Last blog, I shall miss you all

Hey everyone. This is week 10’s blog for Enterprise 2.0 and thank you for reading my blog and going through this mini blogging adventure with me. This week I will be talking about social media. In particular, I will discuss how organizations can implement social media strategies to promote their brand. It is true that many organizations are beginning to use social media to connect with their customers, but what is the right way to do it and how should they approach this double edged sword task?

Abraham Lincoln once said “If I had 8 hours to chop a tree down, I would spend 6 hours sharpening my ax”. This means, planning is IMPORTANT!

The beginning:

Everything has a beginning, and organizations using social media to establish a two way communication with its customers also have a beginning. An organization doesn’t just create a fan page on Face Book or suddenly create a two way communication. In the beginning, an employee of the organization proposes to use social media such as Face Book or some other social media tools. This is the easy part, anyone could easily create a Face Book profile, but how can organizations attract their customers to subscribe or to stay tuned to what they have to say? This blog will discuss how organizations can implement social media strategies to achieve their objectives and goals. The objectives and goals for most organizations are to connect with its customers through technology (in this case social media).

How can organizations engage with its customers and best leverage the use of social media technology? We discussed that social media technology is a double edged sword, meaning that social media can not only bring positive reputation and customer satisfaction, it can also do exactly the opposite exponentially.

Ways to leverage social media technology:

1. Develop a plan – I’m sure you’ve all heard the term ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” This is quite true, I actually learnt that in a unit called Project Management. If an organization has no plan to engage with its customers than it is simply fail, and should be included in failblog.
2. Be Social – Social media technology is a powerful tool, and it is the first word of the powerful term is ‘social’, therefore it is obvious and instinctive for organizations to be social when using web 2.0 tools. Ironically, this is not the case! Organizations should first consider how to interact and communicate with its customers and people. There are some organizations out there who have done such a wonderful job with this, such as Starbucks, and KCI Airport. One reason why organizations find it hard to be social is because they also try to be professional, authentic and relevant. Being social and professional is about the right mix of ingredient of humor, knowledge, authenticity, trust, entertainment, and being real to the brand.
3. Being simple – This means having a Face Book or Twitter account that is simple and easy to remember. For instance, if you are creating a Twitter account for Mcdonalds, it is not advised to have a Twitter account name called Mackers4life. Simply McDonalds is superb.
4. Make it fun – Some smarter organizations have used a larger range of social media and web 2.0 tools to promote their business through many strategies. A typical strategy to make it fun would be to promote special promotions for a limited time or limited edition collectibles. A slightly advanced strategy is the use of viral videos on You Tube. If you are unaware of the power of social media and how it works, here is a link to a video explaining how videos go viral that I highly recommend. Here.
5. Have a primary communication platform – Many organizations are realizing the potential of social media technology and web 2.0 tools. Of course organizations don’t want to fall behind, they want to engage with as many customers and its people as possible through different tools such as Face Book and Twitter. However, it is almost important to have a uniform approach in communicating with the organizations customers and people. It is advised that organizations should use only one dominant social media tool for the majority of communication. This may sound like you’re missing out because you’re only using one tool, but it’s not the case. Twitter and Face Book can actually be linked, therefore messages posted on Face Book can also be seen on Twitter users.
6. Profile photo – It is not advised for organizations to use a glamorous photo of the manager as the profile photo. The profile photo for the organization should be the organizational brand itself.

This is the last blog for Enterprise 2.0 and I wish you all the best with the last assignment. Please feel free to comment and leave your blog web address in your comments below and I will definitely get back to you! Thank you!

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Wiki & Enterprise

Hi everyone! Welcome to my week 9 blog! This week I will be discussing about wiki and enterprises. First of all, what is a wiki?

Background of Wiki:

Wiki is short for Wikipedia, but what is it really? According to itself (Wikipedia), Wikipedia is a free, collaboratively edited, and multilingual Internet encyclopaedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. .

This amazing platform has over 23 million articles, over 4 million in the English Wikipedia alone, have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 100, 000 active contributors. As of September 2012, there are editions of Wikipedia in 285 languages and has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. In 2011, Wikipedia received an estimate 2.7 billion monthly pageviews from the United States Alone.

So you might think, why would people collaboratively write and edit, and do all of this for free? How did it happen, and how can organizations implement a wiki to create this self sustaining knowledge sharing communications platform? There is no doubt that convergence, quality, and social engineering were present in the Wikipedia example, but how can organizations create these manifesting qualities themselves?

 

Who uses Wikis and Why?

 

 

1) Pixar

 

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Pixar! Pixar is a well known, iconic producer of animated films that have won countless of awards, including but not limited to seven academy awards. Like other organizations, Pixar uses an internal wiki to manage film production. It has been reported that the company was using wiki to help coordinate the new computerized animation tools for the studio’s planned 2008 release of the animation film named “Wall-E”. For those who love Wall-E, maybe Pixar changed your mind about using wiki :).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2) Carbon Five 

 

For those who has never heard of Carbon Five, they are a small San Francisco and Los Angeles based company that develops enterprise web applications for clients. They use both internal and external wikis. According to Don Thompson, “Each client gets their own “space”, an area where they can collaborate on projects with the team at Carbon Five”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s the next step?

 

After reading how Pixar and Carbon Five has implemented wiki’s in their organization, we can begin to see the benefits of using wikis. If you are interested on more organizations who are using wiki’s, please follow the link here. Now that we know the benefits, what’s the next step? How can organizations begin to implement their own wiki? Where do they look for a wiki? Do they create one or just purchase one through Cloud Computing services? The possible and popular solution is called Mind Touch. I’ve already dug up some research on Mind Touch, but I didn’t want to bore you with MORE WORDS! So please, without further adieu, here is the You Tube video on Mind Touch:

 

 

Thank you for visiting my blog post for this week, and I am so excited to hear many different opinions and thoughts on this topic. In summary, Wikipedia’s are a great way to collborate between customers and producers, this platform of communication and knowledge sharing should not be underestimated. I hope you have learnt something today from my blog and I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the same topic. Please feel free to leave a comment or follow me, or drop your blog address and I shall take a look when I can 🙂

 

 

 

References:

 

http://www.elevatorview.com/2008/01/08/7-effective-wiki-uses-and-the-companies-that-benefit-from-them/

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM0-B8HSo68

Brisbane Airport – Game Changing Plan

Hi everyone! Welcome to my week 8 blog! In my previous blog I spoke about return on investment, and stressed the fact that ROI is not always just about measuring the monetary return, it is also important to look at what’s hidden underneath! Fear not my fellow bloggers, I am not going to talk about return on investment again! In this week’s blog I would like to talk about an organization, the Brisbane and Sydney Airport, and how social media tools can help the organization to overcome a few of the most troublesome challenges.

The organization: Brisbane and Sydney Airport

In case some of you don’t know, an airport is basically a location where aircraft take off and land, and people are actually inside these planes. The Brisbane Airport is actually the third busiest in Australia, following Sydney and Melbourne being the busiest. Like many organizations that faces challenges, the airport is no different. With an organization like an airport, it requires many professionals and skilled personnels to run, and these people are usually in different departments or sectors. An airport is not just simply aircraft flying in and out, it also includes the following:

• Air traffic control via command tower
• Restaurants, foods and other services
• Shops
• Security patrol
• Staff on land and flight attendant
• Pilots
• Air freight companies
• Luggage and baggage handling
• Parking (temporary or long term)
• Public transport management, taxi and parking services and management (including shuttle services)
• Fuel services and management
• Ground patrol and security

In a busy airport, an estimated of 2400 flights take off and land everyday. This means there are approximately over 300,000 people move through the airport, and my guess is some of them will require the services mentioned above. With an organization  with different departments and providing many splendid services, what really are the top 10 challenges an airport organization face? Here it is, you think it you’ll get it, click ‘here‘ to view.

Airport in 2040?

So how can web 2.0 tools help organizations such as this one to overcome the problems mentioned above, such as luggage and baggage handling, or even parking, public transport management, and locating restaurants, foods and other services. A possible solution could be implementing an ‘Application’ integrated with mobile phone devices. This application will have many different services, such as tracking your own luggage, locating restaurants, service stations and gate number, and also monitor parking expenses. Implementing this application will increase customer satisfaction and experience, and it’s a very good way to exploit web 2.0 tools to make the airport organization a much ‘smarter’ place to be in. Theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku predicted that by 2040, the world we live in will be highly technologically revolutionized, buildings will greet us and will know when we enter a building, and commercial structures like airports might even be able to assist our needs before we even realize them. What will our future become, what will the airport look like in 2040? One thing that won’t change is, technology will continue to improve and change the way we live and think, making an airport more efficient through the use of technology is just a tiny step that will lead our children to a greater future.

Thanks for reading my blog guys! Feel free to comment~ and I’ll get back to you, and also drop by your blog and I’ll come take a look too!

 

References:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/airport3.htm

Hi fellow bloggers! How are you all today? It’s been a wonderful couple of weeks with perfect weather for the beach, but a tad bit too cold. In this week’s blog post, I will be discussing the return on investment, but in particular the ROI of the application of Enterprise 2.0. I will use the Joction case study to best describe what ROI is, and go in depth in other aspects of ROI. Please feel free to comment or discuss your thoughts because I will get back to you, I promise! 🙂

What is return on investment?

According to Investopedia, return on investment is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage.

Most individuals and organizations perceive return on investment as the monetary net profit. Although monetary profit is the ultimate goal from implementing strategies and web 2.0 tools, other important contributing factors must not be forgotten. These factors are also different depending on the nature of the organization. I would like to repeat that return on investment is NOT JUST ALL about monetary profit, it could also be factors such as customer satisfaction, efficiency and effectiveness of email system / telephone system, staff satisfaction and retention, customer experience and the list goes on. Every single one of those above factors are equally important and contribute dearly to the overall success and profit an organization makes. As I have mentioned, every company will have different contributing factors.

Let me show you what I mean by using an example. Please read the case study below!

Joction is a company with twenty offices the United States. The company has approximately 9,000 customers, many of them Fortune 500 companies and primarily involved in financial services. Joction’s business consists mainly of helping these companies with network security systems. The company has doubled in size over the last two years and its employees have started to complain of email fatigue, due to a growing barrage of emails received every day. Additionally, employees have found it increasingly difficult to find specific pieces of information on the company’s network because the company’s servers now contain over 800,000 documents and spreadsheets. Many of these are multiple versions of the same documents, updated throughout the years by different employees making it difficult to locate the most up-to-date version. As the Joction team has expanded across the country, employees have been unable to keep up with the skill sets of new employees entering the organization. Each branch has become insular, communicating and sharing only with employees in their specific office. Management is worried that many extremely talented individuals working across the company are not being utilized efficiently and that the branches are not working cooperatively. Joction fears this is all leading to lower quality and less innovation on each project.

The nature of the organization has more focus on the emailing system and finding documents on the company database. There are many factors that are at risk, as follows:

• Staff satisfaction, retention, loyalty
• Customer experience, satisfaction, retention
• Efficient communication and co-ordination between different platforms and departments within the organization
• The sharing of knowledge (tacit and explicit) throughout the organization

Identifying the actual problems

From the case study, it is apparent that Joction is a successful company, it has doubled in size in the last 2 years and offers superior I.T solutions for some of the world’s most profitable organizations. With time, the organization grew and evolved, but new policies and management did not. The problem arose when employees started to complain about email fatigue. This was due to the increasing number of emails per day, and the lack of an effective system to manage these emails. This problem created an impact on the factors contributing to the success of the organization discussed above, such as the staff satisfaction, retention and loyalty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before I finish off this post, I just wanted to summarize everything! Return on investment is one of the most common tools used by organizations  to assess its performance and areas for improvement. However, many organizations oversee the many hidden factors contributing to the overall result managers get from ROI tools. In this post, I discussed what ROI is and pointed out that most organizations look at the monetary profit as the primary ROI, and that organizations should focus on the foundation of the problem by digging deeper to the roots of what is causing the problems.

 

Thank you again for reading my post, I hope you have all enjoyed it and please feel free to comment or follow ! ^^

 

Calvin

You can never be too careful!

HEY EVERYONE! I’m sorry for posting this blog so late, but I’ll make it informative, short and interesting! Okay! So last time I spoke about the benefits and the risks of social media tools, this time I will be narrowing it down to the benefits and risks of organizations implementing social media tools. To further narrow it down, I will talk about a well known retailer called the good guys and their down fall with social media tools.

 

 

 

The Good Guys discount warehouses are a chain of  consumer electronics retail stores in Australia and New Zealand. Their business model is similar to other retailers such as Jb-Hifi, Harvey Norman and Clive Peters. The Good Guys uses Web 2.0 tools to promote the business and advertise upcoming sales specials.  In 2011, there was a case of an unfair dismissal of an employee at the good guys regarding the use of social media tools after business hours. To read the full case, follow this link (because I like to keep it simple and short! :D)

 

After reading the link, I’m sure you all understand the complications as an organization for not implementing a social media policy (SMP). To simply put, social media tools in a work place blurs the line between work and play. Without an effective SMP, organizations can find themselves in a very bad position. Let’s take this case for example, the court found the good guys in favour, however the organization suffered a negative reputation. This is exactly why organizations must have a clear social media policy. Every organization is different, therefore every SMP must also be tailored for each organization. For instance, IBM, Telstra and other major information technology industries have similar SMP’s but local pharmacies store may have completely different SMP’s.

 

I keep stressing the fact that in business, there are benefits and risks. Implementing SMPs in organizations is to mitigate risk. Why is it that universities require students in teams to write, sign and submit a team contract. It’s the same concept here! One thing to be cautious about is that social media is relatively new, and it will subject to further dramatic changes over the years. In saying that, organizations must also constantly update their SMP to remain protected by the risks and the law.

 

 

Thanks for reading my post, let me know if you’ve got any questions or opinions you’d like to share!

 

 

Benefits & Risks of Enterprise 2.0

Hello everyone!! It’s the time of the week when I post something informative and interesting! YES! You got it right! It is about Enterprise 2.0 😀 ! If you do not know what Enterprise 2.0 is, please read my previous post on Enterprise 2.0. Today, I will be talking to you about the benefits and risks of Enterprise 2.0. I will be elaborating more on the benefits rather than the risks, because I believe the benefits triumphs the risks, and that risks can ALWAYS be managed. It is just the matter of how well it is managed!

Benefit vs Risk

The benefits of Enterprise 2.0:

When something is beneficial, you can almost always count on people exploiting it, using it, popularising it; it becomes an innovation, a trend and soon, an expectation. To help you understand this model, let’s think of a list of Web 2.0 innovative tool that was introduced not too long ago, transitioned to a trend and now an expectation.

Have you seen this video on You Tube??

You Tube

Innovative video-sharing website that allows users to upload, share and view videos, some external applications allow the download of these videos…

You Tube was created in 2005, and has since become a trend. There are many websites similar to You Tube such as metacafe.com, break.com, peekvid.com, collegehumour.com, videos.aol. It is true that the lay out, design and model of You Tube plays a big role in the success, but it is also the CONTENT (videos that go viral!) that makes You Tube a great success of the modern world.

It is an expectation that people know what You Tube is. Friends and family share their videos and other people’s videos on You Tube for laughter. You Tube is used for educational purposes too. Universities are using You Tube clips in lectures to teach students, companies and organizations are using You Tube to promote and advertise products, and millions of users are using You Tube as their digital voice box, creating a digital presence and foot-print all over the world. Finally, You Tube is currently the biggest video-sharing website, and the creators of You Tube know this, and they expect users to come to their website. So now, they have introduced advertisements in videos! Hurray! Soon that TOO will become an expectation, new users will never even know the difference!

Information is shared amongst all platforms

There are many more Web 2.0 Tools like You Tube. First an innovation, a trend, and an expectation. For instance, Face Book, Twitter, Blogging (wordpress.com) and many others. The whole idea of Web 2.0 tool is ability of being able to communicate. In a broader sense, to connect; to connect with everyone who are close to us, friends and fans on the other side of the Earth. Communication is important; the most important strategy in War is to establish secure communication with base; in Alien movies that we see so often, the first thing they do is establish communication with their home planet. In our modern society, connecting has never been easier. Face Book, Twitter, You Tube, Google, Word press, and the list goes on; almost EVERYTHING is connected. You Tube has just released a new feature called FreeTwitTube. It is a feature that allows people to view real time comments on videos being viewed by users. The famous television show Big Brother allows real time twitter messages appearing on screen about what viewers think about the people on the show. Like I said, connecting has never been ever so easy in the history of man kind, and the brilliant thing is, every Web 2.0 tool is like a piece of a puzzle; they all fit together somehow.

What does this mean?

It means that if you don’t have the appropriate Web 2.0 Tools set up in an organization, you will have a major reduction in four areas: Productivity, efficiency, knowledge, and reputation. There are a few interesting success stories on having Web 2.0 tools in an organization. I’ve picked out a few ones that stood out for me.

1. Mcdonald’s senior exceutive created a blog where employees could directly communicate with him and receive real-time feedback. It is unclear about how much the blog was monitored for naughty comments, but this idea changed much of what you experience in Mcdonalds and what you see on the menu [more…]

2. Blogger Jacob Morgan listed 50 case studies and examples of organizations and groups using E 2.0 tools, the list is frequently updated. The list includes medical associations, Federal Government, institutions and universities implementing E 2.0 tools. Please do have a look at this link as it contains EXCELLENT resources and gives a very broad view of the applications of E 2.0 tools. [more…]

 

Finally…

 

With every benefit, there are always risks. In normal scenarios, the higher the risk, the higher the return; a key principle in gambling and other situations. With Web 2.0 tools, the risks can be reduced significantly; risks such as resources, security, loss of control, reputation, reliability and productivity. How an organization is impacted by implementing Web 2.0 tools ultimately boils down to how they utilize the resources.

 

 

Again, all comments are welcome! Follow me for my next post the following week! Thank you for your comments in advance 😀

 

Did this change your perception?

Hey everyone, I thought this was somewhat related to social media and Enterprise 2.0, and I’d like you guys to share your opinions with me. As we examined earlier, social media and enterprise 2.0 play a large role in our society, as an individual and as an organization. This is no exception, for our young and famous pop star, Rihanna. I’m sure many of us has an opinion on Rihanna, but aren’t our opinions mostly based on what the media says? What if there was someone who’s words and actions echoed much louder than hundreds of thousands of people? What if Oprah gave an opinion on Rihanna, wouldn’t that change millions of peoples perception?

Rihanna

Watch the video below  to see how social media and web 2.0 tools were used in this scenario:

Please feel free to share your opinions, views and comment!

Calvin 😀