Accenture put the Accent on Blogging

After seeing that name showing up in almost every post I have read of inspirational business blogs, for this week's activity we will revise on Accenture.

Accenture is one of the world’s leading management consulting, technology services and outsourcing companies.

Other than using social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Accenture, being a company with different customers, also has created a series of blogs with valuable content for their customers' different needs.

The 17 blogs are written by multiple authors who post consistently, and they go from senior employees to middle management to the chief officers. Here is a link for the list of the Accenture's blogs.

Accenture share its personal and professional experiences with other companies and people interested in technology, and in their words, the goal is to "communicate, but more importantly collaborate, with readers to help them think differently about technology".

I focused on the 3 Technology blogs,  where they discuss internal experiences with technology (especially Social Media); the usage of new technologies; and workplace technology product reviews.

We can clearly distinguish the McKinsey Global Institute (2012) value levers, as one of Accenture's goals with the blogs is to apply new technologies that will help their clients and themselves, achieve high performance, and by developing that knowledge based on their experiences and sharing it with their readers, they are creating new services for the customers and for Accenture to offer in the future. (Product Development)

The participation of the employees in the blogs and the teams in charge of working with the technologies the blog posts are about in the research, developing, sharing and finally in the interaction with the customers and the collaboration between them are relevant to Operations and Business Support value levers.

Finally, and in my opinion, the most important value lever present by using blogs in Accenture is Marketing and Sales.

First of all, by sharing knowledge with their customers and allowing them to access expertise for their own businesses, Accenture is strengthening the relationship with them, which creates revenues.

Furthermore, the blogs act as platforms to showcase Accenture's expertise and make a clear distinction between them, their brand and their competition; enabling them to receive potential customers that will notice the thought leadership concept.

And finally, the creation of valuable content will create visibility and recognition, which helps Accenture to build the brand reputation and generate recognition as experts in the correspondent fields.

We can all agree that blogs are a great tool for professional service firms to extend their network, publish and distribute thought leadership, engage with clients and prospects, expand reach, strengthen brand, and build website traffic (Mary Flaherty from RainMakerBlog).

I have to say that I really enjoyed reading some of the posts on the Accenture Blog for Internal IT, I recommend you to go and check them out, and down below I leave with some pages I came across this week. Happy readings! Cheers!

PS. I am on Twitter now! Feel free to follow me because I will start blogging a little bit more... Woohoo!

More on Professional Services Firms Blogging:

Are There Any Good Professional Services Firm Blogs Out There?

Where is your B2B Blog?

Why Successful Companies Use Blogs to Grow Their Business

Accenture's CIO discusses social technologies used in the company and how they make 

Social at Oracle: The IdeaFactory Success Story

For this week's assignment, I have chosen Oracle's E2.0 success story. I assume all of us in the IT world know what Oracle is, but just as a refresher...

Oracle Corporation is a U.S.-based multinational computer technology corporation. The company specializes in developing and marketing computer hardware systems and enterprise software products.  (Wikipedia)

So I found the story of how, in early 2007, Oracle began to incorporate Enterprise 2.0 to its processes, to foster innovation, share information and bring people together, both internally and externally, by developing IdeaFactory. Read the full post on the History of Oracle Connect written by Kellsey Ruppel.

A brief introduction on Oracle's IdeaFactory and Connect

Appslab, an Oracle's development team focused on innovation, created IdeaFactory, a platform to capture product ideas and allow users to propose and have a say in ideas, specifically, Oracle Application products. This tool grew up so fast, that people from all over Oracle logged in, voted, commented and contributed their own ideas, and not just about Oracle products, but also about internal topics and practices, making the communication lines open and honest.

After seeing the tool was working so well amongst Oracle employees, the AppsLab team added a social networking layer, creating Oracle’s first social tool, Oracle Connect. Every Oracle employee had an account and a base profile. The networking was bi-directional and anyone could ask to connect with anyone else in the company, including the CEO, which several people did. With the acquisitions Oracle was doing by the time, new staff also found this tool very useful.

Connect also aimed to generate and facilitate internal innovation within Oracle, so the AppsLab launched OpenLab, an open source-style project that welcomed any internal developers to take Connect’s code and add features that met their needs.

"What began as a little experiment with new technology has grown into a mission-critical social tool, used by thousands of people each day to get work done", said Kellsey.

In addition to Connect, the team created Oracle Mix, a social tool for users interested in Oracle products and the community, where they could make inputs or ask Oracle employees for support like they do in forums in the present days.

Value levers associated with implementing Enterprise 2.0 in the development of IdeaFactory/Oracle Connect:

I have found that two of the functional areas were benefited by the implementation of Enterprise 2.0. For that, I have prepared a table on how the value levers were applied to Oracle.

We can say that there are so many and different benefits in the incorporation of Web 2.0 in business, and although it may have its risks, no company now can stay disconnected from their customers. Down below I leave you with other successful stories and a video to reinforce the idea.

Do you find any other advantages in this case? Let me know.

I know that we only have to discuss 2 functional areas, but do you agree with me that Product Development is involved too? Given that the open code led to the creation of new applications for Oracle Connect by using Oracle Connect.

More on Social Media used in Business:

21 Enterprises Success Stories
Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business

Discovering new social tools

I do consider myself a Social Technology beginner. Aside from my usual daily Facebooking and Instagraming for purely social purposes, I never took a real interest on other tools. So, this week I decided to tackle on some new tools.

First, let's talk about Delicious. I have to say that I was firstly attracted by the name, I was curious and wondered 'What makes this site delicious?', so I looked it up and sign on it.

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks instead of just saving them in your web browser. For more information you can go here.

After signing in, I realised that it has a very simple interface, nothing delicious about it, and the first thing that caught my eye (and I hated it) was the big advertisement at the top. Maybe at the bottom of the page it would not been as annoying, but it was a really distracting feature.

I find it a really good tool for organizing my bookmarks, especially since at work I needed to do a large amount of research, and having all those pages in my web browser, got a little messy, and if I wanted to use other computers I did not have access to all my saved pages. 

Tagging is the primary component in Delicious, you cannot create files, but by using tags related to your bookmarks you can organize them, find them and what is best, and see if other users have the same web page saved. And there is where the 'social' bookmarking comes.

Social bookmarking means that you can actually see other people bookmarks in your network or in the Delicious world and share them or use them. Just by tagging. Is in that way, that you can start following people with the same interests or work you have. You can start sharing relevant content with people at work or school and build networks, or you can go from one person's tag to another and find more information about the topic you were looking for. And if you want to have some privacy, you can have private bookmarks too. Just in case.

Also, it has an interesting set of keyboard shortcuts that I would have to familiarize with, but they are useful. Overall, I find it interesting and I think I will use it from now on.

My second tool choice is Vine, I heard of this one before, but always thought of it as the same as the video-sharing feature of Instagram.

And it is, actually Vine allows you less recording time than Instagram, only 6 seconds.

Elise Moreau from aboutTechnology defines Vine as a video-sharing app that is not just any video-sharing app. It’s designed in a way for you to film short, separate instances so they can be linked together for a total of six seconds. Each short video plays in a continuous loop, and are viewable directly in Twitter’s timeline or embedded into a web page.

It was a fun tool, really easy to use and by linking it with my Twitter account, it allowed me to have all my contacts. But I do not really use Twitter, I am a Facebook kind of person and sadly, Vine can not access Facebook friends, so personally I do not think I will stay on Vine. Another detail is that if I want to record a video it has to be using the Vine app and not my camera roll and upload it a later time to Vine, so I think I will stick to my photo-sharing Instagram. Nevertheless, the idea of using it within a business environment seems really appealing and I do get caught into watching these short videos whether they are made in Vine or Instagram.

Here is a video of how Lowe's (an American chain of retail home improvement and appliance stores) uses Vine and Twitter to attract more customers... and works!

I recommend you to check 6 of the Best, Boldest uses of Vine in Marketing, it has some really good Vines made by some companies you must know.

Want to know more?

 

About Delicious and Social Bookmarking:

Delicious.com
Wikipedia on Delicious
Wikipedia on Social Bookmarking
Commoncraft on Social Bookmarking
Technology Resource Teachers

About Vine:

Vine.co
Wikipedia on Vine
What Is Vine?
6 Reasons why Vine and Instagram are great for your Business
How 15 Real Businesses Are Getting Creative With Vine for Marketing

Successful blogging advice

Image edited by me. Original source: Link

What do we mean by "successful"? Does that mean that we have to make money of it? Do we have to have a million readers? What if we just want to write about our personal experiences and use it as a personal diary, do we want that too? What if we use it just as a way to get out of our shelves?

I think that a blog will be successful once it has built a community. Regardless of its size, the main reason to share whatever it is we have to say is exactly that: Sharing. Sharing information with someone in the world who would have the same interests, the same issues, the same experiences.

Since this will be a blog about incorporating social media into enterprises, what I want to share with you is the knowledge I will obtain from my research and further understanding on how to do it. But I also want this class and this blog to guide me through the path of writing correctly and consistently about the things I am interested to share, and build a community from that, where we can give each other feedback and constructive criticism.

So, I am new in this blogging world, but after some reading I can share with you what I think makes a blog a success.

Content and Consistency

Keep your blog content consistent in terms of posting schedule, content and tone. Be aware that consistency does not mean 'the same', try to keep content varied and interesting so the readers will come back for more.

When writing, find your niche, write about something you are passionate about and willing to share with people, be honest and be yourself, tell your story but also try to write FOR them, ask yourself if this is something they want and tailor your writing to your readers, so you keep them interested and involved in your stories.

Once you find the general topic for your blog, be original, there is going to be a lot of other blogs out there talking about the same stuff you want to share, but give it your own twist. Why would your blog be any different? Because of you! Of the way YOU are sharing content with them. 

A tip from Joshua and Ryan from The Minimalists: "when writing use we/our instead of you, think of it as we are writing peer-to-peer, we are not gods".

And don't forget to do some research, it is ok that you want to share your thoughts on things but you need to have all the knowledge needed so you can give a more focused approach.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Make sure your tags and categories are relevant, ensure your post title accurately describes the content of your blog and get linked by others, to improve the way search engines find you and help your readers find the content they are interested in.

Layout and Images

Look at your blog from a reader's perspective. Is it easy to find content? Is it easy to read? Your blog should be clean and organised in a way the reader feels comfortable navigating through it. Don't forget to categorise your posts and add your contact information and a few words about yourself.

I recommend from my personal experience, using a white background. I find it more visually pleasing to the eye and easy to read text on. In the creation of a blog, less is more. Keep it simple and do not fill your page with distractions or flashy announcements.

The use of images adds interest to the blog and makes it more appealing (yes, this is not one of those). The images and photographs should be big and clear because people respond well to big images. But also, because most of our readers will check our posts from their mobile devices and images should be clear in a smaller scale. So make sure your blog is mobile friendly too.

Also consider adding a photo and description of yourself near the top of your blog. It will instantly make your blog relatable and we will be able to know a little bit about the person whose blog we are reading. 

Building a community

Finally, but the most important part, build your community by using comments, social media, e-mail and collaborations. Be active in your social media sites and share every time you publish a new post, allow comments from your readers and actually read them and answer when possible, it is a great way to cultivate a relationship with them because they will give you feedback and by doing so, you will feel the need to improve your blogging skills. 

Here, Scott Stratten shares an interesting article about The Five Words That Kill Your Blog.

Another important part of blogging is collaboration with other bloggers. Using the same strategies used on readers, build relationships your fellow bloggers to get inspiration and learn from them. Write guest posts with them and their readers will come to your blog and increase the communities already built. 

So, I know it is a little bit long but, what do you think about my first post? Do you agree?