Activity 3: Perpetual Beta

Another one of O'Reilly's web 2.0 application patterns is the perpetual beta of these applications. This involves the constant updating current and adding of new features to an application, meaning that there has been a shift in the way that these programs are delivered, moving away from being a product and becoming a service.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging platform which allows its users to create their own posts or share others by reblogging them. They can also follow these blogs and have their posts appear on their dashboard, or like posts if they want to show their appreciation without the content appearing on their own blog.

Best Practices

One of the best practices that Tumblr is a great example of is that it releases early and often. This means that it is constantly adding new features to its product as well as updating and improving its existing ones. Therefore, any bugs within their system are also being found quickly and rectified. This means that users are constantly getting improvements and maintain their interest in the platform, whilst the developers are continuously getting feedback from users ensuring that they are in fact creating what the users want.

Another best practice that Tumblr is utilising is engaging its users. The staff of the website maintain major two blogs relating to this, one a general purpose one, and another dedicated to updates from their software engineers. This lets users know what updates have been made to the website, both front and backend, and how these will affect the user's experience and interactions with the website.

Comparison

Blogger is a competing blogging platform owned by Google. However, this service has its users focus on creating their own content rather than sharing the content of others, but unlike Tumblr, it does allow for commenting on posts. However, compared to Tumblr, Blogger has a lot of work to do on its perpetual beta strategy. Like Tumblr, its staff members maintain a blog on what updates are being made to the platform, but it is infrequently updated. There appears to only very rarely have new features added or updated, with 5 functionalities added or updated in the past two years, compared to Tumblr's many more.

However, Blogger does have a major focus on the best practice of making operations a core competency. Being owned by Google, its uptime can be monitored through their apps status dashboard. This releases information on whenever there has been a service disruption or outage. Through this service, Google also tells its users how they will be affected, when they expect the issue/s to be solved and if it is possible for it to be recurring. This is a great initiative by Google, as it shows their trust in their users and they make themselves publicly responsible for any problems users encounter.

Future

Tumblr has many options and paths for the future, and since it is in perpetual beta, its developers are easily able to trial new features and updates. Tumblr could improve its services by embracing making operations a core competency by releasing information about its uptime, like Blogger, and increase user trust in the platform. Another area which Tumblr could improve its operations is by engaging its users more in co-development, either by opening itself up more to user suggestions for improvements or by creating an option where users can become testers for functions that haven't been generally released yet.

What do you think of Tumblr's perpetual beta strategy? Tell me about it in the comments.

Activity 2: Rich User Experiences

Last week, I blogged about one O’Reilly’s web 2.0 patterns, data is the next Intel Inside. This week, I’ll look at another one, rich user experience. This involves delivering a PC style and level of interactivity via web browser applications.

One web application which is notable for its rich user experience is Defringe, an online art gallery. Pictures and a short description are tiled across the page and users are able to click to open an article, containing more information on and pictures of the piece.

Best Practices

Defringe exhibits many of the recommended best practices for providing a great experience for its users. Firstly, it puts usability and simplicity first. Users are instantly able to work out how to operate the website, but just as importantly, the designers found a way to make this interactivity fun. Small details, such as the way the navigation icons change or page numbers scroll as a mouse rolls over them, give the application a sense of personality, and this in turn gives the user a more enjoyable experience.

The website also puts a focus on search over structure. Content is easily sourced through typing key words into a search bar found in the navigation on each page. Although structure is provided by allowing users to sort by category or publishing date, this definitely isn’t the application’s focus as individual articles don’t disclose this information, and therefore would make it harder for a user to look for an article they had previously read based on this.

Despite having a seamless transition between various interfaces, Defringe also preserves its content’s addressability by changing the URL for each page. This is clearly a very important ability as it allows users to share their content, and hence increase their site traffic and general brand awareness.

However, one best practice which Defringe is seriously lacking in is deep, adaptive personalisation. The application doesn’t allow for users to create accounts (although due to the application’s purpose there really is no need for this functionality), nor does it make article recommendations based on past browsing activity. This could be an ability which site developers could implement later.

Comparison

In contrast, another platform based on a similar idea but with a very different execution is Instagram. This is a web and mobile application which allows users to upload pictures with a description and tags, which help others to find the post. However, this platform operates very differently to Defringe. Firstly, and most importantly, it relies on user uploads instead of Defringe’s model of having only moderators post (albeit with giving users the ability to make a post suggestion). Secondly, its web application has no focus on search. It is impossible for users to search for content using the web application unless they click on the tag they want within a post they are looking at, although third parties have filled this gap. This complete lack of functionality makes it the antithesis of Defringe, which has a huge focus on searchability. Also unlike Defringe, Instagram is actually a very good example of having deep, adaptive personalisation. Based on a user’s activity, the web application is able to recommend other users for someone to follow.

Do you find Defringe's user experience as enjoyable as I do? Let me know in the comments.

Activity 1: Data is the Next Intel Inside

All web applications rely on data, and its management is becoming a core part of a business’ strategy in an aim to get the most out of one of their vital assets. Hence, O’Reilly has made “data is the next Intel Inside” one of its web 2.0 patterns. Many companies, such as Spotify, are learning to balance having a good control over their data, whilst giving users the access and rights to their own data and the platform's, so together they can explore the Spotify's full potential.

The Platform

Spotify is a web, desktop, and mobile application which allows users to stream millions of music tracks; follow artists, playlists, radios, and friends, as well as share libraries and playlists with friends. Based on a user’s activities, the application is able to suggest other music the user may enjoy listening to. The company is meeting one of O’Reilly’s best practices by designed their data for reuse. They have released an API, allowing outside developers to fetch Spotify’s data relating to artists, albums, and single tracks and users’ personal playlists and libraries (with their permission).

The Competition

Compared to other common music streaming platforms, Spotify is a leader in API offerings. YouTube is one of their main competitors, however it is focused on playing a single video (or much less often, a playlist), instead of Spotify’s more specialised constant streaming of audio. Both platforms allow the retrieval and streaming of tracks/videos or playlists, however Spotify does fall behind when compared to YouTube’s Analytics API, which allows developers to access viewing statistics, viewer demographics, and popularity ratings.

Spotify’s other major competitor is iTunes, which also has released an API. However, the iTunes API has a lot fewer capabilities. Like Spotify, it allows for developers to search the store and display a song or album’s information, but unlike Spotify, it only allows for a small preview of a song to be played. Most crippling though, is that Apple (the owners of iTunes) don’t allow the API to be used for any purpose except to promote the store (even going as far as requiring an iTunes icon displayed wherever it’s used), and explicitly banning entertainment usage. This means that Apple is missing out on many opportunities for its data to be used and exposed to developers with ideas, allowing for Spotify to swoop in and gain a huge market share.

The Future

One best practice Spotify must work on is allowing users to control their own data. For example, there is no way for a playlist to be exported to another application such as iTunes or Windows Media Player, even if it consists entirely of the user’s own locally stored music files. Another possible future direction for the platform is focusing on another best practice, enhancing their core data, by creating opportunities for users to make more explicit inputs, such as ratings and reviews.

What are your opinions on Spotify's use of its data? Let me know in the comments.

Week 7: Misuse of Social Technology

Social media is great for connecting with customers, but what happens when something goes wrong? HMV experienced many business' worst nightmare during a particularly difficult time for the company.

The Incident

HMV is an entertainment retailer primarily based in the UK, selling movies, music, games and electronics. In January 2013, the business went into administration, causing the company to fire employees to reduce costs. On the 31^st of January, Poppy Rose, the (ex) HMV community manager, who ran the business’ Twitter and Facebook, live tweeted the firing of herself and 59 other employees from HMV’s head office on their official account, using the hashtag ‘#hmvXFactorFiring’, which quickly began trending. In her tweets, which later continued on her personal account, she expressed her dislike of how the company was being run and her frustrations with her employers for refusing to learn about the importance of social media.

From The Guardian and Poppy Rose’s Twitter

Later, the new administrator of the account deleted the offending tweets, and posted a response, shown below.

Our @hmvtweets picked up a lot of attention today, it’s clearly been a tough day for us all at hmv, please stick with us #hmvxfactorfiring

There have been job losses today, but not in our stores. We are still open for business, thx for your continued support #savehmv

One of our departing colleagues was understandably upset. We’re still here thou, thx for supporting hmv thro these challenging times

The Fallout

These tweets were clearly not good for the business, showing just how bad the situation within the company was at the time, as well as highlighting Ms Rose’s point of how very few within the company had a good understanding of social media. It also gained HMV some very bad press, mocked the company for the incident, which could have been easily avoided. However, the issue wasn’t without a silver lining for HMV, with their Twitter gaining around 12,000 followers.

The Future

This sort of embarrassment could be easily avoided in the future, both by HMV again or any other company. Once Ms Rose had handed over the account details (which had happened earlier that day), and had set up the new administrator, the company should have immediately changed the passwords and removed her from admin, clearly neither of which they did. They were also very slow in their response to the situation, with it taking around 20 minutes for the tweets to be removed and the response to be posted, by which time it had already gone viral. If this incident were to somehow happen again to any company, their social media team should be quick to respond and begin to rebuild its image.

What other embarrassing corporate social media screw ups do you know about? Tell me in the comments, I’d love to hear about it!

Week 6: Return on Investment

Implementing social technologies within companies by now hopefully sounds like a great idea, but can an actual business case be made for justifying the expenditure? Yes it can, and Yammer is a good example of this. Yammer is an internal social network for companies to use as a way of communicating between employees. To gain access to the service, the business must pay a monthly fee per user (from $5 to $22) and as it is owned by Microsoft, companies are able to bundle it with licenses for Office 365.

Profits and ROI

Coles is a customer of Yammer, signing up 103,000 of its employees to the service. Up to $22 per employee per month, equaling $2,266,000 per month or $27,192,000 per year sounds like a large sum of money, so what would it take for Cole’s investment to pay off? Assuming that their employees work 39.7 hours a week (the national average for full time workers), for 50 weeks of the year, minus 1 day or 8 hours of training, making a total of 1,977 hours a year worked per employee and that their employees are also paid the average wage of $1,516.90 per week, therefore making $78,878.80 per year, an hour of a Coles employee’s working time using Yammer is worth $39.8982. Therefore, each employee must save 6.6168 hours each year to break even, or just under 8 minutes each working week.

If a user saves just 10 minutes each week, or 8⅓ hours each year, the company will save $332.485 per employee, or $34,245,955 across the company. This gives Coles a 25.9413% return on their investment.

It should be noted that this ROI doesn’t take into account any extra internet or networking hardware costs this initiative would incur, although these would be minimal, or factor in the cost of training, although it does allow for lost productivity. It should also be noted that it doesn't include that Office 365 (and support) is included in the cost, a service which companies would almost certainly already be paying for, and therefore that budget could be redirected towards paying for a bundle including Yammer, saving the company some money and improving their return on investment.

Other Benefits

Although companies ultimately make business decisions based on their bottom line, there are many intangible benefits that Yammer can also offer which Coles benefited from. Possibly most importantly, it provides a place for people to share their expertise, increasing collaboration, innovation and problem solving across the company. It also helps to free up store staff, meaning more are able to serve customers and give them a better shopping experience, as well as boosting employee morale and improving retention. Despite what many may think, that Coles is a large and more traditional company and therefore both the employees and the corporate culture as a whole wouldn't be open to trying Yammer, it was actually found that it had a high adoption rate, with 87% of employees using it within 3 weeks of it becoming available in South Australia.

What other companies do you know of that use Yammer or other internal social networks? Let me know in the comments.

Week 5: Case Study

For this post, I’ll be looking at how Coles, a supermarket retailer operating in Australia, has been using social media, especially to communicate with their customers.

Social Media

The social media that Coles is most active on is Facebook. Here, the company has two accounts, on for Coles and another for recipes. The main account's page is focused on posting a wide range of content including information about new offerings in store, product recalls, sales, information about charities Coles involved with, as well as contests and giveaways. It also has some recipes, although Coles also has another page dedicated to them. Their main Facebook also links to a part of their website for online customer service, however any issues or queries customers have don’t appear to be addressed on the Facebook page itself.

Google+ is another area of social media Coles is using. This appears to be basically an ‘edited’ version of the company’s Facebook page, showing some of the more important posts and not updating as frequently. On this service, just like with Facebook, there doesn’t appear to be a lot of interaction with and between customers.

Coles also has accounts on Twitter. One is the main Coles profile, which generally serves the same purpose and tweets the (exact) same posts as Facebook. There is also an account for Coles Online, the company’s online store. The tweets from this account are usually to let users know about any technical issues the system may be experiencing which would affect them, however, there are also tweets about sales available through the store or competitions the company is running. However, both accounts also answer a lot of customer queries, in a casual yet professional way, and it does a lot to both help those people and humanise the company.

Another area where Coles is quite active is on YouTube. Here, they have a range of content available, including cooking technique tutorials, videos from and about competitions they have run, reports about the company from the media, and advertisements, both current ones and 'classic' old ones for the nostalgic user. Here, the company is putting then platform to good use, providing their subscribers with a wide range of content and most are sure to find something that interests them.

Another website that Coles is using well is Pinterest. Mainly this is used as another platform to share their recipes, however it worked especially effectively here. Coles is able to sort those recipes into various categories by pinning them to different boards. It also places the focus on pictures of the food, rather than the written recipe, making exploring the board very visually appealing. Coles has also has created some original content for this platform, rewarding those which track them on this social media tool instead of spamming them with posts the have already seen on other sites.  A great example of this which I especially enjoyed is the pictures of the carved fruit.

Coles also has a blog on their website. This contains longer posts than their other social media platforms, allowing for those who are interested to learn more about the subject to do so. The blog includes a wide range of post subjects, although they are mainly about new products. They also include posts about various charities the company is involved with, cooking or food tips and posts about their supplier farmers. The blog has a good mix of posts that have already featured in other places as well as ones exclusive to the blog.

McKinsey Value Levers

Coles is using their social media to help achieve two of their organisation functions, marketing and sales, as well as customer service. Of the value levers which fall under marketing and sales, the one that Coles is implementing the most effectively is ‘use social technologies for marketing communication/interaction’, however, they do really need to work on their interaction in most platforms. The company is almost certainly also trying to leverage ‘generate and foster sale leads’, and ‘derive customer insights’, and they have a great opportunity and the ability to do these effectively.

Coles is also beginning to utilise the ‘provide customer care via social technologies’ lever in customer service. However, Coles still has a lot of work to do in this area on certain platforms, as well as generally fostering more connection and interactions with their customers.

Do you know of any retail companies using social media and other social technologies more effectively than Coles? Let me know in the comments.