The Social Media Ecosystem is one of the ways in which we can envision how the seemingly disparate parts of the social channels and your small business can and will work together. By some definitions, it might be considered to be a living and breathing organism with each part feeding the other and vice versa. As a result of this, your small business brand messaging has the ability to be widely distributed throughout the ecosystem (social networks).
In the preceding figure, the satellites that surround your business are shown. They represent the various social networks, and as you can see, each of the social networks is pointing toward your business. Traffic generated from each network can be directed to your landing pages, blog articles, and literally any place that you would like your customers and prospective customers to visit. It gets even better!
Your business marketing assets (articles, white papers, and so on) can also be leveraged as the source of this shared information, which gives you the ability to distribute important messages out to each of the social channels; this will then, in turn, direct traffic back to your business. Each of these channels can also be used to share information with another network and then to either point back to the originating network or directly to your business.
For example, you could share your LinkedIn profile on Twitter and then have readers click the link to follow back to your LinkedIn profile, which will, in turn, link to your company page on LinkedIn. You might, for example, share a link that offers a free e-book and have that link direct to a landing page on your website, where contact information is captured and a record is automatically created in your SCRM for follow-up by sales or customer service. Linking is the key element that is used to direct people to the information that we wish them to be exposed to.
We call your marketing assets social building blocks. While Social CRM is the tool that we will use to aggregate and manage our customer-focused activities, it is the social building blocks that will enable the activities themselves. These activities will also go a very long way toward establishing your expertise and making that visible to others. By providing a perceived value to your networks, you attract others to you and your company.
A good example of this would be posts (blog articles) and pages on your website. Assuming that your company has stories to share with your customers and prospective customers, you should and you will also want to put these in writing by way of a blog. In this way, this information is available at all times. Blog articles work for you continuously and unattended. Other articles, even those not written by you, that pertain to your business or to the products and services that you offer will also go a very long way in establishing your company's expertise.
Other examples of social building blocks would include the following:
Newsletters and other campaigns
Images including slideshows and photos
Mentions of your business or of its personnel that are found on other sites
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ company pages
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ groups that you manage or frequent
Your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ profiles and those of your company personnel
Your company's video channel on YouTube
The social networks themselves represent both the power and challenge that is associated with social business. Each is actually a separate communication channel much like the phone or e-mail. People are talking to each other on these networks, and they also want to talk with you and your company. What happens if you are not there? Nothing.