Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

Accenture show the ROI of Social Business

A very detailed case study from Accenture has caught my eye – it goes into great depth about their enterprise 2.0 project and shows in detail the ROI of social business potential. I won’t go into detail here about it – you can read a great overview at Gautam Ghosh’s blog post “ROI of Enterprise 2.0” and at Accenture “Collaboration 2.0 – A Game-Changing ‘Social Strategy’ That Radically Evolved Our Employee-Client Ecosystem

Hard Data Cost Savings
What struck me was this – they have hard data on reaping cost savings – 20 million minutes of company-standard monthly VoIP audio/video usage; 5,000 annual video conferencing meetings, extensive use of TelePresence. This very much reminded me of a project I formed at Cisco just after the dot.com crash where we used Video and web conferencing to save hard cash savings but found it difficult to quantify in a way that could convince the naysayer. Nice to see the technology coming through nearly ten few years after with big numbers.

Employee Satisfaction Up
Next gain Accenture report is employee satisfaction up – Enterprise 2.0 and Internal Communications are the best bed fellows and here’s the facts. Some nice quotes here too:

“I found the expert in 15 minutes versus two days.”

“Microblogging helps me connect to the experts. It doesn’t limit me … …. Everybody’s opinion counts.”

Customer Satisfaction Up
Finally Accenture talks about keeping their clients happy – what better aim can there be for a project?

Enhanced ability to staff global teams with the right skills at the right time during critical junctures in client projects.

Just Touching the Social Business Surface
These are great gains and the project sounds like a really enjoyable one to work on. I still think that it just touches the surface when it comes to both mapping out and achieving the potential of Enterprise 2.0 in creating the real ROI of social business. For an idea of what this might look like, please check out my work on the Social Business Scorecard. Accenture have mapped against basically 3 key areas, what might it look like if a company started that holistic mapping across the enterprise?

Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles Intranet

UBM Case Study shows cash benefits of social media

Great case study on UBM – United Business Media from Forrester on UBM’s use of Enterprise Social media / Social Business software: Case Study: United Business Media Taps Social Computing To Boost Collaboration And Savings

UBM use Jive SBS as their social media platform and after a couple of roadbumps demonstrated tangible hard cash benefits of social media and of employee satisfaction. In the latter the site has become the de facto place to find information:

Today the UBM community directory is the best and most up-to-date central source of information available to employees within the disparate operating companies and is widely used by the companies’ various HR teams
(See my previous blogs talking about the end of the trad intranet).
On the $65 billion question – this stuff is generating money in terms of increased innovation and driving down costs by pooling of buying resources:
Some of the more tangible measures have been hard savings where companies have
joined together to negotiate better terms from suppliers and a rough estimate that 7% to 10% of usage has driven new innovation in the business leading to top- or bottom-line growth.
Be good to get hard ROI figures on this but this study is significant. In sum, social software in the enterprise is transforming the intranet, the way people work and is generating money. We’re going to see a lot more of these types of studies. When it happens it will be what Moore has called the  ‘big whoosh’ – the sound when everyone scrambles to catch up.
Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0

Of Church & Flu – 2 new social media case studies

Social Media Case Study Hot List New Additions

New social media case studies

Flu Shirts – great guerilla case study on SEO and undergoundblackhat tactics: Forums, Twitter and Forbes

My Church – what a good Christian can do with an annual budget of $225 and help in High places:

Website 17,539 unique visitors; 31,529 visitors, 107,726 pageviews YouTube 17,540 views since March 25, 2008 Blip.tv 19,288 views Vimeo 3357 views Flickr 71,264 views since November 2007

Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

Social Media Case Study 4 + 2 Tools

Added to the Social Media Case Study ‘The Hot List’ – 4 new Social Media Case Studies and 2 new tool/app case studies that I found interesting

Bacardi – using Facebook to reach Irish punters and get them drinking Bacardi via a compo. n.b, integration with Facebook API re tagging & photos.

National Express & Silverpop – e-mail marketing in conjunction with social networks – National Express cited (but what about the major TV ad campaign?)

Embarq – conservative telecoms company overcomes the hurdles and battles with negative customer feedback via social media – esp videos (links don’t work – I think the slideshare is to this Slideshare).

Radvision & PixelPoint Press – Corporate blogs, Communities and Twitter (Slideshare)

Publius Project is an effort of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society – uses Drupal for new portal, replacing WordPress.

Corvu “Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage”. Differentiating between public, team and enterprise Wikis, looks and governance and use of Wiki as KM.

Categories
Case Study Featured Articles

7 Social Media Case Studies Updates + Staff Guidelines!

Some brand spanking new social media case studies added to the Social Media Case Study Hot List and a link to a blog with 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines!

BBC and Blogs – Reportr.net How they are central to what the BBC does. Full report needs subscription at: iFirst, but article interesting.

Urbane Apartments – using social media to reach ‘millenials’. No one cared about Urbane so they went for it with Facebook, MySpace, blogs, Flickr, Twitter etc and it worked.

FT.com – not really social media but worthwhile study on increasing subscriptions by mix of free and paid for (yes do keep the free stuff pleeze!)

Paganum Farmer’s Market – showing how a very traditional sector, UK farming can use social media to increase sales with Twitter, Facebook and blogs

1:10 Protect the Human – Amnesty International’s social media awareness and action campaign for International Women’s Day to stop violence against women. Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Bebo, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace.

Freemium and Corey Smith – short but sweet on how Mr Smith gives away his music on his site and sales go up as a result on iTunes

Guidelines and Governance

40 Social Media Staff Guidelines – Laurel Papworth has compiled a mega list of staff guidelines on social media. 40 ways to avoid HR-Hot water!

Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0

Motorola and TransUnion Social Media Case Studies added

2 new case studies added to the Case Study Hot List:

TransUnion – SocialText using SocialText as Wiki and IM in an environment with SharePoint. Best aspect – question asking to groups. Claimed total savings of $5-8M. Hard data on this would be v useful – savings can be slippery – real earnings or benefits are far harder to show…

Motorola’s Intranet 2.0 IT success “70,000 people using it every day, including partners. The company now has 4,400 blogs and 4,200 wiki pages and uses, among other technologies, social bookmarking and tagging by Scuttle and social networking by Visible Path.” 

“I don’t beat Nokia or Cisco or Siemens by having better buildings or shinier cafeterias. Companies are human beings solving problems or responding to crises by working with each other. If you can make your company less of a top-down company at a higher speed than your competition, you have just kicked their butts.” 

Motorola VP Toby Redshaw. 

Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0

4 Hot new sexy social media case studies

Doritos Positive Brand Hijacking – It takes 2 to Tango and Doritos prove this by encouraging slow sexy dancing, in the streets, plus 33 Facebook Groups, 20,000 members, 240 blogs, 200,000 views on YouTube plus $600K media!

Dell make the Word of Mouth Marketing book – ya, ya, ya, Dell hear bad things on a blog, eventually put things right. (I bought HP after buying Dell and ringing customer support.)

Dell and Twitter – update on continuing sales and Twitter featuring a compo to drive them even higher. (Are peeps mad?)

Twitter as a scalability case study. This is cool and different – it’s about Twitter’s architecture and well techie. I like it.

 

All added to the Hot List – and I will sort this out into a more complete and searchable resource

Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0

New Social Media Case Studies

Newly added to Social Media Case Studies the Hot List – I really must sort this list out soon!

Namecheap O’Reilly study on using Twitter to drive sales

Auto-Transporter.com not really social media but good article on usability and doubling conversion rates by using ClickTale to gather the right data and making changes to forms

No Reservations / SnapMyLife – neat study on using mobile photo sharing to keep a TV show’s audience engaged

Schindler’s ‘Killer Elavators’ not really a case study but a very good example of where open communications using social media inside and outside the corporation would be kind of useful

Barack Obama Strategy Slideshare on the Obama campaign – neat round up of what was used when and by whom in the campaign

Australian Bushfires humanity at its best and most ugliest – Twitter, mashups and mobs on Facebook

Webinars and lead generation. Are they worth the effort? Yes! Says Eric Glazer and he has numbers to back it up

Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

How to make a bean online!

Cat Poo Coffee

kopi-luwakAs promised on Twitter, this blog entry is all about coffee beans and how one business is making money online selling them. Two days ago I started to Google for some coffee beans as I was getting low and quite fancied trying some ‘cat poo’ coffee, Kopi Luwak. A few Googles soon put me off that idea as it was around £50 for a small 50g bag. However, I did still need coffee so started to look at some sites.

Not all like the High Road coffee shops

The searches revealed a mirror of the high street coffee shops – lots of them and a high degree of uniformity in the coffees they provided and the design of the sites. One site stood out though and that was HasBean. What I liked about it was the range of coffees and most particularly the fact that someone who obviously knows a lot about coffee was writing the copy for the site. Here’s an example:

In the cup, I got fruit salad sweets on the front end (for those who don’t know these are very sweet fruit chews), and a lovely acidity to match that is not over powering but completely in balance with the whole cup. This is what this coffee does best, it is balanced in the cup. This  develops into a winey, complex, rich flavour, followed by a sweet sweet aftertaste that just carries on and on and on.

And not only do we get splendid reviews, we also get a history of the plantation, a map of its location showing where the beans grow and pictures of the growers. El Salvador La Ilusion Cup of Excellence No.1.

Mr HasBean on Twitter

Back at Twitter I commented on Has Bean, remarking that their site stood out over the rest of the paid search companies. Noticing new followers I checked to see who they were and saw a certain @hasbean was in the list. Saying hello I asked Mr HasBean which bean he recommended and was informed that Cacheoria Canario is amazing coffee and not only that, there’s a video on it! http://www.inmymug.com/?p=91

Perfect brew

dsc00277
My Purchase from HasBean

This I thought is impressive and promptly placed an order. HasBean has got all the ingredients for success:

  • Well designed, informative and easy to purchase e-commerce site
  • A blog connected to the site
  • Video blog on the beans
  • A Twitter profile offering personal advice on beans and coffee makers
  • An absolute passion for coffee 

A history of the bean

This is not the story of using the web to get rich quickly. The history of the company is heart-warming and hilarious with great tales of coffee roaster fires in the garage and cups of coffee for the local cops. What’s more, the more I look at the site the more I find and now I’ve enrolled on an online course on coffee in the form of e-mail tutorials.

Maxing the video

The site, service and the owner Steve Leighton are an object lesson on getting it right. The only thing I’d advise would be to make more of the video. Years of sending sales videos inside the enterprise taught me that short is best and these would be my tips for maximising the video element:

  • Keep the video to 5 mins max
  • Edit in any plantation or map pictures to break it up
  • Create a YouTube channel and post them there too (like Hot for Words!)
  • Embed the video in the main HasBean site and have links from the individual bean’s section

True Enthusiasts

Before anyone asks, I’m just a happy punter who likes his coffee. I’ve gotten to like it even more because of the web and true enthusiasts. like Steve. On that note, here’s one of my favourites which taught me a lot about getting the best from my La Pavoni:

 

 

Phew, this is thirsty work, anyone for a cuppa?

Categories
Case Study Enterprise 2.0

New Social Media Case Studies added

The Rose Project – Dublin based not-for-profit using Twitter and Blogs to help support charity work in Africa

TriWest Healthcare Alliance  – e-mail/video campaign raises awareness with over 1 million people watching video on support for troops. 1st use of social media by TriWest – raising $ with social media.

BBQAddicts.com an enquiry via Twitter starts global viral web campaign to bring home the bacon

IZEA Kmart use whole range of Social Media Marketing tools/platforms inc Twitter and A-List bloggers to get their message through and raise brand awareness. Good range of metrics to back it up.

CoffeeGroundz Mr Tweet shows off how Twitter doubled the clientele in a Houston coffee shop

Carnival Cruise Lines using Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to build brand and customer loyalty

Get them all at Social Media Case Studies – the Hot List