Blog 7 - The Online Megaphone

Well it's been quite the semester, but here we are in the last blog post for INB346! It's been fun, I've thoroughly enjoyed writing my mind to share with the cohort, as well as reading other peoples views, feelings and opinions and would look forward to more subjects doing something like it. For the final post, we're tasked with taking a look on the flip-side of Social Technology; we've covered the many various positive benefits that can stem from social technology, but sometimes it doesn't go all too well. This week we take a look at an organization that have miss-used their social technology front.

In doing my research to find a specific case for this week's post, I quickly found many examples of people or businesses that "went off" on social platforms in spectacular manner. As we've established, networking is one of the key functions in Social Technology, and while these tools can be used to reach a large audience, it doesn't discriminate the message, meaning it is very easy to upset a large number of people, very easily.

This post will closely look at Amy's Baking Company, which had one of these "Social Media Meltdowns" during 2013. 

Amy's Baking Company is a restaurant in Arizona owned by Amy and Samy Bouzaglo, which made an appearance on the sixth season of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. The purpose of this show is to invite the celebrity chef to failing restaurants in an attempt to revive their business. Most establishments that featured on the show ended up benefiting, and went on to be successful - but Amy's Baking Company was the first in the series for Gordon to walk away from - unable to save. It was subsequently used as the season 6 finale, and the season 7 first episode.

Problems for the restaurant didn't end once the episode had aired. In light of being one of the hardest restaurants Gordon had been at, the place became an attraction for a short while after. This was met with a mixed set of online reviews, which baited the restaurant's Facebook page to retaliate with extreme feedback - swearing, insulting and all-caps-raging. Word spread virally onto other internet platforms such as Twitter, Yelp and Reddit, which caught wind and joined in.

Image Source

Following this tirade of futile arguments and opinions, Amy and Samy later stated that their page had been hacked, and that they had not posted any of the comments - which led to more people trying to bait them on.

The company went into damage control and hired a local PR firm to help handle the situation. Later down the track, the restaurant had to delete it's new alternative page as it continued to get a large amount of unfair feedback. Two weeks after the incident occurred, the restaurant "relaunched" itself in an attempt to create a new persona for itself. To this day, the company continues to receive a level of unjust feedback (some citing nothing more than pointless insults), and Forbes has even used it in an article as an example of how not to manage negative feedback on social media. 

Even compared against Rogerson's 8 Ethical Principles of Social Technology, Amy's Baking Company seemed to void all of them:

• Honour - Regardless of whether they were hacked or not, it doesn't take a genius to see that the comments would permanently scar the company.
• Honesty - They weren't honest either. It's very unlikely that the company had been hacked, as their apology mentioned nothing more than one status about it. Owners who would have been genuinely upset about a situation like that more than likely would've used an alternative means to indicate there was a hack under way, or done something to remedy the situation after the fact - like have a sale or deals etc., none of which occurred.
• Bias - It's an unfair situation, as the owners had been quite the hotheads on the show, it's hard to argue whether people were commenting after being at the establishment, or if they were doing it to get a reaction out of them.
• Professional Adequacy - I think this one goes without saying, swearing, raging and laughing at your user base is by no means professional.
• Due Care - Pfft.
• Fairness - The response on Facebook came fast and they were responding to almost every comment in a negative manner.
• Social Cost - I don't think the social cost had come into play - unless they had planned this from the start (which I will talk about soon).
• Efficient Action - While hiring a PR firm was a good choice, as I stated earlier that no other remedial action was taken past a simple "whoops"-like comment, I think it's fair to say that Amy's Baking Company really didn't do themselves any favors afterwards.

Whether the TV show, and more importantly, the miss-use of it's social technology actually was a bad thing for the company is up to discussion and ultimately depends on which way you look at the outcomes. The main reason the company featured on the TV show was because it was in a bad way financially. Given the friction during the episode, it's also evident that it was a difficult situation to salvage.

However, as the old saying goes - any publicity is good publicity - and I think this is a perfect case of that. While the company may now have a damaged persona, it still maintains a high ranking on many review sites because of the number of hits, and pure number of reviews. This has cemented the restaurant on the map, and as an indirect effect, continues to provide it with revenue. In saying that, it could have put many people off going as they have seen what the "owners" are like.

Many of the examples of miss-use that I found while researching mainly occurred on Twitter or Facebook, and I think it's easy to say that with appropriate security measures in place, Amy's Baking Company could avoid another situation like this again - if they did actually get hacked. If it was just a case of Amy or Samy losing their cool, then definitely leaving the responses to the PR people would be a better option. Given the number of negative reviews the company has now, it could even be argued that it's just best to leave them be, and avoid any more social-spotlight all together.

At the end of the day, when compared against each other, I still feel that it was a good thing for the company, given the situation it was in before, and that now it is relatively "well known" for better or worse, and continues it's operations today. This just goes to show that sometimes, even a bad use of social technology can still be beneficial, in whatever weird way that happens.

Blog 6 - ROI and IBM's Social Collaboration Suite

This weeks topic of discussion was the Return on Investment (ROI) of social technology implementations. I'll admit, it was hard to find a case which strictly followed social technology implementations, versus social media implementations which were far more popular, but after lots of searching, I was finally able to find one! Sort of.

My case study is based on the Total Economic Impact Of IBM Social Collaboration Tools report published by Forrester Consulting in 2010. Forrester Consulting was commissioned by IBM to evaluate the potential benefits that can be accrued through the use of IBM Social Collaboration Tools. In doing so, Forrester analysed a large, unidentified multi-national manufacturing corporation which had recently implemented IBM's Social Collaboration Tools as the focus for this study. It should be noted at this point that IBM and Forrester were in communication during this study, but Forrester claims that it retained editorial control and that the findings were fair and unbiased

IBM's Social Collaboration Tools suite is made up of three enterprise-grade software applications which focus on certain parts of improving communication, connections and collaboration. The three applications are:

• Lotus Connections - focused on developing, nurturing and upholding contacts for staff
• Lotus Sametime - an application which provides unified communications across many platforms - voice, data, video and telephony.
• Lotus Quikr - team collaboration software.

While social media implementations can provide benefits from a marketing and sales standpoint, social technology has the benefit of being able to improve just about all areas of a business - as they can re-organise and optimise workflows, access to information and the "chain of command" for both customers and workers.

When interviewed by Forrester, the unidentified company noted many intangible benefits from implementing the Social Collaboration Tools:

• The unified collaboration tools suite was far easier to navigate and communicate using as there were no incompatibilities
• Easier integration environment, good search features, tagging, and a decentralised administration
• A global roll out meant that the entire company was brought up to speed.
• The product had a real impact on the company's emerging markets - allowing employees in developing markets access to the knowledge and advice from other employees across the globe.
• Virtually no training was required due to the familiar nature of the interfaces. The help desk had so few inquiries that the company did not need to track them.
• The company noted a snowballing ROI as the tools shall provide use in ways that cannot be imagined currently.
• It was noted that within six months of the roll out, natural interactions were occurring on the platform - without the cue from higher management.

These benefits are, to some degree, to be expected when investing in an enterprise level solution. With a single - or very few - compatible platforms which all work is conducted on, or at least on a social level means that work can be completed faster. These familiar social tools granted access for quick, open channels to be setup, and meant that the company was able to better respond to the micro-level problems faster, preventing any issues from growing.

The company had two specific areas it felt that there intangible benefits from - Research and Development and Sales. 

The collaboration tools allowed more ideas to be generated, and more employees to chime in with their suggestions, whilst still maintaining intellectual property rights. Better internal communication meant that research staff could find out end user information from the sale staff which meant better requirements, specific technologies and innovations could be established. 

While sales benefited a little less than R&D, the company found that it was better able to support it's clients as it was able to transfer issues to the right department faster, and in the case that support staff could not solve a problem, knowledge could be sourced from other areas. Because the sales people were spending less time communicating and doing paperwork, they were able to spend more time selling and making sales pitches.

The third part of the report details the hard (tangible) benefits through a Total Economic Impact Matrix featuring four different sectors.

• Revenue Of Incremental New Products. It's likely 0.5% (the likely estimate) of new products would be implemented sourced from an idea or use of the collaboration tool. This, in combination with the estimated profit and stock numbers totals an incremental revenue of $2.1m for the company
• Increased Revenue from Faster Time-to-market. The use of the collaboration tool removes unnecessary steps in the production process, and can streamline things. This results in $336,000 of regained value for the company.
• Revenue of Incremental Sales. The use of the collaboration tool to utilise marketing opportunities and knowledge would lead to a $150,000 benefit.
• Staff Productivity Savings. As stated earlier, more efficent staff mean more savings as they can work on things that will bring more revenue to the company. With just a 10 minute time saving thanks to the efficencies of the system, can bring in a saving of roughly $455,000.

In total, these equate to a $3,041,000 saving for the company.

There are, however, some costs involved too. These are detailed after the projected benefits, and are broken down into initial, once off expenses totaling $1,579,600, and reoccurring expenses totaling $313,300 per annum.

Therefore:

ROI = ((Gain from investment - cost of investment) / Cost of investment) x 100

ROI = ((3,041,000 - 1,892,900) / 1,892900) x 100

ROI = 60.6%

A 60.6% return on investment indicates a slight return. The reason this number is not in excess of 100% is mainly because of the installation fees, so let's analyse the following year which in theory should have a higher return as the only expenses are the upkeep:

ROI (Year 2) = ((3,041,000 - 313,300) / 313,300) x 100

ROI (Year 2) = 144%

This means that while the company may not post a return in the short term, once the initial costs have been extinguished, the projected benefits would outweigh the upkeep. This, coupled with the intangible benefits show that the use of IBM's Social Collaboration tools would be a greatly beneficial business move in a large, multi-national company.

Blog 5 - A Social Profile That Fits

Established in 1993, Jay Jays is one of Australia's well known clothing outlets, catering towards a younger age bracket. As time has passed, the subsidiary of the Just Group has effectively evolved it's marketing strategies to its audience, but of late could be doing more to reach a larger customer base, through the use of newer Social Technologies.

At this point in time, Jay Jays is active on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, as just about every retailer is now - and needs to be - and they use each of these platforms in their respective manner - YouTube to advertise their ads, Twitter and Instragram in combination to post pictures of new products and sales, and Facebook as a hub for all of these, with more return channel feedback.

When compared against McKinsey's 10 Social Technology levers, Jay Jays fulfills some of these, but could do more to generate and foster sales and revenue. They currently use social platforms as a means to derive customer insights, for marketing communication, as well as provide customer care (as evident through the public feedback on their Facebook page). If Jay Jays were to develop an smart-device application, it could be argued that this would greatly boost sales.


A report published by Adobe displays a clear increase in the number of users who are using mobile technologies (smartphones and tablets) to make purchases, and that being able to browse through stores online strengthened their connection to the brand. But developing and supporting an application does not nessecarily mean requiring an e-Commerce component. As Nicole Hambleton writes about in her blog post Mobile Apps: Increasing Retail Customer Loyalty, as apps have started to flood the smart-device market, competition is high and applications are better used as a way of marketing, and strengthening brand identity, rather than be seen as a means of making money.


While eCommerce has been shown to pay off greatly in a number of different situations, sometimes just having a mobile catalog, which is regularly updated with products, deals and news is enough to encourage users to download and use. This new tactic would also provide some leverage for Jay Jays as other clothing outlets like City Beach or Quiksilver don't have an application like this (Quiksilvers' application is used for their sports branch).

Today, having social media integration is only one part of what makes up a company's online persona. With the emergence of eCommerce, consumers now have the power to shop globally, and word of mouth is stronger than the old 'bricks and mortar' advertising schemes. Smart-device applications should be utilized in a way which can provide leverage over competitors, once their ROI has been realised through 'splash-back' avenues of returns.