Blog 4 - Informal Formality

When discussing the improvement of customer satisfaction through the use of social technology, telecoms are about the last organization to come to mind. The stereotypical "faceless, money-hungry, infuriating" communication giants that we can't avoid seems to go out the window once you take a look at Telstra's Exchange. Established in 2009, Exchange.telstra.com.au is Telstra's multifaceted blog, a platform in which the various parts of the company can post articles - and more importantly - where users can provide comments, ask questions and even post their own threads. 

Now featuring three main sections (plus an "all" page), consisting of a Technology Hub, Telstra news and Community [news], Exchange is a platform which allows the telecom giant to personalise itself in a professional manner which allows clearer channels of communication.

One of the big levers for Improvement in an organization using Social Technology, as established by McKinsey (2012),  is to established customer care via these social platforms. Telstra's blog allows the company to speak on a more informal and personal level about the issues that are important to them, and can convey news and information in a more local sense, rather than having to maintain their national profile.

Sharing the load through having a variety of posters also allows Telstra to humanise itself and better improve upon it's content delivery, and the site is full of links to their other support means, as well as featuring "Help" posts every so often.

By posting about their own products and services, Telstra is also able to derive customer insights and generate sales leads, in their own yard - so to speak. While return channel feedback on their blog is somewhat lacking, the occasional response does appear to give quality discussion.

While the blog isn't used in an inter-organizational sense, it does foster the publishing of posts by a wide variety of it's team, and appears to encourage people to write about their strength areas.

Overall, Telstra's Exchange blog is a powerful tool which allows a corporate giant to humanise itself, gaining a personal understanding of people as well as detailing it's customers on the going-ons around Australia in a more informal way not commonly seen by big companies.  

Blog 3 - Big Voices for Small Businesses

In last week's lecture, we discussed Social Technology Value Levers; functions which provide value to an organization via the use of Social media tools in various different forms. These can be divided into different categories, depending on their effect (these categories include: Product Development, Operations and Distribution, Marketing and Sales, Customer Support, and Business Wide Support). These value levers were established and detailed  in a report by the McKinsey Global Institute published in 2012. 

For a practical approach to how social techs can be utilized, we were to pick an organisation or business and apply one of the categories of levers. While I continued to think "big" in terms of companies that I could analyse, it wasn't until I was going down to have my weekly coffee with my Dad, that I realised that the solution was right under my nose.

Kobblers is a coffee shop just down the road from where I live, and was the first of it's kind to open on my side of the suburb in February of 2012 after a short revamp from the old, run-down corner store it previously was. Soon after, two more coffee shops opened up only a few streets away - spurring some healthy local competition. The new occupants are an alternative bunch, who like to live in the slower lane of life, embracing technology, environmentalism and most importantly, community. 

While they don't make a roaring trade as much outside of school hours - thanks to the two schools and kindergarten located nearby - there's always something going on down there. The cafe is a great source of local wisdom and interaction, with a community pin board, printer and local produce always on sale. Earlier this year saw the establishment of an art/book store out the back which follows a very similar feel to the cafe.

Scott, the owner and barista at Kobblers, is always looking for new ways to reach out to the community, as  well as ways of improving his company and the local community through new systems. The cafe has a Facebook page, although only has 280 likes, which considering the local population, density and demographics seems a little low. Most notably, the cafe features one of Brisbane's first BitCoin ATMs, which allows people to exchange real currency for the crypto equivalent, and offers a 10% discount at the cafe if paying via BitCoin. Scott also has a dedicated mobile phone for taking SMS orders to streamline the process (which he says is more commonly used in the mornings). There is Wifi for customers also.

While Kobblers is a great user of new social tools, I feel though that more could be done to better improve not just it's revenue, but also the community's interaction with the cafe. All of the McKinsey report sections could be of some use to the Cafe in some way, but Marketing and Sales appears as though it would have the biggest impact on the community-oriented cafe.

The Marketing and Sales driver contains four of the ten social tech levels, and these can each be applied.

Customer Insights
Social technology can be used to gain insight into the customers feelings towards business moves or products, and offers a more informal channel of communication between the two parties. As stated previously, Kobblers has a Facebook page, but thanks to a small user base coupled with a low level of activity (< 1 post per week), there is often little return channel communication. If they were to post more about local  products or promotions, and angle these posts towards looking to hear feedback, then they could cultivate their menu, and perhaps improve their brand identity.

Marketing Communication / Platform
 The page appears to be mainly for posting the big events that are happening every now and then. If they were to post more about the local produce they had on offer, offer deals on beverages, try to gain feedback on things, or use it as a platform for local events (using Facebook's event's feature), then they could better utilise Facebook as a business platform.

Using other tools like Twitter could also be used, to provide snapshots of the general goings on down there, or even allow customers to post orders before they get there, similar to how their SMS system works.

Generate Sales Leads
As part of Kobblers community atmosphere, they also like to culture relationships with vendors of local products, by advertising their products and featuring them at the cafe at reasonable or cheaper prices, often times providing customers with a chance to try something they don't normally.

While Kobblers maintains that they try to keep a formal approach to their vendors, it could be suggested that they widen their social technology scope to also try and approach a new variety of produce suppliers, in turn bringing the business to them, rather than having to go searching. This could be achieved by more openly displaying and discussing the featured products.

Social Commerce
Kobblers seems to have this down pat at the moment. With the use of crypto-currency and e-ordering, users can quickly and easily order and pay on their way past, saving them time - a great feature considering the cafe is located near a bus stop. Neither payment methods are openly advertised however, and I've heard numerous times people were quite surprised you options to. Perhaps Kobblers could look into 'referal' discounts, or Like-coupons - whereby you get a free/discounted coffee by liking certain statuses, or participating in community events.

Kobblers is a great local cafe, and while it may not be world renown, it satisfies the local atmosphere and community superbly by using new technologies not commonly found elsewhere. It could however, benefit far more if it utilized more effective advertising, marketing and discussion strategies, especially available on Social Media.

Blog 2: Striding into the Land of Unfamiliar Technologies

After a successful first blog, I was keen to start this week. We were given a choice this week between two options: Explore some unfamiliar technologies, or identify and discuss some successful industry competitors who use social technologies. Without trying to sound lazy, the first option sounded far more interesting, as it would give me a great opportunity to get some hands on experience with some tools that I've - until now - only heard about.

My two chosen technologies for this blogging activity are RSS and Twitter and a dabble in Wikis. These came to my mind because I've always been aware about them, but never gotten a grip on them. RSS has always seemed elusive as a functional tool, and twitter just seems downright confusing (especially considering it is paraded around as some kind of super simple social media platform), and finally, I was never really sure about how wikis worked. Thus, my goals for this blog are set.

RSS

I've known about RSS since I had really started to explore the internet but never really understood how it works, or how it was meant to be used. The extent of my knowledge was that it was a way of aggregating text based information. How was it read? How was it accessed? Who made RSS, and who owned it?

So my first port of call was a read through of the Wikipedia page about, which was actually quite informative.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication (as I prefer over Rich Site Summary), is a concept that's been around since the mid 90's with the emergence of Web 2.0. There was an agreed view that with all the information being generated, people needed a faster, simpler way to view all their relevant interests - news, blogs, podcasts, videos etc. RSS originated as RDF, and was developed as an initiative by a few people from Netscape, and it seems that it has since been an idea that different organisations have picked up, improved, and put down.

As it was well put in the CommonCrafts video, it basically turned around the way that the internet was used. Instead of users going out to find new information from their preferred sources, this information was brought to the user automatically.

RSS works by taking an XML file out of a webpage, which contains the important, relevant content that the page displays. For example with my blog - it would take out the new posts as they're updated: the date, the author and the content of the post (with a little bit of additional meta data). As it uses the XML file format, it can be transferred over FTP or HTTP protocols, and the raw data can be read by people... but doesn't look very nice - and hence, readers were made which allowed users to categorize, organise and view their feeds. There were MANY Feed readers out there, and as the XML language is quite easy to work with it enabled users to create their own readers. Readers allowed people to have multiple streams going at once, one for work, another for blogs and one for news if they liked.

As my research progressed to find a reader that I could use, it was very clear from the first search that one of the most popular, and discontinued readers - was Google Reader. Launched a decade after RSS was developed, and closed on July 1st, 2013 - notably because of declining use. Google supported users by allowing them to export their data, but didn't provide any sources on where to go from there.

So I started searching around for other popular readers, with a few criteria - it was preferably desktop based, lightweight, and easy to use. 

After a little while of searching, I decided I would use Feedly. Judging by it's references on many of the results when I googled "RSS readers", it seems to be one of the most popular. A browser based reader, users sign in using Google+, Facebook or a few other alternative means (but not email, interestingly) to keep a track of their subscriptions. There, users can search for sites to add to their to-read list, and divide them among categories. At first, I had a little trouble understanding how it worked but after about half an hour of playing around, I got the hang of it, and had a nice little setup with three categories - News, Gaming and Videos - all linked to the sources that I frequent. The display of them all was quite well done too, and I liked the options it provided, of title and short description only, to a larger and more detailed tiled waterfall format.

I should point out though that it did seem to have a little trouble reading straight from a URL sometimes, and the sources that were found via it's search feature were better displayed, but I have a feeling that this was due a built-in limitation, to encourage users to upgrade to a paid "pro" version, giving you a "Speed Boost", which searches for new articles from smaller sites, 30mins faster. It's a little annoying, considering that I'm interested in seeing the new content ASAP, but it makes sense in todays world of online-subscriptions and "utility" fees.

I will continue to use Feedly and RSS feeds during the course of this unit to give it a fair go, but from my intial usage, it seems easier to have my favourite pages bookmarked, to visit them individually, and scroll through them rather than it is to have a tool which takes time to setup, and time to update. While I can appreciate what article aggregators like RSS and Atom try to achieve, I feel that unless your reader is well setup, multi-platform, quick to use and universally supported, then ultimately it's more effort than it's worth.

Twitter

Now ranked in the top ten Alexa "Most visited websites", Twitter was born out of a creative group think going on 9 years ago. Best described as a "SMS service to the internet", Twitter is a microblogging site, which allows users to write short, 140 character messages which are displayed on their pages. Users have handles so they can be contacted or tagged, and hash-tags are used as a means of grouping relevant subjects together.

I was interested when Twitter first came out, and many of my friends started signing up, but I've never really been attracted to it. Of all social media platforms, twitter seems to be one of the most "egotistical" of them all. Outside of my own bubble, 140 characters doesn't seem like enough to spur on any kind of meaningful conversation; and making an opinion with such a small character count means that you could be easily taken out of context - as many people have. Apart from personal-centric use of Twitter, I can see it as a useful way of sharing news and information in a blink, by linking to important, more detailed articles, or being able to provide short, rapid updates of things - like road works / traffic updates, election stats, and play-by-plays at sporting events.

My biggest problem with Twitter has been it's interface. I made a conscious effort a few years ago to sign up so I was able to receive updates about my favourite YouTubers, but didn't stick with it because I found the layout so convoluted - I didn't like how limited you were in seeing people tweets, and the fact that it didn't show what people were replying to, and how it prioritized what they were tagged in, over what they had said. So I took some time this week and tried to familiarize myself with the interface.

After an hour or so of getting to know Twitter properly, it would seem that the updates to it's functionality have definitely made it easier to use. It was at least 3 years since I tried using it, and I now found it far more easier to navigate, view and... absorb Information. My account now is setup very similar to my RSS feeds, with a mix of my personal interests and news. It was interesting to see many of the bigger sources using Vine, a subsidiary of Twitter, to post videos relating to their tweets.

I think I can safely say I will continue to actively use twitter, and as my follows-base increases, there will be more and more use. I can't find much to post about personally yet, however, so I'm more of a lurker than anything - and after viewing some of my friends feed, I'd happy leave my follows related to my interests, rather than seeing somewhat meaningless updates from my friends (yes, that's a nice burger, yes I know you're stuck in traffic).

From a business point of view, I can now understand why it's almost compulsory to have a Facebook AND Twitter page now - especially if you're business conducts interesting, rapid work.

My use of Twitter has also highlighted to me now why RSS is becoming outdated. While RSS feeds are able to keep a consistent, organised feed of content coming in - and it should be noted that do work differently - Twitter utilizes a very similar mechanic in a way that simply seems to work better. If it's worth talking about, people are more than likely going to tweet it, and this is able to be seen far more quickly than writing a post or article about it, and waiting for your RSS feed to find it.


Phew... that's a nice wall o text... But in summary, I found this week to really useful with getting me used to some new technologies. I think in the future I just need to spend some more time getting to know them before I jump the gun and make an uninformed desicion. While I will continue to use both of these technologies for the semester, I think ultimately, I will continue to use twitter afterwards.

Week 2: First Vlog!

Woohoo!

Yep, I finally got it finished. It took me a little while longer because it was my first vlog, and I believe next week should go faster. I was mainly just plagued with technical difficulties, as you might be able to see via the quality. Also, uploading in HD would have taken close to 24 hours which didn't seem ideal; thus I will try some more quality testing this week and hopefully have that fixed next time around.

I did find making my vlog quite fun, but there's some thing I aim to do next week to make them a little better, being:

• Go off the cuff a little more - I followed my written post pretty closely, but my aim with the vlogs is to explore and compose my feelings in a more relaxed manner.
• Add in a few more gags. While vlogs have a specific purpose, there are usually some kind of "humorous breaks" to make the video less of a drag. I had a few in mind, but I think more could be added.
• Relax!

But again, you're never a master from the start, so I look forward to making next week's post.