Author Piskorski analyzes companies that are social media leaders. A basic understanding reached is that the successful platforms offer “social solutions,” where a solution allows one to meet
new people, or to share private information or social support in existing relationships. The social needs being filled online, he finds, are failing to be met in the offline world. Piskorski
compares the functions, history, nature of traffic of different social media platforms--Facebook, Twitter, EHarmony, LinkedIn, OKCupid, MySpace and mixi. Then he investigates choices faced by
LinkedIn in 2005, and studies the failures and solutions of that company in particular, along with others. In the end, he has developed as principles for thinking about social media the ideas
of social failures, social solutions, and social strategies. Piskorski believes his key innovation has been to argue that firms can lower costs or increase customers’ willingness to pay by
investing to build social solutions that get people to interact and effectively undertake corporate tasks for free. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
