Social Media @ Wal-Mart – Social Gifting Facebook Application Shopycat Case Study

Wal-Mart has a very active Facebook page where it has close to 23 million likes, close to million visitors to the page and according to a statement from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, he and his top management team travelled to Bentonville, Arkansas to "deepen" its relationship with Wal-Mart. The relationship between Facebook/Wal-Mart is very lucrative for both parties considering the fact that Facebook has one billion monthly users. @WalmartLabs is developing tools and technologies that will help Wal-Mart analyze the relevant information hidden in the hundreds of millions of social media conversations occurring online every day and through mapping social DNA of social networks users and sort through posts, updates, likes, comments looking to target products based on the genome. WalmartLabs defines the "Social Genome" as "a giant knowledge base that captures entities and relationships of the social world.

In November, 2011, WalmartLabs launched an application for Facebook called Shopycat, which currently has close to 20,000 likes or roughly one-hundredth of one percent of Wal-Mart's Facebook likes. WalmartLabs says the Shopycat app "makes gift giving less stressful and more fun "by analyzing their Facebook activity through likes, shares and posts using our Social Genome technology." Shopycat tries to figure out from a person’s Facebook profile what they’re most interested in, but also then has to find that product and match it to a link online. Shopycat is the first social shopping application from Wal-Mart’s recently-formed @WalmartLabs unit which is focused on developing platforms, products and businesses around social and mobile commerce. Along with products from Walmart.com and Wal-Mart, Shopycat matches users' interests to a catalog that includes other sites like bookseller Barnes & Noble and gifts store RedEnvelope.

According to Ifeelgoods.com Wal-Mart case study where they studied customer acquisition by Wal-Mart through its Facebook social gifting application called Shopycat. Ifeelgoods worked with @WalmartLabs to build the user base for Shopycat. In the initial month-long campaign, Ifeelgoods hosted a seamless user experience that gave 10 Facebook credits to users that allowed the Shopycat application and for preventing fraud credits were direct deposited into eligible users’ Facebook accounts. As an added service, Ifeelgoods assisted with driving targeted traffic to the promotion by displaying ads via the Ifeelgoods publisher network, ultimately managing campaign performance for @WalmartLabs. There was a good 42% conversion rate for users allowing Shopycat and a 27% redemption rate on the credits offer, which highlight campaign success. 50% of users shared the Shopycat promotion with their friends, and that viral earned media traffic flow generated an incremental lift in conversions of 25%. The cost per new user was far less than campaign targets, and the users directed to Shopycat from the Ifeelgoods campaign stayed with the app, making up approximately 90% of the Shopycat user base. Shopycat application success has encouraged Wal-Mart to focus more on becoming social media retail mega player.

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Social Media Adoption @ Fortune 500 Companies- @Wal-Mart Labs, Social Genome

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer and the second largest company in terms of revenue according to the Fortune 500 2012. “Through the innovative fusion of retail, social and mobile, @WalmartLabs is redefining Commerce for the largest retailer worldwide”,according to the introduction on @WalmartLabs. Wal-Mart is developing tools and technologies that will help it analyze the relevant information hidden in the hundreds of millions of social media conversations occurring online every day and use it to understand consumer trends so that they can plan their product assortments, including new products to introduce and supply to secure. Wal-Mart acquired Kosmix, the company behind real-time Twitter filter site TweetBeat, medical search engine RightHealth, and topic-specific engine Kosmix for US$ 300 million and transformed the company into @WalmartLabs with an objective to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce.

According to Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, the company focused on developing a social genome platform that captures the connections between people, places, topics, products and events as expressed through social media — be it a feed, a tweet or a post. WalmartLabs defines the "Social Genome" as "a giant knowledge base that captures entities and relationships of the social world." Wal-Mart has been building their own in-house Social Genome since past few years with both public and private data from social media, tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, You Tubes, it’s all streaming into Wal-Mart. Streaming in so fast, that WalmartLabs created something they call Muppet, a solution for processing Fast Data, using large clusters of machines. The Labs describes the Social Genome as their "crown jewel." Wal-Mart is essentially looking to combine data on purchase history with data from social networks with actual transaction history.

Wal-Mart is looking to transform itself into a social media retail mega player and it is investing millions of dollars into @WalmartLabs to develop new tools, applications and technologies and also acquire companies who are actively developing mobile and social media applications. Post Kosmix and its transformation into @WalmartLabs, the company acquired mobile point-of-sale app maker Grapple, location-aware mobile ad company OneRiot and a mobile app company called Small Society known for writing apps for clients like the Democratic National Committee and Starbucks. According to recent Wal-Mart press release the @WalmartLabs team continues to evolve Polaris a semantic search engine for browsing products and ease of shopping. In the past year, the group has created Shopycat, a social gift finder; Classrooms by Wal-Mart, a program to make back-to-school shopping easer; Get on the Shelf, a crowdsourcing contest to unearth new products for Wal-Mart; and Social Media Analytics, tools that use social chatter to select items to be carried by Wal-Mart. @WalmartLabs goal is to have Wal-Mart create the next great shopping experience by melding physical stores with online search and social media input.

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Social Media adoption @ Fortune 500 companies – Exxon Mobil Perspective Blog, etc.

Exxon Mobil is the largest refiner and marketer of petroleum products in the world and was formed by the merger of Exxon and Mobil in 1999. The company is also the world's largest company by revenue and largest publicly traded international Oil and Gas Company according to Fortune 500 2012. Exxon Mobil adopted various social media channels to be in touch with its customers and various other stakeholders. Since April 2006, Exxon Mobil has been active on YouTube and the channel has more than 1200 subscribers and close to 700,000 views. The official channel of the company has videos highlighting the real time updates of the company, employee videos, advertisement campaigns, and videos from the top management and leadership discussing various issues regarding the company and its products, environment issues, challenges and the company efforts.

Another major effort of Exxon Mobil is its Perspectives blog which is run by Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil's vice president of public and government affairs. The blog talks about company's views on the issues, policies, technologies and trends that are shaping the energy industry and Ken Cohen talks about ideas and actions from industry, governments, researchers and many others that affect the world of energy. The blog was started in November 2011 and it is widely followed and read by many people online. Exxon Mobil also has an official twitter account with close to 26,000 followers and more than 1000 tweets and the company only provides news about the company and various activities of the company in different locations. For further discussions, people are directed to Perspectives blog.

Exxon Mobil does not have an official Facebook page but there are many pages on Facebook that is filled with lot of negative criticism. The company does not seem to be interested in a Facebook page but is very active with a blog, Twitter account and YouTube channel. Exxon Mobil uses Facebook to aggressively market its flagship brand Mobil 1 — the world's leading synthetic motor oil. Mobil 1 Facebook page was launched in March 2008 and has close to 60,000 likes. With a focus on making new friends and market its brand along with a Facebook page, a dedicated channel on YouTube and an online game was launched enabling players to take part in a virtual race against Lewis Hamilton, awareness of the brand is going from strength to strength – the game alone has been played over five million times worldwide.

Exxon Mobil has also launched Apple iPad, iPhone and Android applications for their customers. The ExxonMobil application for iPad provides immediate access to ExxonMobil’s Perspectives Blog, a vital source of energy news and analysis, continually refreshed and relevant, and includes access to ExxonMobil’s library of publications, stock information, news, videos and more. Exxon and Esso Mobile Fuel Finder apps provide real-time maps, driving directions and station information for nearly 10,000 Exxon and Mobil retail locations across the continental United States and Europe. Overall Exxon Mobil is active on those social media platforms which it feels relevant for its engagement strategy with customers and other stakeholders. 

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Case Study - Crowd sourcing @ Mattel – Open Innovation & Collaboration with Customers

Mattel, Inc. designs and manufactures world renowned and best-selling toys and for more than 50 years Mattel had been innovating, designing new toys, reinventing the way children play with each generationand had launched new line of toys for its most popular brands like Barbie, Hot Wheels, etc. Creativity, Innovation, cultural heritage of the company and vision is a must for a company like Mattel to survive and develop the iconic toys for the children. Another critical success factor for Mattel is, the company uses innovation to address existing trends in today’s marketplace and transforms toys into sophisticated gadgets, bringing a new dimension to how kids play. Take for instance Barbie Dolls are portrayed with different careers like Doctor, Teacher, Marine, etc.  The quest for innovation have forced Mattel to adopt a new method of product development process in 2001 called Project Platypus conducted three times a year in which a dozen employees from all levels of experience, with various skill sets and backgrounds were assigned the task of ideating and developing a completely new brand in 12 weeks through intensive and unique brainstorming process. Outside speakers like comedians were brought in to entertain the team and they were given freedom of time to explore and create new concepts like Ello, Construction set for Girls. This is how innovation is fueled within Mattel internally along with its constant innovation and development process the employees engage daily. The company design center called Handler Team Center had undergone an internal design refresh in 2009 to create a more creative and collaborative work environment and currently features a ramp at the front door which slopes up from the parking lot, allowing full-sized Hot Wheels cars to drive right into the building.

Mattel went one step further and decided to engage their customers in their innovation and development of new toys and developing the existing toys even further. In January 2010, Mattel launched a month-long voting campaign open to anyone for Barbie's next career on Barbie.com, Barbie's Twitter and Facebook pages, in addition to a bus and billboard campaign in New York and more than 600,000 votes were cast during the voting. The end result was Computer engineer Barbie "won the popular vote" and anchorwoman won the girls' vote.  Since its inception Barbie went on to have more than 130 other professions, frequently reflecting or even predicting societal change. In September 2012, Mattel has announced an Open Innovation initiative with Genius Crowds to develop crowd-sourced product ideas for their most revered brands of Hot Wheels and Barbie bicycles for young children aged 4-6 years old and the company is asking its customers to provide innovative product ideas and actively engage in the innovation process. Through this platform the company is looking to maintain an open two way communication with consumers about their ideas and product needs by constantly exchanging ideas with the company. Along with crowdsourcing the ideas and creativity the company is looking to constantly stay in touch with and meet the needs of kids and their parents. The company continuously focuses on translating entertainment brands to toys and creates long-term, sustainable properties with global product footprints and relying on crowdsourcing for achieving this goal.

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Case Study: Morgan Stanley Smith Barney advisers allowed partial access to LinkedIn & Twitter

In June 2011, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (MSSB) allowed a test group of 600 advisers, almost full use of LinkedIn and restricted use of Twitter and after a yearlong trial the Wall Street firm allowed 17,000 financial advisers partial access to Twitter and LinkedIn significantly increasing its social media presence. According to the 600 advisors involved in the trial, 40% cited new business through their LinkedIn & Twitter use, and of those 240, 60% said those new customers had more than $1 million worth of assets. According to Lauren W. Boyman, the firm’s head of social media, using Twitter & LinkedIn has helped financial advisers win more business over the past year and Advisers who have used the platforms have come to think of LinkedIn as a tool for networking and finding clients, while Twitter allows them to have more direct marketing campaigns. The full social media roll out across Morgan Stanley Smith Barney allowing access to all 17,000 advisers was always there and the firm had to do the trial to make sure that it has the capability & policy in place so that they can monitor, archive and manage the social media content as there are stringent regulations by the Financial regulators like SEC who had mandated the same rule & guidelines as in the case of email and physical communications & content.

Morgan Stanley’s risk management committee has given the go-ahead for all of the retail brokerage’s financial advisers to use the two sites.To comply with stringent rules governing what and how financial advisers & bankers can communicate, financial advisers of the firm will tweet only prewritten tweets from preapproved library and submit all LinkedIn postings for approval, using software designed by Socialware, and through this software the firm tracks and captures communication of its brokers and retains it for regulators. For using LinkedIn, advisers have to set up a profile that discusses their practice and specialties, receive compliance training, submit all LinkedIn postings for approval and can use all the LinkedIn functions--from requesting an introduction to search features to joining groups which are powerful networking tools and thus increase business. In case of Twitter account advisers can only tweet prewritten tweets from preapproved library, which containscontent related to reports on market moves; the firm’s research on investment strategy; wealth management topics such as retirement, women and wealth and divorce; and general lifestyle content. According to Lauren Boyman, wealth management themes tend to do particularly well, and are frequently retweeted on Twitter.

In case MSSB Advisors require help with the LinkedIn, Twitter & their business usage have to contact firm’s business development organization which will guide them in term of how to use the sites and also a call center is established to answer adviser questions and finally advisers can also seek additional coaching from technology vendor Socialware. A lot of financial advice is emerging from many growing sources and technologies like blogs, Twitter, and LinkedIn, etc. and all the Financial Institutions like Retail Banks, Wealth management Firms, Investment Banks, Asset Management firms, etc. have to see this content as a competitive threat and should also make themselves present on the various social media platforms as the customers are becoming more social media savvy and social media has become an integral part of their day to day life. MSSB is successfully using social media in client interaction & Business Development.

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Case Study: Social Media presence of Goldman Sachs: Looking to improve presence

Despite being one of the biggest investor in Social Media companies like Facebook, Goldman Sachs presence on Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube is quite lackluster. Goldman Sachs joined Facebook in June 2009 and till now it has only 20,000 fans, mere 16,000 likes which is far below when compared to its peers in the Financial Services industry and also has many negative comments about the bank on the Facebook page. It started its twitter account in May 2012 and since then it has 22,000 followers and the twitter account highlights the events, work, research and employees.  Goldman Sachs official twitter account is nothing compared to a parody feed called @GSElevator Gossip, which has over 320,000 followers which reports the various conversations overheard in the bank’s elevators. Goldman Sachs LinkedIn presence has 90,000 followers and is limited to job openings, recruiting interns and informing about employee update and new hires. In February 2012, Goldman Sachs launched YouTube channel and it features videos of employees discussing careers; experts interviewed on topics such as the global economy; clients talking about relationship & work and its corporate citizenship programs. Goldman Sachs is looking to hire a fulltime social community manager who will manage its social media presence and will also monitor the activity.

The reason for such a lackluster presence for Goldman Sachs and slowly improving social media presence for most of the Banks and Financial Institutions is due to the stringent financial regulations by the regulators. Broker, dealers, Relationship managers must comply with very stringent regulations regarding communications with their clients which had become a negating factor. The SEC and FINRA quickly classified social media interactions as records just like emails or physical communications which means they must be archived and managed according to the same rules and which also means tight policing and steep sanctions these institutions face in terms of violations from the SEC/other regulators will also be applied to social media records. Most of the financial institutions were not confident that they could comply with such stringent regulations while using social media so they avoided using it. But there are significant benefits in using social media like advisors/traders/relationship managers can build trust with clients, network more effectively and use social media as a marketing tool for more business and with new tools available that help in archiving and managing social media interactions effectively, Goldman Sachs and other Financial institutions & banks have been actively improving their social media presence. Social Media policy is in place and employees are being trained in terms of how to utilize and manage the social media presence, regulatory aspects and precautions to be taken during client interactions is also provided to all the client facing teams.

Banks & Financial Institutions need to understand that the new era financial customers, clients and public are social media savvy users which also has become an active part of their day to day lives and Social media is disrupting the financial industry with the emergence of social media real time money, investment and trading communities and crowd financing which is funding new players. All the above factors have forced the financial institutions to enter the open and transparent world of Social media. Goldman Sachs too is following and improving presence.

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Social Media @ Intel – Planet Blue internal social network for Employees

Intel, the world's largest and highest valued semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue has an internal social media platform called Planet Blue that was launched in 2009, which is company controlled Facebook styled intranet, where more than 1,00,000 employees can connect with each other, collaborate and share knowledge. Planet blue includes blogs, wikis, status updates, discussion forums and employees can also form groups based on their interests, hobbies, etc. Employees not only communicate and create groups but also use the platform to ideate and innovate which is essential for Intel as there is constant pressure on the company to develop new products. Intel earlier had a wiki based platform for collaboration, called Intelpedia, "the Intel encyclopedia that anyone can edit," was launched in 2006, which employees can edit freely  and had millions of pages and thousands of contributors. Intel had a culture of technology-based information-sharing since early 2003, when employee blogging started predominantly included self-maintained servers under desks and these internal employee blogs gained popularity. Intel CEO Paul Otellini launched his employee blog in 2004 and other top execs and leaders followed throughout 2005 culminating in a fully IT-supported platform that same year. Intel also started its popular developer blogs and wikis for software collaboration called Intel Software Network back in May 2006. In April 2007, Intel created Blogs@Intel as a new business tool for customers and employees to directly communicate and collaborate. In June 2008, Intel added the Digital IQ training program for employees that contained around 60 programs online with certification on how to use these social media tools to increase innovation, communication and collaboration at work.

According to a post titled “How successful is your Enterprise 2.0 strategy?” on Intel communities, “some of the metrics Intel track are related to adoption – such as active users (creators, synthesizers, consumers) and “unique visitors”. However, these indicators may not accurately represent the success indicators of the platform. Quality of discussions, impact of these discussions on the users, problem resolutions, agility in solving issues, ability to find subject matters experts quickly could be different parameters which can really show how successful the platform is.” This highlights that Intel closely monitors its social media styled intranet and hopes that the intranet will fuel social learning among employees and also use it for their career development where they can look for positions and chat about their career progression. Intel created a comprehensive set of social media policies called the Intel Social Media Guidelines that are available in over 35 languages designed to help employees to understand how to manage their social media presence. Intel also created Social Media Center of Excellence, which is a cross functional body of experts from Marketing, PR, legal and Digital Communications, who collaborated to create guidelines, processes, strategies, and skill-building courses for how Intel employees can use social media tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, and social networks around the world. Intel is further looking to improve its Planet Blue and is looking to add voice control features to the content so that employees can use it effectively for their collaboration, communication, learning and knowledge sharing initiatives. 

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Big Corporations transforming to Social Business through Social Media

According to 2012 FedEx/Ketchum Social Media Benchmarking Study, presented jointly by FedEx and Ketchum, some of the big corporations have moved beyond just being present on various social media platforms and are utilizing the social media platforms to strategically engage and strengthen relationship with various stakeholders that include employees, customers (51%) , general public (52%) and partners & suppliers (40%) to not only increase the brand affinity but also involve them in co-creation which will help them in attaining the business goals. The study is based on quantitative surveys and telephone interviews with a total of 85 executives from companies like IBM, Southwest Airlines, Bank of America, AT&T, Chevron, G.E., Cisco, and Time Warner Cable , etc. and communications “thought leaders.” But for many other big corporations this social business transformation is not yet started despite the fact that Social media tools have radically transformed the way people engage with the world around them and employees are constantly looking for and demanding for such tools within the organizations for use in their day to day work. All the corporations who participated in the study have a strong social media framework and policy in place and are most effectively using social media to enhance brand reputation and awareness, provide customer service and strengthen relationships across key stakeholders. The survey also highlights the fact that 88% of companies keep track of online feedback and conversations, and 80% of companies surveyed agree that they are presently measuring social media, with 84% focused on engagement, 69% on impressions, 53% on influence, and 51% on tone.

The 2012 FedEx/Ketchum Social Media Benchmarking Study also highlighted that not only the external engagement with customers, suppliers, etc. but also internal engagement between the company and its employees, and empowerment of employees to represent the brand externally as they are the most passionate and credible ambassadors of the company’s brand have also significantly improved and resulted in employee retention, engagement and productivity. Internally, 85% of companies surveyed have seen employee participation in social media increase over the last year. In terms of goals, 46% of companies are using social media to strengthen relationships with employees, 44% use it to share expertise and foster collaboration and 38% use it to increase employee participation in programs or initiatives. 64% of participating companies said the structure and roles in the marketing, communications or human resources teams have changed as a result of social business. Companies that participated in the study has realized that educating and empowering employees and customers to operate as brand ambassadors capable of managing the social conversation with the support of social media policies and guidelines will be a definite win-win situation for all. Executive Leadership at these companies understand that social media as an essential component of business success and it has become a strategic part of the decision making and overall strategy formulation. With social media rise both internal and external to organizations, 27% of companies are more concerned about transparency issues, including employee privacy, legal and compliance issues, and addressing misinformation that appears on the Web. 

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Social Media @ Lenovo - Customer Service to improved presence on Social Media sites

Lenovo social media engagement started post their acquisition of IBM PC business in 2005 when Lenovo found that there is lot of discussion happening on various online discussion forums & blogs and customers were actively engaging and discussing the various product offerings and Lenovo decided that they should take control and own the responsibility for responding to customer queries and feedback which is critical for future business growth and improve the reputation of the company. Lenovo was a small Chinese player and with IBM PC business acquisition they became a global player with significant market share. Not only they felt the need to respond to customers but also thought that the social media customer engagement strategy will help them in making Lenovo brand a global brand. Within Lenovo all the departments from legal to marketing were assigned responsibility of interacting and managing social media presence. Legal department framed policy and guidelines for social media engagement, marketing and sales have launched specific campaigns targeting customers on various social media platforms, Customer service was provided not only by company’s employees but Lenovo also engaged peer-to-peer customer service communities for interacting with the customers and solving their problems and technical issues.

Customer Service Success - Lenovo created interdepartmental collaboration and powerful partnerships within the organization between the marketing, sales, product development and engineering teams for tackling the customer services issues. Lenovo realized in 2005 that social media could help them understand the customer's point-of-view, the major issues with service, product features, functions, delays in shipments and their impact on the global customers. According to Forrester Case Study “How Lenovo Implemented Customer Service Social Media Best Practices” social media alignment of marketing, sales, service and other departments to accelerate changes and improvements to the customer experience has led to a 20% decrease in laptop service call volumes, an increase in customer service agent productivity, a shortened product problem-resolution cycle and an increase their Net Promoter Scores. The net-net is a reduction in customer service support costs and an increase in sales. Social media engagement with customer was even more necessitated due to the fact that customer service costs for personal computing products was rising constantly, putting pressure on margins and since products were becoming complex, the level of expertise for the customer service representatives also had to be improved by constant training which was adding to the costs and effecting margins.

Social Presence on various sites - Lenovo social media program moved from customer service to a larger program where along with customer service the company used the various social media platforms for marketing its products, new launches, and enhance brand reputation. Lenovo’s has an internal social media team which works round the clock to not only develop but also constantly refresh content (text, images and videos) for all of Lenovo social media pages which include Lenovo Vision YouTube Channel ( Around 9000 subscribers & 14 million video views), official Lenovo Facebook page ( Around 10,000 people talking about Lenovo on Facebook & 350,000 Likes), Flickr stream, Lenovo Blog, Lenovo Twitter feed (not to mention various regional feeds & around 5000 tweets & 22,000 followers) and it’s customized social media website, Lenovo Social which  aggregates all the content from different social media sites in one central location to provide an easy and complete view of all things social wise. Lenovo launched its Community forums in 2007 and it has more than 15,000 volunteers and the forum site is visited by millions of users every month. Till early 2012 Lenovo had pursued multiple blogs strategy by publishing many blogs on various topics but the blogging strategy was changed and redesigned to centralize Lenovo's existing blogs and social media in an engaging, navigable, and branded way, using one easily maintainable CMS.

Social Media use at CES 2012 - During International Consumer Electronics Show or CES 2012 held at Las Vegas, Lenovo used various social media tools and its presence on various social media platforms to reach its targeted audience effectively. Gavin O’Hara, Lenovo’s social media editorial lead, gave Text100.com an in-depth overview of Lenovo’s social numbers as well as measurement tools from CES and a snapshot of the outcome of Lenovo’s social activities during CES, both online and offline were as follows:

• Twitter: Lenovo CES tweets reached a potential audience of 17 million people
• Facebook: Lenovo posts reached an audience of 250,000 people while generating more than 1.3 million impressions. For the week, the Lenovo Facebook page received 3,000 likes, 800 comments & 300 “shares” 
• Flickr:Photos of products, parties and people got more than 25,000 views on the Lenovo photo library
• Lenovo Blogs: The behind-the-scenes blog posts got more than 25,000 page views
• YouTube: Lenovo CES-focused videos were watched by more than 50,000 people in a week. An astonishing 25,000 alone watched the Yoga “Hands On” interview. 

Lenovo Social site which aggregates content from the various social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Flickr etc. into one place and also helps customers, volunteers and Lenovo teams effectively navigate and manage the back-end of the site to manage blog content, and each contributing author gets his own account with necessary controls to access the content areas relevant to him. Another unique feature of the site is a new tagging schema that de-compartmentalizes blog topics so that users can find content easily, filter by topics, products, recent, or popularity and users can click through all blog posts in one place. Lenovo had set up a digital & social hub in Singapore in 2011 that centralized digital thinking and strategy planning to support marketing plans in various regions and also execute marketing campaigns, monitor buzz, and form support teams dedicated to answer technical questions on social channels. Lenovo social media strategy is all about engaging with customers, informing them about various products & services, solving customer issues and technical problems, and company is effectively using various social media platforms and has achieved its target of being the Global brand. The recently launched “The Do Network”, a new social media-fueled brand engagement highlights the importance of social media presence and engagement in overall Lenovo future growth strategy.  

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Social Media impact on Customer Service

The rise of the internet and availability of huge amounts of information on every conceivable topic & subject on the World Wide Web have changed the way customers interact with the businesses. A study by the Corporate Executive Board of more than 75,000 people who had contacted B2C and B2B call centers found that 57% looked for answers on the website before calling the company and such self service oriented customers will help in reducing costs for the businesses as they tend to call the call centers less frequently. Social Media particularly Social Networking sites have become integral part of people’s lives and consumers post more than 1 million social messages every minute and these social messages includes updates about individual’s personal life, share thoughts, content, comments and complaints about the companies with which they interact. Smart companies are listening to these conversations and using social media for much more than marketing. Social media has become one of the platforms for customer service over the last few years and some of the brands like Dell, Lenovo, Best Buy, etc have services their customers through various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc and significantly improved their customer satisfaction levels. There are other traditional channels like email, contact center, help lines, etc available for the customers to interact with the businesses but they are preferring social media most and this is not a recent phenomena as earlier customers and still are using other digital platforms like discussion forums, blogs, chat rooms for customer service. There are instances where businesses when neglected the social media chatter and complaints in regards to their products & services have significantly impacted the brand reputation and even the sales of the products.

This is further highlighted by eMarketer research which reveals that 46% of customers want to solve a problem when they're engaging with a brand on social media, and 39% are looking to give feedback about a product or service. The study from Fishburn Hedges and Echo Research also found that the number of customers engaging with brands through social media doubled from 19% to 38% in just the last eight months. According to the research, 65 per cent of people say that social media is a better way to communicate with companies than call centers.  The 2012 American Express® Global Customer Service Barometer found that consumers who have used social media for service have the most influence as they tell significantly more people about their service experiences, and also say they’d spend 21% more with companies who deliver great service – compared to 13% on average. They are also far more vocal about service experiences, both good and bad. In addition, more than 80% of these consumers say they’ve bailed on a purchase because of a poor service experience, compared to 55% overall. Consumers who use social media for customer service will tell an average of 42 others about a good experience -- and tell an average of 53 people about a bad customer-service experience. The general population, in contrast, will tell 15 people about a good experience and 24 about a negative one.  Businesses have realized that social media is is a valuable service and marketing channel as it allows customers and prospective buyers understand how the company can solve their problems. Despite all the facts Businesses are still not totally hooked on to social customer service and those customers that are using it effectively also feel it is very important to address customer concerns on social media but social customer requests are below 20% of total requests.

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Social CRM market will grow in 2012 – Measurable ROI & M&A surge since 2011

Most of the business organizations across the world have been able to some sort of social media presence as demanded by their customers and some of the businesses are trying to actively use social media in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Since the usage is at an early stage businesses are finding it difficult to tie with measurable business outcomes. Gartner analysts expect the worldwide market for social CRM software licenses and subscriptions to reach $2.1 billion in 2012, up from $850 million in 2011, and social CRM revenue will represent 10% of the overall CRM market. Social CRM grew 30% in 2011 in revenue terms and is 7% of total CRM spending globally as of 2011. Despite rapid rise in adoption of social applications by sales, marketing and customer service departments, Gartner believes that by this year end, only 50% of Fortune 1000 companies are expected to receive a worthwhile return on investment (ROI) from their social CRM initiatives. Another prediction by Gartner is that by this year end three-quarters of new social CRM initiatives that receive funding will have a business case incorporating measurable ROI. This highlights the fact that both vendors and customers are looking at ways to measure effectively the return of investment (ROI) that Social CRM efforts will generate. In fact the success of social CRM in next couple of years will depend on how well businesses and social CRM technology providers can tie Social CRM investment to clear and measurable business objectives rather than make social CRM projects just social objectives.

Social CRM is no longer a concern of marketing, but it penetrated into most of other marketing functions, sales, customer service and support and its importance is already evident in lead generation, cross-selling and up-selling capabilities, and other major successful sales & marketing functions. Social CRM applications help in capturing and sharing of data between users including the customers and other relevant stakeholders and involve them in developing and improving the products and services through their constant feedback. Social CRM applications can have both internal and external company users, communities both public & private and customers, marketing and service organizations use apps to create brand awareness, gather information, build trust, evaluate decisions, sell and aid post purchase activities. Social CRM adoption has been mostly among business-to-consumer (B2C) type organizations and business to business (B2B) companies are seeking to aggressively invest in social and by end of 2013, B2B organizations using social CRM applications will represent 25 % of all projects worldwide. Gartner expects business-to-business applications for sales use will have the fastest growth and will account for 30% of social CRM spending by 2015, up from 5% in 2011. According to a report from Gartner’s Ed Thompson titled “What’s “Hot” in CRM Application 2012,” Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery of CRM applications represented 34% of worldwide CRM application spending in 2011. More than 50% of all Sales Force Automation (SFA) spending is on the SaaS platform.

Early part of 2012 and the year 2011 saw a flurry of Mergers & Acquisitions in the Social CRM space with large CRM players like Oracle & SAP aggressively buying smaller players in this space. Oracle has continued its social media CRM spending spree with the acquisition of Collective Intellect whose cloud-based applications for social media monitoring would be combined with Oracle’s social relationship platform and earlier Oracle acquired Vitrue for $339 million, a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Salesforce recently announced that it has won a bid to acquire BuddyMedia for $689 million and also recently added Radian6, while Adobe bought up Efficient Frontier last year to push its own social CRM offerings. These acquisitions highlight the need for companies and Social CRM technology vendors to dynamically engage the customers on the various social media fronts and the Social CRM technology must simplify and make the two way communication effective. There is pressure on social CRM technology vendors to differentiate their offerings from their competitors in terms of functions, analytics, ease of use and superior experience delivered through professional services and this need is driving the M&A deals in this segment. According to Gartner Research Director Adam Sarner, “Vendors that can assemble a full set of social CRM functions and make progress in two or more areas, such as marketing and customer service or sales and marketing, will be best-positioned for success.”

Despite all the positive forecasts for Social CRM there is another angle that is highlighted by Gartner, that 50% of Fortune 1000 organizations that are not determining, or even measuring, ROI, will face failed projects. Among the companies who will not see a worthwhile return, only 20% will even have the data to evaluate where their social strategy is falling short. These organizations will be unable to justify future funding according to Adam Sarner. Another critical factor is social CRM works only with user communities participating which they will do only if they perceive value from engagement and Social CRM applications therefore must be more customer-centric than traditional CRM applications and they should allow the customer to manage the relationship and organizations should allow this rather than they trying to manage the customer relationships. Another important fact that business organizations need to keep in mind is that media is constantly evolving and new uses are frequently being discovered, the organization Social CRM strategy should be refined on an ongoing basis. Nucleus has found that early adopters of social CRM have recognized clear benefits, such as increased visibility and productivity. The 11.8% productivity gain is high, and Nucleus expects adoption of social CRM, particularly by salespeople, to grow not just in real numbers, but also in frequency of activity as users become more aware of the technology’s capabilities and as vendors’ offerings mature. And Gartner believes Social CRM technology vendors have to show quantified business cases and, more importantly, deliver repeatable social CRM processes that are not yet broadly available.

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Case Study - General Motors Facebook Ads – Temporarily stops Paid ads, free pages to continue

General Motors (GM), the third-largest U.S. advertiser will continue to spend roughly US$30 million (includes spend on multiple ad agencies that create and manage content) on maintaining its “free” presence on Facebook through pages and content but GM announced pull back of US$10 million spend in paid ads from Facebook. GM’s Facebook spend is minuscule compared to its $1.1 billion spend on U.S.ads in 2011 and it’s spend of about $271 million (25% -30% of total ad spend) on online display and search ads excluding Facebook advertising. The reason for stopping paid ads on Facebook is due to the little impact that paid ads are having on consumer’s purchase of cars but GM said it will continue to promote its products on Facebook, but without paying Facebook. GM’s decision will also not have major affect on Facebook ad revenues as Facebook's 2011 advertising sales revenue was around US$3.15 billion and revenue from GM was tiny. Another reason for GM cutting down its Facebook paid ads spend is because of the restructuring of GM’s marketing operations for reducing billions of dollars in marketing costs and targeting to save US$2bn over the next five years. Some people believe GM did not believe in the effectiveness of advertising on social networking sites and it is using traditional measurement tools to measure the effectiveness of social media ads which is not convincing as GM being a top ad spender knows how to measure effectiveness.

According to some sources Facebook has to blame itself for GM pull back of paid ads on its site as Facebook officials' failed to convince top marketing executives at GM of the benefits of  paid ads at a meeting that was held couple of weeks before GM’s paid ads pull back announcement. Moreover Facebook officials emphasized the advantages and impact of free posted content on their website which made paid ads spend unnecessary and also suggested GM cut down its number of ad agencies it engaged to manage its ad spend and content on Facebook. Facebook's "click-through rate", also known as "clicks per page view," is half the average for ads on the Internet and the average targeted ad on the Internet is "clicked" on by a consumer once every 1,000 times it is viewed while Google's is 4 in 1,000 according to Larry Kim, founder & CTO of Internet ad consultant Wordstream. Google AdSense ads are more effectively targeted than Facebook ads and GM preferred to stick with them. GM spent more money on creating and managing content rather than advertising and the ratio of spend is $3 on brand pages for every $1 on paid ads. Also Facebook is expected to increase its ad rates after the IPO. Facebook sells ads for brand pages, sponsored posts that appear on user’s news feeds, and other formats like called "sponsored stories," that allows advertisers to pay to republish positive Facebook messages that people had posted about their brand.

But the fact is Facebook is struggling to develop a scalable revenue generator like Google AdSense and in the past few years Facebook attempts for successful ad model for marketers and businesses included charging marketers to host brand pages, featured banners ads on pages from MSN ad networks and Facebook Beacon system, that sent data from external websites to Facebook, for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements and allowing users to share their activities with their friends. In March 2012, Facebook announced Premium, a new suite of products for marketers designed to leverage the social network’s access to friends and friends of friends. Facebook has been gradually increasing its ad revenues and recommends to marketers that unpaid content like brand pages and building a base of online fans who like a brand is successful and users will know about the unpaid content easily only when paired with paid advertisements like display ads and its "sponsored stories." Facebook said in March, for example, that only 16% of a brand's fans will see a post about the brand without paying. Facebook will use technology to ensure that the Paid ad is seen by 75% of those who click a company's "like" button on its website. Another problem area for Facebook is the mobile platform as most of its users are logging in to the site through their mobiles and the company doesn’t have a viable business model to generate revenues on the mobile devices. Facebook need to convince the marketers and businesses about paid ads, their effectiveness and also need to develop a measurement tool for measuring the effectiveness and reach of the ads that is as simple to use as TV ratings.

Facebook has more than 900 million users as of March 2012 and businesses cannot ignore such a huge platform for promoting their products and services. Realizing this fact many businesses across the globe spent millions of dollars and hired digital ad firms for creating content for their Facebook pages in order to stimulate buzz, which advertisers liken to word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. GM decision of cutting its Facebook paid ads spend is not a permanent decision and the company plans to revive it’s spend once it feels the Facebook ads are effective and reach the targeted customer who will spend in buying cars. GM is not alone in this regards as some of the companies too are apprehensive as quoted by Forrester analysts in their blog post. Businesses, Marketers and Analysts are all demanding Facebook to improve its paid advertising model, make its platform more attractive and post IPO the shareholders are also looking for significant improvement in the company revenues and business model which will increase the profitability. According to Facebook most of the businesses and marketers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads. Some of the GM competitors like Ford are supporting Facebook as they are effectively using the site for various promotional activities but Facebook needs to focus on improving its business model and ad platforms to attract more businesses and make sure that more businesses follow General Motors suit calling it an ineffective platform.  

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Few private Indian Banks have presence on Social Media

Some of the Indian Banks are effectively using social networking sites to listen and engage with customers that will help them in improving their marketing focus & target customers effectively, capturing consumer perceptions, brand building & increased product research. According to Facebook, its India user base has more than doubled in a year to 51 million at the end of March 2012 and Twitter has around 15 million users in India. Most of the social media users in India are younger generation in the age group of 18-34 years, predominantly male and are mostly inclined to use social media for doing banking transactions. Private Banks are the most active in using the social media with IDBI Bank (637K Likes), Axis Bank (545K likes), ICICI Bank (475K Likes) and HDFC Bank (109K Likes) as of May 2012. Public sector banks like SBI, etc are yet to start actively using the social media platforms but they still have presence.

In January 2012, ICICI Bank, India's largest private bank, launched its Your Bank Account Facebook application, which allows users to check their account balances, apply for debit cards, and other tasks like request statements and cheque books without leaving Facebook. ICICI assures its Facebook users that the app is hosted on separate ICICI bank servers and no data is transferred to Facebook as many of the social network users are concerned about privacy and data security which is hindering the active usage of banking applications on the social networking sites. HDFC Bank, one of the early adopter and with an active presence on social media space, runs the Money Matters section on its Facebook page. The bank through its Facebook page engages visitors by putting up interesting news articles, small puzzles and games to educate users about various banking tools and even posting latest offers on cards and loans at the bank. HDFC Bank even lets its customers voice their grievances on the bank’s Facebook page and responds to them within 24 hours.

Axis Bank has an active presence with highest number of likes, has interactive apps & promotional offers that allow the bank to communicate with its target audience. Brand campaign apps like Meri Zindagi ka Safar and Meri Zindagi ki Picture both have seen more than 20,000 monthly active users and bank is promoting its platinum credit cards on Facebook by integrating a movie ticket-booking transaction engine. IDBI Bank is the largest socially networked bank in the country in terms of official presence on four platforms namely Google+, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with the largest number of fans/followers/subscribers/circles across these platforms as compared to any other peer bank in India. IDBI social media success formula is because of their approach which is an interesting mix of informative content, product awareness and grievance redressal. Social Media Platforms are an active part of IDBI marketing strategy.

Despite the fact that many Global banks are still apprehensive about offering their services and allowing customers do banking transactions using social networking applications due to data security and privacy concerns, Indian Banks majorly private banks are actively using the social media platforms to engage with customers and allow transactions through the applications. Apart from offering a low cost, effective customer engagement & marketing platform, Social Media usage through the mobile devices is also on tremendous rise as more people use their phones or mobile devices to make payments or other banking transactions through social networking sites. 

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Twitter origin of most of the Social Media Crises in 2011- How to handle

According to a study titled Epicenters of Social Media Crises by Christian Faller, most of the social media crises in 2011 originated from Twitter and the author studied 30 social media crises in 2011, out of which 16 of the crises (53%) originated from twitter followed by Facebook (17%), Blogs (13%), YouTube (7%) and other platforms (10%). Most of the crisis are triggered by organization’s customers (54%) followed by organizations themselves (34%) and rest by opposing stakeholders (13%). Organizations customers complain about negative customer experiences (28.6%) followed by violations of ethical guidelines through the organization itself or its employees (25%), inappropriate content (10.7%), rogue employees (10.7%), failure to respond quickly (7.1%), violation of legal guidelines (3.6%), security breach (3.6%), inappropriate response(3.6%), community censorship(3.6%), lack of fact checking(3.6%) are the top causes of social media crises.  As is evident in the study Twitter is the favorite platform for customers to vent their anger or negative feedback and the reason for this seems to be brevity of information as Twitter allows only 140 characters per update, users can exchange many different updates in a relatively short amount of time and information spreads much faster than on other channels which users can easily understand. Since many twitter users often forward messages even without reading them and the culture of sharing and forwarding messages as part of the social media culture which also leads to rise in self esteem as spreading message will obviously lead to increased reputation among the circle and the density of influencers and opinion leaders is very high on Twitter and they can easily share information through micro blogging in short messages. There has been a sudden spurt in twitter traffic for the particular company during the social media crisis that highlights the significance.

The study highlighted the fact that Twitter is a major epicenter for social media crises and businesses should have a proper strategy for managing their presence on the twitter. There should be a social media crisis tackling plan with a particular focus on twitter, businesses should be very careful in identifying and engaging the key influencers and opinion leaders that are dominating, regular communication with the twitter users and for this businesses should give the responsibility of managing the communication to specialist teams who not only engage with customers but also manage the content in terms of videos, photos, website links, etc, engage specialists if necessary for developing the content that engages the users. Businesses should be responding in a proper manner to customer’s positive and negative feedback. Particularly in case of negative feedback and social media crisis appropriate response should be given with a focus to lighten the mood, if necessary apology has to be tendered and make amends to the customers. Businesses should make sure that the crisis is properly handled by the responsible people and necessary steps need to be taken so that this will not be repeated in future. Not only is it difficult to build a presence on twitter but also it is equally difficult to maintain the presence on twitter and any negligence in maintaining the twitter presence will have a direct impact on the brand and company reputation. Christian Faller study highlights the major social media crises in 2011 and how companies have faltered. For maintaining the twitter presence businesses should train the employees and if necessary engage the specialist from the relevant agencies to develop and maintain the relevant Twitter strategy for the business.

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Why CEO’s are apprehensive about Social Media usage for Customer interaction

Business leaders across the world believe that advances in alternative energy, biotechnology, nanotechnology and other fields far beyond Information Technology are transforming products, operations and business models and has created new industries, fundamentally disrupted some of the existing industries. 71% of 1,700 CEOs surveyed by IBM expect technology will be the number one factor to impact their organization's future in the next three years. Social networking sites have drastically changed the way people communicate and collaborate with friends, family, businesses and businesses are realizing its role in reaching their existing & new customers. According to IBM Global CEO 2012 Study in which 1700 CEOs from 64 countries and 18 different industries were interviewed, currently only 16% of the CEOs are actively using social media channels in engaging business and customers but 57% of CEOs will actively engage with their customers through social networking websites and social media will rank number two in most utilized channels to engage audience in the next five years as it is presently the least utilized of all customer interaction methods.

Traditional methods of customer interaction that are most preferred by CEOs are face-to-face interactions, followed by websites, channel partners, call centers, traditional media, advisory groups, and social media. Presently CEOs believe that Social Media is a platform to obtain information about customers, collaborating with customers and a two way communication platform. Most of the CEOs particularly in the traditional industries like industrial goods are very apprehensive about the Social media hype and are not comfortable with the fact that their brands are in the hands of customers and employees. Control is shifting from institutions to individuals according to IBM Global CEO Study. Another critical factor highlighted by some CEOs is that Social media has seen tremendous growth in the past few years but industry knowledge on how to use it in the various industries has not evolved and most of the industries are struggling to find success stories and case studies within their industries that have profited from social media adoption and engagement. Very few CEOs are actively engaged on the social media platforms as they still believe that social media as marketing platform and most of the other CEOs are judging social media and its relevance without having firsthand knowledge of using it in their businesses.

Most of the CEOs are more than 50 years old and look at technology as a way of collaborating and communicating with employees and other stake holders, connecting with friends and socializing but the young generation people in their 20s work and think about social media in a totally different way as they look at it as a way of life. Young people use social media in all aspects of their personal lives and also looking for ways to use it in their professional live in terms of using it in performing their jobs within the organizations they work and are demanding for social media like platforms. They are well versed at using social media but not the CEOs and other senior managers who are still not totally comfortable with social media and need more evidence that it is one of the highly successful medium for engaging with the customers. As highlighted in the IBM Global CEO study, CEOs will shift their focus to using social networks as a way for direct engagement with customers from the existing modes of using e-mail and the phone as primary communication modes. Social media will help CEOs build closer connections with customers, partners and a new generation of employees in the future. 

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Enterprise Social Networks 2012 – Increasing adoption in near future

The success of consumer social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc have forced the businesses to provide enterprise social networking within the organizations as employees are asking for such platforms and if not provided employees are using free social networks which is risky for the businesses as they lack control. Enterprise social networks are social networks deployed internally within the business organizations where access is limited to their employees and limited number of stakeholders like consumers, etc and are tightly controlled through strict policies by company management. Enterprise social networks have seen good adoption since past few years and these networks include Facebook styled profile pages that highlight employee expertise, interest, hobbies, activity streams and updates, blogs, wikis, communities, forums, RSS feeds, bookmarks, video/photo sharing and other tools that help employees within the organization spread across the world to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge and information and break barriers erected in multi national companies. Business to Business and Business to Consumers communities can also be built on the enterprise social networking platforms that allow sharing, collaborating and participate in the business related conversation and projects. Mostly IT and Internet Companies are at the forefront of enterprise social network adoption and traditional companies like manufacturing, etc have yet to adopt these platforms.

Forrester predicts explosive growth for the enterprise social software from 2011 revenues of US$ 600 million to US$ 6.4 billion by 2016 which is a CAGR of 61%. It also predicted that new social enterprise applications that allow systematic grouping of employees, information and processes will deliver good return on investment when compared to previous generation of collaboration apps like email, instant messaging, and videoconferencing that are called Unified Communications & Collaboration.  According to Gartner Research, the worldwide market for enterprise social software will top $769 million in 2011, up 15.7% from the $664 million spent in 2010; $578 million spent in 2009 and predicts revenues will reach US$ 1 billion by 2012. IDC forecasts that enterprise social software market will generate revenues of nearly $2 billion by 2014, which is a CAGR of 38.2% over the 2009-2014 forecast periods. Research firms predict a significant growth in enterprise social network revenues in the near future as more and more business organizations start adopting these platforms internally for their employees. Surveys by Forrester and Altimeter Research have highlighted that despite having attention of the management, adoption is slow but increasing and management’s have yet to be convinced of the potential of enterprise social networks in terms of productivity and profitability.

Similar to email that changed the way employees communicate within the organization; enterprise social networks will change the way employees interact, collaborate, and share information and knowledge that is critical for their performance improvement and organizational profitability. These platforms bring a personal touch to communication, sharing and collaboration process and motivate employees who are geographically dispersed and with different socio-cultural backgrounds by creating a sense of empowerment, also through employee profile pages employees and management can know about the expertise, interests and collaborate in key projects and transfer knowledge and finally play a critical role in organizational innovation and development as employees share their knowledge, best practices, streamline processes by avoiding duplication, wastages and provide ideas for the development of the products and services. This will finally lead to improved products and services, improved communication and collaboration with customers which will help in improving their satisfaction and improved organization reputation and profitability. Engaging employees in the innovation and idea generating process is one of the crucial activities being done by most of the businesses today be it large or small and the enterprise social networks will act as a backbone for such initiatives. Along with enterprise social networks, consumer social networks presence is also critical for the businesses and businesses have to find a way to securely integrate the consumer and enterprise social networks for better results.

Businesses are just looking at enterprise social networking as a collaboration and communication tool for employees but not as a tool that will help in faster decision making, business process improving, employee retention and a tool that help in reducing the email volumes and meetings costs. Businesses too are not convinced about the return on investment or business value that these platforms generate and because of this the spending is very low on these tools, after initial euphoria there has been reduction in focus and there is not serious effort from the management to measure the impact of these platforms. Lack of active participation of the employees and lack of proper training, understanding of the significance of the enterprise social networking in terms of improving their performance, productivity and organizational performance is also slowing down the adoption of enterprise social networks. Some of the businesses are offering gifts and other incentives to encourage employee participation but with limited success. There also need to be an organization policy and guidelines for employees for avoiding the misuse and other problems. Businesses also need champions, responsible for monitoring, controlling and initiating the various activities on the enterprise social networks and champions should be selected from all the levels of organization including the management executives and they should be active.

Enterprise Social Networks is a major trend and the businesses have to change their approach in implementing this platform by looking at it a source of business value creation and formulate policies & strategies for increased participation of employees and use it a transformational tool for overall organization development. They are just looking at it as a mere technology without having any performance metrics for measuring the impact. The constant communication and collaboration will generate knowledge, streamline processes and increase the flow of information across hierarchical levels within the organization. Management can interact with employees at all the levels and the two way communication will be a major advantage for management to understand employee concerns and for employees to understand management plans and strategies. For the success of enterprise social networks, top management and executive sponsorship is a must and their regular participation is also necessary. Like the way consumer social networks changed the way people communicate with family and friends, voice their opinions and share information and knowledge, enterprise social networks too have the potential to change the organization communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing processes by removing  communication barriers between the employees and the management and together work for attaining the organizational goals.

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Social Media @ eBay – Intranet Hub for employees

eBay initially rejected its employees request for an enterprise social network and employees were forced to set up their own network on Yammer, a private company that provides the platform for employees of a business to easily setup a free enterprise social network with limited features and functions for that business. The businesses have the option of take over the Yammer network being used by their employees by paying the necessary fees and upgrading their accounts. When eBay management realized that there are significant numbers of employees (around 3,000 employees) are actively engaging on the Yammer network they too considered to take over the network and upgrade by paying the necessary fees but decided not to do so as the Yammer did not have many features and functions that eBay wanted. eBay then decided to develop its own official enterprise social network using NewsGator, an add-on to Microsoft SharePoint and which will be a state of the art platform that will not only accelerate the platform usage by employees but also helps in improving the productivity and performance of the employees. Before finalizing the platform eBay also evaluated other platforms like Jive, Ning, and Chatter but finalized the NewsGator and SharePoint as SharePoint is easy to be integrated with other tools and platforms within the organization IT infrastructure.

With more than 16,000 employees across the globe, eBay created an intranet called the Hub that not only helps employees to perform their jobs in better way but also engages employees with an simple, friendly design and consistent with company identity.  The intranet is also a hub for meetings and company wide events like corporate news, videos, messages, analyst presentations, executive presentations etc and also plays a key role in internal communications with employees that feature blogs, forums, video/photo sharing and discussion boards. Each employee in the company has their own profile page which they can personalize with personal information, upload their photos, engage with other employees who share similar interests and create their own blog and other media. The intranet platform also allows employees to post and receive updates from intranet to multiple internal or external networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc at the push of a button. iChannel is You Tube styled video sharing platform that runs on the eBay intranet and works as a discussion board and communication channel between the employees and management ( Ask a Leader) and recently this channel is used by the CEO to clarify the employee concerns about Skype sale. eBay adopted a test and learn methodology which will help in refining and developing an effective platform that will be easy to use for the employees.

This intranet platform was initially tested with 1000 employees and in November 2011 went live for all the eBay employees. But the intranet is of no use without employees having their profiles uploaded and their active participation and with an aim to encourage the employee participation eBay started a contest called “Hubgrade” that gave eBay employees a chance to win Starbucks gift cards or the grand prize an Xbox. This helped in increasing the employee profiles by more than six times and employees started actively participating in the intranet and build communities, search for information, and even post status updates to the corporate network, LinkedIn, Twitter , etc simultaneously. With rise in participation by the employees’ eBay also launched a innovative mobile application through which the employees can access the intranet Hub away from office which allows to employee directory, meeting schedules, locations and other information access to the information. eBay is using various promotional initiatives like contests, virtual screen savers, training, etc to further increase the employee engagement on the intranet Hub. More active employees with complete profiles will help in the employee’s communication with one another for work, knowledge sharing, common interests/hobbies, collaborate for work and other projects and also improve the overall organizational performance along with their individual performance.

eBay is world’s largest online market place that connects millions of buyers and sellers and company has more than 100million active users globally. Other businesses in the portfolio include PayPal, StubHub, Shopping.com and others where millions of people to buy, sell, and pay online.  The company actively participates on various social networking sites for engaging with their customers and also wanted to provide their employees the similar social networking styled platform internally for increasing employee engagement, collaboration and effectiveness. eBay wanted a platform that will enhance employee performance and also help them in actively improving the organizational performance. Even though the company initially had apprehensions about the effectiveness of the social media styled intranet but the employees convinced the management and started working on the development of the intranet in September 2010. eBay believes that this social intranet initiative will improve collaboration and communication and plays a crucial role in employee retention as the company has to invest significant amounts of time, money and resources in training and inducting employees into the company. The company is hoping to use the social media and networks more effectively for both the employee and organizational benefits. 

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Social Media Monitoring by Companies is on the rise

With internet penetration level of 30% of Global population, there are more than 2 billion internet users in the world and numbers are growing at a significant pace according to data provided by We are Social January 2012 edition. North America followed by Europe has higher levels of internet penetration. With social network penetration level of 22% of Global population, there are 1.5 billion social network/media users worldwide and North America followed by Europe has higher penetration levels. There has been a significant rise in the number of social media users in the last few years and social media users are actively engaging in various social networks in terms of interacting with friends, playing games, sharing information and one of the most critical activity that they are doing on the social networks is voicing their opinions about the various products and services, customer service feedbacks, Branding and reputation of businesses, complaining and actively participating in social media marketing campaigns by businesses. Businesses across the globe have realized the need to monitor various social networks to know what customers are talking about their businesses and their offerings, whether the feedback is positive or negative, how is it impacting the business and how to tackle negative feedback and comments as they have significant effect on the company and its reputation.

A recent study of global companies by SHARE and GUIDE SHARE EUROPE and sponsored by IBM and Marist College found that only 52.8% of respondents are monitoring open social media networks and only 30% are monitoring their proprietary social networks. However close to 60% of respondents have plans to increase the social media monitoring and will increase social media monitoring and invest in Business Intelligence tools in the next two years which highlights the fact that social media monitoring is an essential part of the strategy for understanding the consumer behavior and needs. Businesses are utilizing social media monitoring according to the survey respondents for tracking metrics related to customer satisfaction (26.8%), Overall Buzz (23.7%), Brand Experience (21%) and Advertising campaign performance (18.1%). Survey respondents also highlighted the fact that more than 25% of them are using social media data in their overall business strategy and close to 29% of them are planning to use the data collected on the various social media networkers further more in their overall strategy formulation. Most of the survey respondents are IT professionals and other management professionals and most of the companies are based out of North America and from Financial Services industry.

Social media networks generate huge data and require specific monitoring and business intelligence tools to analyze the data which includes insights on the consumer behavior, brand reputation, customer experience and advertising campaign performance. Vendors like IBM, SAS, and Google etc provide the social media business intelligence tools that help in analyzing the data. Presently sales & marketing, Public Relations and Customer Service departments with in the organizations are actively utilizing the social media monitoring, and analysis of such data in their operations but the rest of the departments have yet to start utilizing this critical data. There is a realization among the businesses about the criticality of the social media monitoring and are planning to invest resources in the monitoring and analytical tools. There are specific teams working within the organization who monitor various social networks and some businesses outsourced it.  

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Social Media in India 2012 – User Base & engagement expected to increase

Similar to the global phenomenon Social media in India is driven by young and educated in the cities and towns across India and 2011 saw a tremendous rise in the number of users and their activity in terms of time spent, engagement levels and quality on various social networking sites. According to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India there has been rapid rise in the number of internet users in Indiaand has reached 121 million users in 2011. Broadband too has seen significant growth in 2011with 13.30 million users (22% YoY) compared to 10.92 million users in 2010 and is expected to reach 15.9 million users by end of 2012. 80% of the internet users are urban users and 20% are rural users in India and educated young people and professionals across industry verticals like IT, BFSI, Retail, Automobile, Pharma, etc are driving the social networking sites usage in India. Indians migrate to United States (US) for education and jobs and most of them will be in constant touch with friends in India which led to the rise in usage of social networks and it was even more increased as US companies set up offices in India employing thousands of people here, Indians using more technology products like mobiles, laptops, other computing devices like PCs, tablets and finally the voyeuristic appeal with open networks drove the usage further.

Most popular social networking site in India is Facebook as recently it has dethroned Indonesiafrom the number 2 slot with 46 million monthly active users in February 2012 on the site, an increase of 132% from the prior year. 75% of Facebook users in India are male and metro cities dominate the usage in India. Google+ has a total user base of 12.3 million in India with 86% of the users being male and dominated by students and young professionals. Twitter has a total user base of more than 14 million in Indiaand is the sixth largest country in terms of accounts and the micro blogging in India has not risen in India when compared to other social networking sites as Indians are not comfortable with a 140 character limit. LinkedIn the professional networking site has more than 14million user base in Indiaand is one of the rapidly growing social networks in India.  Orkut was the initial dominant social networking site in India until Facebook entry and it has around 18 million user base in India but the network which was acquired by Google is fading into oblivion as Google is more focused on Google+. Indian social networking sites too have significant user base in India and Ibibo has around 12 million users base and BharatStudent has around 7 million users base.

Urban cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad and other tier 1and 2 cities and towns dominate the social networking usage in India. 75% is dominated by male and mostly the young students and professionals in the age group of 18-24 are dominating the social media usage followed by the 25-34 age group. They spend hours every month on the various social networking sites and actively engage with friends and others. Most of the users are using social media to stay in touch with friends, track and update their activities, social gaming, follow groups and communities, discuss social, political cultural and entertainment topics and also look for information about brands, products and also provide their feedback. People are actively voicing their opinions on the social networks as was evident during the Jan Lokpal movement by Anna Hazare and his team in 2011 and the movement was supported by people actively through the various social networks. Accessing and using the social networking sites through mobiles is also on the rise as most of the cell phone manufacturers selling in India are selling handsets that are easy to use for social networking and are having inbuilt social networking applications of the popular social networks at low prices.

There has been rapid rise in the number of ecommerce portals in Indiaand also businesses selling their products and services online. Most of these businesses are actively engaging their consumers on the various social networks through games, contest, and other content. Telecommunications services providers like Tata Docomo, Airtel, Vodafone, Mobile handsets makers like Samsung, LG, Nokia, HTC, Automobile manufacturers like Ford, Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra & Mahindra, Volkswagen, ecommerce sites like Flipkart, sports goods manufacturers like Nike, Adidas, beverages like Bacardi, Pepsi, Coke and consumer products like Nestle Maggi, etc are all very active in India and many Indian users are actively engaging with these brands and companies. Content focused at Indian users both by businesses and individuals is being created and Indian users of the various social networking sites like the content and making the content viral like the recent song Kolaveri Di. Most of the celebrities belonging to the cinema world, sports personalities, politicians, artists, business leaders and activists are all actively engaging and participating in the various social networking sites. Indian Users are also actively engaging in the global issues and events on the social networking sites and voicing their opinions.

There also have been some issues with social networking sites in India and the government had issued notices to all the major players in the country in relation to the derogatory content and content that is hurting the feelings of certain sections of the people. The government has instructed the social networking companies to sensor such content and remove it immediately failing which strict penalties and legal actions will be taken against the companies responsible. The rapid rise in the social media usage in the recent years has forced the government for regulating the usage and the policy was framed last year in this regards. There were protests against too much regulation by the government as the users were concerned about their right to express themselves freely but due to certain incidents over the various social networks that hurt the sentiments and feelings of people government were forced to act and frame the policy.

With increasing penetration of the internet and improvement in the technology infrastructure in India, the social media usage in India is expected to increase and this will be even pushed further with significant rise in the sales of the mobiles, laptops, tablets and other computing devices in India. With availability of more information about brands, companies, issues, hobbies, interest etc and increase in presence of companies, governments, politicians, celebrities etc the social media usage across all the age groups is also expected to increase in near future. There is also significant push from the social networking companies and social gaming companies focusing on the Indian User base will also see growth in user base. These companies are localizing the content, providing language supports in local languages and also improving the underlying technologies so that the users can use these sites easily. Privacy issues in terms of individual privacy, personal data security, government and regulatory policy issues in terms of content and the issue of targeting the ads based on personal sensitive information are the significant negative factors that may hamper the growth in near future. 2012 will be interesting and exciting year for social media in India.

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