Category: Business design

An #epicfail attempt from CCD

Posted Jul.04, 2010 under Ideation platform

Update:
This press release tell me that CCD is planning to increase its spendings on social media. Hopefully, it will be put at the right places.

For those who have worked with me, know very well how passionate I get when it comes to crowd-sourcing. So you can imagine my delight when I saw someone talking about an ideation platform by Café Coffee Day on Twitter (@cafecoffeeday)! It’s called Saucerful of Ideas (kinda reminds of Saucerful of secrets by Pink Floyd). But anyhow, it turns out to be a very shabby effort at harnessing social media. I cannot find a single reason why CCD should pay money and time on this.

  • Firstly, login doesn’t work. The banner doesn’t change and keeps the text in the back hidden all the time.
  • The View ideas page gives 404 error! It’s ok, if there are yet no ideas, but get your linking right guys!

  • But wait a second! There are some ideas already. From the administrator himself! Check out the Share menu #epicfail.

  • The voting feature seems to be the only one working right. After voting it leads me to a page where I can see the percentage of votes for each option. This is a great opportunity but it needs to have more options. The popularity of those options, coupled with feedback on the dishes can then be send to the product development team so that they can realize what to change and what to keep.

Ok, so now after so many fuck ups I thought that maybe site is not yet ready for the public. But voila! It is being promoted there on the homepage menu of their corporate website.

Conclusion:
I really appreciate the effort CCD, but this is just highly uncool. I keep telling every brand manager that DO NOT do ‘funky and new’ social media techniques just because they are the in-thing. Are they actually required by your organisation? What are the business solutions you are trying to solve?

Blindly copying (and doing a horrible job at it) will not get you anywhere. If you are really serious about crowd-sourcing and want some good case studies I suggest you look at Starbucks and Dell.

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Customer support using online communities

Posted Feb.01, 2010 under Ideation platform, Slideshare, Support system
Customer support using online communities
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Brainstorming on Social CRM

Posted Jan.29, 2010 under Social CRM

A little brainstorming on customer support using online communities at the office. That little distortion / blob / rectangle on bottom left is my rendition of how a community support overlay should look like. Doesn’t look very good, does it? I guess I need to work on my drawing skills, eh? :)

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Can enterprise micro-blogging actually work?

Posted Jan.15, 2010 under Enterprise 2.0

You open the internet, and it’s everywhere. It’s Twitter this and Twitter that. Why has it become so popular in the recent years, achieving a staggering growth of 500%?

It’s not because it is cool or it’s a cool piece of technology. It’s caught on because it’s changed the way we communicate on the internet for the better. It has made us move away from emails and telephones which are good only for 1-1 conversations to a more open, simple and faster platform. Let’s take a look at how micro-blogging can fit into an enterprise’s internal communication channels.

Current communications
Phone calls and emails take up most of our times, making it very easy for information to get lost; on top of it the closed communication structures hinder faster spread of information through the network. I mean seriously, how many times had you wait for days before the CEO can reach your mail in his inbox?

superchooha-enterprise-collaboration

Current innovations
New media platforms like blogs, wikis and IMs have definitely opened up new things but they all individually lack something or the other. It’s either poor communication [wikis] or less participation [blogs].

What we need
In the trend grows for dynamic and huge [yet decentralized] organizations, we need to find something which satisfies:

  • Simple, fast and secure collaboration
  • It is structured
  • Supports mobile platforms
  • Is an open platform (within only the enterprise of course)

Now, before you read on all skeptical of this; I want to stress that such communications cannot replace emails; but should be used to leverage old school channels.

Here are some ways in which micro-blogging can be embedded into an enterprise

Broadcasting system

If the CEO or head of a department needs to quickly send out a short message regarding a new resolution or maybe the new dish in the cafeteria? :)

Central and collaborative knowledge management

As the number of documents grows in the central repository, a micro-blogging platform can be used to quickly broadcast and index links to the repository (a wiki). One more problem that every organisation faces at every stage of development is training.
This requires finding the key experts and then disseminating to the newly inducted. These new guys can be allowed to see the social streams of these experts to gain valuable and quick real time information.

Bring conversations into the workflow

Would you like to create a wiki page for every small issue? Brainstorming and solving queries can be the biggest asset a communications channel can give to the business.

Analytics and security

Like everything online, these internal Microblogging platforms can be tracked down to the smallest details like who’s the most active learner? Who’s teaching the most? What knowledge is a department lagging in and who needs to be introduced into the stream to solve the same. And all this can be done behind the firewall, keeping company information safe and secure.

Conclusions

Enterprise Microblogging can transform your business workflow by faster spread of information, tracking and brainstorming on issues.

Challenges

Can this model work for smaller teams of 10-20 users?

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