lead to situations of brand reputation being at
stake or to public defamation. It is the duty of the
designer to engage the users in a way so as to
avoid these situations.
5. Customers are your Channel of Advocacy
Decisions on buying and becoming loyal to a
brand are highly influenced these days by peers
and the discussions that happen across the dif-
ferent channels. It is not about “sell and forget”
any more. The relationship with the individual
goes beyond that. The design should be flexible
to enable the cycle of purchase, enjoyment, ad-
vocacy and bonding. This will lead to a valuable
customer for life.
6. Multiple Channels
Unlike the earlier days where CRM relied on one
channel, these days social CRM often relies on
multiple channels. Customers define the dyna-
mism of each of these channels and as a result
keep brands on their feet. It is not uncommon to
hear of frequent changes in brand loyalty these
days due to the brand’s inability to cater to one
or more of the channels. In an ideal world one
would expect the same customer experience
irrespective of channel, be it the social media
technologies one or the traditional face to face
interactions.
7. Changing Platforms and the Issue of
Scalability
With technology penetrating more and more into
our lives, customers are reaching out to rep-
resentatives at any point of time from different
types of devices. Mobiles, tablets and of course
the laptops and hi-tech systems have made life
complex. Dealing with issues of web portability
and being able to provide the same ‘wow’ user
experience across platforms is the key.
8. Making Sense of the Chaos
The main challenge for businesses is to translate
the pillars of social CRM - the fans, likes, shares,
and re-shares - into sales. All these pillars of
SCRM lead to a lot of data being generated.
Making sense of all of it is important and only
then can SCRM be of immense value add for
businesses. This is also important for customers
since their decisions are formed based on their
past experience and that of their network. Thus,
the key here is to translate it into a data-driven-
high-user-experience design, such that it can be
beneficial for both the designer and the business.
Tools such as information visualizations and ana-
lytics can be of immense value to the designers
cise that is often supported by various tools and
technologies, and the strategy is based around
customer engagement, interactions and experi-
ences. So apart from the traditional goals of mar-
keting, customer query answering and increase
in sales, a SCRM solution is also looked upon as
a source for peer-to-peer customer support, idea
management, market research, product launch-
es, advertising channels, promotions, and brand
reputation management.
Customers today are better informed and have
a lot more channels to broadcast their opinions
and experiences. Therefore, the value addition
that SCRM must bring about and influence at a
larger scale is important. This, in my opinion, is a
design problem and the solution should be done
through a proper design and not by force. We are
not talking about just going overboard with social
media technologies as there is always the danger
of over-selling.
In this context I will outline some of the challeng-
es that the designer faces.
1. The Complexity of Dealing with the Offline
and Online Worlds at the Same Time
More and more people are spending more time
online. With the advent of cloud computing and
usage of the cloud to manage large systems, the
user is connected 24X7. Our lifestyles are being
monitored all time and as a result we tend to
expect more from services at all times.
2. Understanding Users
This has been a designer’s classic problem
space, but with every passing year the users
seem to become more sophisticated. There are
more social technologies that are being adopted
every year. One of the biggest goals of the
designer needs to be to keep things simple in
this complex world. In the present context, the
users (customers) define the processes and also
define the hours in which they seek the customer
service and engagement.
3. The Notion of Identity
In the earlier days of CRM there were more per-
sonal and face to face meetings. In the days of
social CRM people often tend to have a different
persona that they present online and in the of-
fline world. So the key is to ensure the seamless
integration of both the worlds.
4. Share it to Engage in it
A lot of things happen in realtime and as a result
of the identity point above, one is often in the risk
of sharing too much. For a designer this is chal-
lenging as the issues of privacy and trust become

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