The Social Channel App

Purpose and Audience

The Social Channel App is a user manual and textbook that teaches its readers to practice experiential social media and social business transformation. Experiential differs sharply from social media marketing, which is so prevalent that it defines “social media” for most people. Experiential uses service design principles to change the game in customer experience and employee engagement. It helps firms develop true empathy with people, so they can interact with unusual care and consideration, which improves their employees’ and customers’ feelings about the firm—a lot.

Experiential social media requires practitioners to know much more about the people with whom they are interacting, so it is much more nuanced than social media marketing. The App also shows readers how to transform their firms by using experiential to change the cost of business relationships.

The App is designed to support several types of users: CEOs who regard social networks as a transformation opportunity, heads of marketing, social media managers, entrepreneurs, and the general public. I have also used it as a textbook to support consulting engagements because it accelerates teams’ learning.

Summary

I began writing the Social Channel App as a book, but I realized that most people would probably read it on a tablet, so halfway through the writing process, I redesigned it to be an “app” that could take advantage of tablets’ interactive capabilities. I have learned that the App bridges several categories, so today I describe it as an interactive book. I created it in Pages [Mac OS], which has robust styles and bookmarking features. The App is 450 8.5 x 11 inch pages long, in six chapters. It contains hundreds of internal links as well as links to external websites for online collaborative learning. Odd pages utilize a familiar tabbed website design that links to menus while even pages’ tabs link to external websites. In addition, the first page of each chapter contains a link to a short introductory video that describes why I created it and why it is important. The App features three levels of help.

I designed, architected, and wrote the entire app, and I also managed a team of editors. It required several years part-time and two years of full-time work.

The Social Channel App contains six chapters called Menus:

• Hello introduces users to the App. It also contains an onboarding guide, introduction to clickstreams, which are workstreams dedicated to defined use cases, support options, and commentaries from nine chief marketing officers on their experiences with digital social networks.
• Game shows how the game of customer experience and marketing has changed. It explains the profundity of the change in terms of four economies and three shifts. It shows how pervasive digitization is transforming organizations and careers.
• Arena is focused on digital social networks. It outlines the true nature of “social” and defines what I call the Social Channel. It reveals how the nature of what business leaders think of as products is rapidly shifting under their feet. It asserts the importance of delivering personal interactions at scale and how to use social networks to compete globally, both offensively and defensively.
• Guide advises customer executives in two ways: how to apply the learnings from Game and Arena menus to lead change, and how to increase their relevance and influence as individuals. It equips CMOs, CDOs, and CCOs to lead change in their organizations, mentoring their teams and contributing more to their C-level peers.
• Tools helps users leverage the Social Channel to differentiate their companies, brand, products and services, step by step. Tools includes several management tools and two versions of the Social Network Roadmap(SM). They have been tested in seven years of client work with global commercial, nonprofit, and government clients.
• More is a treasure trove of extras that extend the App in unique ways. Some of its submenus are extensive, and they provide even more information outside the App. More is designed to function like plugins work in WordPress or widgets work to extend many platforms or software you probably use.

Learning More

The Social Channel App has a website, of course. It includes a preview version of the App as well as additional information about it.

• The Social Channel App website.