Social network strategy – Participate fully and consistently

The term social networking refers to groups of people forming groups and communities sometimes in schools, universities and organisations. Online social networking includes the term connecting and sharing information and also same interest and goals with other people through online. In enterprise 2.0, Social networks are increasingly being used by organisation to enhance collaboration both internally and externally.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social networking can give a positive impact especially to strengthen marketing strategy by organisation. It replaces the traditional method of meeting face-to-face and in turn build a powerful relationship internally and externally. The way to do this to to get more interaction among the members.

There are many strategies that can be used for social networking and one of the strategy that im going to explain is participate fully and consistently.

 

 

 

Some tactic to participate fully and consistently

1. Determine your goal and objectives

The organisation must set a goal for what purpose they created the social network to allow communication internally and externally. Whether its marketing, public relationship or others that  the organisation will benefit from the social networking strategy, they must set a goal to fulfill those objectives.

2. Create digital rodolex of contacts and content

Relationships will build naturally as long as social networking is done correctly. This can be done by making good connections with people by following conversation. Interesting conversation will lead to more people interested to participate and will spread out by word of mouth.

3. Post and upload more quality materials

By posting more whether it is comments or in forums, and answering questions by others, it will create more people eager to participate. This is because they know that the organisation is active and is always there to entertain them.

4. Strengthen relationship

Even though the communication are done online via social media, it is considered to be much powerful and effective. The reason for this is because people can hide behind their avatar or profile picture rather then being face to face. This will strengthen the relationship with those who the organisation have conversed with even when never met in person.

Social network strategies will vary for each organisation.  However, one thing is clear, it  needs to have everyones commitment in order to be successfully integrated into you’re the organisation’s goals and objectives.

 

References:

http://www.whatissocialnetworking.com/

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/7-steps-for-a-successful-social-media-strategy/

http://www.universitybusiness.com/article/five-steps-developing-powerful-social-networking-strategy

Successful Wiki – Assigning a champion

An organization creates a Wiki acting as a group communication mechanisms allowing contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself. This method is called ‘open editing’ where the concept has some profound and subtle effects on wiki usage.

 

 

 

The Strategy – Employ, incentivize, entice so called ‘champions’ to smooth the way for others

Appoint ‘champion’ for wiki:

One of the best way is to assign a staff member of an organization with knowlegeable skills of using a wiki so that he/she will be able to help guide others on how to use it. The role of a champion of a wiki will be to lead others in using it and making sure all contribution are accurate. A champion will make sure to observe and check all contributions to a wiki by others. In turn, champion will also add content to give encouragement for other to increase participation.

Apply Rules and Regulations:

Rules and regulations should be clearly specified to everyone that uses the wiki’s in an organisation. Since it is a way of communication and collaboration between colleagues, it is a good idea to let users know and understand of the rules and make them aware of it.

Allow others to contribute:

Some people are reluctant to contribute their ideas probably because they are scared that it might not be correct or acceptable. The idea of a wiki is to let other users share what they think is accurate and this will also replace the original work of other people who have contribute it earlier. Though some people might feel that it is wrong to mess up with peoples work and replace it with their own, this is how wiki works as long as their contribution is clear and precise.

Tactics for implementing the strategy

A wiki champion responsible for integrating information on the wiki and keeping it up to date. Some other roles could include:

• keeping track of edits
• removing spam
• pulling information from blogs and other corporate channels
• encouraging other staff members to use the wiki

 

References:

http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

Microblogging strategies

Some people might be familiar with the term blogging and wonder what microblogging is.

According to wikipedia, “A microblog differs from a traditional blog in that its content is typically smaller in both actual and aggregate file size. Microblogs allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links”.

 

 

 

 

Some examples of microblogging are Twitter, Facebook,  pownce and Tumblr. Microblogging  is different from the traditional blogging where it shares information with the readers immediately where people broadcasting short message. Sometimes it can als be in the form of images or video links to convey their messages. Two-way messaging is possible and people can give feedback and response.

From my previous blog post, I mentioned about how Singapore Airlines (SIA) have recently adopt the usage of social media. They uses microblogging (Twitter and Facebook) to send our information to their customers regarding their flight offers. Since they are new to microblogging, there are few things that they should keep in mind:

1. Regular updates should be practice and this will tend to get more followers to read your post
2. Link all the microblogs together so that people can know other updates and create interest
3. Experience, Information and Business should be shared together in microblogging
4. Get user involvement and always reply back to readers post
5. Keep it real and authentic
6. Think of what you are willing to share before you microblog because everyone can see it
7. Add widget if possible, this will instantly show up wherever it is placed and add instant updates.

Microblogging will be a long term trend. The ease to post regularly are why people are attracted to it the most. It is the bred of blogging and acceptance by more people to this concept will make it more likely to be the next best thing to blogging alone.

References:
Wikipedia – Microblogging
Singapore Airline Website

Adoption of social media

There are large number of organisations have not implement the concept of enterprise 2.0 in their strategic plan probably because of the lack of confidence in trying to decide which social media tool to start off with. Social media tools are used by many organisations nowadays and if an organisation is not taking the advantage of using it, they are falling behind with the progress.

I will use Singapore Airline(SIA) as my example here where they only started their social media debut last week and use twitter for the first time. However, there is a Singapore Airline facebook page previously but judging from the page, it was not created by SIA since there was a total silence and no response to visitors post. This gives a bad impression to SIA where people will think that they are not listening and don’t care.

They finally tackled the issue of adoption of social media. If compared to other airlines regionally, SIA is very late in engaging social media. They manage to take over the unofficial Facebook page recently which the creator (an enthusiastic fan) picked up more than 100,000 fans. Now, SIA has some catching up to do where their rival (AirAsia) has more than a million Facebook fans.

The reason for SIA to turn to social media was because of some confusion from people viewing their SIA Official website. Apparantly, the current use of Facebook and twitter helps to boost their image up. This will establish stronger links with its customers.

References:

Singapore Airlines Wiki page
Singapore Airlines suddenly starts tweeting and facebooking
Singapore Airline finally embraces social media
Straitstimes
Facebook page – Singaporeair
Twitter – Singaporeair

Is it possible for social media to threaten an organisation?

Nowadays, when people mention social media, the first thing that comes to mind would be Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare it’s a worldwide obsession. Although people think social media gives more benefit impact, the risk is always there. Greater risk may occur and this may give a big impression to their reputation and financial success. It’s a matter of the importance engaging with others through the social media openly with honesty and transparency.

For my example, im going to talk about Nestle ( the largest food and nutrition company in the world ).

In May 2010, Nestle’s product Kit Kat  received negative views  when it uses palm oil from companies that where trashing Indonesian rainforests and  threatens the livelihoods of local people and pushing orangutans towards extinction.

This was the response from Greenpeace.

While this is a risk of social media to Nestle, Greenpeace is leveraging social media to its great advantage. This also involves consumers attacking Nestle’s Facebook page where they have around 230k fans at the company’s page where some are joining just to voice their opposition. This is when social media is a threat and can spell disaster in just a matter of minutes.

This is the screenshot from facebook of what happen when Nestle respond negatively and causes more problems:

Organisations that maintains publicity through social media such as Facebook page should learn from Nestle’s mistake. With corporate policies and proper training, this could have been avoided.

Here are some tips to keep in mind for organisations engaging with social media:

1. Take positive aspects others and accept negative consequences.
2. Always monitor your social media outlets
3. Making social media as part of crisis communications plan.
4. Put someone responsible and experience in charge.

References:

Nestle
Greenpeace – Kit Kat campaign
Do organisations need social media policies?
Nestle’s facebook bungle and example for SMEs

Nestle – Facebook page comment

Enterprise 2.0 Benefits

In some organization, employers face the problem to know that their employees more into socializing than working. What some employers don’t know is that, being in the environment of social networking can be a great asset to a business. They always think that when employees socialize, they have this negative feeling that it’s a way of having fun instead of doing work. In some cases, this might be true and it’s a big problem and is the potential loss of productivity. Otherwise, they can actually change the way the organization do business and boost up its productivity.

Here I list down some of the advantages and benefits that Enterprise 2.0 has to offer:-

Communication / socialize

Internet is one of the greatest communication tools. For organization, they can do business with others simultaneously and expand their business further. This will also allow them to make better and faster decisions.

Alligning shared goals among diverse team

Business are more global and can share the same vision with those situated at different areas especially at remote places. They can connect with relevant people with whom they prefer to do their business with.

Enhance innovation

Employees can harness great ideas across business. This will motivate others and enable ideas to flow and shared across the organization. This can also gather and create collective knowledge through everyday communication. This knowledge can be distributed quickly through medium provided.

Example

Westpac set an example using Enterprise 2.0 in their banking strategy. By using Enterprise 2.o, they managed to connect themselves with people and share knowledge. Another advantage to this is attracting, retaining and reusing people and corporate knowledge.

 

Reference:

Westpac

Enterprise 2.0 – Interconnecting teams and their collective knowledge

 

What is web 2.0?

Web 2.0 describes that technologies allowing data to become independent from the person who produced it at first or from the site it originated on. Information from this will be broken up into units an therefore will flow freely from one site to another without the person who create it realise or intend to do. Web 2.0 also is a combination of the technology allowing the users to interact with the information.

According to Tim o’Reilly, the diagram below shows example of how the web 2.0 evolves:

My Web 2.0 experience

I have my own experience in using some web 2.0 tools such as follows:

WordPress

I actually started blogging since few years back and it was more on personal stuff where i share stories and travelling pictures with family and friends. At that time, I was using a different blog website, I only started using wordpress this year and I find it very interesting especially knowing what it can actually do more and it provides a more user friendly admin platform.

My ebay

My eBay is what I mostly use to do my online shopping especially when the items I look for is unique or not available locally. It has new added features to help make buying and selling on eBay faster and easier.

Twitter

I just recently started using  twitter since im taking Enterprise 2.0 and i use it  to inform other students that my blog is updated with new post. It does help a lot especially when you others to view and give comments.

References:

Web 2.0 Examples. A Mini-Guide

What is Web 2.0 by Time o’Reilly

Successful Bloggers

Starting a blog

There are already lots of bloggers on the web regardless of whether it’s a professional blog or just a simple one. Basically, anyone can start blogging straight away as long as they know what to blog about. To start a blog, you only need to sign up with one of the popular providers such as LiveJournal, Blogger, Tumblr and manymore. As for me, I choose WordPress since I have experience using it before and comfortable with it. These blog providers mention above provides templates so that bloggers can easily manage it since there are not too technical to use especially for beginners.

What blogging can do?

There are many reasons why people do blogging. One of the many reasons is to keep in touch with family and friends by sharing news and photos. A way of sharing stuff with others that the blogger find interesting especially like hobbies, activities and travelling pictures.

Another reason for blogging is that it can be a way of self expression as well as letting out feelings to writing it in the blog.

For those who are into business and marketing, they use blog to promote themselves and it proves to be a good way of network marketing.

For job seekers, they use blog to promote themselves and update their job experience and education field on the blog so that interested companies can browse more about them and contact them when they find the blogger to be qualified for the job.

The blog that I frequently visit is TMZ where it updates activites from big celebrities and usually the trouble that they get themselves into which makes it more interesting and entertaining.

One example of a successful blog that i visited is LinkedIn which is a social networking site where people update details about themselves and connections. LinkedIn can be use in a number of ways such as:

• To find jobs, people and business opportunities recommended by someone in one’s contact network.
• Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates.
• Job seekers can review the profile of hiring managers and discover which of their existing contacts can introduce them.
• Users can post their own photos and view photos of others to aid in identification.
• Users can follow different companies and can get notification about the new joining and offers available.
• Users can save ( bookmark) jobs which they would like to apply for.

References:

TMZ Blog

Linkedin BLOG

LinkedIn Wiki

Reason to start blogging

Top ten reason to blog