Posts tagged ‘business value’

Case Study: In Disrupted Media Industry, Meredith Drives Profitability with Enterprise Social Software

By Christopher Lynch | June 8, 2010, 12:24 pm | 0 Comments

If you follow the media industry, you know how much it has struggled to adapt its business model to the Web. But what’s not written about as frequently is how some media and publishing companies are using social software — one of the very technologies that disrupted the industry — to pursue new business opportunities and grow revenue.

That’s been the case at Meredith Corporation (here is our full case study we published today). Meredith counts 23 subscription-based publications in its portfolio, including Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal. With its various properties, Meredith serves a readership of nearly 75 million women.

Meredith has been using Socialtext to manage subscriber campaigns, respond to market changes, and ultimately drive profitability in its circulation. Meredith utilizes Socialtext Signals for microblogging to share and discuss new ideas, SocialCalc (a social spreadsheet) to manage subscriber campaign reports and online workspaces to collaborate more deeply on strategic marketing projects.

At Socialtext, we focus very heavily on the business value that social tools can generate for companies internally. As someone who cheerleads for media companies who work hard to adapt to market changes (I used to work for one), I was encouraged by Meredith’s strong results during the course of my research.

“Since Meredith began using Socialtext in the fall of 2008, its subscriber numbers bettered an industry that was in decline. According to the most recent State of the News Media report, the magazine industry’s paid subscriptions, which make up nearly 90 percent of magazines sold, declined 1.12 percent overall. Meredith, meanwhile, in the second quarter of fiscal 2010, increased its circulation revenue by nearly half a million dollars from the same period a year before.
In a disrupted industry where flat revenue or even light losses are viewed as an accomplishment, the increase wasn’t lost on Meredith’s investors when the company reported its financial results. In fact, the company reported that the “revenues, profit and related margin in Meredith’s circulation activities (that) increased in the second quarter of fiscal 2010 compared to the prior year (were) driven in part by efficiencies in subscription operations.”

business value, case study, enterprise social software, media industry, social media, social networking

Business is Conducted by People, not Users

By Eugene Lee | February 9, 2010, 2:25 pm | 8 Comments

One of the more unfortunate words that prevails in the software industry is “user.” “User” marginalizes the importance of people, and subconsciously implies that we should simply use the software in the way it’s presented to us without question. It makes it seem as if people should adapt to a vendor’s terminology, data model, and workflow. In reality, it should be the other way around: Software should enable people to communicate and collaborate with each other, share knowledge, make informed decisions, and get our jobs done faster and more efficiently than ever before, in a model that makes sense to them.

I’ve only found two industries who describe their customers as “users”. One is high tech, and the other is drug dealers.

We have even evolved highly specialized disciplines whose monikers involve the word “user” – “user interface” or “user experience.” Worse, the science of “user interface” has historically been called “human factors” – where we’re now describing “humans” as organic life form alternatives to the preferably predictable and “error-proof” silicon powering the machines we force users to adapt to.

In reality, business is conducted by people, not users. People introduce themselves by job title or organizational affiliation. They have passions and expertise, and like to share knowledge with the teams and groups they’re on. Almost no one describes themselves as “an Oracle user”.,

Socialtext has always focused on reaching out to business people first – which fits hand in glove with our all-SaaS business model (as opposed to selling big perpetual license deals to IT who then try to stimulate adoption with users). Our whole company is aligned around the priority of enabling our customers to achieve business value, not just adoption. That starts first with designing and delivering functionality that enables customers to answer more substantial questions (such as “who knows what” or “who knows who knows what”, not just “who knows who”). Our entire sales and marketing methodology emphasizes the importance of identifying business champions (see Michael Idinopulos’ excellent post “How to Find Enterprise 2.0 Champions”), and partnering with our customers throughout their implementation to ensure they are realizing business results. We continually adapt and innovate product enhancements based on their feedback.

Business people feel proud of business results they achieve by being part of something bigger than them – and usually by being part of a team that made it happen. Software should adapt to these people and their needs.

business value, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise social software, SaaS

Why Enterprise Microblogging Must Be Integrated with Other Social Apps

By Christopher Lynch | February 3, 2010, 3:30 pm | 0 Comments

Although enterprise microblogging has emerged as a key technology to enable better collaboration between employees, it holds the greatest business value when it’s integrated with other bits of social and enterprise software. That’s the overall theme in an article today by Clint Boulton of eWeek. Detailing a recent Gartner report, Boulton writes that “while more than 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging by 2012, stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.”

The predictions reflect what we’ve experienced in the market with customers. One of the reasons our customers have derived business value from Socialtext Signals (our microblogging tool) rests in the fact that it integrates well with social tools in our platform. For example, when saving a workspace page, Socialtext can automatically post a link to the page in Signals, making it simple for your colleagues to discover and access the updated content.

In the article, Garner also predicts that “70 percent of IT-led social projects will fail.” This bolsters our contention that line of business (LOB) people make the best champions for social software because they feel the pain points in their daily processes very tangibly. This is not to say IT won’t play an important role. In allowing enterprise social software to integrate with other enterprise systems in a secure environment, IT is a critical player and needs to work closely with LOB champions and vendors to provide this integrated experience.

A significant downside to standalone enterprise microblogging tools, which isn’t cited in the article, concerns security and control. As some of these free, niche tools crop up organically within companies — and employees begin to share private, proprietary information over them — an IT administrator must pay the vendor providing the service just to get control of logins, passwords and the domain the employees set up to host the information. This isn’t a true freemium model; it’s an extortionist sales model.