The “Social” in Social Media

Who put the "Social" in Social Media? The answer is… the Community.

As Phil Dworsky recently recently commented about my post on December 11, beyond the ability for anyone to publish, it's the community interaction enabled by the Internet that is the defining characteristic of social media.

Tools are tools, but the dynamic interaction between people – colleagues, strangers, experts, novices, customers, competitors, advocates, detractors, et al – is the driving force behind the social media wave.

Blogs and other social media communication channels do not exist in a vacuum. Whenever a blogger hits "Publish," their thoughts and ideas immediately become filaments in a virtual tapestry collectively woven by worldwide communities of people loosely joined together by shared interests.

The Internet is the loom, and all of us are both potential weavers as well as beneficiaries of that which is woven.

As I suggest in my response to Phil's comment, the fundamental shift that's underway in marketing is from a one-way "tell" paradigm to a model that's multi-directional, interactive and conversational. Advertising seeks to put messages in front of eyes, while social media seeks an ongoing dialog with communities of people that invites and welcomes participation.

Rich Goldman emphasizes in his comment to the same blog post that a key part of the job ahead is to understand how the communities that are important to Synopsys (i.e., design engineers, CAD managers, executives, etc.) want to be communicated with as social media becomes omnipresent.

Where do our customers tend to congregate online? What sources do they trust and view as credible? How can we best serve their information needs without stepping over the line by whipping up marketing fluff?

What are you hearing? What do you think? Let's use the community that is our own marketing team to listen, observe and figure this out together.

B2C? Nope. B2B? Somewhat. G2G? Bingo!

When people begin talking about social media, it's generally helpful to narrow the conversation to keep everybody on the same page. Social media is a broad concept, and one size certainly does not fit all.

At the most basic level, social media simply means that anybody can publish content on the Web. Everybody has a voice (if they choose to use it).

Like "Social Media," words like "Food," "Books" and "History" are nebulous and generic until modified. What kind of food? What genre of book? What period of history? As the focus narrows, the topic becomes more specific and meaningful.

Because social media includes everything from kids on MySpace to mood tweets on Twitter to the 133 million blogs that have popped up since 1999 (according to Technorati), business people typically begin by narrowing the focus to commerce-related domains like B2C (Business to Consumer) or B2B (Business to Business).

Such domains are only partially relevant to what social media means to Synopsys. We don't sell widgets to consumers, so forget B2C. And even though we're a business that communicates with other businesses, B2B is too broad a domain to add much meaning.

For example, Intuit is a Mountain View-based software company that sells QuickBooks to a target audience measured in the millions. They are certainly B2B, but pursuing a completely different business model than ours. Other companies like Cisco, SAP and Intel are also classically B2B, but each pursues marketing and communication goals with a much broader audience than, say, the 50,000 or so EEs doing chip design.

So when Rich Goldman recently coined the term G2G (Geek to Geek), we suddenly had a context to narrow social media to a scope that matches our business objectives.

Social media at Synopsys = G2G.

That's an important definition – and helpful guidepost – as we chart the course ahead.

What is Social Media?

Social media is the democratization of information, transforming people from content consumers (one-way communication) into members of online communities who are empowered to converse and participate with one another (multi-directional communication).

Social media shifts the marketing paradigm from "Tell Your Audience" to an "Engage and Participate" model rooted in conversations between content creators and community members.

So what is an online community? Here is how several influential bloggers define the term:

"An online community is where a group of people with similar goals or interests connect and exchange information using web tools." (Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research)

"A community is a group of people who form relationships over time by interacting regularly around shared experiences, which are of interest to all of them for varying individual reasons." (Mack Collier, The Viral Garden)

"Communities are bodies of people loosely joined together by a common interest that exchange information using web tools." (Shel Israel, Global Neighborhood)

What do the concepts of "social media" and "online community" mean to Synopsys? Fundamentally, it means that we have a huge new opportunity space to engage in effective and meaningful ways with our customers, partners and other key constituencies.

Note that this does not mean "use instead of" our other well-tuned marketing, communications and customer engagement programs – rather social media provides a complementary set of tools and possibilities that have the potential to significantly contribute to our overall marketing mix over time.

As we expand our social media-related programs in the months ahead, our vision is to help reinvent customer interaction in an Internet-enabled world, elevate the Synopsys brand, strengthen our leadership in the electronics value chain and enhance overall customer experience.

Big vision. Big goals. But, hey, we're quite a team and up for the challenge.

Social Media and Strategy

Question: "How should social media change our business goals?"

Answer: "They shouldn't."

The challenge with social media isn't about how to deploy shiny new tools throughout our organization, it's to understand how such tools can support and add value to existing business objectives.

Based on that philosophical framework, it's easy to see that spending time trying to figure out a MySpace strategy or how to influence customers with tweets on Twitter is heading down the wrong path.

The right path is the one that enhances trust and extends our thought leadership in the places where our customers are choosing to congregate online.

Sounds simple enough, yet therein lays the challenge.