A WAY TO BECOME ENTERPRISE 2.0: BEYOND WEB 2.0 TOOLS

The arrival of social and collaborative software applications (e.g. Facebook, Hyves, and LinkedIn), known as Web 2.0 applications, has provided an opportunity for customers to express their opinions and share their knowledge and thoughts with others. While customers use Web 2.0 applications on daily basis, companies are struggling to embrace fully functioning Web 2.0 applications for their business. An organization that is able to successfully select, facilitate, and utilize appropriate Web 2.0 technologies and applications is called Enterprise 2.0. There is an enormous social pressure on organizations to adopt Web 2.0 technologies and become Enterprise 2.0 as quickly as possible if not now. Based on six cases, the paper as an exploratory research will provide immediate actions organizations can take to move toward Enterprise 2.0 by recommending Web 2.0 tools they can adopt and some aspects they should consider in changing organizational internal conditions to support Web 2.0 activities

Social Business Intelligence: a Literature Review and Research Agenda

The domains of Business Intelligence (BI) and social media have meanwhile become significant research fields. While BI aims at supporting an organization’s decisions by providing relevant analytical data, social media is an emerging source of personal and individual knowledge, opinion, and attitudes of stakeholders. For a while, a convergence of the two domains can be observed in real-world implementations and research, resulting in concepts like social BI. Many research questions still remain open – or even worse – are not yet formulated. Therefore, the paper aims at articulating a research agenda for social BI. By means of a literature review we systematically explored previous work and developed a framework. It contrasts social media characteristics with BI design areas and is used to derive the social BI research agenda. Our results show that the integration of social media (data) into a BI system has impact on almost all BI design objects

‘I just saw this on Facebook, I need it now’: Exploring Small Business use of Facebook

This paper reports on a study exploring social media adoption and use by twelve small businesses. Results indicate that Facebook is the dominant platform used and it can provide small businesses with a virtually cost free and easy way to reach customers. Businesses reported immediate results from using Facebook; customers arrived in store after seeing Facebook posts. Participants felt there were minimal risks involved and none had experienced negative feedback or inappropriate posts. Most felt that using Facebook increased their competitive advantage due to their enhanced online profile. Despite some effort to engage customers, business to consumer transfer of information is the primary function of the Facebook pages studied. Page owners report limited training for and analysis of their Facebook activities. This indicates a need for further research in the small business context, focused on approaches to boosting customer interaction, to realize the full potential of Facebook engagement

STIMULATING USER ACTIVITY ON COMPANY FAN PAGES IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS

Due to the popularity and intensive usage of Online Social Networks, more and more companies try to get in touch with existing as well as potential customers and to market their brands and products within these networks. Especially Facebook provides an extensive user base and the opportunity to implement fan pages, which allow companies to leverage a broad range of technical features and media types to interact with users. However, the success of company fan pages varies and is by far not guaranteed. Therefore, it is necessary to measure whether a company\u27s efforts to stimulate user activity on fan pages are successful or not. Hence, we deduce and hypothesize factors influencing the number of active users on fan pages and take different technical features and media types companies can use into account. To test our hypotheses empirically, we draw on publicly and non-publicly available data of a global insurance company\u27s fan page within Facebook. The results suggest that based on the number of current fans companies can particularly stimulate user activity and engagement by using company wallposts with its different media types as well as by commenting on already existing wallposts. Finally, both theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Toward a Framework of Web 2.0-Driven Organizational Learning

During the past few years, Web 2.0 applications have changed the Web from a search tool to a platform for collaboration. Research has also started to show that Web 2.0 applications promote organizational knowledge sharing and creation. There is not, however, a comprehensive conceptual framework that explains how the organizational use of Web 2.0 leads to organizational learning. In this article, we develop such a framework by drawing on social capital theory, the SECI knowledge creation model, and the concept of Ba to show how the dimensions of social capital that emerge from the use of Web 2.0 applications evolve and drive organizational learning

The rise of customer-oriented banking: electronic markets are paving the way

The banking industry has been a pioneer in adopting electronic markets with exchanges, clearinghouses, and multilateral trading facilities having become the backbone of today’s globally integrated financial transactions. While most banks use the services of these electronic markets to handle interbank processes, they still strive for bilateral relations in the field of customer-facing processes. This position paper argues that the financial crises, the changing behavior of customers, upcoming innovations based on information technology (IT) and financial services offered by non-banks are strong drivers towards more customer-orientation in the financial industry. A large variety of banking IT innovations has emerged and illustrates that traditional banks are expected to have less power to impede competition at the customer interface and in consequence need to re-position themselves. Building on these developments on the one hand and existing electronic market infrastructures in the banking industry on the other, the concept of a customer-oriented financial market infrastructure is proposed as a possible future solution. The impact is illustrated using a competitive analysis of the banking industry and analogies to the media industry where new entrants from the computing industry have caused disruptive changes. Besides describing the threat to existing banks, the position paper also discusses the perspectives for banks