Attracting bright young recruits has been the focus of HR professionals at the world’s largest companies for well over a decade now. It’s been the subject of flashy magazine articles that look at Google’s free lunches and Apple’s compensation plans and the cool factor of working for Facebook (the impending mega IPO there helps). There’s also hope for smaller firms looking to stay competitive in the talent wars: using social media for internal communications.

According to a new study by APCO Worldwide and Gagen MacDonald, employees really, really LIKE employers who have implemented social tools to upgrade their internal comms. So much so that 58% said they would prefer to work for a company that uses ISM (internal social media) and 86% said they would gladly refer others to work for this company as well.

The study mentions that wikis, blogs and Facebook-like platforms are quickly challenging the intranet as the preferred communications platform, continuing a trend that began a few years ago on the enterprise side. One of the most interesting findings of the report is what aspect of ISM is most valued. Quality content – accurate, pertinent and timely information – still rules the day. The second most valued aspect is the feedback/dialogue/collaboration component.

Here’s the rest of the study, presented in infographic form:

I’ve only twice ever turned to Twitter to clear up a vexing customer service glitch. The results were deeply gratifying: I got a helpful response in a fairly timely manner resolving my ongoing feuds problems with Groupon Italia and Bank of America. Turns out I’m not alone in thinking this is the future of attentive customer service, as new research shows.

According to a Maritz Research survey, a whopping 83% of consumers were extremely grateful that the company they sent a grumbling Tweet to responded in some way. Maritz goes on to say:

And just under 75 percent of those people who received a response were very or somewhat satisfied with the response they received. A little more than 15 percent said they were either very or somewhat dissatisfied with the company’s response.

When three out of four consumers checks the satisfied box you must be doing something right. What’s disappointing though is the overall response rate. Just 1/3 of those who complained actually got a DM in response from the brand. They really missed a big opportunity. “For the two-thirds of respondents who didn’t receive an answer to their complaint, a similar number, 86 percent, also would have liked or loved to hear from the company,” Maritz explains.

eMarketer used this data to ask the question: when should companies respond to angry Tweets? It turns out that different demographics have different expectations from their Twitter customer service experiences. For example, older consumers (age 45 and above) fully expect to get a response from the company when using Twitter to complain. What about the 18-35 age bracket? Less so, but still their expectations of a response are relatively high too.

It’s pretty clear that the 1/3 response rate, low now, will only grow as consumer-facing companies invest more in Twitter-bound customer service. eMarketer notes:

Many brands are responding to tweets and mentions in order to maintain their reputations and sustain important customer relationships. According to a Forrester Consulting social media report commission by Dell, 58% of US marketers believe that listening and engaging with consumers through digital media will help with customer perceptions of their brand. Also, 56% said their social media efforts would aid in building long-term customer relationships.

Here’s the full breakdown of what brands expect to get out of this investment:

It may seem like a massive investment, but building an attentive “social” customer service team should pay big dividends where it really counts: in customer satisfaction and loyalty. In theory it should also cut down on in-bound calls. In this way, the investment pays off double.

For some, their local barista is a lifeline into a busy day. Without the perfectly-poured coffee, stuff just doesn’t get done, days are spent in a fog of sleepiness and Monday mornings feel like black holes of stress and woe. For facilitating your amazing transformation from gibbering idiot to fully-functioning achiever, the person behind the counter at your regular coffee haunt deserves a medal.

In absence of a government-sanctioned barista recognition system, though, and where a hefty tip and big beaming ‘thank you’ just isn’t enough, there’s We&Co, a new iPhone app soft-launched last month that allows customers to provide thanks to service staff, individually by name.

Built on the Foursquare API, profiles are portable from job to job or among current jobs, so service staff can build up their personal ‘brands’. If they’re customer service heroes then they, their employers and everyone frequenting their place of employment will know it – no doubt very welcome news to service staff, who can often feel taken for granted or irrelevant.

With the strap line ‘Thank different’, We&Co aims to enhance the relationship between customers and service employees, and allow people to build a ‘little black book’ of great servers, as well as discovering their friends’ favorites. It adds a long-term benefit to the simple act of purchasing goods, too, as this post notes on We&Co’s Facebook page:

The coolest thing has started to organically happen using We&Co. When I ask service professionals for their names they’ll innately ask me for mine. Now, when I walk into my ‘regular spots’ they actually welcome me by MY name! It’s like we’re old pals! I now want to tip them more, learn more about them, and continue to want to come back.

Like Foursquare, there are a number of achievements to be unlocked and perks gained, too. Employees can become the ‘boss’ of their business if they receive the most thanks over a 30-day period, and users can receive personalized perks from their favorite employees.

But it’s not just about coffee and sandwiches. We&Co has opened its platform up to Thank911Heroes, so that users may individually thank the people that displayed truly selfless, heroic behaviour during the September 11 attacks – an innovative way for people to display their gratitude for actions during this horrendous period, and one which also depicts the expansion potential of the We&Co model.

In its first month, 6,000 users signed up to We&Co and by all accounts the model has some substantial marketing backing. A web-version is on the cards, as is an Android model, and the brand plans to hit 100,000 downloads in the next couple of months.

The potential for We&Co to integrate social media and real life relationships is huge, and if it takes off your morning coffee experience will leave you full of warm fuzzy feelings, as well as that much-need caffeine boost.

With continual talk of billions of dollars floating around the social commerce sphere, it’s easy to imagine the dollar signs flashing in the eyes of investors and entrepreneurs alike. A consumerist society gets the goods it craves, and the fat cats make their money. That’s capitalism and it’s working nicely.

However, a pleasing break from the money-focused merry-go-round was launched this week in the form of Farmigo, a social network that connects customers with fresh, local produce. In doing so, regional farms broaden their customer base and people have easy access to the tasty, organic food we’re all told so often we should be eating.

As SmartPlanet notes, Farmigo is essentially a cross between community-supported agriculture (CSA) and a Groupon deal. There are already around 1,500 farms in action in the US, but to create another, enough people need to ‘buy in’ to a particular farm. The farm will then take orders and schedule deliveries of its produce to a set pick-up point – a community hall or school, for example.

Farmigo itself takes two percent of every sale – a reasonable figure given that the produce is being sold cheaply, at wholesale prices (which is the network’s major appeal to consumers) – and it’s a model that works well enough to have caught the attention of judges at Tech Crunch Disrupt, where it reached the final in the ‘Startup Battlefield’, although was kept off the top spot by avatar-based chatroom, Shaker.

Nonetheless, this is good exposure for Farmigo, which currently boasts only a meagre following on Facebook and Twitter. Given the CSA aspect of the company, it relies heavily on word-of-mouth and as such could utilize social platforms to great effect. Certainly, a Facebook application would complement the idea well – users could log in to let others know that they’re joining the real food revolution, or buying in for a new local merchant (after all, their social circle is likely to be geographically relevant to this). Better yet, if Farmigo could develop a sophisticated app that would allow users to place orders via Facebook (and in the long run perhaps even a transactional Facebook storefront), then the F-commerce landscape would diversify away from the onslaught of capitalist consumables and start having a wholly more meaningful impact on our lives away from the web.

As no bidders came forward to buy the company, bookselling chain Borders is singing its swan song this week, and is heading for liquidation. Its remaining 399 US stores will begin winding down today.

Over ten thousand employees will be made redundant and bookworms with a Kobo account purchased through Borders have been left confused by what Kobo lawyers are calling a ‘hurried and confusing’ sale process of Borders’ stake in the e-book maker. In short, it’s a big deal.

But over in Borders’ social media sphere, it looks like business as usual. Their Facebook page reveals nothing of the company’s impending closure (but hasn’t been updated since the announcement), and ol’ Borders Matt has been merrily tweeting away about Comic Con and Harry Potter. As the social media ‘voice’ of the brand, it seems odd that he’s not mentioned anything about a development which has rocked the US bookselling industry, save for official party line replies to followers who have quizzed him about it.

“Thanks for being a great customer! Stores & Borders.com are operating as usual & we’ll have updates here,” he tweets repeatedly, before directing interested parties to a wholly lacklustre page of legal blurb which makes little or no sense to the average Joe.

And that’s the official Borders social media response to its impending liquidation. Utterly uninspiring.

This is not the first time we’ve seen businesses ignoring the elephant on the social media landscape; back in April we identified four notable examples of brands going down without so much as a cursory wave to its online audience, including the Flip video camera where Cisco, like Borders, took its sweet time to acknowledge the demise of its product to its social media channels.

And indeed, what’s the point, many would ask? If the situation is a write-off, why invest dwindling resources into a medium that only really existed to help pump more profit into the company? Well, according to a report by The Economist Intelligence Unit, retailers just don’t care that much.

Here are some notable stats:

• Only 12% of retailers have added full-time staff to manage social media
• Only 6% measure ROI on social media investment
• Only 12% believe social media marketing is more effective than traditional marketing
• 84% rate their social media efforts as poor or average
• 23% monitor social sites but don’t actively participate
• 24% don’t use social media to communicate with customers

And a further point of note, in an independent study recently carried out by our friends at SocialCommerceToday, 68% of retailers believe that if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, it would have no effect on their business.

Of course, you’d think that top dogs like Borders would be aware of the importance of engaging with their audience through social media (that’s an audience of 1.1 million combined fans and followers right there), and indeed they’ve taken the time to mingle, make nice and schmooze. But now the party’s over and they’ve slunk off without a word, and that’s just downright rude.

I have been thinking more and more about the various strands to Social Business Intelligence, which is a major area of focus for us here at Dachis Group in 2011. At our London summit earlier this year, I spoke about the way open data inside and outside organisations can uncover new sources of value and help drive performance improvement. Yesterday, at the lovely Social Media Influence Conference, I spoke about how the field of Social Media Monitoring will become more real-time, operational and valuable as it moves towards Social Business Intelligence.

In summary, I think social media monitoring will evolve towards real-time data-driven business improvement based on socialising customer insight within the firm as a whole, not just within marketing and outbound communications.

Here are the slides, and a longer summary follows below for those of you who were not there:

From Social Media Monitoring to Social Business Intelligence

Listening grows up; becomes more business-focused

We have all been to events where people (sometimes me!) reference the Cluetrain manifesto and say that markets are conversations, and therefore we need to get better at listening before we engage. But in reality, the fact that ‘listening’ is still seen as a new and novel activity just goes to show how alien this has been to the culture of large companies and brands for so long.

But, looking at Altimeter’s survey of social strategists, it seems that listening, customer dialogue and word of mouth are now high on most organisation’s spending priorities for 2011. This is a good sign. Listening tools and techniques have evolved rapidly in the past year or so, and the purchase of the market-leading Radian 6 by Salesforce suggests that listening platforms are now regarded as a key piece of the wider social business infrastructure.

However, current practice is still largely dominated by the ideas of brand monitoring and buzz – in other words, it is still more about the company or brand than the individual and their needs or interests. Brand monitoring is a slightly narcissistic way of engaging – ‘they love me … they love me not’ – and often tend to look at aggregate measures of sentiment (which is, by the way, extremely unreliable) and reach, rather than specific issues. But there are plenty of other ways to use listening platforms to get a better idea of customer needs, opportunities, etc. We are working on some quite specific listening campaigns to help refine clients’ service offerings, and this requires far more linguistic gymnastics than asking “does my brand look big in this?”

Brand perception is obviously important, but I think utility matters more to customers most of the time. This is why I love the way companies like Southwest Airlines and others use Twitter in a very down-to-earth way, responding honestly and openly to complaints, questions and issues.

A fun little story that I think exemplifies the way utility trumps “official” brand communications, and also illustrates the need to listen and engage rather than jump feet first into social media, is the tale of woe surrounding Tom Armitage’s Tower Bridge twitterbot.

I am sure our favourite bridge needs no introduction. We love it and watch it every day (as some of you will know, often from the window of our favourite local eaterie). It’s only downside is that when the bridge raises, we sometimes get stuck in traffic for 10 minutes or so on the way to meetings in the city. Luckily, whilst he worked here, the lovely Tom Armitage created a twitterbot for the bridge that would diligently tweet bridge openings and closings, and even tell you the name of the boat sailing through, all based on public data. Beyond its practical utility, the twitterbot gave the bridge a personality in the social web, and inspired other inanimate objects to do the same (incidentally, the SF writer Bruce Sterling coined the term spimes in 2004 for this very purpose).

At some point, the marketing people at the corporation of London, who run the Tower Bridge Exhibition, decided they had the right to the “official” twitter handle @towerbridge and applied to Twitter to have it handed over to them. After trying and failing to contact Tom, Twitter sadly complied with this request and what began as a public utility (that also did a great job of promoting the bridge) turned into a dull, series of weak marketing messages for the exhibition. Perhaps the Corporation of London thought it had ‘followed a process’ and so everything was ok.

To cut a long story short, a minor twitter storm ensued with over 1,250 tweets mentioning @towerbridge in just a few days (approx. 50% of the 3 year total), almost all of which were very critical of the Corporation of London’s disregard for both Tom, the Twittersphere and the users of the bridge. I would hate to be the one trawling through the sentiment analysis for their newly minted Twitter account. Finally, realising their mistake, and to their credit, the people involved contacted Tom and the bridge now tweets at the rather unmemorable @twrbrdg_itself, presumably to “protect” the brand equity of the exhibition.

Listening and analytics cannot, of course, undo stupidity like this, but there are many other situations in which earlier action in response to product or service problems or user issues could be possible thanks to real-time data.

Some pointers for data-driven business

There are several areas in which I think listening and analytics will grow up to become more business relevant, and if they do, then I think they can play a major role in helping businesses evolve in a more customer-centric way:

• Instead of studying a microcosm of online social activity, we should try to immerse ourselves in the ecosystem and be closer to the context of what is being said and shared.

• In addition to listening to opinion, it also makes sense to gather and connect behavioural data so that future social marketing efforts can build up a rounded picture of customers and their needs.

• Don’t just listen to external conversations – also point analytics at internal conversations and see if there are common themes or correlations between them (e.g. someone in product teams suggesting feature X might be buggy should ideally be picked up before customers begin complaining).

• Share streams of listening data internally as widely as possible to bring everybody closer to customers, and involve the whole company (not just marcomms) in making sense of the data and what actions it suggests.

• Think carefully about who should ideally action customer insight, and bring them into the listening loop. For example, efforts by Gatorade, Dell and others around social media command centres have shown great promise in immersing C-suite execs in the flow of customer insight, and that helps them understand what social media teams are trying to do and why.

• Move beyond reports and dashboards and find new ways to share real-time data ‘in the flow’ of peoples’ work. Reports have never been a particularly effective way of changing behaviour, but in this case their limited distribution and the time lag effect both limit their usefulness.

The “who owns social” question

In order to action some of the points above, the perennial question of how to organise for social cannot be ignored. Who “owns” social (if anybody)? How do different business functions come together to make it work? These are not easy questions to answer after decades of increasing specialisation and silo-building, but without at least an interim answer to this question (even if it is as simple as a co-ordination committee), there may be problems ahead.

Ideally, we would recommend the kind of podular structure that my colleague Dave Gray has written about recently. It is interesting to note how Amazon – a very data-driven business – uses small teams or pods to drive tiny features on each Amazon web page, and how they use he vast amount of behavioural data generated by the site to tweak, improve or remove these features in an approach dubbed ‘Data Darwinism.’

Actions speak louder than algorithms

Why do we listen? We listen to learn and inform action. But how do we act? This is the key question that can help us close the loop between insight and results. All the data in the world will not help if we do nothing with it. Right now, one of the problems we see with listening campaigns is that the insights go no further than the marketing department, but they are not able to pull the right levers within the company to act on them. This was one of the take-aways from Jaimie Punishill’s entertaining talk at the 2010 Social Business Summit in Austin, and from what I understand, it came up in his 2011 SXSW panel on the challenges of doing customer engagement using social media as well.

So how can we both improve the way we make sense of customer insight whilst also encouraging people to take ownership of the issues identified?

We are working on the application of social analytics to this problem for clients that want to take the next step beyond passive listening. The basic idea is this: start by surfacing a stream of potentially actionable events or insights within a social environment inside a client’s organisation, and give people the opportunity to easily flag items as actionable / non-actionable or to claim them as actions. Claiming actions in the open, we believe, encourages a culture of ownership but also helps others learn what sort of actions and resolutions work best. The logical next step is to reward those who are best at filtering, sharing, escalating or claiming actions, perhaps through simple game mechanics or visible rewards.

We believe that open data can encourage greater self-management from staff by giving them the real-time feedback on how their efforts are playing out in terms of results. This can play a vital role in creating the conditions for evolutionary improvement in companies interested in harnessing customer insight to drive performance.

Lee Bryant was a keynote speaker at Social Media Influence 2011. He Tweets at @leebryant.

By Davide Casali

Any good social business is built on two carefully balanced pyramids, which mirror two different approaches that are required to coexist in a business that wants to thrive in a world where its customers are highly connected.

The first pyramid is the business as it’s usually intended. It is built top-down, where decisions and strategies are decided at the top level and propagated downward toward a single carefully crafted communication channel, which might even span or multiple media, but still fundamentally “broadcast” in nature.

This kind of approach usually takes its driving force from both the company values and its market strategy, building on them and trying to find the correct way to communicate to an audience.

The second pyramid is the business as perceived and lived by its customers, by the people using its services, and it is by nature bottom-up. It is also bigger, of course, and made up by a complex network of discussions, relationships and interactions with the brand itself. This second pyramid is going to exist regardless of any action in this direction from the business itself, because it’s a natural evolution of the interactions between people.

This very simple metaphor means two very important things:

1. The ownership of the social element in a business is a coordination between the top pyramid and the bottom pyramid – one cannot exist without the other. Trying to take complete ownership of that often translates into an alienated audience, while at the same time complete carelessness can lead to blunt surprises when the complex social interactions emerge in a more united response.

2. The balancing of the top pyramid, the business itself, is simpler if you allow it to “merge” it with the bottom pyramid by engaging the workforce. This means for the business to engage more with its users, allowing the internal people to interact with the external people, as human beings and not behind the company-controlled wall. This process creates an ecosystem with permeable boundaries that translates directly to more permeability, stability and feedback to improve the business itself.

There are just a few delegate places left for the Social Media Influence 2011 conference. Register here.

There are various strategies to surface this double pyramid and allow the two pyramids to begin to merge. While the strategy itself may vary a lot between businesses, there are two core elements:

1. The person the business wants to talk and interact with needs to be understood in terms of values and motivations. Failure to understand them leads to a negative ROI, while a correct understanding ampli?es the good signals and creates value for both the person and the business.

2. The ecosystem is a complex adaptive system. Complex systems can’t be built, but can be evolved through good social experience design that is able to pick the correct signals and amplify them in the direction that is better for both the person and the company.

An excellent example of this is the Vodafone Lab community (Italian language only), created in July 2008, as an open space to test and get feedback from users and developers on new and innovative solutions coming out of Vodafone’s tech team.

Developers are a core component in these kinds of community, and they are usually driven by a slightly different set of values. They are often highly curious individuals, trying to find optimal solutions for a problem, and they aspire to be recognised for their skills. Money and prizes here are not major motivators, but challenges and responses are very valuable.

Vodafone started creating a very small service, engaging a few people and then constantly evolved its wiki, forum and blog services in order to adapt to the needs that the users were expressing, supporting them with a constant and transparent feedback. Over the years, more and more features were added, but never more than the users required, and today the site supports them with technology news and informative videos as well.

At the beginning of 2011, the site reached more than 200,000 registered users, with a really high level satisfaction, which comes across clearly in the forums and answers, with people apparently happy to help solve problems and provide hints, creating value for both themselves and Vodafone.

This is a good example of a community that evolved its double pyramid, understanding people and designing “nudges” that helped the community to take shape, and integrated the top-down pyramid with the bottom-up one in a seamless social layer.

Davide Casali is a Hybrid User Experience Designer for Headshift, a sponsor of Social Media Influence 2011. Register now to hear Headshift director Lee Bryant speak at the conference on June 14.

For a good 500 years, spanning the 12th to 17th centuries, the Republic of Venice was the world power of maritime trade, with an influence that spanned Europe, Africa and the Far East. Its influence today is greatly reduced, but it’s still a fitting venue to discuss the future of the digital economy as we’ve been doing at the Digital Economy Forum.

The likes of Google, Amazon, Cisco, Intel and some big Italian brands, Barilla and the bank Intesa Sanpaolo, have led a series of discussion here on topics ranging from social- and mobile commerce to social media marketing to innovation and entrepreneurialism. Italy, it must be pointed out, is a curious market to lead some of these discussions. The impact of the digital economy here represents about 2% of national GDP, well behind that of France and the UK. Still, there are some interesting things happening in the market here that could have a spillover effect into the wider digital world.

The impact of mobile

Italians are mobile-mad. While broadband penetration rates remain relatively low, the mobile penetration is staggeringly high here. High enough even to impress Nokia. And there are examples of innovative geo-based projects that predate by years what’s happening today in the wider wired world. No wonder then that Amazon is eyeing big things from mobile here, and throughout much of Europe. Diego Piacentini, SVP of Amazon, has this to say about mobile and tablet commerce:

• Mobile commerce (and shopping apps in general) is more than just “shrinking the screen” of the online store to fit a PDA or iPad.
• Mobile has unique features to be exploited not possible with a PC: price comparison via QR codes, photos and even speech recognition.
• consumer experience shifts from “I want that” to “I bought that” anywhere, anytime.
• handsets will be the most common browsing device, beating out the PC in the next few years.
• Tablet shopping = couch shopping.

Social media marketing: even banks get it now

I spoke with Fabrizio Paschina, head of advertising and web for Intesa Sanpaolo. He has a small team of four that in the past year started to respond individually to the many questions they were seeing posted by consumers daily about their products. Here’s what they’ve achieved in just two months:

• Simply by responding to customer queries posted on various public forums they managed to eliminate 90% of the confusing and negative sentiment about the brand and its products. 90%! Clarifying confusion could be the biggest way to clean up your brand image with a demanding public.
• Banks are sitting on impenetrable product brochures with detailed information, some helpful, some tiny fine print. A smart customer outreach team can, in response to a query, Tweet or post the relevant bits of information to confused customers and “really build a connection” with the public.
• My favorite insight of the event: for banks, the low-low interest rates of today mean they’re not making much money from their high-margin products (loans and mortgages). It’s imperative then that banks adapt social media outreach “where we can earn a valuable customer relationship.”

Manage customer data to predict the future

This was a challenge put forth by Stefano Maruzzi, country manager of Google Italy. Maruzzi used these three words – “predict the present” – to sum up the challenge facing all consumer brands in the digital age. Making sense of the massive output and outpouring of data consumers produce on a daily basis, much of which touches brands directly, is the key to business survival. The key to understanding shifting tastes, fickle public sentiment has never been more crucial. Luckily for brands, these conversations have never been so accessible.

If you want to see an Italian version of the digital future, call on the Americans!

It’s lost on nobody here that this event is organized by the U.S. Embassy in Italy. Ambassador David Thorne, with a background in finance and publishing, has been sitting in on every panel and asks some probing questions. And the counterparts in the Berlusconi government? Not a single Berlusconi dinosaur lackey appointee is in attendance, nor have they even beamed in with a few encouraging words to the attendees. This truly discourages the Italian entrepreneurs in attendance. At one point, American entrepreneur Susan Koger, by way of introduction, mentioned in a panel that she started Modcloth at the age of 17 (now the second-largest growing privately held company in the U.S.) That’s a precocious success story we are unlikely to see here in the bel paese as long as the current gerentocracy remains in power here.

InsideView
Location: San Francisco
Founded: 2005
Sector: Social CRM/social business

Description: InsideView hosts a social CRM software platform that aggregates unstructured information on a particular topic or brand from a number of sources including traditional news, financial markets and social media networks. This information can then be used to develop sales leads.
Big Wins: On March 24 InsideView announced a $12 million series C funding round lead by Foundation Capital. The company has more than 1,000 corporate customers, including Adobe, BMC, Cap Gemini and Experian. In 2007, InsideView acquired its closest competitor at the time, TrueAdvantage. To date, the company has raised $37.4 million.

Future Challenges: Social media analytics is a crowded field, only the best capitalized with a deep client roster will win. This turf now appears to be in the hands of Salesforce.com, following its Radian6 acquisition.

Vitrue
Location: Atlanta
Founded: 2006
Sector: Social media analytics/social business

Description: Virtue has developed a social media management platform that helps clients create and maintain their social media presence while effectively engaging with their followers to monitor the results.

Big Wins: In February Vitrue announced it had closed a $17 million series C round of investment led by Scale Venture Partners and Advent Venture Partners. From Q2 to Q3 in 2010, Vitrue doubled its revenue by tripling its number of clients, a list that includes Harley Davidson, Mentos, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Crocs. To date it has raised $29.2 million.

Future Challenges: Vitrue operates in a very competitive sector, the monitoring and managing of conversation across a variety of social networks and discussion venues for its clients. It has already been ahead of the game on new social features such as location-based sharing, but it will need to keep ahead of its clients’ fan base to ensure an effective product.