Social Media Pyramid
The Social Media Pyramid, developed by Bart van der Kooi (SocialMediaModellen.nl) is a model that can be used to define your focus in the existing Social Media field.
To apply social media in your organization, start with monitoring; define your online image. What has been written about my organization, brand, product or service? Or isn’t there much activity going on? Are you aware of what’s going on? When you are, prepare to listen. Listening is more than just monitoring your online reputation, it is about preparing to take action. One important action is responding. Responding or Commenting comes in many shapes and sizes. Let the outside world know that you exist and that you take questions / complaints / discussions / etc. seriously. Often it is required to respond, but it can also be a wise choice not to respond. And do you have the resources necessary to handle all incoming requests? Then it’s time to add value by creating.
Monitoring can be defined as an N-to-1 relationship. For listening and responding you are dealing with an 1-on-1 relationship in which the sending and receiving change positions (listening: organization is recipient, responding: organization is sender). When you are creating you get a 1-to-N relationship. See table below.
| Action | Rel.ship | Role organisation | Role target group | Organisation attitude | |
| 1 | Monitoring | N-to-1 | Recipient | Sender | Passive |
| 2 | Listening | 1-to-1 | Recipient | Sender | Preparing |
| 3 | Commenting | 1-to-1 | Sender | Recipient | Active |
| 4 | Creating | 1-to-N | Sender | Recipient | Pro-active |
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Source: Bart van der Kooi, SocialMediaModellen.nl