Week 10 : Return on Investment (ROI) of Social Technology implementations

Although social technologies enhance cooperation amongst organizations and enhance their levels of collaboration with each other, it only contributes a very small deal to the true Return on Investment of an organization. Still, organizations around the world are concerned about finding ways that can increase their ROI given the reason that social technologies have potentials to take the business to newer heights. As long as the changes are implemented in an effective manner, crowd-sourcing and customer feedbacks have the potential to translate into ROI. It is suggested by the social innovation adopters that the collection of new ideas form the business world and the collection of new business knowledge through different social technologies is a very profitable aspect of the corporation, if it is used effectively for multiple gains other than simply increasing company presence.

Social technology implementations involve employees in a collaborative environment of research and exploration in order to collect and form new ideas for business interest. However, a contribution to the organization’s ROI will not be possible until and unless those ideas and feedback are put into concrete practices. This is why companies are increasingly concerned about not only exchanging ideas but “practically” implementing those, too.

In order to gauge the success or failure of a project in a successful manner, the ROI numbers need to be as accurate as possible. Without truly knowing about these figures, assumptions regarding the effectiveness of the project can only be made. Gathering the right type of data involving social technologies implementation is indeed a tedious task. For this reason we selected IBM as our company, in order to see if social technologies implementation at IBM contributes to its ROI or not. Forrester Consulting group is a company that mainly deals in realizing the ROIs of companies that implement social collaboration technologies within their businesses. It has been studied by the IBM Corporation that an adoption of social media tools can result in providing profitable incentives for the prospects by its partners and business collaborators. It was maintained that social technologies implementation will result in bringing new revenues to each set of new products for the corporation, savings of staff productivities and more profits on incremental sales.

IBM’s total revenue: $20 billion a year

Revenue of new products: $420,000 - $8,400,000 (likely estimate: $2,100,000 per year)

We get the following estimates for the profits by adding up the low, likely and high estimates in these four years’ categories:

Profits (1 year)

• Low – $1,045,500
•    Likely – $3,041,813

• High – $10,556,813

Profits (3 years)

• Low – $3,136,500
• Likely – $9,125,439
• High – $31,670,439

The three ROIs for social technologies implementation for IBM are as follows:

ROI Low=47, 53%

ROI Likely = 329, 23%

ROI High =1389, 67%

These figures illustrate that IBM can realize a good degree of financial success of it implements social technologies using effective social media marketing tools.

Week 9 : Social Networks and Social Media Monitoring

In this global age, everyone and “anyone” are engaged in some form of social media interaction. Individuals around the world are engaged in conversations about the brands or products, and services that various companies offer. This trend spurs the usage of various online platforms available within easy access. It also invokes the importance of social media monitoring so that companies regulates what is being said or “commented” about them. Individuals in large numbers may be tweeting about the quality of your services, may be discussing your reputation on a community forum, may be reviewing your products on some blogging website or simply putting comments on Amazon regarding the product listing by your company. Thus, social media monitoring is helpful to provide insights regarding the company’s strategic decision-making, issues handling, crisis management, customer relations and feedback, messaging and positioning for a certain brand.

The company that we have decided to monitor, for its social media practices, is Coca Cola Incorporation. Their social media presence and interactions over various interactive websites can be monitored suing the tool Brand-watch. Brand-watch is a monitoring tool that gives a comprehensive coverage of the online content that is intended to be delivered. It identifies a conversation in over 25 languages while constantly enriching its “crawling” capabilities using added features and applications. It has been gathered that Coca Cola embraces a very active and socially-encouraging position over the social media platforms while strictly adhering to the Social Media Principles as laid out in the company’s digital policies.

We have found out that the company Coca Cola is a good “participant” on online blogs and forums, whereby the company abides by its Information Protection Policy in addition to be very responsive to what people seek to know about it. The company adopts a transparency approaches in all its social media engagement wherein selected representatives are always willing to cater to their customers’ queries and feedbacks. The company regularly monitors its behaviors in social media forums, and constantly cross-checks for its claims holding them being true to life.

Coca Cola maintains an established position for itself, on the Internet; the company is sure to penetrate even more in the coming times. The company selects 360i as digital agency for monitoring its social media presence. This agency monitors and takes adequate “care” of what the customers say about its products across Face book, Twitter and other forums. The company is well-aware of the prospects that social media can offer, provided that the company acts as an active social representative about its own happenings and services. The coming days will see a more integrated approach form the company, building relationships with its key business partners in addition to forming strong customer-relations. 

Week8 Blog : Enterprise Use of Blogs, Twitter and Wikis

The International Business Machines Corporation (commonly referred as IBM) is an American multinational that manufactures and markets computer hardware and software along with providing hosting and consulting services. This multinational corporation was found in 1911 as a technology giant through a merger between the International Time Recording Company, the Tabulating Machine Company and the Computing Scale Company. The IBM has been making the most “clever” use of Blogs, Twitter and Wikis in its enterprise-level operations in order to spur employee innovation using social media tools and solutions. It is undoubtedly one of the most active social media participants in the corporate world.

The company undertakes a decentralized social media participation approach whereby the company does not have a corporate Blog or a corporate Twitter ID but IBMers are encouraged to use their personal blogs and discussions both in-house and externally outside the organization in order to participate and “comment” about key organizational happenings. The company boasts of having around 17,000 internal blogs with over 100,000 employees very actively participating on those blogs to discuss various topics and happenings pertaining to enterprise operations and prospects.

Communication researchers maintain that the importance of using social media for enterprise and official usage has still not yet been adequately regarded by the corporate world. Social media is a distinct area of technology that serves many purposes at the same time. It is considered as one of the most desirable platforms for User Generated Content. The company rightly uses this technological power to voice out its employees’ opinions by using “Social Blue” which is similar to as Face book for its employees. There is a great scope of enhancement of presence on the social media and the company feels it can go even far. Presently, there are a few thousand members on Twitter while almost 200,000 employees have their accounts at LinkedIn. The employees of the company realize their importance as company representatives on these social media websites whereby they can not only create an image of their companies but also enhance their customer and clientele base. Moreover, there are 50,000 members in alum networks on Face book and LinkedIn. In short, the company is successfully maintaining its social media presence, making it a platform to spur business and bring knowledge to many people at the same instance.

Being a knowledge-based company that IBM is, it is only the company agenda to prioritize social media participation as a vital factor for company’s workforce integration, empowerment and collaboration. They contend that it makes perfect “business sense” to the company management teat their employees share and exchange ideas while contributing to the collective information of the entire organization. The coming era is sure to see a more active and integrated presence of the company in more social media networks that emerge from time to time. 

Week 7 : Social Technology Use in Healthcare

The use of social technology in healthcare sector has recently been realized as one of the main pillars that can designate important information amongst recipients while enabling the practitioners to carry out their work related practices in a healthy manner. Social technology in healthcare remains one of the top priorities of new and running non-profit institutions including the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS).

The CHCS dedicates its services towards improving upon the healthcare provisions, providing quality health care amenities to people and children belonging to low income groups and adults and senior citizens with chronic diseases. There are ethnic diversities involved in the process along with the concern of providing a range of amenities and healthcare facilities even to the remotest geographic regions.

Using social technologies in the sector of healthcare will lead the users to remain up-to-date on latest medical processes and procedures, socialize with like-minded people and expand upon their existing networks of professionals and peers, communicate with patients in an effective manner and grow their practices in the said profession. This is why taking advantage of social media in the department can be beneficial for an increasing number of users belonging to the field.

Despite the fact that social networking may resemble an extra burden for doctors having some busy schedules, other members of the field at CHCS use these tools to send reminders about the patients, schedule appointments on daily basis, or simply notify or update the patients , schedule a new one, or notify them when running late fro a meeting or a treatment follow-up. In the longer run, participation of the healthcare practitioners and participants in social media not only provides an opportunity to the doctors to function smoothly and efficiently; but, it also improves upon the communication network and interactive environment between a patient and his doctor. 

The participation of the CHCS in social technology mediums also improves upon the patients’ word-of-mouth marketing about the services offered by an institution. This not only educates the general public about the provision of facilities but helps them seek the best available doctors for their beloveds. The management of the Center for Health Care Strategies believes that it must be its employees’ utmost responsibility to extend their reach to those in “need” using platforms where millions of users can be facilitated in the minimal of time span. The present-day times critically demand for a presence where health care amenities are provided to even the remotest localities at the spur of the moment since advancements in medical fields have already enabled the treatment of even the rarest of diseases.

Incorporating social media in the sector of healthcare, as we studied in the case of CHCS, results in a significant number of benefits. They cyber relationship between the patient and the doctor signifies a cordial relation amongst the two that is essential to cure critical diseases. In the coming times, more hospitals and healthcare facilities are probably going to incorporate such technologies to have real-time benefits along with enhancement of doctor-patient relationship. 

Week 5

The Legal Risks and Risk Mitigation Strategies for Organization’s Implementing Social Media

Active participation of organization in social media activities has exposed the organization to high risks. Access use of social media technologies prone organization to three kinds of risks;

     1.     Reputational risk
        2.     Information security risk

          3.     Legal and employment risk

Use of social media exposed the organization to reputational risk; they need to understand the types of risk that is coming from either general public, employees of the organization, and from organization itself.  The general public may give open comments about the organization on social network, they could be positive or could be negative and it might sabotage the image of the organization. Employees of the organization can leak the inside information on social networks about the performance of the organization or the negative information about the culture of the organization that could harm the image of the entity.  Lack of organization’s presence on social media could expose them into high risk of defame. They should be there to defend their self or even promote their culture or market their self on social media.

Second kind of risk is the information security risk that is usually faced by all organizations who have their existence on social networks. The information shared by them on social forum are not even secured and protected no matter how strict security measures they apply. This risk is due to the low protection walls of social networks that can be easily breached. 

Third kind of risk hovers on the head of employee, in case wrong information shared by them they can be exposed to the legal consequences; it could be legal proceedings against them or termination from the organization.  

Week 4

Social technology earns benefit?

People around the world are availing the benefits of social technologies in their personal and professional both lives. Social technologies have made social interactions within the organization among employees or outside the organization with the buddies and relatives very convenient and fast. The use of social technologies is not limited to the share of information in corporate culture or in the personal lives of people. Rather, today they are being used for political movements, for selling of products or for marketing purpose. Millions of information is shared through these social media platforms world widely.  Few benefits reported in 2009-2011 survey are mentioned in below chart.

Companies use this forum to reach targeted customers in various unique ways like they can create solicited messages after obtaining information about the consumer or corporate clients. With proper insight of customers, organization can better target them and can better exploit the needs of its customers to make sale to them.

However, it has been observed by Gartner, Inc. that by the end of 2015, 80% of efforts made by social technologies will not be in good directions and hence, will not be achieving expected benefits due to wrong supervision and over reliance on technology. Carol Rozwell, Vice president, Gartner Inc. said, “Businesses need to realize that social initiatives are different from previous technology deployments”. He differentiated between the push and pull approach of using technology, according to these technologies if employees were trained for conventional technology like ERP or CRM then they are expected to follow “push” approach like they are trained and then they will use these technologies. On contrary, on social networks, social initiatives are required “pull” paradigm included continuously innovative methods and ways of keeping workers engaged and make efforts towards improving the ways to work. In the second case, organization cannot force their employees to use this technology rather; they can only be opted by employees themselves.

Week 3

IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN PRODUCTIVITY BUILDING IN ORGANIZATION

Today, when whole world has gone electronic the social media and social technology have taken huge places in organization life. Concept of building brand and increasing productivity is all depended upon the efficient use of social media to lead the market of the organization in due direction.

Gone are days when organizations were depended upon the manual market or only media market via advertisement through television or radio channels. Instead social media has not only driving the lives of common people but also the enterprises as well. Twitter, facebook, linked in, my space, orkut, and four square like platforms are being used as image building platform by the organization. Entrepreneurs set the core culture of integrity and commitment by positive marketing of their organization’s environment on social media like posting a discussion on linked in group that truly depicts the organization’s culture and sometimes it involves the employees to share their ideas and suggestion that could lead the company toward better prospect.

It is said “seeing is believing”, it is completely true, I have myself experienced observed that any organization that is uploading its cultures and workplace’s pictures on company’s sole blog or facebook page create a positive perception about that company specially for those who has never visited that company and of course that is how they build their image. Now, every time when the name of that company is being called the image of that company would come in my mind and that is call power of branding through social media. Perceptions are always bigger than reality, so companies should take due care while branding through social media platform because once the image is created would take so long to get changed and after long effort. Organization needs to put up all the research and efforts in utilizing these social media platforms and should continuously monitor the activities that are being performed there with their name and authority.