Project of Enterprise 2.0

A term coined to describe efforts to bring technologies such as social networks and blogs into the workplace.

Introduction

Small Businesses are using networks to become bigger

• Mission Pie, a small shop in San Francisco

  • "Hey first peaches of the season are here. Comes and get your peach pie @10am"

  • Simple tweets like that have helped Mission Pie, a small shop in San Francisco, drum up interest in its mouth-watering array of sweet and savoury pies.

  • As well as twittering about its wares, the store also alerts customers to peotry readings and other events it organizes.

  • Krystin Rubin, a co-owner of Mission Pie, says the business had just 150 followers for a while after one of its bakers started sending out tweets almost a year ago. Then that number suddenly shot up to over 1000. Over the past few months business has been very brisk and Ms Rubin reckons Twitter deserves part of the credit. "It has a sort of street credibility that's not there with traditional media," She says.

• SprinKles, a cupcake bakery

  • Sprinkles, a cupcake bakery with stores all over America and nearly 94,000 fans of its Facebook page, posts a password to that page each day which can be redeemed for a free cake by a certain number of visitors to its shops. Such offers can attract a lot of attention.

• Anti-celebrity movement in Taiwan, the power of social networking. An anti-Miss-ChowYuKo Fans group at facebook reached 52,016 members in 2 days.

Social Networks are arguably having an even greater impact on small businesses than on the bigger league. By giving entrepreneurs free access to their audience, service such as Twitter and Facebook are putting corporate tiddlers on a par with behemoths such as Starkbucks and Dell when it comes to broadcasting mesages to a mass market. (source: The Economist, Jan. 30th - Feb. 5th, 2010, A world of connections: A special report on social networking, p.13)

Objective
Establish a small business & prosper by using social networks

• Find your co-founders (1 week)

  • Class is grouped in teams, the maximum number of teams is 12.
  • Each team must has 4 or 5 members (no exceptions).
  • All team members are expected to show up and make presentation. Absent from presentation will receive ZERO credit.

• Establish your own business (2 weeks)

  • Prepare a powerpoint presentation to introduce your business.
  • Products & Services
    • Avoid food stands, or business with no employees except the owner and his/her spouse.
  • Customer base
  • Current state of business:
    • revenues & profitibility analysis, challenges.
    • Competitors survey.
  • set goals: how social networks help your business
    • more customers
    • better brand awareness
    • new product and service ideas

• Progress presentation(2 weeks)

  • Prepare a powerpoint presentation for approaches will be used
  • Products or services briefing.
  • Objectives
  • Approaches
    • What networks do you use to attract more traffic? (websites, blogs, ...)
    • Activities: Good experiences posting, promotions, ...
    • Alliance with other groups, networkings,
  • KPI: how do you evaluate your achievements?
  • Facebook fan pages' stat analysis
  • Reference: Spicy dumplings use 36 different platforms to get its business moving. Just Facebook will not do the trick.

• Achievement Presentation (4 weeks)

  • Prepare a powerpoint presentation for your achievement
  • Products or services briefing.
  • How do you approach your goal. Your promotion strategies. online implementation i.e., online promotional activities.
  • planned vs. achieved goals
  • Lessons learned

Grading Scheme
grades distributions: Business plan 10%, midterm progress report 30%, final report 60%.