Social Media Strategy – American Express (Additional post )

Hello everybody, in my last post I will start off introducing a case study of how american express grows its massive social media presence. I have spend a lot of time on researching case studies and found out this is one of the best one i’ve seen.

Case Study – American Express(http://mashable.com/2012/03/28/american-express-social-media/)
Credit card company American Express seemed to come out of nowhere in the past year, offering one social media program after another.

Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ — it’s got them all covered, and even better, it stands for what its consumers want across all of the social platforms it’s on.

While American Express has seemed to pump a lot of life into its social strategy as of late, it has actually been on the scene since 2009, helping cardholders solve problems one tweet and wall post at a time.

We spoke with Leslie Berland, SVP of digital partnerships and development at American Express, for the backstory on AmEx’s social media strategy, mission and goals. Read on for what she had to say.

American Express joined the social media scene in 2009 with presences on Twitter and Facebook, aimed at providing customer service for cardholders.

American Express first made its appearance on Twitter with the @AskAmex handle, focused on servicing Cardmember and merchant questions and needs. Berland says that @AmericanExpress and the official American Express Facebook Page came soon after.

“Our mission is to be everywhere our Cardmembers and merchants are,” says Berland. “To engage with them, service them, deliver unique value that’s shareable and create seamless digital experiences that surprise and delight.”

Since the beginning, American Express has built its social strategy on service, and it continues to improve its implementation by taking in user feedback. “We spent a great deal of time listening to the community. The community interests and feedback defined our strategy,” says Berland.

AmEx has come a long way — with nearly 2.4 million Facebook fans and more than 348,000 followers on Twitter for the American Express U.S. pages alone. Its presences have also expanded internationally, and the brand now supports efforts on LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube and Google+, as well.

Social Networking Strategy

Strategy that I have come up with  are:

1.Idea

2.Design

3.Implement

4.Evaluate and analyse

For every social media process, it will go through the idea phase first. Which is the planning of the whole process. This is essential and the corner stone of a successful network strategy. After this phase, it moves on to the design section. Which is the part where basic layout, step by step flow chart, set of milestones, and etc. are set. Later on, implementation comes in. Implementing/Practicing strategy are often time consuming but enjoyable, an example of this would be strictly advertising micro-blogging/blogging and set an example for students to follow. Last but not the least, Evaluation of analysis, which is to collect all analysed data and to determine weaknesses and strength.

Thank you all for sparing time to read my post, it has been a fun trip and I hope going through my posts can help you understand more about social media and the whole concept of Enterprise 2.0.

 

Reference:Case Study – American Express(http://mashable.com/2012/03/28/american-express-social-media/)

Return on Investment (ROI) of Social Technology implementations

Return on Investment is certainly one of the best metrics to indicate whether the social media tools you are adapting is really effective and worth it. Therefore, for this week’s blog post I will like to introduce ROI and the calculation of it.

This youtube video demonstrate a way of calculating ROI on social networks.

What is ROI?

Experts often say “Social media ROI can’t be calculated because there are too many unknowns” or “Don’t worry about the ROI, just get a strategy and start doing something.” They quote metrics and/or key performance indicators (KPIs), but few know how to take those metrics and convert them to ROI.An ROI calculation is just a way to put your metrics into formulas to show,in numbers, how your strategy is increasing revenue and decreasing costs. ROI calculations can also provide perspective on the potential strengths and weaknesses of your strategy.
Calculating the ROI of social media involves three variables:

1. Traditional business metrics

2. Social media metrics

3. Changes to traditional business processes and metrics when social media is used in a business
By understanding the relationships and dependencies between these variables, you can gain insight into the activities, reach, relevance, and behaviors of customers. (Petouhoff & Herrman, 2011).

Calculating ROI

A perfect way of calculating ROI is to calculate the savings and costs and put them into the classic ROI formula. Which is ((Gains-Cost) / Cost )*100. In this case, I will be calculating the savings that social media tools can save on basing on replacing call centre’s calls.

Savings

First of all, there are three mini-parts in saving. Indirect/direct deflections, first call handling, and average handling time. The formula of deflections is:

1. Direct Deflection Savings Formulas:
# New Questions answered by Super-Users = (# Total New Questions Answered) x (% New Questions Answered by Super-Users # of Direct Deflected Contacts = (# New Questions answered by Super-Users) x Est Direct Deflection Rate Savings per period= (# of Deflected Calls) x (Avg Cost/Call)

2. Indirect Deflection Savings Formulas:

# of Indirect Deflected Contacts = (# Total New Question Answered per period) x Estimated Indirect Deflection Rate
Savings per period = (# of Deflected Calls) x (Average Cost/Call)

For first call handling and average handling time is basically the same as indirect/direct deflections. All you have to do is calculate the questions answered by social media tool(forum, superusers). So you’ll know how much has been saved on.

Costs

The major costs for social customer service programs center on people and technology. The ability to scale your social program will be an important factor in providing efficient and effective customer experiences while containing operational costs. The key to success is to:
• Deploy the right-sized team to support your social program

• Implement well-defined work processes for your people

• Use the right technology solutions to support your people and processes
Additionally, as you prepare your program strategy, be sure to anticipate higher demands for people and technology resources as your program gains success.

An example of costs formula will be:

Payroll Cost Formulas:

Burdened Compensation per social team member = (Salary + bonus + benefits load) x (% time devoted to social)
Total Payroll Costs = Sum of Burdened Compensation/Social team member

To conclude, taking gains and costs and put them into ROI formula will give you the ROI of your proposal. I hope anyone who have interest in calculating ROI can leave your comment below and I will try my best to give you a satisfying solution. Moreover, to anyone who wants to dig in more into ROI please read Calculating the ROI for Social Customer Service from Dr.Natalie Petouhoff and Kathy Herrmann, which are also where most of the content above came from. Thanks for reading, See you all next week!

• Microsoft SharePoint Return on Investment – Do the numbers add up? (adenjones.wordpress.com)

Social Networks and Social Media Monitoring

Hello, welcome to my week 9 post. This week I am going to use social media monitoring tool to monitor and analyse “Seven News Brisbane”‘s social media presence.

Organisation

Seven News Brisbane is QLD’s leading news team and committed to provide quality television news service  for Queenslander.Seven News Brisbane has a strong  social media presence, they used Facebook,Twitter to get involve in online social network.

Social Media Monitoring tool: Social Mention

Social Mention is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the web into a single stream of information, it monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

Social Mention has a simple user interface, user just need to enter the organisation name then wait for the result :).Social Mention used a lot of  criteria to determine Seven New Brisbane’s social presence.

Please have a look at the following diagram.

From the results, we can see that the Seven News Brisbane’s strength is only 2% ,which means that they are being mentioned every two-hour and 60% of  those mentions will have been written by a same author. Next, Seven News Brisbane’s sentiment is 8:1, which means that they will receive positive mention more often than negative mentions. However, Seven news Brisbane received a greater number of neutral mentions over both positive and negative mention. Further, we can see that their reach is 16%, which means that they have not really wild range of influence.

To sum up, Social Mention is useful  media monitoring tool, it provided a sound insight of  “Seven News Brisbane”‘s social media presence. It is still lack of proper analysis  and more detailed insight like other commercial social media monitoring software like SocialBakers.

As Social Mention is free and open source so I don’t want to ask for too much :). So what tool do you think is the best social media monitoring tool?

Thais all for this week, have a nice weekend . Dont be shy to leave your comments here 🙂

Reference:

SocialBaker

Social Mention

Social Mention : Seven News Brisbane

how Littles Lawers use blog and twitter to improve their collaboration and communication

Hey. How’s going everyone? This week I would like to talk about how Littles Lawers use blogs, twitters, and wikis to improve their collaboration and communication.

Littles Lawyers is the trading name of the Incorporated Legal Practice (ILP).

Littles Lawyers was incorporated on 7 January 2008 and is a full services legal firm which operates in Brisbane, Indooroopilly, the Gold Coast, Mount Gravatt and Sydney.

At Littles Lawyers, they are dedicated to providing everyone in their diverse community with quality legal advice.

LITTLES LAWYERS’S SOCIAL SPACE

Littles lawyers currently having two social spaces on the internet:

1.Twitter

2.Blog

By applying McKinsy global institute’s model The Social economy report, McKinsey Global Institute, 2012, Littles Lawyers Utilised  blogs and twitter to improve their collaboration and communication  .

Collaboration and communication

Twitter

Littles Lawyers Utilised twitter to promote their activities, ideas, and visitors are allowed to post topics, comments and questions on the wall, which will be responded by legal expert. Twitter allow Lilttes Lawyers to have a better communication, interaction and build a good relationship with their client. Their client can also follow Little Laywers’s twitter page to get lastest legel knowledge,legal tips and free consultation by drop a question on Littles Lawyer’s twitter.

Blog

Littles Lawyers also utilised blog on their offcial website to provide general information about themself in order to allow online client get to know about their organization and previous achievements. Littles Lawyers also used blog to provide online consultation to give quality legal advice to their client. Besides, Littles Lawyers update thier official blog regularly to attract more attention from online users.

To conclude, there is no doubt that Littles Laywer’s  colloaboration and communication have significantly improved after they implemented web2.0.  Blog and Twitter are very powerful tools for organization to gain more online user’s attention and allow the organization to get involve in online social community.

Thats all for this week. dont be shy to leave your comment:)

Reference:

Little Lawters Official Website

Littles Lawyers Facebook

Littles Lawyers Twitter

 The Social economy report, McKinsey Global Institute, 2012

what benefits can the social media bring to social sector

Hello everyone, it is good to see you guys again.  This week, I would like to talk about what benefits can the social media bring to social sectors. We were asked to select an organization from the social sector and briefly describes my selected organization and how some of the value leavers may apply to my chosen organization. 

My chosen social sector is Oxfam Australia.Oxfam Australia has been working with communities for more than 50 years, and we have learnt that simply giving hand outs is not the answer. Instead, we provide people with the skills and resources to help them create their own solutions to poverty. We fund long-term projects around the world and we work in a range of areas, from water and sanitation to education and health, to bring about positive change in people’s lives

McKinsy global institute have identified nine social-sector value levers that fall into four areas: collecting information and insights, mobilizing resources (including fundraising, executing mission, and organization-wide leavers). By applying McKinsy global institute’s model , Oxfam focus on “Moblizing Resources”, both money and personal is crucial to Oxfam, as they want to use social media to:

• Increase awareness of work
• Promote active citizenship
• Increase online donations

FUNDRAISING

Oxfam Australia used Facebook and their official website to raise donation and promote their effort. It allows Oxfam Australia to maximize their fundraising potential because anyone,anywhere with a credit card or online payment account can donate to Oxfam, even they are too far away to offer any meaningful in-person and real-time support.

CREATING AND EXPANDING VOLUNTEER NETWORK

Besides, Oxfam Australia also used Facebook to promote their activity and get more volunteers to join them. Facebook allows more social technology user to participate in their event.

RETAINING SUPPORTS

Oxfam Australia also used their official website, Facebook page to share news,responds,comments and interact with their supporter in order to retain supports and maintain a good relationship with their supporter.

Other than that, social media also offers many compelling benefits for Oxfam Australia such as:

• Learn what  supporters are saying and sharing about  organization.
• Drive traffic to Oxfam various web properties — websites, blogs, etc.
• Drive visitors to online donation pages.
• Enable supporters to distribute messages about Oxfam through their social web presence.
• Empower Oxfam most passionate and influential supporters to promote organization.
• Enable grassroots movements in real-time and rapidly respond to unforeseen events.
• Humanize Oxfam by not limiting communications to traditional methods or messages.
• Acquire new contacts and build supporter database.
• Increase trust and loyalty from  supporters by allowing them to share their voice through feedback forums.

Thats all for this week. Hope you guys like my post. I will see you guys next week 🙂 Cheers

Reference:

Oxfam Australia Facebook

Oxfam Australia Twitter

Oxfam Australia Official Website

OXfam Australia Wikipedia

 

The Legal Risk of Social Media

Hello everyone! welcome back to my blog ! This week I will talk about the legal issues that might generate through social media. People often say whatever they want on the internet because they think they will not be responsible of any words they say. But that’s wrong, throughout the popularity of social media especially twitter and facebook

This youtube video provides the perfect case of how social media can go terribly wrong, lawsuit can be caused and someone will be account for their action.

My selected organisation will be Mcdonalds

Reputation Risk

A post on the internet can do a lot of harm to mcdonalds, remember the video on youtube about how putting mcdonald’s food inside jars and leaving it there for days without them showing any sign of decaying? I will supply the video at the end of the paragraph incase any of you are interested. Other then videos, posts or tweets can also harm mcdonald’s reputation in many ways. Such as posting pictures of food served with insects or disgusting environment inside mcdonalds. These information online can really do a great deal on destroying mcdonald’s reputation.

Confidential Information Risk

Employees of mcdonald can provide confidential information that mcdonald’s doesnt want the world to know. Just a simple tweet is just as affective as jumping on stage during the olympic open ceremony. Information that is on the internet can spread by users sharing posts, media quoting, and etc. Special recipe or procedure of certain action that should remain confidential can be at risk due to how effective social media can be.

What should mcdonald’s address on social media policy

In my opinion, certain agreements such as confidential agreements should be sign in order to get rid of the risks. Social media policy should address both internally and externally, action should be taken so that people will know that there is actually law on social media.

Thats all 🙂 I will see you next week

Benifits and Risks of Enterprise 2.0

Hello guys, it is good to see you guys again here!  In this week’s post , I will be introducing the benefits and risks of Enterprise 2.0 implementation using case study AT&T . However, not every single benefit and risk are covered, I will just point out the really useful ones to help me explain the whole concept of how Enterprise2.0 can be both beneficial and harmful.

Case description

Initial response or demand was weak in that people didn’t really understand the need back in 2003. For over a year, the implementation struggled to get traction but when it did; demand sky rocketed. Collaborative spaces, meeting spaces, web conferencing and shared document spaces started movement. As with many implementations, it’s the small value add components that add up with volume. Sharepoint is considered the tool not really a product. Products are what you can do with the tool. Additional products and services were added as the implementation progressed. Services like search, PDF creation, and vanity URL are just a few add on services. The entire customer experience was reviewed from the initial knowledge that the tool existed to the killing of a decaying collaborative site. The goal was to create a single customer experience model that could be scaled as the user base grew from 100 to 60,000.

Today, a new set of tools are being added including blogs, wikis, professional profiles, and many others. While some are inside the Sharepoint offering, many will be provided through development and open source. As we progress, the key will be to bring all of these tools together into a single offering for many-to-many communications. Cost transformation and business speed are the two principle problems being addressed with the portfolio.

Enterprise 2.0 solution

The case study picks up after two years of implementation with little adoption by the business and technology communities. In 2004, another group with experience in deploying mass adoption software was brought in and asked to take this application to the scale defined by “mass adoption”. The main metric of progression will be the collaborative site count. Teams, group, and individuals can order a collaborative site which allows for group communication. At the time of only 100 collaborative sites had been built. This is similar to the five other implementations seen by the author. After implementing the core business model described below, the site count has increased to around 13,000 with around 3.5 Million page views per month. The number of document objects stored within the collaborative solution is over a million. Social Software is considered a subset of Collaborative Solutions and this group has now picked up the Social Software rollout deployed at the enterprise level.

The enterprise solution is actually a portfolio of solutions built on top of vendor products and open source. Microsoft’s Sharepoint and MOSS provide the core collaborative solution set. Confluence Wiki Software was also purchased for the Enterprise Wiki and various Open Source solutions provide the additional enterprise social software (Drupal, Roller, etc.)

Results

• Over 37,000 Collaborative Sites growing at 124%
• Over 4 Million Documents Housed and Managed
• User Awareness of 98% of Total Population
• Average 8 Million Page View per Month
• Intranet Replacement
• Documented Reduction of Staff (Web Developers)
• Servers Retired (Cost Transformation)
• Speed of Business and Decision Making

However, there are still disadvantages of using Enterprise 2.0. Throughout my research I found out Enterprise 2.0 can do damage because of:

1. Spread of rumours (Rapidly).
2. False information .
3. No long term plan or budget.
4. Security Issues
5. Reliability

Thank you all for attention! See you guys next week.

How can Web 2.0 helps to enhancing your personal productivity?

Hello everyone ! Its good to see you guys here again!! this week I will talk about how can web 2.0 tools assist with your own personal productivity.

Web 2.0… What is it’s usage and what is the difference between Web1.0 and Web2.0? Well, this is a commonly asked question to someone who might not know about the term “web2.0″. However, those who didn’t know what’s the definition of web2.0 might have already use it on a daily basis. Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Wikipedia, Youtube, and even WordPress is a part of the Web2.0 family.

According to wikipedia, “Web 2.0 is a concept that takes the network as a platform for information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design,[1]and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in asocial media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.“

 

Web 2.0 enhancing personal productivity

Social media plays a big part in nowadays digital environment, online presence is now more and more important. From my personal research and analysing those data. I have came up with some Web2.0 tools that are useful and has been used by me inorder to achieve good productivity.

 

Google Scholar

Great tool for academic research, finding useful references, and published books. Throughout my bachelor degree, google scholar is  the second most useful reference source other then library. Its keyword search engine using google spider is just easy to use and accurate.

 

 

Google Docs

Useful tool for editing and creating documents online and also collaborating with others in live. Offers free storage and web-based office suite. I have been using google docs as a collaboration tool during my studies, almost every group that I have been a part of choose to use google docs as the main media of exchanging information. The reason is obvious, it is cheap and productive.

 

Signing up on Line

For the second part of the weekly activities, I have sign up to an instant messaging application named LINE.

Apparently, it is similar to whatsapp that offers functionality such as messaging, sending cute icons, and calling. However, the interface and stickers provided inside Line is a lot more cuter than whatsapp. It allows me to upload gallery and sending video and voice messages, which is quite useful on irritating my friends. Amazingly, it has a feature similar to Facebook’s Timeline that allows me to check on my friends’ updates and albums. I am also capable of posting my own status using this application. Overall it has been a great experience using this application and I will continue using it from now on.

(An example of Line’s interface)

 

Thanks for spending your time on my blog, I will see you next week!

what makes a blog successful

Welcome to my blog ! My name is Jason. I am  post-graduate student who have no IT background at all.(Just graduated from QUT under-graduate business degree).

The purpose of this blog is to express my personal passion and for my calss Enterprise2.0 aswell.

First of all, this blog post will be discussing  some useful tips, which will also be my strategies of blogging that i have came up with and also introducing strategies on how to obtain leadership.

What are the tips for writing a good blog?

Through out my research on writing successful blog, i have came up with tips that I think are important and those tips will be constantly practiced through the life of this blog.

1. Heading!!!- Heading is the first thing that readers will notice, but more importantly, not just readers, but search engines as well. Writing a heading including keywords but at the mean time maintain attraction to readers will be the best outcome of a successful heading. For example, a post introducing sports car with a heading of  ”Sports Car” is definitely great for search engines but I highly doubt that readers will find this heading worth reading. A better heading will be “10 facts you should know about sports car”.

2. Update Constantly – Every successful blog such as 95to5mac and baseball nation has the same characteristic that is constantly updating posts. Let’s say that a blog has finally reached their goal of 1million views and decided to take a break and stop updating informations. Sooner or later, those original readers will find other blogs in replacement of the old one because no new informations can be obtained from the old ones. No one wants to read a blog that has been read 10 times.

3. Interaction with Readers – Asking questions, invite comments, answering questions and reply comments. The best way to engage readers is to interacte with them. Every comment and question shows their interest in the post and replying them is essential. Everyone expects a response when they throw out a question right?

4. Comments!!! – Number of comments and response to comments are often an important thing that a blog needs. Have you ever went to a youtube video by accident but after reading the top comment decided to finish the whole video? Or leave immediately because the top comment was ” this is fake and gay”. Thats exactly how powerful comments can be.

5. Valuable content – When writing a content, bloggers should always think at a reader’s perspective. Content should be easily understood and read. For example, a blog that introduce programming should always start with the basic programming skills and progressively include the difficulty of programming so that the reader will understand.

There are many worth reading blogs on the internet, but out of all, I like get rich slowly the most. It constantly update wise advices to readers on how to manage your finance better. It will be great if you check it out when you have time.

Thanks for reading this post, see you soon!