Weekly Reflection 1: "Social Media? Get Serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media."

General Terms

Platforms for general masses: Facebook, Friendster, Hi5

LinkedIn: Professional

YouTube: Photos & Videos

Blogs: Wide range of audience

Microblogging: Provides real-time updates

Honeycomb of Social Media

The article provides a honeycomb framework containing seven social media building blocks to address the lack of understanding about social media and its various forms.

These blocks, when taken individually or together, are helpful for the managers to make sense of the social media ecology while understanding their target audience and their engagement needs.

1. Identity: Identity strategies could be real or virtual; some focus on self-promotion (Facebook) vs self-branding (LinkedIn). People reveal different identities depending on the context of different social media platforms. Maintaining a balance between sharing identities and protecting privacy is essential in selecting social media tools. Otherwise, the imbalance may lead to cyberbullying and off-topic and off-color comments.

2. Conversations include a tweet, blog, et cetera to meet new friends and find love. Firms can make effective use of blogs by posting details that can be rich and useful to a specific audience. However, firms need to know when they have to chime in and show that they care for their audience.

3. Sharing represents the extent to which users exchange, distribute, and receive content. Firms need to identify new objects that can mediate their shared interests with the audience, without having these shared objects, a network will be merely social connections without anything connecting them. In addition, firms also need to be concerned with the terms and conditions of the platform where they share the objects.

4. Presence refers to the extent to which users know if other users are accessible in the virtual or real-world location, such as online/hidden/available/active, check-in in a particular place, etc. So, firms need to pay attention to the relative importance of user availability and user location.

5. Relationships represent the extent to which users can be related to other users. Relationships could be formal/informal or structured/unstructured. For example, Blogs allow an informal structure, while Skype allows people to talk to buddies or contacts they already know. Two properties of relationships include structure and flow. Structure refers to several connections and their position in their network of relationships. The flow property refers to the types of resources involved in individual relationships and how these resources are used, exchanged, or transformed, thus describing the strength of the relationship.

6. Reputation is the extent to which users can identify the standing of others, including themselves, in a social media setting. For example, LinkedIn builds the reputation of an individual based on endorsements from others. Other examples include likes, view counts, or ratings. For a firm, the engagement needs of its community should inform the choice of a reputation system. So, firms need to develop a metric system to provide information on their reputation accordingly.

7. Groups represent how users can form communities and sub-communities. Danbar (1992) mentions that the number of stable social relationships is about 150 due to the cognitive limit. Social media platforms provide the options of permissions and a few categories of groups to manage many groups.

The 4 Cs

The 4 Cs relate to how firms should develop strategies for monitoring, understanding, and responding to social media activities.

 1. Cognize: To navigate the social media landscape effectively, firms should utilize the honeycomb framework, highlighting social media functionalities and customer engagement insights. It is crucial to pinpoint where and how discussions about the firm are happening and to comprehend the impact of key influencers in the industry.

2. Congruity: Firms should develop social media strategies aligned with their goals and the functionalities highlighted in the honeycomb framework. Key success metrics might include the speed and engagement level of conversations. Acknowledging the pivotal role of customer service in marketing, strategies should aim to improve customer satisfaction and actively seek feedback.

3.  Curate: A firm should curate its social media interactions by establishing clear engagement frequency, timing, and representation guidelines, involving selecting employees attentive to online discussions and skilled at creating community-appropriate content. Policies should be developed to manage and sustain social media engagement effectively.  

4. Chase: Continuously monitoring social media activity can be demanding, yet it's indispensable for firms to grasp the speed of conversations and information dissemination influencing their market standing. Using the honeycomb framework proves beneficial for assessing the dynamic social media environment, enabling firms to reevaluate community engagement, track platform developments, and scrutinize competitor reactions.

Reference: Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business horizons, 54(3), 241-251.