I’ve been doing a number of presentations as of late on social media and I thought I’d share a slide I’ve been using that I call the "5 P’s of Social Media." I figured posting here might be a good place to get some feedback to make this even better.
The marketers out there will remember the 4 P’s of marketing popularized by E. Jerome McCarthy: Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement.
In the 2001 book High Intensity Marketing by Idris Mootee, the author proposed a new set of 4 P’s for the Internet age: Personalization, Participation, Peer-to-Peer, and Predictive Modeling. Overall, I like this model and had never seen it before doing some research in prep for writing this blog post (I’ll have to get the book). While social media has matured a great deal in the 6 years since this book came out, I think the model applies very well.
What I was looking for was a prescriptive and informative model for describing the various forms of social media as well as the underlying components required for describing a social media strategy. Here’s what I came up with:
note: It’s a build slide that starts with People and builds clockwise.
In fairness, it probably needs to be 6 P’s by adding "Purpose" – but for me, purpose is the overall talking point for the slide, therefore, you don’t see it here. And 6 P’s? – Getting carried away!! 
Here’s a short summary of definitions (though this is made more real by using examples that are relevant to the audience).
- People: The talkers, authors, contributors – empowerment of the individual.
- Places: All the diverse venues the conversations can take place in.
- Process: What collaboration (and moderation) you enable, how you entitle contributor types and how you integrate with existing systems.
- Platform: Where and how you tie together the places, processes, people (identity/privacy) and privileges.
- Patterns: Presenting, tracking, filtering, measuring, monitoring and decision support.
That’s it…let me know what you think, what I missed and what examples you might use.
Thanks,
sean