Who is Achieving Strategic Results in Australia by Design? By Dion Hinchcliffe and James Dellow.

1. WHITEPAPER
The State of Social Business
in Australia for 2012
Who is Achieving Strategic Results by Design
May 2012
by Dion Hinchcliffe and James Dellow
Ripple Effect Group Pty Ltd (ABN: 28 135 533 514)
P.O. Box 1227, Woollahra, N.S.W. 1350
Suite 1, 50 Stanley Street, Darlinghurst, N.S.W. 2010
© 2012 Ripple Effect Group
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2. Introduction
Despite being nearly last in the developed world in adopting social business (aka enterprise
social media), a wide cross-section of Australian companies are now seeing the benefits,
both inside (workforce and business partner collaboration) and out (customer participation).
Encouragingly, the latest data shows that enterprise social media is set to grow by over 25%
between 2013 and 2015, the largest uptake yet. In fact, by some accounts, Australia is the
5th largest user of grassroots enterprise social networks in the world, highlighting the pent up
demand that local companies are likely not yet actively taking advantage of.
Yet the proof of success with social business ultimately lies in the real-world, bottom-line
results. Business leaders and workers are challenging social business evangelists to
demonstrate what Australian organisations are actually achieving and what benefits they are
seeing. Can applying social media to their various business challenges provide the extra edge
and differentiation to not only keep up but also innovate and help Australian companies to be
more globally competitive?
Key Findings
Based on recent data from 2011 and 2012, the following trends and results were uncovered:
• Australia is a leader in consumer social media, yet a laggard in social business.
• There is strong demand by workers for better tools to collaborate and engage.
• Australian firms that strategically commit to social business see the largest results.
• While early days, some large enterprises in Australia are implementing social
business at scale.
• Results of social business implementations in the enterprise in Australia so far
include:
‣ Better and more meaningful connection to customers and workers.
‣ Improved market engagement that scales quickly.
‣ More direct handling of media crises with lower negative impact.
‣ Relatively low cost, compared to traditional approaches of similar types of
business activity.
‣ Seamless access to content or influence over the products people care
about are primary drivers of mass participation.
‣ Adoption of internal enterprise social media can be achieved relatively
quickly.
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3. Social Business in Australia: The 2012 Data Points
One of the key insights of the latest data about social media in Australia is how entrenched
and widely adopted it is in people’s personal lives. The most current data available shows
that, in terms of regular engagement, there are:
• over 10 million Facebook users,
• 4 million Blogspot users,
• 2.1 million users of LinkedIn,
• 1.8 million users of Twitter, and
• the list goes on.
When new globally popular social networks appear, such as Instagram and Pinterest, they
also quickly climb towards the top of the Australian charts. The data are clear: Social media
in Australia is strong, vibrant, and users are deeply engaged. Everyday, millions of Australians
connect with each other, share information, make plans, and live otherwise more enriched
and community-based lives in social media.
However, the story of the business world in Australia is considerably different than the
consumer world today, although it is starting to change. Only Japan, at 27.5 percent, has a
lower level of business adoption of enterprise social media, with Australia coming in at 41.6
percent according to recent data from KPMG1.
By comparison, China comes in at 87 percent and the United States at 71.5 percent. Even
this misses a critically nuanced story, that many organisations claiming adoption of social
media often consists of as little as having a corporate Twitter account.
The reality is that only a small number of businesses in Australia are using social media
beyond the early adopter areas of marketing and corporate communications. Those that do
are finding a more potent way of engaging with customers and employees where there is an
increasingly strong story of correlated business results such as higher sales and customer
satisfaction2.
In a broader business productivity context, it is worth considering that research published by
the University of New South Wales in 2011 showed that the characteristics of high performing
Australian organisations include high levels of employee participation, better use of
technology and talent management - all factors closely related to being a social business 3.
Interestingly, the number of industries engaging in social business today is varied and wide.
These include travel, law, government, consumer electronics, retail, and food and beverage.
All of these industries in Australia had strong enterprise social media stories with either
significant adoption numbers or concrete outcomes worth noting. While external customer
engagement is the most well documented and measured, a number of notable internal
stories have emerged recently as well.
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4. Real-World Vignettes: Using Social Business to
Improve Outcomes
Companies rarely document what they do in a way that can be shared easily in a publication
like the Harvard Business Review or the Australian Financial Review, to make it clear to the
rest of their peers about what they have accomplished. This is true of social business as
much as with any other new strategic business innovation.
Sometimes this is due to competitive secrecy (and in our experience, many early adopters in
Australia see social business as a significant source of competitive advantage), often they
simply find it hard to measure the affect of IT when applying technology to business. Yet the
broad outline of social business, here defined as situating social media adapted specifically to
enterprise, needs to improve the way organisations operate on both the inside and outside, is
emerging at last to the Australia business community.
Case study: Canon Australia - customer engagement
One particularly stand-out story is of Canon Australia, whose popular line of digital cameras
generates particularly strong brand affinity. Their research showed that consumers, who
respected and adored the company’s products, wanted “an enduring relationship with the
brand.4 ” But building an engaging relationship that is both genuine and useful requires a
two-way medium, one in which physical presence or traditional media cannot do.
Canon Australia eventually designed a multi-channel social media strategy that was based on
a central hub community of enthusiast customers, dubbed the “World of EOS.” Connected
to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, as well as being a destination in its own right, the
strategy netted over 75,000 members with over 100,000 photos uploaded. Canon created
engaging events and content such as competitions, live exhibitions, custom designed
Facebook applications, tips and tricks posts, and more.
The real question of course is whether building relationship-based connections with
customers creates real business results. Canon reports that in the most recent period in
which World of EOS was integrated into their marketing efforts that they attained a 50% value
share across all interchangeable lens cameras, more than all other competitors combined.
Unit sales grew by 23% in 2011 over the previous year and brand awareness in the general
Australian population grew from 26% to 31%.
Case study: Tourism Australia and Jetstar - external engagement
In late 2011, Tourism Australia and Jetstar entered into an agreement for a $10 million effort
to boost visitor arrivals to the country using primarily social media 5. Already a social media
giant with over 2 million followers on Facebook, Travel Australia realised that the emerging
middle class in Asia was already profoundly tech savvy and an ideal group to be engaged in
social media. The plan was to entice tourists by using the channels they frequent most.
A series of social media campaigns ensued and just six months later, despite a high
Australian dollar and regional economic weakness, flights have increased and visits are
substantially up, including a 10.7% increase from China 6.
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5. Case study: NSW Department of Education and Communities - employee engagement
The move to social business has not been limited to the private sector. Recently, the NSW
Department of Education & Communities (previously the Department of Education & Training)
provided a 12 point social media policy to its staff. The intent, to lay the groundwork for their
staff to be become more engaged and collaborative with each other using social media tools.
Employees with clearly defined rules can better participate in the freeform and dynamic
conversation inherent with social media. They can also be educated on how best to use them
to produce useful results for the organisation.
While still nascent, the early results have been encouraging and the rollout of enterprise social
networking tools inside the department (initially piloted with Yammer, then a full scale
implementation of Socialtext) has netted over 13,000 active users which have formed
specialist communities of interest around educational topics such as maths and science7.
Students themselves can reach out for help on the social network and find teachers or others
willing to assist them, making it a self-help resource of considerable potential.
Case study: Minter Ellison - internal communication and collaboration
The Australian legal sector is undergoing a period of significant change and Minter Ellison’s
CIO, Peter Westerveld, wanted to make communication and collaboration better and more
seamless in his company. The challenge: A far-flung workforce with 2,500 total staff, 290
partners and over 1,000 lawyers working in Australia, China, New Zealand and the United
Kingdom. The firm selected a new unified communication service from Cisco, known as
Quad, which combines video, audio, virtual meetings, as well as an enterprise social network,
which has been rolled out to all employees8. Users can employ the best communication
method for a given situation.
The desired outcome: Reduced e-mail volume in a very intensive e-mail workplace and better
knowledge retention in a knowledge heavy environment.
Case study: Telstra - social customer service
Social media has also begun making it’s way into the way Australian telecommunications
industry’s work. Telstra has recently had considerable success in using the medium for
customer care. In August, 2011, they announced they had moved to 24 hours a day, 365
days a year social media-based customer support via Twitter and Facebook9. Since then,
their followers have exploded from 11,000 to over 37,000. But perhaps what is most
significant is that have worked to create a customer community, using Lithium Technologies’
social CRM solution, who can are willing to help other customers, reducing the workload on
Telstra staff while cutting costs and increasing customer satisfaction.
By making major investments in social business for a critical business function, Telstra are
preparing for the future of social customer service.
Case study: Domino’s Australia - social product co-design
Finally, Domino’s Australia recently used its hundreds of thousands of engaged Facebook
fans to design a new product, a pizza. In March 2012, Domino’s asked its social media fans
to vote on a wide range of features such as the type of crust used, the sauces to add, the
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6. toppings and even the name. Fans of the company quickly joined in en masse. The most
popular choices were added onto the new pizza, the winner of the process which has since
been added to the Domino’s menu, dubbed Fan Favourite.
Using the social connection to customers to co-design the exact products that they want is
an important new aspect of social business and this is a leading Australian example.
Conclusion: Social Business Getting Traction in
Australia in 2012
The good news is that despite the Australian industry’s low benchmark position globally for
adopting social business, demand exists on the ground from both consumers and workers
for better business use of social media.
Customers are willing to interact at scale with businesses, workers are adopting grass roots
social media until their workplaces offer them. The major roadblocks are easily understood as
well. Despite the transformative nature of social media to improve business outcomes,
organisations remain concerned about both security and relevance to their business.
However, as shown in the vignettes here, a new crop of leading companies in Australia are
finding their way forward in engaging via social media to improve business outcomes in
marketing, sales, customer care, and product design.
The limits that exist in what organisations can achieve by tapping into their customers and
employees are largely self-imposed. We often find that managers need to look beyond their
individual experiences and attitudes towards social media so they can identify the beneficial
patterns of innovation, productivity and performance that better collaboration and collective
intelligence provides.
Business leaders need only look beyond the shores of Australia for hundreds of additional
high-impact examples that can be learned from and applied to their organisation. Social
business, while still in the early days of adoption in Australia during 2012, is showing enough
maturity around the rest of the world in process and tooling to be taken seriously on the
management agenda. It is now poised to deliver major benefits in higher performance and
bottom-line results for the companies willing and able to make the necessary improvement to
the way they work.
Looking ahead, Australian companies should focus on understanding how becoming a social
business can:
• Act as a force multiplier that allows them to punch well above their weight in a
globalised economy;
• Help them to engage better with staff, so that they can attract and retain
employees and empower them to be more productive; and
• Enable them to deliver innovative co-produced products and more personalised
levels of customer service through social media.
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7. About the Authors
Dion Hinchcliffe - Executive Vice President of Strategy, Dachis
Group
Dion is Executive Vice President of Strategy of Dachis Group. A
well-known enterprise architect, author, blogger, and business
strategist, he currently works with the leadership teams of Fortune
500 and Global 2000 firms to devise strategies to help them adapt
their organisations to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st
century. Dion has been featured or quoted in CIO Magazine, Computerworld, Forbes, Wired,
and BusinessWeek, and is a frequent keynote speaker at industry-leading conferences such
as Web 2.0 Expo, Enterprise 2.0, CeBIT, and the Agile Executive Forum.
Dion still works hands-on in the trenches where he develops new ground in the areas of
digital strategy, next-generation IT, enterprise social media, open supply chains, business
agility, and emergent Web architectures in large engagements for enterprise clients. He is also
co-author of Social Business By Design with Peter Kim (John Wiley and Sons, 2012.) Dion
writes about next-generation business at http://dionhinchcliffe.com and on Twitter at
@dhinchcliffe.
James Dellow - Senior Business & Technology Consultant
Master of Business & Technology (MBT)
As General Manager, Social Business Consulting, James is
responsible for managing the technical and organisational aspects of
all social software implementations. This encompasses helping
organisations maximise the value of social software to meet business
objectives, providing expertise on social computing strategies and
integrating social software tools with current IT systems.
James brings more than a decade of experience working in
information and knowledge management roles and as a consultant with a wide range of
government, professional and blue chip companies including AMP, the Australian Red Cross
Blood Service, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission, the Australian Taxation
Office, BHP Biliton, Blue Scope Steel, CSC, Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the
Government 2.0 Taskforce, Ernst & Young, the Children's Hospital at Westmead, ING
Australia and Rio Tinto. With a thorough understanding of emerging web 2.0 technologies
and user-centred information workplaces, James is a well regarded business and technology
expert in the social media landscape.
James’ viewpoint has been sought in a range of media channels including the Australian
Financial Review, Sky News Australia and the Sydney Morning Herald. He has also written
articles for publications such as CMS Wire, Image & Data Manager magazine and the
International Association for Human Resource Information Management.
James writes at http://chieftech.com.au and on Twitter at @chieftech.
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8. Additional Resources
Organisations wishing to adopt social business approaches in order to achieve the benefits
outlined in this white paper may wish to consult the following resources:
Social Business By Design: A Strategic Roadmap and Playbook
Social Business By Design is the definitive management book on
how to rethink the modern organisation in the social media era.
Based on their research and work through the Dachis Group,
industry thought leaders Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim deftly
explore how the social, cultural, and technological trends
provoked by the social media explosion are transforming the
business environment.
Designed as both a strategic overview and a hands-on
resource, Social Business By Design clearly shows how to
choose and implement a social business strategy and maximize
its impact.
Links:
http://socialbusinessbydesign.com
http://dachisgroup.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1118273214/
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9. References
1“Local business yet to capitalise on Australian's love of social media.” KPMG Press Release. August 2nd,
2011.
http://www.kpmg.com/AU/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Press-Releases/Pages/Press-Release-L
ocal-Business-Yet-02-Aug-2011.aspx
2“Leadership, Culture and Management Practices of High Performing Workplaces in Australia: The High
Performing Workplaces Index”, University of New South Wales. October 2011.
http://www.deewr.gov.au/Skills/Programs/WorkDevelop/Documents/SKEHPW.pdf
3“Local business yet to capitalise on Australian's love of social media.” KPMG Press Release. August 2nd,
2011.
http://www.kpmg.com/AU/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Press-Releases/Pages/Press-Release-L
ocal-Business-Yet-02-Aug-2011.aspx
4“Social Media’s Role in the Marketing Mix.” Switched-On Media. February, 2011.
http://www.theprreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Canon-Switched-On-Media.pdf
5“Tourism Australia, Jetstar Tap Social Media to Bring Back Japanese Tourists.” International Business
Times. October 24th, 2011. Vittorio Hernandez.
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/236279/20111024/tourism-australia-jetstar-tap-social-media-to-bring-back-japa
nese-tourists.htm
6“China, Japan arrivals boost Australia tourism.” AFP. May 9th, 2012.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g8gEDKHEI8H-tHVDn6Q97Iw9eLiw?docId=CNG.b87
53a623ca4cf7edb396e16ede50159.2a1
7“Making social media happen in government: case study of NSW Department of Education.”
RossDawson.com. December 12th, 2011.
http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2011/12/making-social-media-happen-in-government-case-stud
y-of-nsw-department-of-education.html
8“Cisco Quad Makes Law Firm's World Smaller.” InformationWeek. August 2, 2011. David F. Carr.
http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/workgrouping_team_collaboration_workspaces/2313000
18
9“Telstra opens next chapter of social media customer service.” Telstra Press Release. August 16th, 2011.
By Gerd Schenkel. http://exchange.telstra.com.au/?p=14431
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