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and the We Are Social blog.

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Social media change at the speed of light: they evolve to adapt technology to conversation and to the way people behave.

In very short time frames, everyone can see remarkable evolutions: behaviours that were not even tracked and identify two years ago emerge and become significant. It's very important to stay at the edge of this change for brands that want to remain relevant to people.



But where's the huge change? You might know Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder: a classification of social media behaviours.

• Spectators (Enjoy social media content);
• Joiners (Use social networks);
• Collectors (Collect content);
• Critics (Comment);
• Conversationalists (Interact on social networks, category added later);
• I creators (Create content);

As you can see, a first add-on was introduced when Forrester presented the concept of "conversationalists", but today ther are more behaviours that are becoming real from a mashup of other ones.

Dynamic Aggregation and Content Curation are nothing new, but they're becoming at the core of people's social media experience. Dynamic Aggregation represent the way people dynamically filter and select their content and has a huge impact on our lives on social media because it defines how we spend our time when we're on social channels.

Content Curation is the action of finding content and bringing it to an audience, while giving context to it and activating a conversation. Content curation isn't just the explicit act of selecting and sharing that can be done by brands on Facebook Pages: most ot the significant actions we do on social media is a content curation activity because it shows contextualized content to our audience.

To mention a few

• Like, Facebook;
• Share, Facebook;
• Retweet, Twitter;
• Pin, Pinterest;
• Reblog, Tumblr;
• Share, Instagram;

Brands must be good at both today: they must be relevant enough to become part of the dynamic aggregation people develop everyday, while proposing a remarkable content curation activity in topics that are very related to the brand can be an excellent to develop a trusted relationship. Community management (both at a strategical and practical level) is one of the most important contexts where Dynamic Aggregation and Content Curation can be applied at their best.

How is your network structured? Who are your friends? What do you post and how does it perform?

Now Wolfram Alpha, the "Computational Knowledge Engine" lets you see all of this and understand your network complexity and organization. Here's how:

1. Go to wolframalpha.com
2. Click sign in (sign in with Facebook)
3. Give WolframAlpha permissions you choose (and that can allow it to gather data)
4. Get back to wolframalpha.com search "my facebook"

In a few moments, you'll be able to see your data and to understand your network better:

Aggregated data will include

• Activity
• Post and comment stats
• Geographic data
• App activity
• Interface activity (e.g. desktop / mobile / tablet)
• Content (e.g. photo and video)
• Your friends

It's amazing to see the potential everyone (including brands) on social media has in optimizing conversations and relationships with people, considering their own social graph and crafting only relevant interactions with them. This connects to Facebook's recently presented post targeting, based on very precise variables.

You shouldn't adapt your business to face people's needs: you should put people at the center of your business.

This is the main topic that Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research deal with in their new book: "Outside In - The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business".

I had the opportunity to chat with Kerry about this topic, with a particular focus on conversation, participation and the concept of "putting customers at the center".

How is customer experience changing, thanks to conversation?

• Social media have created a permanent change in the way companies do business. Between 1900 and 1960 we were in the manufacturing age, between 1960 and 1990 we have seen the distribution age, followed - between 1990 and 2010 - by the information era. Now we're inside the "customer experience" age. Customer experience is what really differentiates a brand from another. And it's build through each single interaction between companies and people, through conversation;
• Companies today are ecosystems: social technologies allow employees, customers and stakeholders in general to be a part of the same universe and to build value together;
• Putting customers at the core means listening and understanding people's needs, through direct observation of their behaviors (particularly on social media) and through direct interactions (strongly enabled by social media);

We're in the age of customer experience, and social media are more important than ever to develop an effective relationship between people and companies.