Week 5 - Blogs in Professional Services

After being introduced to the two big major enterprise social platforms it seemed interesting to research into how organisations in the professional service sector are using blogs to enhance their business. The first sector to come to mind was finance more specifically accounting consulting. Ernst & Young is one of the worlds largest professional services firms by aggregated revenue and also has an interesting implementation of blogs into their core businesses structure.

Ernst & Young have several platforms in which they utilize blogging. They have various blogs hosted on their website, ranging from Energy and Science Blogs to team building blogs. However, the majority of their exposure is generated from their Twitter and Facebook pages. While nearly all professional firms have a frequently update Facebook and Twitter page Ernst & Young utilizes this quite differently by having over 30 different pages for each of these social tools. 

The twitter pages range from individual topics such as Automotive, Banking, Insurance and Real Estate and by specific events that the corporation holds. They even have a separate twitter for each country that they are involved in to be able to make more relevant posts to maximize benefit. This heavily ties into the value levers of implementing Enterprise 2.0 as written by McKinsey Global Institute (2012). An Enterprise Wide Lever is essentially the use of social technology to expand intra or inter-organizational collaboration which is the main objective of Ernst & Young's social media enterprise plan. 

Ernst &Young have taken great care in their social media strategy and understand that it is a consumer driven platform which brings in various risks. In their Social media strategy, policy and governance report they state that the greatest benefit they receive is from their extensive listening programs that allow them to receive customer feedback and monitor and assess negative company branding.

References

Ernst & Young Analysis. (October 31 2012).Social media strategy, policy and governance Retrieved August 26 2014 from http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Social_media_strategy_policy_and_governance/$File/Social_media_strategy_policy_governance.pdf

Erbst & Young Social Media (August 26 2014). Social Media. Retrieved August 26  2014 from http://www.ey.com/gl/en/Home/Social-media

Week 4 - Value Levers

After analysing the readings about value levers published by McKinsey Global Institute in 2012 (in 

The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies) their importance in social technologies became clear. This weeks post will discuss how value levers have benefited Taco Bells implementation of Enterprise 2.0. There are 10 value levers as can be seen below organised into separate sub-categories which are listed below.

A - Product Development

1.Co-create products.

B - Operations and Distribution
2. Leverage social technologies to forecast and monitor3. Use social technologies to distribute business processes

C - Marketing and Sales4. Derive customer insights (shared with Product Development)5. Use social technologies for marketing communication / interaction6. Generate and foster sales leads7. Social commerce

D - Customer Services8. Provide customer care via social technologies 

E - Enterprise-Wide Levers9. Use social technology to improve intra- or inter-organizational collaboration and communication.10. Use social technology to match talent to tasks.

The reason Taco Bell was chosen as the company to analyse  was due to their strong involvement in social technologies. Their social media department began in 2007 and since then has expanded into an entire organization with PR operations, product and marketing leaders planning and researching social media operations. They were even awarded with Ad Age's 2013 Marketer of the Year and have implemented over 50 separate social technology campaigns since opening their social media department. 

The two most relevant areas for the case study are Marketing and Sales and Customer Services.

Marketing and Sales

Upon releasing Doritos Locos Tacos, Taco Bell ran an advertising campaign based upon various social technologies. With the ability to moderate messages sent to their Twitter, Taco Bell could then send approved tweets to a billboard on Times Square and Sunset Blvd. This apply's to the specific levers of Using social technologies for marketing communication and Deriving customer insights.

By having the Tweets posted publicly it not only increases awareness of the product and encourages customer interaction but also allows customers to send their insights. With the implementation of a webcam on the billboard it also allowed people to send tweets from home and watch it being displayed on the billboard on a live stream. This turned out to be a very successful promotion and increased sales of the product by over 50%.

Customer Services

Another lever that Taco Bell has proven to exceed at is the use of social media to enhance customer services. Between 2007 and 2012 Taco Bell reached seven million Facebook followers through organic growth. On top of this they also heavily invested in posting on other social media technologies such as Twitter, Youtube, Vine, Snapchat, Pintrest and Tumblr. They dedicate a large amount of resources to social media and use a social media think tank which reviews the performance of previous social activity and sets plans for the future posts. By reading and posting on a variety of social media platforms it allows Taco Bell to customer care while also increasing their brand image.

Week 3 - Power of Social Tools

This week in the Enterprise 2.0 lecture we were taught the immense value of social technologies when used by businesses. These social technologies allow these corporations to connect and communicate with customers and in some cases assist them with business problem solving.

 Some Examples...

These examples all contain various elements from the 10 social technology levers which is an important concept for growing businesses.

Braintree is a good example to start of with due to its business-to-business nature. A B2B is an exchange of product or service between two businesses rather than between businesses and customers. This made it quite difficult for Braintree to reach out using social technologies as standard forms of social media such as Facebook was ineffective. To solve this Braintree analysed the four enterprise 2.0 benefit dimensions.

• Knowledge
• Reputation
• Productivity
• Staff Engagement

Focusing on Staff Engagement and Reputation they chose to post content that reflected their internal culture and utilized it as a recruitment tool. This made them instantly appear more attractive as an employer and also increases their visibility in the market place.

A more well known company that has taken advantage of social tools in a more unique method is HP. With the release of their 20-inch HDX Dragon laptop they initiated an interesting marketing plan by attempting to engage bloggers with giveaways. This was a first among large scale companies and it gained mixed results. They also began to take advantage of social media through another managing company called Buzz Crops Inc. Buzz Corps Inc then started a social media project that involved 31 leading tech bloggers who agreed to make a contest called '31 days of the Dragon'. 

The contest created a lot of attention for the product and supposedly increased their sales by 85% during the first year of release. Contrasting this to the Wikinomics mass collaboration model it can be easily seen that HP had looked to achieve a Peering business model. This involved a creation that harnessed the power of mass collaboration with self organising communities, which in their case was in the form of Blogs. Also the blending of producers and consumers through the blogs showed elements of the Prosumers model.

References...

KISSmetrics. (2014, March 11). 29 Companies Tell you how to rock social media. Retrieved August 9, 2014, from KISSmetrics: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-to-rock-social-media//

TECHtarget. (2012, June 19) B2B (Business-to-Business) Retrieved August 9, 2014, from TECHtarget http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/B2B

S. Diesenreiter, Awareness im Enterprise 2.0. Master thesis. Institute of Design and Assessment of Technology, Vienna University of Technology, 2013.

Week 2

So who is this guy?

Hi, I'm Sam. I'm currently in my four year of my Electrical Engineering and Information Technology dual degree and my first experience with Enterprise 2.0 was when I saw the class in my electives list. After doing a bit of research I became very interested in the concept of businesses using on-line platforms to build their digital presence. Although I've never written a Blog before I'm interested in learning the different techniques to maximise exposure and interest to what is essentially just my personal opinions.

What's the purpose then?

The posts that I'm planning to make on this Blog will aim to be of a mostly academic nature and I will be avoiding making making this into a personal diary of sorts. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm aiming to simply state facts void of any opinion or personality but rather keep it somewhat 'professional'. All successful Blogs have a consistent theme and tone in their writing and I feel establishing this early on is important.

How will these posts be useful?

I'm expecting that the Blog posts will eventually expand to a variety of subjects and topics so to ensure that the Blog will be useful I will need to make sure I have done sufficient research on the topics discussed. Although I may not be an expert at these topics, by gathering information from a variety of sources and breaking it down into an easily digestible posts the blog should be useful.

How will I get readers?

This is a question I'm not entirely sure on at the moment. Although I'm aware that I can get a small amount of readership by commenting on fellow classmates blog posts, this will still be a relatively small number. Certain strategies that I have considered include using social media websites to gain interest such as facebook, twitter, reddit although this will only be effective given the posts are interesting to read. Also effective formatting of the text and images within the posts will make the posts become more eye catching which will obviously increase readership.

Example of a successful blog

One blog that I will be taking advice from is the Australian gaming blog website Kotaku. Although Kotaku is currently at a much larger stage than this blog, with a large group of writers posting multiple times a day, I still feel there is a lot I can incorporate from the blog. The posts are all very consistent even though written by a large variety of people, all having a similar professional tone and formatted similarly. By having a consistency through their topics and writing styles I believe it encourages people to return daily to stay up to date on the latest gaming related news.