The ROI Calculation of Social Media Tool Implementation for JetBlue

Based on the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, a significant 83% of marketers indicate that they believe social media is important for businesses.  But do they know whether social media is helping them to gain real profits?

Let’s find out utilising the Return on Investment (ROI) calculation method.

Return on investment calculation is widely used by organisations to determine the amount of profit received considering the investment input.

It has always been a challenge for businesses to determine the ROI of enterprise 2.0 implementation; since many benefits generated by social media are less tangible hence the method of ROI calculation is not always obvious.

And that’s why after analyse and asked thousands of marketing professionals, it has found that the top question social media marketers want answered from is how they can measure the effect of social media marketing on their businesses.

Today we will have a look at a ROI case study about JetBlue provided by Nucleus Research.

About JetBlue

JetBlue is an American low-cost airline incorporated at 1998; and serves 78 cities with 800 daily flights. JetBlue is well-known for its affordable price, award-winning customer service and free inflight entertainment.  JetBlue is a true customer centric business which means they mainly relied on word of mouth and for its customers to tell others about the airline as the business’s marketing style.

At August 2011, JetBlue decided to have a specific promotion team to engage customers on social media, and where else would they find a platform allowing customers to talk about JetBlue whenever and wherever they want?  Of course it is social media!

JetBlue's Enterprise 2.0 Challenge

JetBlue has been trying to engage customers on Facebook and other social media platforms previously.  But it has found social media implementation can be exhausted and involve many unnecessary work.  The business was craving for a more streamlined and templated method to manage social media marketing and communications.

After thorough research, the business has selected Salesforce Buddy Media as its social media marketing application because of its strengths in creating and managing Facebook tabs.

Benefits of Social Media Management Tool Implementation

With the help of Salesforce Buddy Media Management tool, JetBlue has gain the following benefits:

Increase social platform implementation efficiency for better promotion execution
JetBlue doesn't have to create microsites and content each time for new services or campaigns, the business can easily set up different social media campaign pages utilising one controlling system.

Increase productivity of the JetBlue promotion team
The social media controlling system also allowed JetBlue to set up different campaign to start at different date and time, the auto execution process has made the promotion team’s work much easier hence increasing their productivity.

Increase social media implementation visibility
JetBlue has increased its social media implementation visibility by accessing to social media metric monitoring and analytics. It has become easier for JetBlue to quickly understand the reach, volume and impact of an online campaign.

Key Cost of implementing social media utilising Salesforce Buddy Media
the initial and ongoing costs of Salesforce Buddy Media software for a total of 3 years has been included for the key cost:
Software license subscription fees
Initial consulting and training fees

ROI Calculation

When talking about profit gain, there are always tangible gain which contains the measurable profit, and the intangible gain containing hidden and unobvious profit which can be really difficult to measure.

Tangible Return
The reduction in creative services costs JetBlue has realised
Increase of productivity within the promotion team driven by time savings

The tangible returns were calculated using estimates of the average annual fully loaded cost of a JetBlue employee within the promotion team, the time saved by employee and the amount of employment saving for JetBlue has been used to calculate the benefit.

Intangible Return
increase productivity in other part of the business because of the less input for online media management

ROI Result

ROI of JetBlue’s Salesforce Media Buddy implementation is 140% based on calculation.

This case study looks like a great example of successful implication of Enterprise 2.0 tools considering it has taken consideration of tangible and intangible benefits.  Furthermore, it has provided reasonable calculation method utilising employee’s salary and calculate the direct saving JetBlue have had by paying for less people and less hours.

Personally, I do not think the ROI calculation is very accurate since it has made many assumptions and use only estimates to calculate the benefit returned.

So Should Business Calculate ROI for Social Media Tools Implementation?

ROI calculation for social media implementation can be tricky, and that’s why there are so many technology professionals are going against it.

Brian Halligan:  "What's interesting about social media marketing is that it's really about the thickness of your brain, not the thickness of your wallet."

Andrew McAfee: "Measure what you can measure ... and don't try to hang a dollar figure on it."

Although there are a lot of controversies over the ROI calculation for social media implementation, and it is difficult to calculate accurate ROI, but still, which business is going to implement a new technology if they cannot see the benefits?

Thank you for visiting my blog, and feel free to leave any comments!

Social Media Monitoring Tools: The Way to Find Out Enterprise 2.0 Performances for Siemens

Just like any other marketing strategies, online social networking for businesses will need to be monitored and evaluated so that they know what people says about their businesses.

There are countless tools online providing social media services; which many have been used as business intelligence to identify, predict and respond to customer’s behaviour.

Siemens is a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, operating in the fields of industry, energy and healthcare. It is a huge business globally, but let’s have a look at Siemens’ social media performance utilising online social monitoring tools.

After performed a bit of research and look at what other users have said about each individual tools, I have decided to use Social Mention since it is free while offering great functions including analysing and measuring social media engagement for businesses.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a a free, real-time social media search and analysis web tool. It provides real-time data and analysis, customised advance search features enabling the business to retrieve and analyse data from multiple media platforms.

Functions and Tools

Quick Search
Any user can type in keywords and quickly search for mentions across the board.

Advance Search

The advance search page not only allowing users to search mentions from videos, comments, blogs, events and etc., it also allow the use of Booleans such as AND, OR and NOT to specified search terms further and select mentions from different locations, dates and languages.

Quick overview of social network performance
After completing a search, there are a few useful tools on Social Mention helping users to understand the performance of business on social media platforms.


Strength
Figure determining how likely would your business be discussed in social media
Sentiment
Figure representing the ratio between positive/neutral and negative mentions.
Passion
Figure determining whether the business has passionate followers and commenters.
Reach
Figure indicate the range of influence.

Search founds

After performing a few searches for the keyword "Siemens" on Social Mention, I noticed the following facts:

Many of the results returned are in different languages, be able to select different languages means businesses can monitor their social media performance within different regions.



The social media performance figures differed depends on the time interval selected, the date selection for search would be a great tool for businesses to track their performance from time to time online.



Recommendation made for Siemens based on the analysis of Social Mentions

Because the search result showing that majority of mentions are neutral and the top user is Siemens itself, it is obvious that most information available on social platforms are posted by Siemens and related business units. 

After a bit of research, I have found that a lot of the mentions in the search result are corporate related information such as Siemens company events, CEO speech and etc.

I would definitely recommend Siemens to actively engage their customers to get the conversation traveling both ways. It would be a great idea to encourage customers to post their genuine opinion about Siemens and its products online.

Other Potential Benefits of Monitoring Social Media
Besides directly knowing what customer thinks about your company and its products, monitoring corporate social media also has many other potential benefits; I have just named a few as shown below:

* Data collected from social media platforms can serve as great information source for business environmental scanning; while identifying latest environmental needs, competitor information, customer requirement, crisis situation and etc.

* Social media monitoring could enhance market research on the client demographic, cultural and other business related aspects.

* Analysis of data collected from social media can be used to help to make decision on the business strategy to better engage customers and improve brand images.

* Monitoring social media could also indicates the business the relationship between the revenue and its online reputation; so that it can make decision on the investment for Enterprise 2.0 implementation.

PlayStation Blog - Not Just Another Boring Corporate Blog

For those who remembered, we have talked about the benefit that Enterprise 2.0 can bring for social-sector organisations.

Web 2.0 tools such as microblogs, blogs and wikis could support strong interaction between businesses and consumers if implemented appropriately.

Today let’s have a look what blogs can do for the professional service sector.

First I want to make this clear.  Although blog can be a powerful communication tool that build brand awareness, nurture engagement and gather opinions, but not every businesses can utilise this tool appropriately to create value. And that’s why many businesses have poorly developed blogs with barely any visitors and even fewer comments.

Initially, corporate blogs are just blogs managed by businesses to share information about their products and services. But for those who have posted beyond boring marketing material and cut/paste media release information, they have taken initiative for the occurrence of bidirectional information exchange on their corporate blogs.

Expectedly, the best corporate blogs are dominated by the IT sector. We will take PlayStation blog as an example.

PlayStation (PS) is a well-known video game console released by Sony date back to 1986.

Since 2007, it also published a corporate blog to successfully engage customers, promote market sales and improve product development.



The PS blog has divided itself into two sections (as the green arrow has indicated on the above image), both strongly supporting customer engagement.

Engage customers while promoting market sales

The “PlayStation.Blog” part contains exciting PS product news, latest game information, gaming industry news and official blog cast to showcase products and services.

By deriving customer comments and encouraging marketing communication, PS has not only engaged customers to participate in the business activities; but also utilised the blog as a marketing tool to promote its sales.

Engage customers while improving product development

The “PS.Blog.Share” section provides a space for users to formally submit their ideas for improving PS products. The submitted ideas will enter a ranking system where other game fans can vote up or down these ideas. The most popular idea up to today has received over 45,000 votes. 

These innovative and serious feedbacks have become great treasure for Sony PS, the highly voted ideas represent what the customer truly wants and hence can be really helpful in improving product design and development.

It’s said that blogs are the tools born for consumers and used for businesses. As a result, businesses should really encourage and allows customer to add value to the company with user-produced content and knowledge sharing; just like what PS has done.

Thank you and feel free to comment on my post if you have any opinions/ideas :)

Raised More Than 2 Million Dollars Online? It Would Never Happened Without Social Media!

I have previously talked about how social networking tools can be helpful for individual and businesses.

Well, they can also be extremely useful and provide unique opportunities for social sectors; including non-for-profit organisations.

First let’s take a look at Oaktree Foundation.

(Thousands of Oaktree volunteers have standed together to create this message across Manly beach)

Oaktree is an Australian charity aiming to end world poverty.  It has started to collect millions of poverty donations for third world countries since 2003; and has held many well-known events including “Live below the line” and “Schools4Schools” programs.

The Significant Power of Social Technologies for Oaktree

Just like the benefits that social media tools have for private businesses.  Implementing enterprise 2.0 can also be extremely helpful for charity organisations such as Oaktree foundation.

Mobilise resources

As a charity, Oaktrees’ majority mission is to gather financial and personnel resources to help the people in need. Like most social-sector organisations, Oaktree collects donations and always need volunteers to carry out its missions.

Find Volunteers

Through utilising the connection power of social media tools, real opportunities arise for Oaktree to attract long term workforce support from the public.

As Australia's first and largest youth-run international aid organisation, the entire foundation is run and led by young people and has more than 100,000 volunteers aged from 16 to 26 nationally. 

Being a foundation aims to attract young volunteers, social media platform is such a powerful tool for recruiting; since the younger generation truly embraces the social media. 

Obtain Donations

Oaktree has created an online fundraising campaign called “lived below the line” and has raised more than 2 million dollars utilising the power of social media.  

This online campaign challenges individual online users to spend less than $2 dollars a day on food for 5 days in a row and post their experiences online while attracting online donations.  

Fundraisers and donors are connected via different online social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube Channel.

Potential Power of Social technologies for Oaktree

Other than helping social-sector organisations to collect human and financial resources, different social tools were also known to be very helpful at information collection, mission execution and organisational operation improvement. 

Collect information and insights

Oaktree is very active on both Facebook and Twitter.  The Facebook group has received more than 10,000 likes itself.  The Oaktree Twitter also has more than 5000 followers. 

Right now, Oaktree is still only using these platforms to advertise about activities and provide update on events.  But there is definitely great potential for Oaktree to utilise the social power to collect information and ideas from the online community.

Possibly Organisation Wide Improvement

Social media tools could also help Oaktree to improve internal organisational collaboration and build up appropriate leadership structures.  They can also be used to generate appropriate organisation cultures.

While living in a society loves online communication, social-sector organisations should really embrace the power of social media; or else they will miss out on the endless opportunities that the social media brings.

Leave your comment if you would like to share your point of view on the post topic :)  Thank you!

Can the risk of implementing Enterprise 2.0 be mitigated?

Enterprise 2.0 represents the use of emergent social software platforms within businesses, organisations and their clients. 

Social platforms can gather thoughts, opinions and other information internally within the organisation; and allow businesses to react simultaneously. It is believed that Enterprise 2.0 can help businesses to produce better goods and services, solve problems, and exploit opportunities.

And then it leaves us one question to consider:

There might be enormous amount of benefit for businesses to implement Enterprise 2.0; but can its risks be mitigated?

Today I will discuss one of the most looked-upon risks, the legal risk for utilising social media tools by a government department - Department of Health and Ageing (DOHA)

About DOHA

DOHA is a dynamic Australian Government Department that seeks to promote, develop, and fund health and aged care services for the Australian public. It leads the development of Australia’s health and aged care system by providing expert policy advice, analysis, program advice and other services to our Ministers, federal and state government agencies, and external stakeholder and clients. 

To achieve the aim of providing easy and high quality services to the public; DOHA has developed its commitments with input from customers, business partners, community representatives and departmental staff.  It has also been constantly reviewing and improving its services based on the feedback and comments from communities (including online) and other government agencies.

Possible Legal Issues For Implementing Enterprise 2.0

Discrimination Concern within the Hiring Process

There were plenty of stories on the news about recruiters rejecting applicants based on the the information they have found on job seekers' social media profiles. As a government department providing trusting health services, it certainly wouldn't want to have anything to do with discrimination.  Hence it has to be extra careful to not discriminate employees or violate any anti-discrimination laws by evaluating employees' social media content.

Loss and Disclosure of Confidential Information

DOHA employees have access to confidential and sometimes sensitive information of its clients.  Because the fact that social media is a channel not protected by typical information security safeguards, it would be easy for employees to "overshare" information without the presence of strict regulations and rules. Leaking sensitive information not only could cause harm for clients; but also can constitute a breach of confidential information.

Intellectual Property and Media Risks

Obviously what employees of DOHA posted on social media platforms could be seen as a statement made by DOHA officially.  Hence it is essential for employees to understand the right way to deal with others' intellectual property.  The infringement or violation of intellectual property rights could occur when employees post other's work online without permission. 

Solution

For a government department such as DOHA; it is definitely necessary to perform tasks to eliminate the risk of utilising social media.  

Identify and Quantify the risks

First, DOHA should conduct risk assessment to establish how it will use and be affected by social media.

Write policy and regulations to encompass social media and implement safeguards

Based on the risk assessment result, it should then create policy to control the use of social media to avoid risks. Basically policy should be written to ensure its employees know when, what, where and how to post appropriate information on social network platforms.

References:

http://www.acegroup.com/us-en/assets/ace-progress-report-social-media.pdf

http://www.bits.org/publications/security/BITSSocialMediaJun2011.pdf

http://www.crowehorwath.com/folio-pdf/TR11908_SocialMediaWhitePaper.pdf

The implementation of Enterprise 2.0 by government departments

As a government department employee, I have observed the great impact that internet technologies have had on government organisations. 

Today, many government departments are utilising social media as an internet-based tool for sharing and discussing information; and I would like to talked about how the Enterprise 2.0 tools has helped different government departments to improve its customer services quality.

Thanks to the 2nd generation of Web, today 80% of online users interact with social networks regularly. 

Research shows that internet users spent approximately 1/5th of time online using online social networking platform and create new information. 

The flourish of social media means that information get created faster and spread faster. 


Unlike a decade ago, the government clients have much more power to affect businesses. Millions of people share their thoughts and views about government services online despite the department like it or not. 

Social media is a double sword, it amplifies both positive and negative media effect because the easiness of information publishing, sharing and consuming within the group. And many government departments have chosen to collect data and information constantly via Enterprise 2.0 tools; and act appropriately to adapt to the current environment.

Since social media has the potential to create large and powerful networks by allowing many people to instantly and conveniently communicate at anytime from anywhere; these technologies can help to generate rich new forms of consumer insights and allow government employees to provide feedback instantly; at lower cost and faster than conventional communication methods. 

With the help of Enterprise 2.0 tools, government departments can gain access to more realistic feedback from customer; which enables employees to provide better services based on truthful customer feedback.  Government can also publish and transmit messages to its customers quickly; this will increase the positive exposure of organisations on social media; which could enhance different department's brand images and service quality.
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A list of Enterprise tools utilised by government to and their webpages:

Facebook
http://australia.gov.au/news-and-media/social-media/facebook

Blogs
http://australia.gov.au/news-and-media/social-media/blogs

Twitter
http://australia.gov.au/news-and-media/social-media/twitter

Youtube
http://australia.gov.au/news-and-media/social-media/youtube

Flickr
http://australia.gov.au/news-and-media/social-media/flickr

RSS Feed
http://australia.gov.au/news-and-media/social-media/rss-feeds

Podcasts
http://australia.gov.au/news-and-media/social-media/podcasts

The Benefit of Using Web 2.0 & Pinterest & Habbo

Web 2.0, also known as the 2nd generation of Web, focused on the ability for internet users to collaborate and share information online.

There are over 1.5 billion social networking (Web 2.0) users globally.

As a full time university student and employee, I believe Web 2.0 tools are very beneficial and have helped greatly with increasing my personal productivity.

Benefits of Using Web 2.0 Tools

I have been used many social media tools online; including Facebook, Blogger, Wiki and etc.

These tools have helped and encouraged me to:

Communicate efficiently, effectively online

Collaborate online for study and work purposes

Receive up to date information quickly 

Utilise online user generated information and content

Build digital identity and reputation

Share living, studying and working experiences

Document thoughts, ideas and other information

Share information, content and knowledge

Take initiatives to start communities and groups

Join other’s communities and groups

Meet new friend and perform online networking

In summarisation, Web 2.0 tools have helped me to find interesting things to do, stay motivated and conduct lifelong learning.

Recently, I have tested out 2 social media tools that I haven't used previously; and would like to share the experience with you.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a social bookmarking website similar to Digg and StumbleUpon. Instead of asking users to write lengthy blog post and articles, Pinterest is highly visual focused. Pinterest is currently used by for personal, professional and business purposes and it is growing rapidly.

Pinterest is like a microblogging platform for photo and video sharing; where users can view and create categorised Pinboards to pin photos, videos clips and to share with others.  Users can pin images and video clips to express personal styles; and most importantly to share and talk about interesting visual contents.

So if you simply like to share, discover and discuss images and videos in a billboard similar environment, then Pinterest will be the perfect choice for you!

Habbo

Habbo is an online virtual community mainly used by teens to meet new friends. Habbo is one of the successful Web 2.0 examples for combining social networking and gaming experience, so called gamification.

Like the famous gamified virtual community, Second Life, Habbo visualised the online communication by utilising avatar, virtual coins, virtual items and etc. But unlike Second Life, Habbo utilises pixeled graphic and text chats to ensure the speed and user experience.

Another special feature about Habbo is that it hires staff to serve as online ‘helper’, users can simply click a button to chat with a real person and reach for help.  I suppose all users on social platforms want to be accepted and involve in the community; and Habbo has definitely done great to make me feel welcomed and attached. 

So if you like to interact with people in a "simplified Second Life" environment; love to decorate your virtual room, dress up your avatar to the style, and not minding the pixeled graphical effect; then Habbo would definitely be my recommendation.

Thank you for visiting my blog.

Please leave your comment, or maybe you also want to recommend a few interesting online social media tools.