Another one of the Tim O’Reilly eight cores of Design Patterns and Business Models” is Rich user experiences. Rich user experiences refer to the development of web page application. This concept changes the web deliverable to contain both multimedia content and GUI- graphical user interface which also know as Rich internet application (RIA).
There some technologies that made this possible such as Ajax, Adobe Flex and JavaFX.
Ajax and Rich user experience
AJAX, is a short form of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, it combined several technologies that allow some parts or all of a page to receive new data without refreshing the entire page. With AJAX, web applications can be much more responsive and intuitive. With it capability it can make Web2.0 richer in user experience by creating more interactive platforms.
Most of the social media networks invest in the Rich user experience concept by rapidly evolving to increase and create more user’s traffic that are influential and valuable. Websites like Twitter, facebook, YouTube and are always evolving.
As example of evolving Social networks is Pinterest. Can explain as “a visual discovery tool that you can use to find ideas for all your projects and interests”.
Pinterest’s new look is slicker and makes browsing pins and keeping track of updates much easier.
These are some of the newly developed updates to match the new technology trends:
The categories section
The notificationsfeature.
The built-in Pinterest analytics feature for business profiles.
Enhancing Contributions from Building Successful Online Communities, that when users are contribution to social platform. It suggests that contributions can increase and enhance if the social media platform contributor can find motivation and expected value.
Motivations in both forms Intrinsic or Extrinsic can a great impact on people contribution to any social media network. Been a part of a friendlier community, positive performance feedback, joining social media contribution with other ways of contribution like workplaces, Social learning, Rewards and Interesting experiences with clear goals, feedback, and challenges that apply people’s skills to their limits but still leave them in control.
Facebook and Instagram likes- tags for example can motive content creators to continue with the good work. On the other hand polls, survey and comments can be increased when social media contributors feel that their voices and input are listen to and taken seriously. Rewards are another way of motivation financially $$$, status, privilege, exclusive access or material benefits etc..
Anticipated value is another way to encourage contribution. Committing to smaller social community, the feel of unique and influential contributions, listing what kind of contribution needed or by simplifying the execution on the need help and contribution.
Innovation in Assembly
Innovation in Assembly is part of Lightweight Programming Models, one of the eight cores of Tim O’Reilly, Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. According to O’Reilly innovation in assembly is” when commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in novel or effective ways”.
The idea behind that came from the fact that social media platforms are open source services. Web2.0 has shifted the platforms to offer both service and data. Open platforms can provide rapid growth model and build trust and community. The different of Web2.0 from Web1.0 is that it open source, which create room for extending in them, which made software developers create applications that allow of innovated way of to communicate with the web2.0 platforms and community. These called API
“An application program interface (API – and sometimes spelled application programming interface) is the specific method prescribed by a computer operating systemor by an application programby which a programmer writing an application program can make requests of the operating system or another application”
API’s of popular platforms like Amazon, eBay and Google offer a lot of functionality to create powerful and interesting applications. Also APIs can foster third party innovation where customers can show how services are really used. In addition API can drive cost from been to large fixed to variable cost according to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Gumtree is a straight-forward example of that
Gumtree.comis an online classifieds and community website. Classified ads are either free or paid for depending on the product category and the geographical market. It is now the UK’s largest website for local community classifieds and is one of the top 30 websites in the UK, receiving around 8 million monthly unique visitors and reaching 17.9% of the U.K.’s online audience. Gumtree was founded in March 2000 by Michael Pennington and Simon Crookall as a local London classified ads and community site, designed to connect Australians, New Zealandersand South Africanswho were either planning to move, or had just arrived in the city, and needed help getting started with accommodation, employment and meeting new people. In May 2005, Gumtree was acquired by eBay’s classifieds.
The nature of Gumtree different from eBay and Amazon as it locally focused.Gumtree API has similar business to the one on the actual platform.
By use Gumtree App “API” you can create the following
post items for listing.
Get current list of categories.
View information about listed items.
Provider different way of communication (Telephone/Email/SMS).
Data is the Next Intel Inside is one of the eight cores that has been mention by Tim O’Reilly, as part of design Patterns and Business Models and patterns for the Next Generation of Software.
The idea was a result of the move from internet as access age to Web2.0 age and who provide the data, the shift is that data was added by the service provider but nowadays it mostly collected from the community. This creates a great need to database, not a small one but a huge.
The question is who own the data?
As mentioned by Tim O’Reilly. He pointed out that in the era of the internet; companies had to invest a lot of resources to build their own products “DATA”. For instance companies like NavTeq invested $750 million to build their database of maps and directions, similarly -Digital global also devoted $500 million to launch their satellite for better imagery. Nowadays leading maps services providers like google, yahoo and MapQuest use these databases to run their services. So that mean if the data harnessing collecting concept were introduced in the early age of internet, that may been another story – these services owners could use the input of users to improve their products and make it hard for the competition and maybe eliminate them.
Web 2.0 age with its technologies made this possible. Social media platforms are the core of web2.0, service provider can use the mechanism of social networks to build up their database or products. Gathering the data come in many forms writing a comment, poking , tagging ,liking sharing topics- videos or photos, this usually result in enormous amount of data.
WHO fit this profile?
Yelp is an incredible online community of locals and travelers that have honest opinions about everything. Through user reviews and ratings, you can find a wealth of information on the best and worst places to eat, visit, and do business with from restaurants to dentists. Yelp is a powerful tool with both business and personal applications.
The whole Yelp idea can be merely done by acquiring the community reviews and share for the local services and businesses. That means Yelp mainly business is based on a huge database that mostly gathered from the community inputs and shares. Web2.0 application enables and facilitated Yelp to build their products from this contributed database.
The concept of harnessing collective intelligence was introduced by Tim O’Reilly , this idea is part of the design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. He argued that this notion developed from the transaction of the PC era to Web2.0 era and when the internet started to provide not only connection but provided a platform and services.
Harnessing collective intelligence can be defined as crowd sourcing the public. Some may tend to define it as harnessing the wisdom of the masses. Whichever concept phrase you prefer, all of them basically mean collecting and taking advantage of the bigger community – its input, feedback and ideas.
IBM has jumped in to harness some of this intelligence by creating platforms that help make this a possibility, especially for the professional world.
As a chosen platform I thought Instagram has what it takes, similar to twitter it uses #hashtags. Those hashtags are going to bring in the views, often from those who might not ordinarily be able to find you but moreover it provides the ability to share photos and recently short videos. Because the fact that users interact with image-based content more than any other form of content on social networks
“Instagram is a photo sharing app for iPhones that makes it easy to take pictures on a iPhone and share them with your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or connections on your Instagram account. Instagram allows users to apply a series of filters to their photos in order to create a vintage look for their images that resembles a polaroid.”
Instagram uses the harnessing collective intelligent concept which generates some benefits. I chose two fields to shed some light on.
In business
Market your products and services in creative ways.
Post behind the scenes photos from your business.
Update people on your latest offers, events and promotions.
Find Fans – by finding and connecting people who are already using your products or services with those who have similar interest which may lead to potential new customers.
It promotes customer engagement – a perfect opportunity to encourage followers to participate in anything that involves your business –for instance product and services development.
It helps build business personality.
In education
Instagram & Spatial Intelligence –is a mental process through which the mind attempts to interpret certain types of information (visual).
Instagram & Linguistic Intelligence – students may articulate their thoughts into the right words and sentences, also they can participate in a group activity where students ask others to comment on the photos or the videos, thereby gaining instant feedback and interaction.
Instragram & Logical Mathematical Intelligence – can be done by sharing pictures with students by requesting them to work on it like cropping an image or improve its quality using Photoshop.
Instagram & Interpersonal Intelligence – Through sharing meaningful photos and videos may lead to the development of Interpersonal Intelligence which enables people to envisage and understand the desires, motivation and intentions of others.
Use of Instagram and iPhoneography in Art & Photography Classes – by understanding the camera setting and other tricks to improve the photos quality can assist student be better prepared to create wonderful photos.
Instagram & Intrapersonal Intelligence – understanding oneself and realize one’s fears, feelings and motivations can be done by allowing students to work independently and reflect on some of the pictures they capture and create.
This week’s blog is about identifying and discussing Social Media ROI case example. Talking about how ROI was calculated and where if it include all the tangible and intangible benefits? What are the strengths and weaknesses in the chosen approach if any applicable?
In the beginning, let ask this question
Traditionally, what is ROI?
The formula for return on investment sometimes referred to as ROI or rate of return, measures the percentage return on a particular investment. ROI is used to measure profitability for a given amount of time.
But Social media ROI is a bit different story …
While in the financial world, the ROI is a way to measure the financial efficiency of a financial investment.
The Social media ROI is unique and more about measuring the digital social media traffic in relation to a company, brand, product or marketing campaign and how to put a dollar value on that as a return.
What is Social ROI
Increase in conversation.
Open line of communication between your customers.
Increase in profits.
A return Sale.
New potential customers seeing a POSITIVE EXPERIENCE through your social channels.
How to calculate the Social ROI?
Searching for ways somehow can calculate the social media ROI, I found a model to be interesting can cover most aspect, It’s called:
The Six Models
The Amplification Model: how much would it cost to buy these impressions/social actions through paid media?
As case example I choose Cisco systems for their amazing results.
Cisco
Founded 1984, Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, that designs, manufactures, and sells networking equipment.
Cisco engaged with customers, dealers, partners and anyone who interested in their work over the social media networks from an early age. They started with blogs and they went more as the social media networks grow bigger. Cisco realized the value and the important of social ROI, as result they set up SMLC Social Media Listening Centre.
Some of Cisco social media ROI stats:
Blogs: 22 external, 475,000 views/quarter
Twitter: 108 Cisco feeds with 2 million followers
Facebook: 79 groups with 100,000 fans
YouTube: 300+ channels, 2,000+ videos, 4 million views
Second Life: 150,000 visitors, 50+ events
Flickr: 300+ photos, 400,000 views.
And the number has got bigger as the study stats were published in 2010.
The highlight of Cisco social ROI success
9,000 people attended the social media product launch event – 90 times more attendees than in the past
Nearly three times as many press articles as with traditional outreach methods
More than 1,000 blog posts and 40 million online impressions
A Leading Lights award for Best Marketing
One-sixth the cost of a traditional launch.
Social media helped Cisco shave $100,000+ off a product launch.
Most important fact is that Cisco social ROI drive the company ROI to be 281% annually.
What are the tangible and intangible benefits of the Social ROI?
It is mostly mean short term and long term benefits.
Some tangible benefits “short term”:
Inbound Traffic
Distribution Channels.
Increased “Sharability”.
Intangible benefit is basically described as keep up the good work over time e.g. building digital brand name, delivering the brand experience and most importantly is changing the way to conduct business for the best. These are not always captured by first-click.
Some of the Intangible benefits are:
Brand awareness
Customer loyalty
Engagement through social conversations
Engagement due to content
Offline channel transactions
Personal referrals due to awesome content that adds value
These are hard to put a value against but they are real but soft metrics and should be in your marketing tactics tool box.
Not sure yet more cases to check out in this video, and please leave a comment and share your thought. Thanks…
This week topic is to explore some of social media monitoring tools that been used today. Select a brand or organization that I am interested in monitoring. Then, I will discuss my experience and reflection using the analysis given by these tools. The organization that I have selected for this analysis is Apple.
Apple
Apple Inc., formerly Apple Computer, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Cupertino, California that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software and personal computers. Founded: April 1, 1976.
Topsy
Topsy is a real-time search engine powered by the Social Web. Unlike traditional web search engines, Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried.
Apple could use Topsy to give instant answers to critical business questions through real time analysis of public conversations. Topsy analysis report can provide insights into a wide range of business demands. Everything including: spotting breaking news and identifying customers’ satisfaction issues and concerns. Moreover as one of the world’s biggest brand names, Apple can use Topsy as their (day to day) social dashboard to discover and track the impact of trending topic and predict future events. Another value using Topsy is the ability to compare social activity and presence against competitor.
Addict-o-matic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on.
Using addictomatic simply type in your search phrase and the site pulls results from a board scale of sources –Twitter , YouTube , Flickr ,Digg, Yahoo web search and more.
Apple can use these tools to have a first hand overview about what is being said about the company, its products and services. It can paint the full picture almost instantly.One of the most important benefits, in my opinion, to a company is the ability to monitor the internet reputation or the reputation of the brand and products. In short Apple can hear the conversations that the entire globe is having about them.
HowSociable
HowSociable has been providing a simple way for how to begin measuring your brand’s impact on the social web since 2008.
They measured over 250,000 brands while requiring zero configuration on the part of the users and only a few seconds wait while they analyse a brand’s presence to calculate initial scores. They analyse a sample of the activity on up to 36 popular websites.
Apple can easily measure the impact of the brand on the social media or any of released products.
Personally I believe that these tools are an eye opener or I must say a digital eye opener, especially considering the fact that I had not used them before. They are quite nifty tools to know about. You can get the impact of certain words, products , brands , political movements in a few moments. Topsy and Howsociable both are fast and the result is easy to grasp. While using addictomatic, it did give a good overview about what was being said referencing the searched word from a range of social platforms. However I found that it did not receive any feedback from twitter and twingly blog searches. In my opinion that is a big drawback, especially in the case of twitter which is one of the biggest used social media networks.
Thank you for reading this post , please leave a comment and share your thoughts…
This week blog will be to select an organization from the Professional Services Sector (e.g. accounting, advertising and marketing, architecture, management consulting, engineering, IT, legal, and scientific research services). Identify and discuss how they are using a blog, twitter, or a wiki to enhance their business. Make connections to the relevant value levers associated with implementing Enterprise 2.0.
PeopleLinx is Founded in 2009 by early LinkedIn employees , and it is an organization that helps companies with using social media networks, in particular LinkedIn, where they believe that using such a network will help companies to look great and engage more in the marketplace. Moreover, PeopleLinx offers four main services. One of the services is Scalable Training, where PeopleLinx provide the company’s employees with LinkedIn training and solutions, in order to empower them to successfully use LinkedIn.
Also, they provide Profile Optimization tool, which is an online wizard guide for employees to create their profiles,
hence that will make the company shine online.
Moreover they customize reports which tell the customers“a company” what the employees are doing on LinkedIn and how it helping the business and it can coordinate sharing by publishing workflows to mange and measure the employees sharing of marketing approved content.
People use these three social media networks LinkedIn, Twitter and their own blogs.
We could see that their most value levers using social media technologies that mentions in McKinsey global report are in these areas operation and distribution, marketing and sales , customer services and business supports.
LinkedIn
PeopleLinx use LinkedIn as tool to connect to people throughout a wide range of talent network and help promote their work. Moreover this tool is valuable by forecasting their operations and work and helping to distribute their business process. Applying LinkedIn are more beneficial in the area of operation and distribution.
Twitter
As very popular tool that is used by professional sector around the globe , PeopleLinx is no differ.
As a powerful tool that helps marketing and sales, PeopleLinx uses twitter to spread the word about the products and services they offer to pick up and increase their sales levels and numbers. Twitter also provides PeopleLinx with communication and interaction with current/future customers. Moreover it provide customer insight and ideas which may help in better and refined products in the future. Another area of value levers that can be add to PeopleLinx in relation to the use twitter is customer services by having the ability to reach , response and act with customer concerns and feedback and try to find solutions if needed.
PeopleLinx Blog
Blogs are more intense and powerful tools for collaboration and communication that been used by PeopleLinx . Blogs post can explain and elaborate more about products, approaches and solutions that been used. Blogs post can be used to match talent and expertise to the task in hand.
This week blog will identify and discuss some of the major benefits and value levers associated with implementing Enterprise 2.0 in Non-profit institution and non-governmental organisations. With align to McKinsey Global institute report.
According to McKinsey report, it mentions that examining leverage areas for non-profit organisations are a quite different. Due to the fact of their nature and characteristics they are more socially oriented than the business ones. The task is to show how some of these value levers may apply to a selected organisation which is this case is OXFAM international.
Oxfam is an international confederation of 17 organizations networked together in more than 90 countries, as part of a global movement for change, to build a future free from poverty.
They work directly with communities by seeking to influence the powerful to ensure that poor people can improve their lives and livelihoods and have a say in decisions that affect them.
In McKinsey report, it point out nine social sector value levers from which is categories under four main areas of leverage:
Collecting information and insights.
Mobilizing resources (including fundraising).
Executing mission.
Organization wide-levers.
In Oxfam case the collecting information and insight and mobilizing recourses are been applied strongly.
Oxfam uses popular social media sites like twitter and Facebook to gather information about any issues and crisis around the world or regional through their regional organisation. In twitter they use #hash-tags about recent crisis for people to chip-in and give feedback and insight about what real happen on ground and what their solution. Oxfam also use YouTube on top these technologies to crowd-sourcing knowledge from a wide group of people to solve some issues in hand, where donors and volunteers contribute their expertise for solving problem or executing missions.
This will add valuable information to the pool of knowledge and make better and useful volunteers’ participation. They also joined these technologies on GROW page for the critical and up to date cases to get as much involvement as possible.
Oxfam also use social media networks to mobilize resources and efforts in regards to their social work. The use their online presence to fundraising and increase donations by explaining more about the crisis in real time and what is needed. They use broadcast videos about cases, causes and crisis happening or waiting to be happened in order to seek and expand their volunteers’ network and retaining support.
Oxfam engagement with social media offers many benefits in support of these goals:
Learn what their supporters are saying and sharing about our organization.
Drive traffic to our various web properties — websites, blogs, etc.
Drive visitors to online donation pages.
Enable supporters to distribute messages about the Oxfam organization through their social web presence.
Empower their most passionate and powerful supporters to promote the organization.
Enable grassroots movements in real-time and rapidly respond to unforeseen events.
Creating more humane organization by not limiting communications to traditional methods or messages.
Acquiring new contacts and building supporter database.
Increase trust and loyalty from supporters by allowing them to share their voice through feedback forums.
Even though Oxfam benefits acquired by Social media are mostly in Collecting information and insights and mobilizing resources area that are mentioned in McKinsey report about the four value levers areas in the social sector , we can see that they inter- relate and overlap with the other area and build on e.g. educating the public about their message.
Best Buy is the world’s leading multi-channel shopper electronics dealer with shops across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and China. BestBuy.com is one of the top ten retail websites in the United States and they have one of the best customer loyalty programs of its’ kind. There are more than 1 billion visitors to their websites and 600 million visits to their U.S. stores each year.
As a major player in the retailer business, Best Buy, try to reach their customers as much as they can, promote interaction between employees within the organisation and also with their current and potential consumers and create a well known digital entity for themselves which can distinguish them from the competitors. They emerge into the social media era through many social technologies as stated:
Similarly as their advent into new technology they face a rise in treats and risks that could affect the organisation. That could be related to legal, business or reputation destruction. According to DUNDAS LAWYERS they argue that the legal risks of social media technologies can be classified into five main categories:
Confidential Information.
Employment: Wrongful dismissal.
Technology Risks: Viruses and Malware.
Statutory Risk: Copyright, Privacy, TPA/CCA, Defamation and/or Fair Work Act.
Reputation Risks.
Occupation and organisation specific risks.
These can be Internal OR External Risks!
In order to prevent this from happening, many companies and businesses have already put in place Social Media Policies, and Best Buy is no different. At the beginning, they instituted the following:
Best Buy® Social Media Policy
Be smart. Be respectful. Be human.
As a general guideline, it related to the basic human morals and ethics, and to stick by them even when communicating through the virtual world.
In case the guidelines above are forgotten or ignored, this is what could happen –
ü Get fired.
ü Get ‘Best Buy’ in legal trouble with clients or shareholders
ü Cost the organisation the ability to get and maintain customers.
So this policy should eventually minimize and eliminate some of the internal or external risks that they could face.
Some examples of these threats are, when an employee publishes work related matter, financial and operational information or promotion dates. This could cause ‘Best Buy’ to lose financially or result in a drop in the market place and thereby become more vulnerable against their competitors.
Other example is when an employee comments on the business on behalf of ‘Best Buy’ without authorisation , pretend to be someone else or share customers’ personal information which may put ‘Best Buy’ in the position of having legal problems or loss of reputation. All these can be seen as either internal or external risks.
In (accordance with) Mckinsey report “The social economy : Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies”. It discusses that organisation and companies can achieve value and benefits by using social technologies . It shows the Ten ways that organisations can add value “levers” to their business which lay under Five business areas .. [1] product development, [2] operations and distribution, [3] marketing and sales, and [4] customer service, and also across the enterprise [5] business support.
To examine this we had to look for and assess an enterprise that used Social media Technologies for uplifting their business.
Zappos was established in 1999 , as an online retailer that sells shoes and later clothing and accessories.They are known for their strong focus on creating “Real Relationships” with their followers and customers.
This is a company that started with an online presence, following the merge of Social Technologies They wanted to enhance this space using these tools. Zappos used Social media to target their marketing and sales , customer service, operation and distribution and even their internal enterprise collaboration and communication.
Marketing and Sales
On their Facebook they have a catchy saying “Let’s be in a Like-Like relationship” . It shows and attracts potential customers by presenting themselves as equal, humble and heavily interested in building up their relationships even more.
Their strategy is to build and to draw customers step by step in a nice flow. Once the “would-be” customer and fan press like it will immediately change the tab , open the opportunity to subscribe to their Email list and look up products. Zappos demonstrate care and respect to their followers choice, by waiting until they click the like button first.
Moreover, Zappos uses a technique called “fans-only-content” which will only reveal content once someone becomes a fan, as shown above, it will provide instance access to exclusive items, videos and special promotions. Also they include on the welcome tab a remark “widget”, as shown below, where you can post and comment on their products and that will then be posted directly on your profile page to let your friends know what you like most about their products.
That will foster more interaction with customers and expand the number of fans and followers’ club, which will eventually generate more sales.
Zappos is not only using the social media technologies to gather customer insight, increase sales and market their products, but also to build and nurture “customer service relations”. It uses Zappos culture, blogs, YouTube, video experience, “video comments” and twitter. This will provide customer care over social media Technologies.
Zappos promotes a sense of friendship – through all of their social media technologies to enhance their customer service!
Moreover they customize reports which tell the customers“a company” what the employees are doing on LinkedIn and how it helping the business and it can coordinate sharing by publishing workflows to mange and measure the employees sharing of marketing approved content.
Talking Social Media 