There is a lot of feedback I have received on this model and will be posting an updated model soon.

Just to touch the questions you have raised:
The case study in itself is an attempt to document “those paradigms” that exist in the “black box”. Our initial categorization for them being ” listening, efficiency improvement & Awareness generation ) ” .

The Business objectives can be tiered, like when we say Brand & Demand Generation they could be sequential as well as independent effects of a “black box”campaign.

..working on your inputs.

We hope to end up with a lean- jargon free model at the end though

What are the key aspects that really matter to a company in connection with social media? You listed these aspects as: Building awareness, efficiency and listening which drive cost savings and sales. I’ll add a little more.

Social Media, if well managed, aims to benefit the company in the following ways:
• BRAND (Awareness + Monitoring + depth of customer engagement)
• Demand Generation (SoMe = new marketing channel + reach*frequency  Revenue)
• Cost Savings (through collaboration, co-innovation and shorter product lifecycles through web 2.0 AND marketing through social media sites is free  AND higher ROI on marketing dollars )
• In addition what $ value would you attach to the “immediate impact” of a news/product/anything that spreads virally? (immediate impact  demand generation)

Consequently my diagram would look a little different. It would start with SoMe and ends with $ that signifies revenue, growth etc. SoMe level is followed by a black-box which contains all the ‘activities’ which a company does on social media and web 2.0. These activities could be : brand awareness, brand monitoring, community engagement, marketing, advertizing, collaboration, co-innovation, product lifecycle management etc…. ALL the possible things that a company can do on social media. This is a black box because every team pursues social media with a different objective and also because the “use case scenarios” are still evolving…….To recap: SoMe  Blackbox

When you step back and look at the ‘activities’ that comprise the black-box – patterns emerge and we can categorize these patterns in some ‘buckets’. These ‘buckets’ signify business objectives that aim for the ultimate – $. [Re-cap: SoMe  Blackbox Business objectives  $]. These business objectives are the same as what I listed above : BRAND, DEMAND GENERATION, COST SAVINGS, IMMEDIATE IMPACT. Now I’m comfortable talking about how brand affects $ and how demand generation affects $…….makes sense?