Digital Transformation with FOAF Model - Building business friendships

Digital transformation is not just about creating a clever front-ended CRM solution and pack some cool social listening features in it and then hope that consumers will come to you; It's a lot more than that!

While its savvy to do your business campaigns on Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat or any other new platform that you'd want to embrace, most organisations end up being taken for a ride when it comes to the "let's do the social with your current static marketing campaign".

Surely, business goals such as driving in-store sales, improve/synchronize multi-channel experience, increase online sales etc are all taken into account when you embark on this journey but except for top brands why does this (see below) happen to most brands?

Social playbook - Where is your brand in this (failed) social journey?

Take a look how a typical sprint looks like if you were using say, Facebook as a platform. Has your journey been identical to this?

Disappointed? Unfortunately, there's more bad news! If you continue to allocate marketing and sales budgets to such small sprint campaigns, you are bound to lose your existing customers. Why? Because you never reached to the level of friendship! Fans are like bees, they'll go anywhere. Friendship is the nectar and most will continue to come back. but don't be mistaken, its a slippery slope trying to convert customers into fans. You must build bridges so you can truly have immersive friendships.

You're getting it, right? We need a trust model. So how to get there?

Enter the FOAF Model

What is it? This is an excerpt from the FOAF project from Tim Berner Lee.

To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them. For example, a document might describe a person. The title document to a house describes a house and also the ownership relation with a person. Adding semantics to the Web involves two things: allowing documents which have information in machine-readable forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship values. Only when we have this extra level of semantics will we be able to use computer power to help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our own reading. - Tim Berners-Lee "W3 future directions" keynote, 1st World Wide Web Conference Geneva, May 1994.

I express my network in a FOAF file, and that is a start of the revolution. - TimBL 2007, Giant Global Graph (foaf)

FOAF is a project devoted to linking people and information using the Web. Regardless of whether information is in people's heads, in physical or digital documents, or in the form of factual data, it can be linked. FOAF integrates three kinds of network: social networks of human collaboration, friendship and association; representational networks that describe a simplified view of a cartoon universe in factual terms, and information networks that use Web-based linking to share independently published descriptions of this inter-connected world. FOAF does not compete with socially-oriented Web sites; rather it provides an approach in which different sites can tell different parts of the larger story, and through which users can retain some control over their information in a non-proprietary format.

Making business friends with FOAF trust model

This is where the web is heading. Just like our real lives where we trust our friends and value our association with them, identify with them etc; businesses are no different, you require trust which can only come if you have reliable friendship that fosters human collaboration so you can do great projects together.

The FOAF trust model that connects and interconnects members of a social network enables users to define different rules for sharing information for different levels of connections. We know this from real lives as well, right?

However, this same trust model can potentially be leveraged for business purposes beyond the capabilities of a traditional online channels or even the nascent social communities by making connections from one group of users to reach out to the other -- as I demonstrated in the graph above, except for where it falls short and pushes your brand back to where it was.

This network of socially connected users/people build their own demographic profiles by connecting to dozens of affinity groups. Which is where the real value lies! This self segmentation phenomena is a great boon to marketeers and sales to spend more time in figuring out ways to improve awareness, sell more and new products etc.

Conclusion

Social business is a great medium to finally build and maintain business friendships but without enterprise-class controls you might find it overwhelming to manage the users. In order to bypass the customers/fans endless iterative cycles and jump towards a trust based friendship model, organisations must carefully assess valid business cases and adopt appropriate policies when implementing a trust-based business friendship model.

Remember, your brand is no longer what you tell your network what it is, it is what the network tells each other what it is.

Note

This was a teaser post, I will explain the FOAF model more in detail on my website (https://tarrysingh.com) where I will explain the following...

- How to leverage FOAF trust model (I have defined a model where trust gains/losses can be measured in the business friendship journey which can be very useful for CMOs/ Customer Care and Sales)

- Areas of legitimate business usage (HR Recruiting, Product Marketing, Market Intelligence, Promotional Applications etc)

- Implementation and Integration (why you must carefully plan your activities)

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For more insights into digital transformation with cloud computing, big data, social and mobile, please feel free to visit my blog. Here a few related blog posts you might like to read:

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