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.