Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Internet users want applications that are “socially aware” of their identity and relationships;
most users do not want to re-enter profile information and re-establish friend connections on
every new site they visit. Social networking platforms allow developers and businesses to tap the
existing social graph for their applications and Web sites instead of having to reinvent the wheel.
Similarly, Social network APIs such as the MySpace API, Facebook Connect, and Google Friend
Connect, take the online social network beyond the native social networking sites to external Web
sites and applications. Thus, social network is enabling a new Web experience that allows us to
bring our online identities and friends with us to whatever site or application we choose to visit
on the Internet.
Facebook and LinkedIn established a clear friend request protocol and culture of
trust for their networks. Facebook did so through e-mail-based identity confirma-
tion and modeling their online networks of of real offline networks. For example,
when you join Facebook, one of the first things you must do is choose one or more
networks with which to be associated. Your options include schools, employers, cities, and
other real offline networks that have real offline trust. LinkedIn took a different approach to
establish protocol. By accepting a LinkedIn connection request, you implicitly agree to share
your network and to professionally vouch for this person. Most people aren't willing to
vouch for strangers, so they are more careful about accepting LinkedIn connection requests
from strangers.
An important precursor to social platforms was the ability to embed YouTube videos on
MySpace pages. Prior to MySpace, YouTube struggled to hit a tipping point and really take off.
It had a small and scattered community of fans that used its video-sharing service as one-offs.
Joining forces with MySpace changed everything overnight-YouTube found itself with a large
global audience and infrastructure for word-of-mouth distribution. MySpace saw its pages come
to life with rich, multimedia video and its Web traffic shot-up impressively. Naturally, a host of
similar successes leads to high degree of heterogeneity in terms of social network platforms. This
quickly led to the demand for interfacing standards. In 2007, product managers at Google led an
effort, called OpenSocial, to define a set of open source social APIs that could work across any
social networking site or other Web site. Having a standard set of APIs would theoretically enable
developers to write an application once and have it work on any OpenSocial site. OpenSocial has
since spun off from Google as its own independent nonprofit organization and is supported by an
industry consortium of social networking sites.
14.11.3 Social CRM
Traditional CRM is effectively a networking tool that lets sales reps view “profiles” of their
accounts, capture deal information, track performance, communicate with contacts, and share
information internally with sales managers and other members of their account team. However,
the social networking sites differ from traditional CRM in one critical dimension—they are con-
duits for bidirectional visibility and interaction. By making the customer an active participant
in CRM, not only will companies benefit from more accurate data and better engagement, but
