My latest blog post on s+b:
Seeking Social Failures
The business shelves are crowded with books on how to promote ourselves and our companies on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, a professor of strategy and innovation at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) and formerly the Richard Hodgson Fellow at Harvard Business School’s strategy unit, takes a more robust approach in his new book, A Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media (Princeton University Press, 2014). Using three specific social media concepts, he creates a framework that marketers can use to craft an effective and innovative social media strategy.
Piskorski’s analysis of social platforms suggests these three concepts can account for their success and the success of companies that use them: social failures, social solutions, and social strategy. If you want to be tomorrow’s Mark Zuckerberg or piggyback on the triumph of the next big social platform, look for today’s social failures. Before the lunch invitations come flooding in, I should explain that a social failure isn’t a person—it’s an unmet social need, of which there are two categories. “Meet” failures, Piskorski says, represent constraints in our ability to make connections with new people; “friend” failures represent constraints in our ability to connect with people we already know. The first determinant of a social platform’s success is the commercial potential inherent in the social failure it aims to address.
Social solutions remedy social failures. An online dating service, like eHarmony, for instance, is a solution to a meet failure: the barriers to finding that special someone. An online messaging service, like Twitter, is a solution to friend failure: the barriers to communicating efficiently with your social network. Every solution, explains Piskorski, comes with “trade-offs that arise between different ways of helping us interact with people we do not know and with those we already do.” For instance, a company that is designing a social solution to a meet failure must decide whether it will offer its users private interactions with a few strangers, private interactions with many strangers, or unlimited public interactions. Decisions such as this one define the business concept for a social platform and its user base, and establish its competitive differentiation.
A social strategy, the final of Piskorski’s three core concepts, is the means by which a company can tap into the success of a social platform. For instance, how can a company like Ford or Procter & Gamble leverage the popularity of Facebook or Twitter? Too many companies use social platforms in ways that irritate, rather than attract, customers. “These commercial messages interfere with the process of making human connections,” says Piskorski. “To see why, imagine sitting at a table having a wonderful time with your friends, and then suddenly someone pulls up a chair and asks, ‘Can I sell you something?’ You would probably ignore that person or ask him to leave immediately. This is exactly what is happening to companies that try to ‘friend’ their customers online and then broadcast messages to them.” Now, that’s the other kind of social failure.
Piskorski says that an effective social strategy is one that helps “people do what they naturally do on social platforms: engage in interactions with other people that they could not undertake in the offline world.” So, if you want to market on say, Twitter, you need to understand the social solution it offers its users—for most people, the ability to communicate briefly and efficiently with a relatively small number of family members and friends—and craft your messages in ways that are aligned with and enhance their use of the platform. This is the deceptively simple, central idea behind a successful social strategy.
Being a closet Luddite, I’m amazed by the kind of user numbers that social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are reporting: 1.28 billion monthly users; 255 million monthly users; and 300 million members respectively. With user bases of this size, the reach of these platforms rivals and, in many cases, exceeds the media giants of yesteryear. Thanks to Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and his new book, companies now have a clear strategic framework for figuring out how to tap into their power.
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