Ford Benefitting From Value Levers - Week 4 Activity

Many success stories have come from organisations implementing Enterprise 2.0. For example Alcatel-Lucent had 60% of employees collaborating on the new platform to be easier and Yum! cut the time to release international menus from 18 months to 4 months. Such results come from the understanding of 10 Social Technology value levers published by McKinsey Global Institute in 2012.

One of the many organisations who have benefited from these value levers are the Ford Motor Company, a global automotive industry leader based in Michigan in the United states. They manufacture and distribute across 6 continents with about 164 000 employees producing the Ford and Lincoln brand.

The Ford motor company have implemented Enterprise 2.0 with their FordSocial website, Flickr and YouTube accounts which fall under the marketing and sales segment of the value chain. The first value lever of this segment is deriving customer insights which is exactly what the FordSocial is made for. This website allows Ford users to express their story and their experience with their Ford vehicle. There is also an ideas section which is simply their for motor enthusiasts who may have liked a certain design or want something extra from Ford. These are ways of understanding the community and the best way to expand on ideas and create objects that Ford already know the customers will like. 

Ford also has a Flickr and Facebook account for users to upload images of their Ford vehicle which is a form social commerce. Ford uploads images of the latest designs and upcoming work onto their Flickr account to capture the people's eyes and to sell their brand. They encourage the community to do the same for example, someone may upload their image with their new Ford vehicle and tag the Ford brand or like the Facebook page. The use of photos and tagging is a great way to attract new viewers and draw in existing audiences to the Ford Website. Liking the Facebook page also shows which friends have done so and can create common interests.

From what we can see, Ford makes full use of social technologies to sell their product and to give the brand the friendliest image to the community. By marketing their brand online, Ford is able to give customers deeper knowledge of their products and can make use of customer feedback for future designs. On another note, a customer of Ford wanted them to produce a mobile app, what do you think? Yay or nay?

Thanks for reading!