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Q8-3 How Do SMIS Increase Social Capital?

Questions usage, and so on, depending on the type of machine) to a 339
Chatter or other SM site. How can an organization use such
1. Visit www.salesforce.com/chatter to learn about Chatter’s reporting in the context of machine, customer, and employee
features and applications. How could Chatter affect value chain social media?
activities? 5. How might machines use foursquare (location-based social
2. How might Chatter help Apple Inc. create better products? networking)? Consider machine-to-machine interactions as
well as human-to-machine interactions.
3. Why would employees, managers, and owners like to use
Chatter? Consider each individually. 6. Could machine-to-machine social interactions lead to security
or privacy concerns? How?
4. One example of social media for machines is having machines
report operational status data (say, speed, temperature, fuel

All of the people in the client’s social network (users 4–6) see the likes, tags, and tweets. If
user 6 likes the pictures, they might be seen by users 10–12. It’s possible that one of those users
is looking for a wedding photographer. Using social media, the photographer has thus grown
her social network to reach potential clients who she wouldn’t have otherwise had access to. She
also used SM to grow the number of relationships she has with clients. Depending on the num-
ber, strength, and value of those relationships, her social capital within those networks could
substantially increase.
Such relationship sales have been going on by word of mouth for centuries; the difference
here is that SMIS allow such relationships to scale to levels not possible in the past. In fact, the
photographer in our example might even consider paying the client for the opportunity to take
the wedding pictures if the client were a famous celebrity with hundreds of thousands of follow-
ers. In this way, social media may allow users to convert social capital into financial capital. Some
famous celebrities get paid more than $10,000 for a single 140-character tweet! 14

Using Social Networks to Increase the Strength of Relationships
To an organization, the strength of a relationship is the likelihood that the other entity (per-
son or other organization) in the relationship will do something that benefits the organization.
An organization may have a strong relationship with you if you write positive reviews about it,
post pictures of you using the organization’s products or services, tweet about upcoming product
releases, and so on.
In the previous example, the photographer asked a client to like her Facebook page and wed-
ding photos. To the photographer, the number of friends the client has in her social network is
important, but equally important is the strength of the relationships. Will the client’s friends like
the photographer’s page and photos? Will they retweet the client’s success story? If none of the
client’s friends like the photographer’s page and photos, then the strength of the relationships is
weak. If all of the client’s friends like the photographer’s page and photos, then the strength of the
relationships in the client’s social network is strong.
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In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin provided a key insight. He said that if you want to
strengthen your relationship with someone in power, ask him to do you a favor. Before Franklin
invented the public library, he would ask powerful strangers to lend him their expensive books. In
that same sense, organizations have learned that they can strengthen their relationships with you
by asking you to do them a favor. When you provide that favor, it strengthens your relationship
with the organization.
Traditional capital depreciates. Machines wear out, factories get old, technology and comput-
ers become obsolete, and so forth. Does social capital also depreciate? Do relationships wear out
from use? So far, the answer seems to be both yes and no.