Week 4: Internal Blogs

As I wrote in my last post, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute outlines 10 value levers relating to social technology implementation within business and the 5 parts of the business value chain which they fall under. This time, I will be writing about a different lever, collaboration and communication, which fall under enterprise wide levers. This lever is about how a company can simplify communications; reduce in-person meetings; and increasing collaboration and the sharing of internal knowledge. A great way of achieving this is through the implementation of an internal blog.

So how and why should you write an internal blog? Well firstly it’s a good way to foster collaboration within the company. Not only are people already more likely to communicate with others they already know virtually than in person, but it can also connect people from different departments or shifts that would normally have never encountered each other before. This means that a more diverse set of people are able to collaborate together on various projects. Internal blogs are also a great way to store and share company knowledge. They are an easy way for employees to stay up to date with news from within the company or quickly send out their own knowledge which they feel others should hear about, such as what happened in a meeting or what they have been doing on a project. Unlike emails, blogs cannot become lost, buried or forgotten to be sent and are a lot easier to search. Blogs also generally aren’t deleted when someone quits or is fired, and therefore that employee’s knowledge isn’t lost with them. Internal blogs work well for many types of workers. Those who may be viewed slightly narcissistic or attention seeking have an outlet where they can write about all the good work they feel everyone should know they’ve done and their co-workers who dislike them can easily not follow or ignore the blog (which is a lot harder to do if they are constantly clogging your inbox). Meanwhile, those who are more modest may just use their blog as a way to keep others informed or as a way of organising themselves. Finally, many workers may already use this technology in their personal lives and have some great ideas about how it could be used within the company, or may even already be doing so without their boss’ knowledge. Therefore it would be a great idea to begin listening to what the employees want by implementing a company policy on how these technologies could be used for improvement throughout the business.

IBM is a technology company, notable for its usage of internal blogs. The business has a long history with social media, starting in the 1970s with forums being created for mainframe programmers. They now, among many other products, sell social software for implementation within businesses, such as IBM Connections (which they even have their own employees using). Using internal blogs within the company was the idea of Luis Benitez, IBM’s social software product manager. He found it hard to keep up with his work and emails and already ran a personal blog, so he decided to create one for work as well. He found that this eventually greatly reduced his emails. This is especially important as not only are blogs preferable to emails for a number of reasons I discussed earlier, but also because IBM, like almost every other email provider, has a storage quota placed on its employee’s accounts. This means that if they are sent too many or receive a number of large files, this limit can be quickly met and workers are forced to spend precious time on sorting through and deleting old emails, reducing their productivity. In 2005, the company as a whole began embracing blogging technologies, with a blogging policy and guidelines being written over two weeks on an internal wiki by the same employees who would later be using the blogs. Now, the company has 17000 blogs as well as microblogging capabilities within Connections and the company has implemented an online course on how to use their blog appropriately.

That’s all for this post. Do you know of any other companies using internal blogs? Let me know in the comments.

Week 3: Social Media and Customer Service

According to a report published by the McKinsey Global Institute, various applications of social technologies within a business can produce value for that business via 10 ‘value levers’. These 10 value levers fall under 5 areas of the business’ value chain: product development; operations and distribution; marketing and sales; customer service; and enterprise-wide levers. One of these levers, which falls under customer service, is ‘provide customer care via social technologies’.

When customers receive bad service or unforseen inconveniences, they often turn to their social media of choice to vent their frustrations. It is now becoming expected that a company replies to these customers or it may become a PR issue, damaging the company’s reputation.

By implementing customer service solutions, businesses can reap many benefits. It reduces the workload on traditional call centre staff, as the answers provided become available for other customers to search through and other customers or certified experts from outside the company can also help out those in need. These technologies also allow companies to react to or control issues which could have the potential to damage the company’s public image.

As previously mentioned on this blog, Twitter is becoming a great way for companies to interact with their customers. Some businesses now have Twitter accounts devoted to helping and responding to customer issues. Twitter is an effective method of communicating with customers as both the customer and employee are able to view information about the other, making the experience more personal and answers are approximately real time. However, around 70% of customer issues raised on Twitter aren’t responded to. There are also certain legal issues, such as in America,  banks are only able to take a customer’s name and  zip code via a direct or private message.

T-Mobile is a mobile network provider which is using social tools for customer service in an effective manner. The company has Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and forums where customers are able to contact the company. T-Mobile is one of the best business users of these tools in the customer care area, with an average response time on Facebook of 51 minutes and a response rate of 70.4%. The company also has a Facebook app titled T-Mobile Support, which allows a customer to live chat with a member of the support staff. In 2013, the company ran a campaign where they removed their contract termination fees, meaning that the business had to provide a high quality customer experience to retain their business. As Scott Tweedy, the vice president of customer services at T-Mobile stated, “that meant putting our customers at the centre of everything”. Part of this initiative was implementing the social media tools, as stated above. The company found that customer satisfaction increased by 31%, call deflection increased by 40%, call backs decreased by 10% and the support team’s productivity increased by 21%.

As you can see, it isn’t just ‘keeping up with the times’ when a business uses social media to interact with their customers, it also makes great business sense. Many more companies should begin implementing tools like T-Mobile did, and they will see results! Do you know of any other companies which give great customer support via social media? Tell me in the comments.

Week 2: Business and Social Technologies

So if you’re on this blog, you probably think that enterprise 2.0 technologies are great, but who is actually using them? Here are two major companies who are using them in very different ways to achieve their business objectives.

Disney is the company that made all those amazing animated films from your childhood, but did you know that they also have a high quality social media presence? Disney and its child companies (ABC, Marvel, etc.) are in charge of over 1000 social media accounts for their various television programs, movies, characters and other properties. They are the second most popular company in social media (behind Samsung), and with a small amount of browsing it is easy to see why. As well as the standard Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, they are involved in many other networks as well.

The other major player in social media, YouTube, is being put to great use by Disney. Their various channels are littered with a wide range of videos, from cooking tutorials, to various behind the scenes videos, and an online series aimed at encouraging young children to learn a second language.

Vine, the other video sharing site, notable for providing the most damning evidence when baby boomers say that younger generations “have no attention span”, is also being utilised very effectively by Disney Parks. Though these videos are very rough and basic, they are still able to convey the company’s trademark humour. They are also able to interact with their audience, running competitions and ‘revine-ing’ videos other users took at Disney theme parks.

Disney has also taken to Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. Their posts/boards include a wide variety of topics, from visually appealing pictures from their productions, to plugs for their theme parks and merchandise as well as more tutorials and fashion advice.

What makes these accounts so noteworthy is how well they are managed. Disney walks the line between casual and professional, creating a sense of loyalty and community with their followers. They listen to their customers and appear to genuinely care about their feelings towards the company. Disney also creates high quality content, not all of their posts are outrageously obvious advertisements, many are actually interesting and informative. These include posts from actual employees, further humanising the company and further fostering the link between the content producer and consumer.

Coca-Cola is another company making great use of social technologies. Most notably, Coke has been a great supporter of crowdsourcing, posting various projects, on sites including eYeka. Most notably, these have included advertising initiatives. One of these competitions garnered around 3600 responses and the winning advertisement was shown in Asia. The company also found that their new initiative made economic sense, there was an approximately 900% productivity gain when compared to traditional means of creating advertisements.

It isn’t just marketing that Coca-Cola is turning to crowdsourcing for though. The German arm of the company asked the public to help design a new bottle crate. Their goal was to create a new crate which had an improved designed, was more user friendly, and better for the environment. Whilst not as popular as their advertising initiatives, gaining ‘only’ 438 responses, Coke still received a wide variety of designs from many innovators.

Both of these companies are aligning themselves with some of the business models outlined in Wikinomics. Both Disney and Coca-Cola are creating prosumers, Disney by re-tweeting/vine-ing/pinning/blogging appropriate fan generated content and Coca-Cola by utilising their audience to create advertisements. This means that the people consuming there are also producing them. This also links to the other model they are making use of, open and global platforms. The content these companies are publishing are being made across the world, however they are still trying to ‘act local’, with various regional differences (such as dedicated social media pages for different countries, and different advertisements and flavours being sold across the world).

What did you think of this blog? What companies do you think are using social media and crowdsourcing particularly uniquely or well? Tell me about it, I’d love to know!

Week 1: How to Blog

The purpose of this blog is to write about exciting and cutting edge technology relating to the Enterprise 2.0 movement as well as social softwares in general.

This first entry will be relating to what makes a blog successful and how I intent to achieve this.

So what does make a successful blog? Well, according to The Guardian, it is the result of a large mix of factors, some obvious, some maybe less so.

The first thing you have to do when you start a blog is to pick your topic. It should be something your passionate about – if you don’t love your blog, how can you expect your readers to? You should feel compelled to write about this topic, meaning you will provide regular updates and not loose followers due to inactivity. It would also be ideal if this topic fills an open niche; there are millions of blogs on the internet which you have to compete with for your audience’s time, so what would make them pick your blog over theirs?

So now you have a blog and you have a topic, what now? Time to start posting! The first thing that your readers are going to see of your content is the title, so if you want them to keep looking, it had better pique their interest. This is also what their friends will see if they share it to social media, so it should make them intrigued as well. Once they’ve gotten past the headline, it’s easier to keep readers if you make your posts more personal. People want to know more about you, and this will cause them to form an emotional connection with you, making them continue reading you posts. If possible, you should also include pictures in your posts. This will make your blog more visually appealing and enjoyable.

Mandatory picture of a cat. Don't think that you're getting more. This isn't BuzzFeed.

Finally, make sure that your blog looks and feels professional. Proofread your posts before publishing them and make sure your layout isn’t a visual assault.

Okay so now you’ve got a great blog, but how do you market it? Firstly, link your blog with your other social media so that those friends/followers are aware of your blog and can follow you. You can also begin to build up a reputation by posting comments on other similar blogs so that those readers are aware of you. You could also do guest contributions on other blogs, and have guest contributions on yours to help make those other blog readers notice you. I intend to gain a readership by promoting myself through various social media platforms. These will be both my personal ones and the INB346’s Google+ community. I also hope to include on this blog a wide range of quality posts which people outside this small community will be able to find.

So what kinds of blogs do I like? Well, one of my favourite blogs is xkcd’s What If?. It encapsulates everything that I wish for this blog to become. It is both informative and hilarious. The reader instantly has their curiosity captured by the strange titles and stranger questions the blog aims to answer. The author, Randall Munroe, also has a great relationship with his audience, with each week’s post topic being taken from reader suggestions. Possibly the only downfall of this blog is the lack of ability to comment on and easily share posts.

Another blog I love is The Drum. This site, run by the ABC, provides opinion pieces on a wide range of political and social issues. It is always very topical, in depth, and unlike many other less professional blogs of this nature, provides facts and references to back up their authors’ claims. Unlike What If?, readers are encouraged to comment and add their opinions (although, like with many other blogs like this, it can often end in a flame war) and easily share the story to their personal social media profiles. However, also unlike What If?, the reader has a much harder time connecting with the authors. There are many regular contributors and even more guest writers, so unless the reader already knows of the author or is a very regular reader, they will not know much about the author and probably won’t even remember who wrote the article they just read.

That’s all for this week, stay tuned for next week’s post. Feel free to write anything in the comments. What are your favourite blogs?