Boston Social Media

You should also attempt to contact the client company (through social media sites) and see if you can
do a short interview with them about where they see opportunities in this space. Obviously, you should be
completely transparent about who you are and your objectives when you contact the client company. Tell
them you are a student team and that you are doing a research project on how their company can benefit
from social media use, and it would be great to get any insights directly from the organization itself. Any
information obtained would be used solely for this class.
Your social media solution should touch on both the external and internal activities of the client:
a). External: This would focus on external stakeholders, such as customers, consumers, and business
partners. How can social technologies help with any of the customer lifecycle – new product ideas,
product development, brand awareness and management, product launch, and customer service and
retention? etc.,
b). Internal: This would focus on both knowledge management and talent management activities. How
can social technologies help the client with internal collaboration among knowledge workers and
product/service innovation in the R&D function? How can leaders within the client company leverage

social media? How can these technologies be used to develop knowledge workers, onboard new
employees? What specific social media roles might be needed within the client company?
Depending on where you see the business opportunities for the client, you may emphasize an external or
internal activity in your presentation. However, you should still touch on the other activity. Also, you may
find that it is difficult to obtain research information in one of these activities. It is fine to make some
assumptions, but you should have some research data on both the internal and external workings of the
company.
As part of your solution, you should also get specific with tactics with regards to the technologies used as
part of the campaign, how these technologies may be implemented, and what metrics you would use to
measure the success of the campaign.
2-page paper (rough estimate) that details your research and campaign solution.
To summarize, your campaign should include the following:
a) Think about the 3 C’s – content, community, and collaborative platforms. What content will
be part of the campaign? How may you build a user community? Who might be the
influencers? How will you build the “viral” aspect for your client’s campaign which is critical
for most social IT initiatives?
b) What are some of the critical implementation factors? How will you get people (e.g.,
consumers, customers, employees, leaders) to use your solution?
c) Think about the 2 L’s – listening and learning. What metrics (qualitative or quantitative) might
you use to measure the success of your social media initiative?