Same Objective, Just Different Social Tools. - Week 3 Activity

After many clicks and skim reading, I've come to realize how big it is for businesses to apply enterprise 2.0 strategies. I say this because the little guys are now able to talk to the head honchos removing the middle-man and the general hierarchy that we once understood. How do they do this you may ask? With social media of course... And many other processes... But our focus today is how these organizations have successfully incorporated social tools to expand their business.

Our first example is Vistaprint, a business which provides a printing service for all your printing needs and one which has filled my junk mail. They have achieved the enterprise 2.0 objective of staff engagement with the use of the wiki platforms, a website made for the community, used by the community and edited by the community, and Intuit, a problem solving business which created a brainstorming platform.

Their initial issue was that Vistaprint had no proper way of managing information. With a staff of approximately 80 staff, public folders, shared drives and blogging platforms were not enough. They then met another issue as the business started expanding and more engineers were required, the problem of training 75 engineers in a short period without breaking the software. By analyzing these issues, they eventually found the drive to implement Enterprise 2.0.

There answer was to incorporate an enterprise wiki by creating articles with just a title and leaving it as a blank page. This allowed employees to work on and edit freely on different sections which came out as better quality work and better timelines. This cut the training time by 50% which came to about 4-6 weeks where we all know time is money. They then came to answer the issue of managing information by using a brainstorming platform by Intuit. This allowed employees to share and innovate which meshed smoothly within the companies existing culture as this was one of their strong points. 

Another business example is McDonalds, one of the biggest fast food restaurants, have achieved the same goals as above through staff engagement with the use of blogging and a feedback Awareness platform. A senior executive of McDonalds struggled to communicate with a large number of employees in the organization. 

To resolve this issue, he turned to blogging, one for employees only and one for customers only. By creating two sets of blogs specific to the readers, it allowed employees to share information and ideas as well comment on subjects making it a two way flow. The blog specific towards customers was a community blog called Open for Discussion. This was essential to the business as it was a good source of customer feedback and it also gave the customer feel like they made a difference and encouraged them to participate in the community.

From both businesses, the key enterprise 2.0 objective was staff engagement. Both businesses allowed their to be a two-way communication disregarding any form of hierarchy. This allowed more ideas to flow in in less time. We can also see that by allowing communication between different status levels will bring forth different types of opportunities. This could be creating new product, leading a team to manage company objectives and so on. All this collaborative work and the concept of community creates a better atmosphere for the organization and can only result in positive outcomes.

In regards to the Wikinomics business models, both business clearly show each step. For peering, both VistaPrint and McDonalds created opportunities for the community to have their say about ideas and products with the use of blogs and other social platforms. For ideagoras, VistaPrint a wiki was created for anyone and everyone to gather to exchange ideas and solutions. Lastly, for prosumers, McDonalds Open for Discussion platform made the consumers the producers as it gave them the chance to talk about what the next themes and products should be.

Thanks for your time. Let me know what you think about any of the above and see you soon.