Andrea Malsbender

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Mission statement

• Joint Research with local QUT staff in the context of the NSS project - Enterprise social media analysis
• Setup of contacts to international industry companies
• Strenghten the cooperation with QUT Information Systems School at the Science and Engineering Faculty

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Research results

Leveraging Enterprise Social Media for Innovation Strategies in Organizations

Organizations to date are increasingly utilizing social media to compete for customer awareness and improve the quality of their goods and services. Furthermore, they are experimenting with internal platform solutions (e.g. wikipages, blogs, forums) for widespread collaboration between employees. With emphasis on internal platform solutions, organizations are furthering their effort to leverage social media tools for internal interaction and participation such as Yammer, which is a leading enterprise social network. Thereby, employees can participate in the design of the strategic orientation of their company. These kinds of micro blogging platforms are used for both knowledge management within the organisation and innovation planning for the company, among others. Different social media platforms are applied depending on the task to be fulfilled.

Nevertheless, although organizations tend to increase their usage on these platforms, the real benefits of leveraging social media are, in the most cases, unknown. In recent literature, the focus in this field is on dimensions of use of social media platforms (e.g. Kaplan & Haenlein 2010), the potential for joint creativity (e.g. Ellison, Steinfeld & Lampe 2011) in social media, and the impact for organizations (e.g. Treem & Leonardi 2012). However, little is known about how to leverage enterprise social media, and how such platforms can contribute to success of innovation or even to the whole strategy of an organization.

With our research, we endeavour to address and contribute to this body of knowledge, i.e. leveraging social media in the corporate environment. We do so by analysing the data set of an organization regarding their innovation strategies. This particular organization uses Yammer as their enterprise social media platform and establishes a group of employees to post their innovative ideas on Yammer. Based on a communication data set spanning over a year, we develop a measurement model to analyse which ideas could be implemented in the ’real world’ and how the social media platform could contribute to it.

 

Defining Social Media Leveraging Strategies for a Retail Company

The focal retail company is one of the leading retail companies in Australia. As the ’social media hype’ especially in Australia is increasing exponentially, users of different social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.) start to communicate on them regarding their experiences and demands with and for the company. The company does not actively take part on these platforms at the moment but is aware of the high potential of these platforms especially with regards to the customer relationship and the market segment and platform that they wish to tap into. As Australia is the leading country of citizens actively using social media platforms, there a lot of opportunities as well as risks to get in touch with the customer and to foster the customer relationship.

Based on different data collection and analysis techniques (sentiment analysis, web search, etc.) we crafted a white paper presenting potential opportunities, including competitors’ sentiments both locally and globally.