Day 6/7

I spent the entire day six and seven doing research. First I started off looking at how competition used social media. It was quite clear that the top companies had the most social media activity; I attribute this to the "network effect": once the activity reached a critical threshold it expanded rapidly. A common rule of thumb is that the more people who use something the better it is, which isn’t true in all cases, but in many it is. The classic example of this is the telephone: if you have the only phone then it is a useless technology. Its value is directly tied to the number of people using it.

I noticed that many of our competitors' apps don't have a traditional customer service hotline or e-mail service.  Rather, they use Twitter as their customer service platform.  Customers who need help will hashtag the app's Twitter account asking for help and then the customer service team will respond. At first I thought this was quite clever, but a few of our competitors also use the same Twitter account for general conversation with customers, in the form of social-media advertising in a Culture of Convergence.  I found that combining the two greatly devalued the brand as an app's Twitter page was full of complaints from the customer service side.

We have yet to set up a comprehensive Twitter page and it was my suggestion to my boss that we have both an advertising and a customer service Twitter page.  It is likely that they will develop our Twitter presence in this direction.

So far I have enjoyed doing plenty of back-end research into social media landscapes. It has given me the opportunity to learn the intricacies of social media applications while coming up with my own methods of research. Collating all of the information into readable graphs has been an informative experience as well.