Risks of Enterprise 2.0 in Business

The main focus of this blog has been to promote Enterprise 2.0 and as such all blog posts so far have been promoting it with out looking at possible problems that could occur. Enterprise 2.0 whilst good for business, requires social media policies to be drafted and implemented, for a sustainable social presence. Creating a social media policy (SMP) comes with the benefit of controlling social media risk. To make a point, if a company doesn't disclose their legal liabilities and responsibilities they can be subject to many legal repercussions. Such legal repercussions include:

• Loss of confidential information;
• Breach of copyright;
• Defamation;
• False statements and or misleading and deceptive conduct;
• The tort of Passing off;
• Reputation risk;
• Statutory risks including:
• Breaches of the Privacy Act;
• Breach of continuous disclosure obligations in the case of listed public companies;
• Discrimination;
• Organisation and industry specific risks posed by the organisations operating environment.

 The above is quoted from Dundaslawyers. Classification of risks can be found here.

Any risk to a companies legal standing is a risk that should be taken very seriously, and as appropriate risk should be mitigated. It is especially important for high-traffic (those with a large customer base) businesses and organisations to create an SMP. For example QUT requires an SMP, some scenarios in which it would be necessary:

Reputation Risk

Reputation risk is classified by Dundaslawyers as follows:

Reputation risk is probably the most imperative risk to minimize in the social media environment, as the intangible loss of reputation can significantly damage the hard earned brand, in a very short time.  Numerous example of reputation of organisations being harmed on Social Networking Sites occur on a seemingly daily basis.  DundasLawyers

This is relevant to QUT as they have many staff members working in close contact with students who avidly use social media, thus negating any way they can be caught liable due to students is important to QUT.

Scenario 1
A past student defames a tutor they did not like, on the QUT Facebook  age. The public now sees the tutor in negative light, and the tutor wishes to sue QUT for damages to his/her character. QUT requires its SMP to claim that any post on their social media pages, which is not directly posted by them, is not expressive of the view held by, endorsed by or affiliated at all by QUT.

False Statements and/or Misleading and Deceptive Conduct

False Statements and/or Misleading and Deceptive Conduct covers any statement published by an organisation digitally, which legally can include those made by 3rd parties with out a SMPdisclosing otherwise. This is relevant to QUT as they allow 3rd parties to post on their Facebook page.

Scenario 2
A past employee working for QUT PR department with access to QUT's Facebook page's password posts on the QUT Facebook  age that Easter holidays is a week early. A student sees this and believes it, misses an in-class exam due to their belief the class was the next week, fails their degree and then sues QUT for falsely failing the student demanding monetary repercussion. To avoid such a problem QUT's SMP requires their Facebook page to be non-representative of QUT's course structure or other calender related structures.

I am not going to go any further in depth about how QUT could be exploited with out its SMP s I have made my point apparent, with out an SMP they can be made liable for things that are out of their direct control. In conclusion their SMP should be aimed at negating all liabilities from student and staff contact with the organisation through social media.

Expanding on Dell's social technologies

If you have read my previous blog I covered Dell's Enterprise 2.0 implementation, Idea Storm. This week I am going to investigate in more depth on how Dell's Enterprise 2.0 has an impact on marketing and sales of Dell products. There are four sub-categories I will be covering: how Dell derives customer insight, how Dell uses social technologies for marketing communication/interaction, how Dell generates and fosters sale leads, and how dell uses social commerce.

Customer Insight

Researching Dell's enterprise and social technologies I can confidently claim that Dell's Enterprise 2.0 focus is to gain Customer Insight. As previously mentioned in earlier posts Idea Storm allows concerned customers to provide input on how the future of Dell products. This insight is to the benefit of Dell as it allows them to change their product to meet demand with less focus on market analysis and more focus on customer demands.

Marketing Communication and Interaction

Dell's marketing communication and interaction is a core focus of their social technologies, evidence behind this would be Dell's Facebook Page where they advertise Dell and also interact with their followers with posts. This communicates their product to consumers who are interested and allows them to interact with staff, ask questions, etc. This benefits Dell as they can get their product marketed directly to the consumers they want, without having to spend money on conventional marketing that reaches less of their ideal market.

Fostering Sale Leads

Dell as of 2012 had the third biggest market share of any personal computer manufacturer, against heavy competition from HP and Lenovo. Some of the success in staying in the top 5 for market share over the years can be attributed to Dell changing with the times to support user interaction. It is not directly clear how Dell's enterprise 2.0 implementation is used to impact sales leads. Beyond advertising their new products on social networks and on their website, Dell does not actively push for sales leads as they push for customer insight or marketing interaction. Sales leads are a subtle side-effect from the other components of Dell's Value Levers. Arguably fostering strong relationships with their user base through IdeaStorm, Dell is able to secure sales leads with technical users upon release of new products.

Social Commerce

The social commerce aspect of Dell's marketing and sales enterprise technologies is not as pronounced as some of the previous technologies but it is still accounted for by Dell. Dell links from their social networks sales that appear on their company website that has a shopping cart for product purchase direct from the manufacturer. This is beneficial to Dell as they can recommend this medium as the best way to purchase Dell products giving them the most profit as they don't have to sell their products to retailers who buy at a lower price than consumers.

Summary

In conclusion Dell benefits greatly from Enterprise 2.0 in the aspect of Marketing and Sales through the use of gaining customer insight, marketing communication and interaction, fostering sales leads and social commerce. Not only have these technologies allowed Dell to remain competitive but they also allow Dell to understand their customer base properly.

Dell and the Escapist, Social Technology used efficiently

Social networks and other social technologies are on the rise within cutting edge companies around the world. The focus is to bring together employees to work more efficiently with greater production per group of employees. A good indicator of the popularity of the enterprise 2.0 revolution is the amount of companies adopting these technologies. An expert in the area, Mel Duvall writes for CioZone, a website that specialises in networking for IT leadership. In the articles, the author's found that 64% of companies in the united states of america use Web 2.0 Technologies within their enterprises. Mel continues in more detail the type of technologies, 

Those technologies (Web 2.0 Technologies) range from Web Services to blogs, wikis, social networking, podcasts, and instant messaging/ presence applications. Mel Duvall - CioZone

Mel goes on to list the percentage of respondents who say they are using or implementing Enterprise 2.0 Technologies,

• Web Services - 78%    

• Instant Messaging/Presence - 64% 

• Collective Intelligence - 60% 

• Wikis - 60% 

• RSS - 56% 

• Blogs - 53% 

• Podcasts - 53% 

• Tagging - 50% 

• Social Networking - 48% 

• P2P - 45% 

• Rich Client Technologies - 44% 

• Mashups - 42% 

• Semantic Technologies - 39% 

• 3D Web -37%

 Mel Duvall - CioZone

From the above findings we can deduce that social technologies of all types are vastly popular, with web services being the most popular. Web services are indicatively critical to a company that wants to expand its social technology presence.

To get a better look at how corporations use Social Technologies to their advantage, is to analyse a few examples according to the Wikinomics business model. That is the aspects of Peering, Being Open, Sharing and Acting Global.

Escapist Magazine is a online magazine that posts articles and videos that review games and movies, discuss social issues that are relevant to gamers/geeks, and discuss political issues that impact the audience of the magazine. The online community is kept alive by its busy forums which discuss the previously mentioned topics along with many other off-topic items. The site is made profitable from its advertisements aimed at the gamer/geek audience which flock to the site for their interesting articles.

Peering

The site's customer base, the visitors can engage in discussion facilitated by the staff of the website, or peer users. Such discussion devices are personal messages, comments, polls, all of which help bring the community into a strong discussion over the topics brought up daily. The company uses popular forum discussions and often tasks their article or video writers to target important issues with their customer base. As an example the popular desire for two of the companies most watched video reviews to get together to co-produce a video, brought together a collaborative series that was well praised on their forum.

Being Open

The magazine works with its community to let them know when new articles or video series are on their way. It keeps a close relationship with their user base, letting them know that first they are a company and need to make money. But they do not let this hamper their focus of creating active, engaging discussion in a clean and nice community, which they structure. Ranking their users highly in their priorities, it allows them to successfully use this connection to grow their customer base, and along with it their profitability.
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Sharing

Escapist has free giveaways to its customers to build interest in their events such as the EscapistExpo and their online store. In which members of the website get a discount. Such use of sharing fits perfectly with their online magazine structure.

Acting Global

The website is based in America, but most of its members are from a diversity of english speaking countries. Generally most users are from North America, Europe and Australia (source, user created survey). Thusly the magazine is acting global, as it is a website, it is available anywhere that has an internet connection.

Dell is a electronics manufacturer, specialising in producing laptops. As a company going through the expensive process of bringing products from design, through to production line, it is very important for Dell to gauge what their customers would like in a product. To better understand their customer base Dell launched Dell IdeaStorm. Idea Storm aims at collecting ideas from customers, refining them and then finally integrating them into their own designs to deliver a product that users will (hopefully) enjoy. To get an idea of the numbers behind the IdeaStorm Dell claims that: 19,766 ideas have been submitted; with over 742,210 votes submitted on them and almost 100,000 comments on these ideas, bringing together a refined total of 541 ideas implemented since the conception of the idea.

Peering

Dell produces good products through collaborating with their technical users through their social technologies.

Being Open

The entire idea of Dell's Idea Storm is to increase an open trust with its user base as they can communicate their wants and needs to the Dell developers benefiting both parties. Through their strong feed back and discussions Dell hopes to create trust with their customers.

Sharing

Dell facilitates sharing of intellectual property through their brainstorming sessions with developers and customers. Where ideas are passed back and forth on the structure of dell computing, what features Dell would like improved and how customers would like to improve them. This is quite open for a company delivering a product, and quite unique. It has certainly helped Dell foster both a relationship with technical users and increase their products growth as they are released with more features people desire.

Acting Global

Idea Storm is available to any customer of Dell products who speak english, while this may be a slight limitation, Dell products are not often sold in countries that don't speak english. Dell's global activity meet its social needs perfectly as it reaches its entire user base with the option to communicate with the developers of the products they use.

Summary

In summary of the two companies investigated, both use different means of communication with their customers to improve their product significantly. Social technology is a powerful force in regards to building relationships and trust with users.