Social Software in Customer Relationship Management: A Study Exemplified in Instant Messaging Networking

The Concepts Of Web 2.0 And Social Software

In the last few years, “Web 2.0” and “social software” were the key words for a remarkable career. The term Web 2.0 and Social Software are closely linked. Tim O'Reilly has defined these innovations and developments as “properties of Web 2.0” in his article “What is Web 2.0” as follows:

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  Services instead of software in the package: Services of the application are located in the foreground, and not in the user interface. Thus, the applications are independent from the operating systems and the equipment.

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  Mixable data sources and data transformations: The applications have to collect the primary task data, which must be easily available, and that makes the combination with other sources possible.

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  Architecture of participation: The active use of the parties is a fundamental property of Web 2.0 from the users to developers, operators of web sites or authors. The results of this active use should be stored and documented for a long-term.

Web 2.0 stands for general principles and developments in the WWW, which supported by technologies such as Ajax or RSS.

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  Networks rather than communities: In Web 2.0 applications, there are options for the natural need satisfaction, such as communication, self-presentation, documentation, and created categorization. Through the establishment of networks, there is a possibility for the exchange between users without limits.

Social Software offers for all participants the opportunity to communicate, get information and cooperate. Under “Social Software” we can find applications that support human interaction. The broad spectrums of social software applications can be structured in different ways. We prefer the structure of the three dimensions functionality (see Figure 1):

Figure 1.

Social software (Koch & Richter, 2009)