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!