A successful use of Return on Investment and Social Media

Written on Tuesday, 1 October 2013 by Unknown

Alas, closure to the blogging saga with this final blog post. This week's post is measuring the ROI of social media for Cadbury.

Image source by Cadbury Chocolate

Return on Investment (ROI) is a topic that any business should be very familiar with. There are two ways of calculating ROI. The standard calculation involves a measure of a corporation's profitability, equal to a fiscal year's income divided by common stock and preferred stock equity plus long-term debt.

Image source by RMS

This is crucial for businesses intending to venture on social media platforms as this can indicate whether using social technologies would be worth doing. Let's use Cadbury as an example to calculate how they managed to receive a ROI by using social media.

Cadbury Wispa Bar

Long before I was born in 1981, Cadbury introduced on the shelves the scrumptious milk chocolate, Wispa that everyone loved before disappearing off the shelves completely in 2003.

Image source by CargoCollective

Consequently, the entire population of UK initiated a petition to demand their beloved Wispa bar back on Cadbury's Facebook and Twitter page. Cadbury responded by sending out 40 million bars to the market! After 18 weeks to responding to the petition, all 40 million bars were sold. This added an additional 30% to Cadbury's annual profits.

How did this happen?

I wasn't able to find the exact number of followers they had on their Twitter and Facebook page at the time but we can assume it was more than enough to force Cadbury to review their decision for taking good old Wispa off the shelves. UK must really like their chocolate. Their social media presence has enabled Cadbury to listen to what their customers wanted most and as a result they obliged.

By demonstrating  how Cadbury was able to calculate their ROI with social media, other businesses can evaluate the ROI of the use of Social media themselves and become one of many successful businesses to use social media.

Here's another random fact..

After winning a high court battle, Cadbury owns Pantone 2685C purple by trademark rules which prevents other companies from using that colour.

Thank you for reading, it has been a pleasure.

You can read more on Social media ROI importance here.

Posted in Australia, blogging, blogs, cadbury, Calculation, London, monitoring, QUT, ROI, social media, UK, university | 2 comments

Monitoring the works with social monitoring tools for GoPro

Written on Saturday, 21 September 2013 by Unknown

I have covered in earlier blogs the benefits of implementing social media technologies from a wide range of organizations. This week we gauge on GoPro's social media performance using the social monitoring tool, RowFeeder.

GoPro

You might have heard of the extensive and highly versatile camera manufacturing company, GoPro. GoPro is a brand of high-definition personal cameras, often used in extreme action video photography. They are known for being lightweight, rugged, wearable (head-mounted) or mountable in unusual places such as outside planes, cars, or boats.

I've chosen GoPro as my rat for this social monitoring tool experiment. GoPro has a high involvement in social media and popular range of products, I thought it would be the perfect company to monitor socially. So let's see how well they performed according to RowFeeder.

Row Feeder

Pro’s

1. Volume and Time Analysis -- See when people are talking and measure the size and velocity of the conversation.
2. Conversation Driver Analysis -- See what people are talking about. Search the underlying themes within the conversation.
3. Location Analysis -- See where the conversation is happening by country, state, and city relative to population.
4. People Analysis -- See who is driving the conversation. Draw out the most influential and active users.
5. Multiple Terms/Share of Voice -- Compare the relative volume and velocity of multiple topics, brands, or competitors.
6. Influencer Analysis -- Analyze the impact of influencers on the conversation based on followers and Klout score.
7. Contest Winner Selection -- Quickly export your contest participants and draw a random winner.

Cons

Absolute sluggish process.Waiting for Rowfeeder to find GoPro hits on Facebook and Twitter database took nearly 20 mins just to find only 49 matches. RowFeeder needs to cycle through a range of non-relevant posts each time if you’re on the free account. This was a huge let-down.

After inputting my search terms then selecting which social services I wanted to retrieve data from, I noticed how unreliable the data will be due to only analysing Facebook and Twitter social networks. In saying this, blog posts and YouTube videos aren't included within the search pool.

Another con I found was when selecting the time of relevance manually, this was missing from the service completely.

Insights

As you can see in the pie graph of Twitter’s post mix only 54% out of 94 posts found were relevant to GoPro, the other 56% weren't.

 . 

From these results shown above, you can see the mix and frequencies of the top related keywords & frequency of posts to be able to see which social media site has a stronger impact based on the term.

Overall, if GoPro became more socially active over their Twitter and Facebook networks it is possible to see higher figures in all areas of frequency and popularity of the search term.

We can expect to see improvements once GoPro releases a new camera and through mainstream social media for marketing. 

You can check out the details of GoPro’s social monitoring results I found with RowFeeder here.

Posted in Australia, GoPro, INB346, monitoring, QUT, social media, social monitoring, social monitoring tools, Social technology, university | 2 comments

Cognizant - Putting Social Media Work to Work

Written on Monday, 16 September 2013 by Unknown

Nowadays businesses associated with the professional services sector have switched to social technology platforms to maintain competitiveness within their selective industries. Last week, we discovered how the non-profit organization from the social sector, ONE meets their goals and objectives through social technology, receiving the benefits of using social media that followed. Today we probe into how the professionals benefit from implementing social technologies.

Cognizant, professionals in IT solutions and consulting

Image source newsmate

Founded in 1994, Cognizant is a world-class IT firm leading in today's business and technology services to help clients shift towards an advanced IT infrastructure future for; maintaining ahead of other competitors. Cognizant 2.0 (C2) is a service provided by the company to share knowledge and efficiently manage projects across the globe to delivery their clients the most cost-effective and comprehensive, end-to-end, advanced IT solutions. Through this service, Cognizant outsource specialized skills from a broad talent pool from across the globe to solve any problem through C2. Cognizant's new social media tool helps company continue growth, compete with outsourcing giants such as Accenture, IBM.  C2 can be considered a social platform but for enterprise use.

You can see their service, C2 in action below.

Cognizant on current social media technologies

Their comprehensive applications of a variety of social media technologies include Twitter, Google+, Facebook and YouTube. Let’s look at how each social technology leverages value within Cognizant’s business functions based on the Mckinsey report.

Marketing and sales

Cognizant uses twitter to market the value of the services they provide by posting quality success stories of organizations implementing Cognizant solutions. This influences potential clients into considering using Cognizant based off positive feedback from other clients and assures that clients will achieve their IT innovation goals with Cognizant. You’ll also notice their use of Facebook include Business-2-business (B2B) communications and interactions.

Customer service

Like other organizations that adopts social technology, Cognizant provides customer care through twitter as a way of addressing their clients for technical issues or complaints about their service.

Enterprise-wide levers (Collaboration and communication)

Cognizant collaborates and communicates through the use of their own unique social technology platform, C2, to improve collaboration and communication between staff within their organization or when improving their client's current processes. This allows employees at Cognizant to be able to match talents to a specific task.

These social media technologies together effectively contributes to value across the organization at Cognizant and for their clients.

Posted in blogging, business, cognizant, companies, enterprise, enterprise 2.0, foundation, IBM, INB346, QUT, social media, Social technology | 3 comments

A Social Sector's use of Enterprise 2.0 in ONE

Written on Saturday, 7 September 2013 by Unknown

 Rewinding back a couple of weeks when I briefly discussed how Commbank implements a social technology strategy to reap the benefits and values of providing a strong community and customer-based support network, today I will go through how an organization from the social sector (i.e. a not-for-profit institutions and non-governmental organization), could benefit from using social technology. Again, we’ll base how the social sectors can create values and benefits from the McKinsey report.

ONE is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to advocate and campaign to tackle the extremities of poverty and preventable diseases affecting third world countries such as Africa. They achieve their objectives by raising public awareness, as well as informing world political leaders on the need to support policies and programs to save lives and ultimately put kids back in schools for a better future. Co-founded by Bono, the lead singer of U2 in 2004, ONE is highly active with African activists and policy makers.

Execute mission

You may have of already noticed many organizations use Facebook or Twitter to help spread a message quickly but ONE shares with their supporters and readers compelling stories or facts about to encourage movement to help fight ONE’s cause. Some of them I found were informative and some quite funny. 

ONE's online-presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Youtube has helped them reach a massive 3 million supporters! Through these social technology channels, ONE promotes public awareness and encourages movement by their supporters to help reduce the severity of poverty as well as commitment towards preventing diseases (such as #AIDS #TB & #malaria) from occurring in Africa. 

So with the power of ONE organization to empower over three million supporters to take action, has proven that ONE has made a valuable use of social technologies to spread  the word of  their cause.

Here's a random fact..

On September 24 of this month, an organisation which ONE associates with, The Global Fund will launch a  mass social media campaign push to end the AIDS, TB and malaria diseases for good during a World leaders meeting at the UN General Assembly (UNGA). What will take place is a message which will be released to all supporters' social media page simultaneously with the following:

“We can #BeTheGeneration to defeat #AIDS #TB & #malaria. Are you in? http://thndr.it/15zAOXb”

This message will be shared simultaneously on Twitter feeds, Facebook and Google+. This is another quality example of a social sector building rapporting with their followers for a good cause.

You can donate your support here.

So what are your thoughts on ONE's smiley approach to providing facts on social media?

Posted in Africa, Australia, blogging, charity, diseases, donation, enterprise 2.0, Facebook, foundation, howto, INB346, not-for-profit, one, QUT, self-help, social media, Social technology, Thirdworldcountries, twitter | 5 comments

Commbank leverages the values and benefits of Social Technology

Written on Friday, 16 August 2013 by Unknown

A study in McKinsey’s report identified the benefits and values associated with organizations implementing Enterprise 2.0 using the 10 Social Technology value levers (as shown below). These levers are present in multiple functional areas of the business (also known as the business value chain).

Image by Mckinsey

Last week we discussed how the Wikinomics business model principles applied to businesses using enterprise 2.0 technology such as Starbucks and StacksOverflow. Today we look at how Commonwealth Bank uses enterprise 2.0 tools to leverage the product development and customer service functions for their business.

Image by Newspaperworks

They’re SOCIAL on social media!

Like Starbucks, Commonwealth Bank (or commbank) has multiples modes of interaction between its customers and key staff members so they could achieve as much feedback and ideas for improvements on any particular product or area of service as possible. They’re connected to just about all social media channels that you could think of… from Facebook to Youtube to Google+ and their most recent, blogging.
More on Commbank’s social media strategy can be seen in this clip below.



1. Product development (Customers are the co-creators for products)


Commbank provides a livespace community forum, called IdeaBank where customers can post, vote or discuss with other customers within the community the ideas which could relate to existing products or products (or services in some cases) that they wish to see modified or developed in the future. Customers can vote on the likelihood in which they wish to see an idea come into action. This is the usual process for product development via social media interaction.



Image by Expounder with cheese

So in essence, Commbank listens to their customers and what they would like to see changed or developed and implemented.

2. Customer service

Similar to other facebook pages that you might find for businesses, Commonwealth bank sports a support community page for:

Ö        Real time search for addressing problems with customers

Ö        Community building, not just for selling their products but instead as a way for building a community-minded philosophy

Ö        As a method for interacting with bank customers about their products using this social media channel, and

Ö        Enabling transparency by allowing only key staff members, such as the bank manager, to answer questions directly to customers via a community page.

Image by Commbank So I believe that Commbank has set the bar for other major banks to up their game when it comes to providing a strong community and a customer based support network or simply by reaping the priceless benefits and values of using social technology. A big thumbs up for Commbank!

Posted in banks, blogging, blogs, business, CBA, commonwealthbank, companies, enterprise 2.0, INB346, QUT, social media, Social technology, university | 4 comments

The foundations of creating a successful blog via modern technology

Written on Sunday, 4 August 2013 by Unknown

Hey all,

Welcome to my first official blog post. As mentioned in my about me, this blogspace will be primarily used for all weekly topics as required by my university studies and hopefully will prolong into regular use afterwards. I will aim to have a blog posted at least once or twice a week with links to helpful articles based on the content from each weekly topic.  

Let's get started, but first..

WHY do we spend countless beginnings and endings punching into our keyboards our thoughts and feelings through blogs? Is it for bragging rights with  friends, a personal hobby of interest, or perhaps to reach out for connection through the medium of technology? To put it simply, 

Image by LadyLay

"Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud."
Andrew Sullivan

Now that's the why we blog in modern society but today I will go through some useful tips on how to build and improve a successful blogspace.

After reading Joshua Becker's 15 Reasons I think you should blog was an eye opener of the advantages I could have just by blogging regularly. He elaborates in 15 good reasons WHY you should create a blog. Not only does he go through the "Why" of blogging but his article also extends into the purpose of blogging as well.

Q: So what are some of the best approaches to creating a successful blog?

A: Well, from a large pool of recommendations for creating successful blogs, here's a taste of what I will include in my future blogs here in the coming weeks.  

1. Define your target audience - Well this one is quite obvious. I need to know to whom I'll be writing my blogs for and who I'll be expecting to connect with.
2. Keep it simple - Having a complex blog in terms of design and content can be a huge deterrent for readers to come back to my blog. So my intentions are to keep my blog layout design simple and remove all the unnecessary gadgets that you (as the reader) won't need to use or look at.
3. Research - Not really a necessity if you have a high knowledge about your chosen blog topic but it helps if the reader would like to learn more.
4. Find your voice - Find a writing style which you are most comfortable with. If you have just started blogging like myself, this will most likely develop as we continue to blog more over time.
5. Social Media -  I highly recommend using Twitter and Facebook to help connect with readers and other bloggers, but it's important to focus on having high quality content first.

Well that's it for me this week. I hope you enjoyed this week's topic on what makes a you a successful blogger.
This is the first time I've posted a blog. Any constructive criticism or feedback is much appreciated about today's content or anything else that you can see on this page in the comment section below or via facebook, twitter or Google+ but most importantly don't forget to share/like if you found this post helpful!

Thanks for reading!

Image by flickr

To learn more on how to become a successful blogger, click here and here.
To learn more on the reasons people blog, click here.

Posted in blogging, companies, enterprise 2.0, howto, INB346, QUT, self-help, university | 2 comments