Enterprise 2.0 Assignment 2 Audio

Link: http://enterprisetwopointoh.podbean.com/

An Analysis of WWE Advertising via Twitter

For the final blog post, I decided to follow up on my “Companies Using Social Networking” post to see whether my assumption was correct in that WWE uses Twitter to bombard you with advertisements from multiple sources.

I will be analysing the last hundred tweets of three different WWE Twitter accounts, which are:

• IAmJericho – Chris Jericho.
• TedDiBiase – Ted DiBiase, Junior.
• JohnCena – John Cena.

Just to clarify what I consider advertising – If a wrestler tweets about how they broke their iPhone, I do not consider that advertising for Apple. If they mention the latest WWE figurines or their new autobiography coming out, I do consider that advertising.

The following is the types of products each wrestler has out to advertise:

• Jericho – Autobiography, music tour, DVD, clothing and figurines.
• DiBiase – Shirts, figurines, the million dollar belt and The Marine 2, which came out awhile ago.
• Cena – A movie in cinemas (Legendary), a movie on DVD (Fred: The Movie), clothing, figurines, merchandise and more.

IAmJericho (160,166 Total Followers, 3306 Total Tweets)

Most recent ad: “2 days until BreakingTheCode! I did special DVD commentary for 3 of the matches… Me vs lance ’90, me vs Dragon ’95 and me vs HBK ’03” 11 hours ago.

Date beginning last hundred tweets: September 12

Random tweet: “About to go watch a dance contest between Evan Bourne and Ted DiBiase. I’m not kidding”

Number of advertisements: 36 of the last 100 tweets were ads, split between the Fozzy tour, an upcoming wrestling DVD and Chris Jericho’s upcoming autobiography.

TedDiBiase (58,603 Total Followers, 763 Total Tweets)

Most recent ad: “RTWWE NEWS: Ted DiBiase on Syfy’s WCG Ultimate Gamer – Watch WWE Superstar Ted DiBiase as he appears on Syfy’s “World ..http://ow.ly/195kyD” September 21

Date beginning last hundred tweets: August 10

Random tweet: “Me and my BFF watching TV together:http://twitpic.com/2mbf42”

Number of advertisements: 12 of the last 100 tweets were ads, split between mentioning appearances on TV and pay-per-views (Summerslam, Superstars, WGN America), bringing up DVD’s of movies he has acted in (The Marine 2) and a few mentioning autograph signings. It’s worth noting that the ads weren’t nearly as explicit as Chris Jericho’s and finding 12 ads was probably a stretch.

JohnCena (172,995 Total Followers, 708 Total Tweets)

Most recent ad: “Signing for legendary at walmart in lutz fla tomorrow night, going to smackdown syfy premiere on fri in ok city. This week will be epic…” 6 hours ago

Date beginning last hundred tweets: September 8

Random tweet: “@Madonnanana swiss cheese poop? Hummm. Sounds..unique, ill be to austraila b4 u know it”

Number of advertisements: 32 of the last 100 tweets were ads, with the vast majority being John Cena thanking people for using the trending tag #Legendary to help advertise his latest movie. There was also a mention of RAW/NXT/Smackdown and of Nexus shirts.

Although it isn’t accurate to derive information when I have only analysed three wrestlers, I did it anyway:

• 26 and 2/3 out of the last 100 tweets as ads.
• The more followers you have, the more ads you post.
• The more products you have to sell, you more you advertise.

Company Using Wiki’s

The following post is about an interesting and unique case of wiki usage by a company.

Wikileaks – Published by the non-profit organization The Sunshine Press, Wikileaks is a “multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public”. Wikileaks is different to general wiki’s in that normal users can not edit or add to content on the wiki – they are expected to contribute with money or by following on Twitter or the official blog. Professional writers can also contribute articles to the website based on leaked information and be paid for it.

The benefits for hosting Wikileaks are not so much benefits for The Sunshine Press, but for the general public. This includes:

• Ability to leak documents anonymously
• Publicly making available controversial documents

There are risks in hosting a site as controversial as Wikileaks. They are:

• Potential legal action
• If Wikileaks does not properly protect the identity of whistleblowers then they are potentially putting their lives in danger

Companies Using Social Networking

The following post is about interesting and unique cases of companies using social networking.

Dell – Participates in the online 3D virtual world Second Life, where they have the “Dell Island”, a place for users to hang out and communicate with Dell employees.

The benefit is that Dell is tapping in to a social network that not many companies bother with, and they are doing it in a unique way. Most companies would just chuck up a Facebook/Myspace page with the generic details you would find on the front page of their website, but Dell created a virtual island that users can interact on. How cool is that?

The risk of doing this is that Second Life’s reputation might rub off on Dell. Many people haven’t heard of Second Life and of those that have, they do not have a good impression. Along with this, Second Life only brings in roughly 750k unique users to the website each month, which many would consider pitiful compared to Facebook’s hundreds of millions, and various other social networks.

WWE – Takes advantage of Twitter and Facebook to communicate with people.

The benefits of Twitter usage within WWE are interesting because it’s not centralised. Where other companies would have a single Twitter, WWE has an array of superstars to bombard you with. You follow the ones you like then have them all telling you to buy their merchandise or tune in for RAW. If you are sick of a wrestler’s tweets, you don’t associate that with WWE being bad, you associate it with that person being terrible or uninteresting in their social media pursuits. This also brings in non wrestling fans in that wrestlers have extra curricular activies (Hardy’s have the Youtube Hardy Show, Chris Jericho has a band called Fozzy etc.) which people would follow them for, then receive wrestling related tweets to get them to watch it.

WWE has many unique risks in the way that wrestlers use Twitter. As an example, are wrestlers allowed to break character? Now that WWE is PG, do the wrestlers have to censor themselves? Did he just tweet after ten chair shots to the head when he is supposed to be in a coma? Most people know that wrestling is not real but you can’t come out and break the fourth wall directly, much like normal TV shows can’t acknowledge that they are TV shows. Although this is a big risk, it can also be a positive. Some wrestlers tweet controversial or out of character material which is often brought in to future story lines and mentioned during commentary.

Personal Experience Using a Social Network

For this blog I will be talking about my experiences with Facebook, which I had been using for about a year and a half after quitting Myspace. I haven’t used any social networks apart from this in a long time and I deactivated my account roughly a month ago.

Benefits

• Keep in touch with people I don’t see in real life
• Easy to manage event planning
• Sharing photos

Pitfalls

• Compulsive need to check Facebook whenever I haven’t done so in awhile
• Time spent procrastinating when I should be working on assignments
• Privacy issues
• Wall plagued with “x likes x” fan pages and general spam
• FARMVILLE

After quitting Facebook, I haven’t felt the need to go back and reactivate. I have had a few people contact me and tell me how offended they were that I “deleted them from Facebook” (seriously) and I cleared it up. Apart from that it has been smooth sailing.

In general, the complaint I hear about Facebook (in a professional sense) is potential employers reading yours and not hiring you based on content. I’m not an employer nor have I ever screened anybody based on their Facebook page but there was a lot of content on my profile that could be controversial to some people. This included:

• Pictures of me in a Britney Spears drag competition
• Non-PG pictures
• A lot of swearing on my wall
• General taste in music that most people would scoff at (top 40’s, mainstream pop)
• Religious views
• Trashy mutual friends
• Homosexual “interested in” setting
• Fan pages I have “liked”
• Groups I was a part of

I could say that I wouldn’t want to work at any companies that would discriminate me based on the above content but that would be bullshit. For one, it wouldn’t be the company discriminating, it may just be one bad seed interviewer/employer. I wouldn’t want to risk losing a job opportunity at a big tech company just because they can find out that Mean Girls is my favourite movie.

Do I think employers should be allowed to screen based on social networking profiles? No, none of the above has any bearing on how well I could do my job. Do I think employers should screen based on other information they can find out about you on the internet? Again, no. It doesn’t matter if you post naked pictures on *chans or submit bodacious cleavage shots to Reddit or even upload amateur vids to Redtube. It’s 2010 and you should do whatever you feel like.

Personal Experience Editing a Wiki

For this task I will attempt to edit a wiki. The page I will try to change will be on something WWE related, because I am a huge wrestling fan and I think I know enough about the topic to be able to contribute something to it’s Wikipedia page.

Start page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wwe

First I have to decide on which specific sub-topic would need user contribution. Originally I was going to find some obscure page but I decided to scroll down the main page and see if I could find anything to change/remove/fix. I hadn’t expected to find anything because the main page would likely be:

• High traffic
  • Other people may do updates after I have seen the original problem but before I am able to commit the fix
  • More users to monitor it
• Moderated and updated by WWE employees

Surprisingly, I did find something that I could change. Under the Championships and Accomplishments header, the current champions are listed in table form with other titbits related to their championship win. Under the event column, the pay-per-view/TV show that the champion won the belts at are listed. Immediately I can see that while four of the current champions won their belts at the same event, only one of those event names are hyperlinked to the wikipedia page for that pay-per-view.

So I can change this easily. I first grab the URL for that event (already listed in the first hyperlink, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Champions_(2010) ) and then click the edit button of that section.

This moves me to Wikipedia’s edit page. The first thing I notice is that:

• My edits are subject to review – This is a given.
• They record my IP publically and will send me messages (because I am an unregisted user). This seems a bit intrusive but Wikipedia is a respected website so I can trust it to do the right thing.

After that is the edit box, where I can make changes to the content. This poses the problem that I have absolutely no idea how Wikipedia formats their information – I assumed I would just be working with some basic HTML or CSS at the worst, but the formatting is unique. But since the first hyperlink is correct and the other three are wrong, all I really need to do is copy and paste the correctly formatted one over the others, right?

Yep. That works. I click to preview the changes and now the text is properly hyperlinked in all cases. To help Wikipedia moderators and editors, I enter

“Hyperlinked Night of Champions 2010 for US / Tag / Unified Diva’s Champs”

into the Edit Summary field. With everything finished, I click the “Submit Changes” button. I am redirected to the WWE page and my changes are integrated already.

Thoughts

• This was easy. Really easy. If I exclude the time that I spent switching back to this document to log my experience then it only would have taken all of three minutes.
• Wikipedia is more than adding or subtracting information. I’ve learnt that I don’t need to do either – I can add hyperlinks, provide references where [citation needed] tags are found or upload more recent pictures.
• Wikipedia hasn’t change that much – You could probably do everything you could do now five years ago, even with other user generated sites moving to forced accounts with karma or “credits” to value users, Wikipedia still allows an anonymous user contribute and do updates and have them published immediately.
• There is always something to add – The hyperlinks I added were for an event that only happened a few weeks ago so it is easy to understand why they weren’t complete, but some content on that page is going to be changed extremely rarely and is still unfinished. For example, listed under Board of Directors is Vincent Kennedy McMahon (a legend, if you are reading this you should see how he turned a sport nobody cared about in to a billion dollar industry), who is not hyperlinked. He has been the CEO for decades already and likely will be until the day he dies. So even information that is considered a constant is still not completed.

Finally, I check the Revision History page and can see that my changes were accepted by linguisticgeek, a Wikipedia user. Too easy.

How Google uses Blogging and Microblogging Within their Enterprise

Google uses external blogging to deliver news on all aspects of Google, from general business information, to products, to ads, to developer information and to region specific information. The different Google blogs can be found here:

http://www.google.com/press/blogs/directory.html

Benefits:

• Information directly from the source
• Insight from people that work on the products/services
• Latest news on new features and fixes
• Credible data and statistics
• Linked in with the official Google site so likely to get a lot of traffic
• A level of quality is expected from Google employees

Pitfalls

• Since the blogs are official, Google is directly accountable for any wrong or inaccurate information
• Even if the information isn’t technically wrong, there is likely to be a spin put on it in Google’s favour

Full list of Google related Twitter accounts:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-accounts-on-twitter.html

Google’s official Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/GOOGLE

Contains news and updates tweeted often by Google. Has 2,400,00~ million followers, is listed in 42,000~ lists and has tweeted more than 1700 times. Follows various other Google related Twitter accounts.

Benefits:

• Huge user base to advertise latest news, products and services to
• Tweets don’t have to be analysed as much for potential legal or privacy breaches since they can only be 140 characters long
• Messages from tweets not limited to their followers; likely to be retweeted to a wider audience

Pitfalls:

• By following external users, it can be seen that those users are “recommended” by Google and thus anything they say may affect Google’s reputation
• Lack of followers (compared to competitor’s twitter accounts) may reflect badly on Google’s image
• Google is likely to have it’s own social network in the future (google.me) so if they still use Twitter once that is released then it will look like Google doesn’t have much faith in its product

Legal Risks and Risk Mitigation Strategies

The organisation I have chosen for this blog post is Google.

Google is an international billion dollar technology company that aims to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Google, 2010). Google employees 21,805 full-time employees as of June 30, 2010 and brings in almost 24 billion revenue annually, with 6.5 billion of that being profit. Google’s product range includes Youtube, Search, Maps, AdSense, AdWords, Admob, Analytics, Gmail, Chrome (Browser), Chrome OS, Android, Docs, Translate, Google Code, Picasa, Go and many many more.

Confidential Information

Google processes over a billion search requests and twenty petabytes of user generated data every day. With such a huge amount of data available to Google employees, users are very vulnerable to the stealing of confidential information.

Possible outcomes

• Employee steals Gmail login details, uses them to recover details for accounts on other sites and could eventually have enough information to log in to their bank account (alternatively, go through emails and see if any bank information has been sent).
• Employee steals Google Checkout details and thus has all credit card details that are registered with that account.

Ways to mitigate

• Sanitize any data that could be viewed directly by employees
• Legal action against any breach of confidential information

Privacy

Very similar to the above situation, where an employee could access information set to private by the user. Privacy is a very big deal relating to Google as they are making information public that does not necessarily want to be made public by the creator.

Possible Outcomes

• Viewing of private emails, Docs, YouTube vids, Blogspot posts etc by employees and thus gaining access to information that wasn’t made public by the user.
• Google Vans accessing an open wifi and logging the information

Ways to mitigate

• Make users aware of exactly what information is available to who
• Make any breaches of privacy made public so users know if their information was compromised
• Track information that employees access to make sure if it is relevant

Misleading and Deceptive Conduct

Possible Outcomes

• Information supplied by official Google blogs supply misinformation
• Posting false sales numbers (i.e. Android phone sales numbers are released every once in awhile but it’s assumed that the manufacturers of the phones are supplying Google with correct sales numbers)

Ways to mitigate

• Blog posts require approval before posting
• Dissociate posts from Google and associate it to the writer
• State that the information supplied to blog is always subject to change
• State the circumstances of any information posted

Benefits and Risk from implementing Enterprise 2.0

Internation Business Machines (IBM) is “an outsourcing and services leader and has placed its bet on analytics for the near future. IBM’s software assets focus on everything from business intelligence to analytics to collaboration to middleware and open source development. On the hardware side of the house, IBM is a mainframe and server leader. Big Blue also has a large research unit and is the patent leader.”

The case study I chose to do for this blog post is “How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation” at http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-ibm-uses-social-media-to-spur-employee-innovation/

Over 100,000 of IBM’s 400,000~ employees have registered to comment on 17,000+ internal blogs, 53,000 use SocialBlue (IBM’s Facebook) and over 200,000 are on LinkedIn. The potential for wasted time especially when such a large portion of your work force is using social media is incredible. Tactical Marketing Labs argues that even if these mediums were inaccessible, employees would find other ways to waste their time. Embracing social media lets users “waste” their time improving the reputation of the business while spreading knowledge.

IBM handles the mass amounts of social media by not handling it. There are guidelines for any social media published by employees but IBM states that they are not personally responsible for any of the opinions or content. Employees are expected to self-regulate. With so many people blogging, it is expected that information will leak (accidentally or intentionally) relating to the inner workings of IBM or its products. It isn’t acknowledged in the case study but information is always able to be leaked and as long as bloggers follow the guidelines it shouldn’t happen.

Apart from the normal staff engagement through the above means, IBM also hosts a “Jam”, where employees are brought together in an online forum for three days. The original success of these jams brought IBM to implement the blogging system, and they now hosts jams with as many as 500,000 people discussing over 50 different research projects. The best topics were funded with 100 million dollars to make them a reality. This arose purely through social media discussion. This very much emphasizes the benefits and usefulness of staff engagement, in that the opinions are being heard and funded to push IBM forward with innovative technologies.

As for increased use of resources, IBM made 100 billion in revenue in 2009 and create their own software and hardware. Any costs to them to bring forth the resources needed by the social media would be negligible compared to what they hope to gain from it (innovative ideas, reputation, presence etc).

References

ZDNet (2010). IBM Corp. Retrieved August 22, 2010.

http://www.zdnet.com/topics/ibm+corp.

Tactical Marketing Labs (2010). Social Media – Time wasting at Work or Marketing Genius? Retrieved August 22, 2010.

http://tacticalmarketinglabs.com/social-media-time-wasting-at-work-or-marketing-genius/

On Using Reddit as an Enterprise 2.0 Tool

I hadn’t heard of any companies using Reddit as an enterprise tool, but instead of searching for companies that do use it and how, I decided to explore Reddit and see if I could find something that could be used.

I came across creating your own reddit. An employee could create a reddit for their business and invite employees to participate. This would work well because you can:

• Restrict who can participate (invite only)
• Control the content that can be posted

So ideally, an employee posts news and updates to the businesses reddit. Employees check it during the day and can vote and comment on the posts, promoting communication within the organisation.