Juice Digital, Making you Digitally Famous

Setting corporate strategy for social media is not straightforward. One thing that helps is to have a conceptual model to represent how you want to create value from any social media platform.

This is part of a larger Digital Public Relations picture where social media is partly used for syndicating content that a company produces.

A sound conceptual social media model leads to tactical methods for creating value and making concrete plans to act as a basis for strategy. The tools and buzzwords in social media are constantly changing but such a value system embedded in a conceptual approach is a more stable way to approach all social media.

There is a useful 4 ‘C’s model developed by Gaurav Mishra, who is a social media thought leader and co-founder of Social Media analytics company 20:20 Web Tech. In his previous avatars, he has done marketing at the Tata Group, taught social media at Georgetown University and co-founded Vote Report India.

His model focuses on four underlying themes in social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these four themes can constitute a value system – the four ‘C’s.

Content
Content refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and simple.

User-generated content, and the hope of monetising it through advertising, is at the core of the business model of almost all social media platforms. User-generated content is also at the core of citizen journalism, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Most users prefer to consume user-generated content. Some users ‘curate’ user generated content, by tagging it on social bookmarking websites, voting for it on social voting websites, commenting on it or linking to it.

Researchers have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in a variety different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of users are creators.

Collaboration
The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action.

As consumers and curators engage with compelling content, the content becomes the centre of conversations. Conversations create buzz, which is how ideas tip, become viral. Many social media practitioners who are from a marketing or public relations background are focused on creating conversations.

However, conversations are a mere stepping stone for co-creation. In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling or organising an offline protest or event.

Even though conversations, co-creation and collective action are different forms of collaboration, the difficulty in collaborating increases dramatically as we move from conversations, through co-creation, to collective action.

The key is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism). It is also important to bridge online conversations into mainstream media buzz and online engagement into offline action.

The 4 'C's of social media @ Gaurav Mishra

Community
The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The notion of a community is really tricky because every Web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength and is built around a meaningful social object.

Most people understand that a community that has a large number of members (size) who have strong relationships and frequent interactions with each other (strength) is better than a community which doesn’t. However, a community is more than the sum total of its members and their relationships.

People don’t build relationships with each other in a vacuum. A vibrant community is built around a social object that is meaningful for its members. The social object can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea.

The fourth ‘C’: Collective Intelligence
Collective Intelligence refers to the idea that the social Web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google extracts ‘page rank’, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behaviour.

Amazon and Netflix are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behaviour and comparing it to the behaviour of other people like us. eBay and Amazon assign ratings to sellers and reviewers respectively, based on whether other members in the community had a good experience with them.

The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

In summary
So, the 4Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social media. As we move from Content, through Collaboration and Community, to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them: they are less visible.

Each layer is often, but not always, a prerequisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a prerequisite for meaningful collaboration which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

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