MA 2008 / Favus / Business of multimedia project
'A business social network bringing transparency and cohesion, making work more efficient and knowledgeable..'
For the business of multimedia project the brief was given to us by a company called Headshift. They are a leading enterprise social computing consultancy based in London. Our task was to create a proposal for a business social network for a imaginery business named Tulip. Operating in 23 different countries and with over 10.000 employees, the aim was to have a network that brings transparency and cohesion to the company.
Our group consisted out of six students, each taking on roles such as project manager, information architect, interface design etc. Besides being responsible for the conceptual design with three other students, I was in charge of market analysis and creating a well thought out marketing strategy.
At the end of the five-week project we pitched our ideas professionally to our clients (Headshift) and delivered a 72-page long proposal to them.
Excerpts from the proposal:
ABOUT US
Favus means 'honeycomb' in Latin and emphasizes our mission to create and foster relations within organizations. In order to do so we focus on the research and development of online applications that help create engaging social networks. Our core values shape the culture and define the character of our company.
OUR CONCEPT
The focus in our Social Networking system will be making visible:
Presence, Updates, Location and Status.
By doing this our system will keep Tulip employees in sync with each other regardless where they are located or how long they have been at Tulip. Our system will make accessing information fast and precise as well as highlighting connections within Tulip with an emphasis on 'who is working with whom' thus keeping everyone updated and united in Tulip. We have called this system 'tulip.PULS'.
MARKETING STRATEGY
In the past written communication in organisations has been mostly one way and almost always done a relatively small group of people. Social networking changes this concept by moving from the static and unused world of documents to a conversational style of communication available to everyone. This potential is enormous; it leads to more effectiveness and creativity within an organization.
Being a multinational company with thousands of employees all around the world, we believe Tulip can only benefit from introducing social networking tools to their organization. With 'tulip.PULS' employees are encouraged to say what they think openly and to seek connections and collaboration with other employees without having to deal with geographical boundaries.
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Encouraging the adoption of our platform can be achieved by fostering grassroots behaviours that develop from the bottom-up of Tulip's organization. Eventually users become convinced of 'tulip.PULS'' usefulness and help the system grow.
Market research approach:
Once we were finished with the analysis of our brief I started doing market research to find out about existing solutions in the social networking industry. This research involved looking through various blogs and articles focusing on the idea of 'enterprise2.0' and tools such as semantic wikis. After finalizing the research we decided to build our own system based on the Drupal CMS framework.
Marketing approach:
Our product is not marketed business-to-customer but it was still necessary to think of an internal marketing strategy. I did research on how to implement social media into organizations considering various marketing principles. With our project it was quite important to understand the idea of 'change management' and apply it to our roll-out and adoption strategy.