Social Exchange through Social Media

In today’s business world, the companies ought to harness competencies from the customers. In this respect, the markets are viewed as forums for firms and active users to share and combine resources and capabilities of each other in the process of product/ service development. Co-creation and Co-production are used to describe the relationship between firms and consumers. Co-creation is based on the idea that value is solely determined by the consumers and firms serve as either to facilitate value or to co-create by becoming involved in the customer’s value creation process. The Co-production on the other hand refers to the mere involvement of consumers in product and service development. According to Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000), the morphing of customers’ role in the dynamic business environment from passive to active players demands companies to involve customers around four axes: 1) Engage in dialogue with the customers, 2) mobilize communities, 3) Manage customer diversity and 4) Co-create personalize experience. Today Social Media comes at the heart of mobilizing Social Exchange mechanisms in various forms.

Today, the purview of social media has swept away all the firm boundaries and customer premises. Online forums and tweeter feeds used for marketers and product developers towards discernment of customers desires is now an old story. The world is now at the verge of technological change and there is yet much more to be delivered by social media that will come at the later part of the talk. Looking at social media from Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s pivot points to exploit customer’s knowledge and ideas, we can think of social media providing the following:

•  Engage in Dialogues with Customers: Social media has long been thought to providing a new channel for companies to communicate with their customers but now it has fundamentally challenged to other forms of communication. Today companies are moving towards using social platform and social design mechanics to manage interactions across all communication channels to customers (Social-driven IT, Accenture Technology Vision 2012). This will also add value by insuring value adding communication among customers, employees and enterprises.
• Mobilize Communities: Matt Shaw (2011) reported that 84% of the adult customers feel that they feel more loyal to the brands because of social media and on the other hand, only 9% reported that social media are best to obtaining clear comprehensions about their favorite brands and 85% believe that a brand could not reach out to them over past 3 months. This indicates a clear gap between the potential of social media and the under-utilization of it. Hence social media needs to capitalize on mobilizing the communities in view of potential of social media to do that.
• Customer Diversity: Can be achieved effectively by social media. Social media provides the opportunity to manage various groups and networks and therefore an effective social exchange mechanism can take place by exploiting each fragment managed via independent network.
• Co-create personalize experience: It is very important to understand that Social media is just not about marketing. Social media is among the technologies, that Bingham and Conner in their book “” write as innovations that enable a new kind of knowledge-building ecosystem with people at its core. With examples from Best Buy to Intel and from Deloitte to U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, social media improves the way you recruit talent, engage employees, and build work-force capacities. Social media creates useful learning assets from customer’s experience with respect to your product and customer’s feedback. Hence, interaction between users and developers can establish valuable ties that can result into more customer loyalty and business value. Facebook recently launched the new version of Open Graph. It’s a framework that enables content developers to build applications that allow users to share whatever they are doing without overwhelming their friends.

Opportunities provided by Social Media:

Social media provides new opportunities to capture, measure, analyze and exploit social interactions in new ways.

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S   Social Polling which is an effective marketing tool to determine what works and what doesn’t. In this way, firms produce directly usable information which serves as the key to making business decision (Johnny S. John, 2009). 

     F8 event (Facebook event to bring together the developers, entrepreneurs and innovators who are building a more social web), facebook is now involved in exploiting the users activity by adding more verbs in addition to “Like”, such as “Read”, “Watch”, “Listen”, or “Travel”. In this way, if a travel agency learns that a user is planning for travel, they can render lucrative offers and cheap tickets to his desired place to travel. This is an insight that would not have triggered the travel agency had the user clicked “Like” for Madagascar.

    

    The traditional customer-firm relation is blurring away because users are now more actively involved in sharingexperience with each other. Toyota Private Social Network provides an opportunity for Toyota owners, dealers and cars. You can be alerted when your car needs battery recharging and also provides you with tips on maintenance from the dealers.

P    Provision of a social commerce platform like “The Gifts Projects” of eBay.

     Provision of commerce services like Geico’s service to pay bill online on Facebook without even clicking Geico’s own website.

    Better handling of customer’s problems, for example telco’s implementation of lodging complaints over twitter and that result into increasing the customer satisfaction level from 70% to 85%. 

Challenges - What firms need to capitalize on?

·         Companies need to revisit the whole business process and systems that implement them. All the firm boundaries where firm interact with customers need to be integrated with each other and “socially enabled”. This would mean at the very least that customers get the same answer to question whether asked over email, website, call center or face-to-face interaction.

·         Companies need to capitalize on new forms of data generated by those social feeds.

·         Establish an IT team to design and pilot cross-functional social media platforms.

·         Move beyond merely “Social listening” to managing social interactions. This can be done by helping individual business units to position their social strategies on top of enterprise wide strategy of social.

·         Monetize on social interactions.

·         Firms need to identify an effective social medium to interact with the customers so that optimal value could be achieved.

Social media is an effective mechanism for co-creation where various business units will interact with the customer to generate value by getting valuable knowledge from the customer. Companies today must adopt social media otherwise a Social Media legacy will culminate businesses in future as these companies will be lacking the useful insights from the customers that they know about them and their businesses will be lured away by the customers. 

Oct 14, 1990 & 2012

Life is a puzzle and sometimes, it shows its weirdest face. History repeats itself and we humans are perplexed. Today is October 14, 2013 and one year ago, I didn't this day would change my life like that. October 14, 1990, the day when my father had to leave for his trip to his hometown around 1000 KM from where we live. I remember the last time I ever shook hands with him. We bid him goodbye and I kept looking at him while he was leaving until he was out of my sight. We didn't know he was on way to his eternal place and this journey was just start of it. 

December 22, 1990, a day before he had to come back, he had a sudden heart attack which was quite severe and he died within few minutes even before the medical help could reach him. 

Last year until October 14, 2012, my life was so perfect and nice when my mother had a brain stroke that day. Initially it was not diagnosed, in fact I only came to know about the severity of her strokes few weeks after her death by getting access to her reports. Earlier I had "personally diagnosed" her disease through internet search. I thought that she had "Transient Ischemic Attack" meaning only little part of brain damage while it was "Tonic Clonic" means the whole brain was damaged. After her brain strokes, she did survive for 10 months but she was only physically present but not "really" with us. She passed away on August 22, 2013. Both on 22nd! (My mother born on Thursday, died on Thursday). Life is a mystery sometimes......

I actually lost both my parents on October 14, (father in 1990 and mother in 2012, my father physically and my mother mentally). I never saw either of my parent dead. My father passed away in his hometown and they buried him there. I came to know about his death on the third day because I was too little. For my mother, I opt not to go to Pakistan for her funeral. For me they are still alive. May Allah SWT forgive him.

I would relate it to another date, December 14, (1994 and 2012). On December 14, 1994, my mother had a worst heart attack. She was admitted in the hospital on that day for 1 month and 1 day (until January 15, 1995). And December 14, 2012 was the last day she was ever in the hospital. She was released from the hospital on that date. Every year, I would tease her and remind her of her heart attack and say, "mom today is your heart attack anniversary and she would get mad at me". From October 14, 2012 to December 14, 2012, she was admitted in the hospital for 5 times. From December 14 until the day she left us, we were on a roller coaster avoiding the fear of when she needs to be admitted in the hospital again. Her Tonic Clonic seizures could come anytime. But that day never came. She passed away peacefully in her home, in her room on her bed without any obvious sign of a stroke or attack. I saw her one day before her death, me, my friend who was visiting me and Ebrahiem. She was looking like an angel, so much carefree, like a small baby. That is why, when i heard this news from Aurin (same friend), i just could not believe it.

Parents are a shelter. When they are with us, we take them for granted and when they leave, we realize we have lost the biggest worldly support -  no THE ONLY worldly support. I have realized this but its too late. I hope those who have parents realize it before its too late.