SOCIAL SITES, THEIR APPLICATIONS (APPS), PITFALLS AND POTENTIALS (PART 1)

I recently overheard a friend once mention that he is an addict of the very popular social network site, Facebook . Many people will no doubt be able to identify with this situation as a full hour in a day hardly passes by without checking the updates posted by friends, colleagues connected to them from all countries around the world.

Social networking sites are so significant such that when one of the sites that have a large membership from around the world hit a 200 million membership mark in early 2009 (membership size is now 300million), it made a big deal out of it by splashing the figures all over pages of the media all over the world. In Nigeria as at July 2009, there were close to 800,000 Nigerians with Facebook membership.

The nearest to today’s social networking website was called “Friends Re-United” and was developed in 1999 as a tool to re-connect old friends who attended same schools or grew up in United Kingdom and had lost connection. Social networking websites morphed from online communities such as forums dedicated to certain issues and started from popular sites such as Yahoo Geocities, which enabled different communities made up of people with several interests to link up each other. Websites such as Friends Reunited were built for initially were those who attended schools in the pre-internet age and pre-mobile phone age, as they were unable to exchange contact details that were not fixed to a particular spot such as fixed landlines. As these friends moved residences, most friends lost touch and thus created the fertile ground to create the very first social networking sites to reconnect such friends as well as relatives who had moved to very distant areas.

Friends Reunited was initially very successful netting over 20 million members in United Kingdom at its peak in 2003, however, its business model was soon to hit a brick wall as the income made from attracting corporate advertising was unable sustain business operational expenses. Its business executives were able to convince a less-knowledgeable board of ITV Communications, United Kingdom to purchase the business in 2004 for a princely sum.

Wikipedia lists 158 active social networking sites on its list of websites. Popular social networking sites include Linkedin - business networking, Orkut - Google owned social site, Black planet - African American networking, Twitter - microblogging site and many more.

Most of these websites are international in nature and membership is usually in hundreds of thousands, or the website serves several interests for members.

Research credited to Wikipedia material

Getting Your Internet Business Processes Right

As you set out to start that brilliant internet based business, there is the need to ask your self and your team about the exact ways that business attracted, for your product or service, is processed. Enquiry about a product either via referral, advertisement is usually the first point of a prospective customer’s contact with a company and the ability of the customer to enjoy the first contact and thereafter, the structure put in place to enable the customer’s expectations to get exceeded, increases the chances of converting such prospect to a buying customer.

It is not good enough for an internet/web based/e-commerce business to possess fantastic graphics on the website while lacking the necessary back-end office to execute the service provided. This not only negates the business being provided in the first place, it also compromises the relationship that would otherwise would have been built with the customer. Also since it becomes more expensive to acquire a new customer, it means that every customer you succeed in dissatisfying, your business incurs an expense to advertise for another new customer.

Thus, it is very important that any internet based business worth its salt, have its team sit down to discuss the various processes involved in getting the product or service to your customer and outline these processes while tackling the issues that affect excellent service delivery. Examining a process means breaking down every part of the service provided to the customer from the point of interacting with the customer for the first time which includes taking phone calls, sending enquiry emails, as well as displaying advertisements (the medium for the advertisements, the type of adverts, the target audience e.t.c.) as well as how the customers’ orders are processed. Every step the customer goes through till the items are paid for should be outlined including the alternative actions that are executed for every action undertaken by the customer.

Having a well broken down process helps a business observe at a glance, where pitfalls are imminent for a business as well as shorten the expected time for tackling issues that come up.

As shown above, a business flowchart assists a business team to evaluate several business steps involved in processing a customer’s enquiry, actual order placed, issues to be resolved e.t.c. Using the above flowchart as an example, processes involved in completing an order for a customer is outlined in a diagrammatic way to ensure a grasp of what is involved for each step.

In the event of crises occurring, it becomes easier to trace how a particular process affects the whole business process flow, as it is possible to simulate different occurrences to produce results. This ability to create, understand and manipulate the business process gives a business important strategic insight and contributes to the growth of business.

Questions that come to mind about the effectiveness of an having existing business process for any internet or e-commerce business includes –

- How scalable is your business process i.e. if you presently process 20 orders daily at the moment, how well can your available resources cope with a sudden surge in orders that shoot up to 1000 or 1,500 orders a day? A lot of websites or ecommerce sites in less developed countries provide services that require cash payment into a bank account as opposed to using credit, debit or prepaid cards to complete payment for goods and services. This provides a problem by itself as it involves a manual process that has to be constantly monitored. For a business that processes 20 orders a day, it is easy to monitor bank payments for that number of orders, however when business suddenly booms, how effective will the resources on ground be to handle such increases?

- How flexible or dynamic is your process i.e. if your business is involved in the online sales of auto accessories and you are able to get access to purchase car spare parts, how fast can your team work out an agreement whether to include this and integrate it into your business offering otherwise, turn the opportunity away. At a particular stage of Bringitbay , it was obvious that we had created a platform that was very important for customers and they were getting really used to us providing them service for delivery of apparel especially clothes and shoes from online stores in United Kingdom. The opportunity for our customers to access an otherwise clumsy offshore online market meant that they started to clamour for us to extend our service offering to include other non-apparel stores. We had started the business only for apparel but it did not take us more than a few days to conclude that our business process could accommodate other types of product offering.

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