Deloitte and the Thought Leadership Revolution

External blogging is of great importance to modern professional services firms. This is not only due to the sales and marketing opportunities this platform provides, but also the stimulus it provides for customer and community engagement.

Research by the McKinsey Global Institute found that value in the product development value chain could be increased by 18-21 percent via social tools. This increased value potential is afforded through both internal and external collaboration opportunities for research and development. Marketing and sales value potential was only 0-1%, however this value chain is imperative for sourcing and retaining customers, so any potential value increase is pertinent.

For large consulting firms, such as Deloitte, being perceived as an expert in the field is vital for generating awareness of your firm, attracting customers and retaining their business. This has historically been achieved through physical publications; in Deloitte's case a semiannual periodical, Deloitte Review. Along with other publications, Deloitte Review can now be read online via the Deloitte University Press website. In today's increasingly digital age, providing research findings, news and business insight articles in an online format helps to solidify Deloitte's position as a thought leader. A thought leader is 'an individual or firm that is recognized as an authority in a specialized field and whose expertise is sought and often rewarded'.

Alongside, the articles and periodicals made available online via Deloitte University Press, Deloitte also has a global network of blogs that draw upon the knowledge of individuals from within the firm across a wide variety of topics.

Deloitte Perspectives is the flagship blog within Deloitte's global blog network. The aim of this blog is to 'provide a forum to discuss issues affecting the global business community'. Through sharing the insights of Deloitte's global network of professionals, Deloitte Perspectives effectively engages external parties, creating a forum that allows Deloitte to harness value potential in the Product Development and Marketing and Sales value chains.

Other blogs accompanying 'Deloitte Perspectives' include:

• 'Short Takes...on Analytics', a blog focusing on how company's can leverage analytics to improve operations and decision making
• 'Green Business blog' which focuses on sustainability and corporate responsibility
• 'HR Times blog' focusing on all things related to human capital
• Mid-Market Perspectives' which delves into news and analysis on issues that may affect firms in this high-growth size range. 

There are many other blogs that help to form Deloitte's global network and it is this level of depth across topics that bolsters Deloitte's reputation as a thought leader.

Providing this variety of insights on their own is not enough to attract potentially interested readers to the material however.  The Deloitte blogs tie in with the S.L.A.T.E.S. paradigm and are backed by Deloitte's social media network including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+. Through the sharing of links via these media outlets, Deloitte enables those interested to find relevant articles. Each article or case study on a Deloitte blog also makes use of tags so that they might find other relevant publications of interest. RSS feeds are made compatible with the blogs in the Deloitte network, thus allowing those who have found content to be of interest in the past, to have future articles signalled to them on a regular basis.

Of course, all of Deloitte's blogs include a comments section, so as to foster the 'forum' environment Deloitte has set out to achieve. This allows the firm to harness customer and community insights for value creation. To ensure that all comments are constructive, it is noted at the bottom of each blog post that 'comments are moderated and will not appear until the author has approved them'.

For professional services firms, being perceived as a 'thought leader' within the industry is imperative for obtaining and securing a solid customer base. In today's digital age, a firm can only be seen as a thought leader if they are communicating their insights via an online medium.

Question for my readers: Thought leadership is increasingly becoming more relevant as a cost-effective sale and marketing tool within the 'free world'. Do you think the publication of inventive new ways to do business that may conflict traditional methods could hurt a firm's ability to do business in countries with more conservative outlooks?

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Value Creation in Business Support Functions at Unilever

The value creation opportunities for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies afforded by social technologies is enormous. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute found that these technologies have the potential to create between $212-308 billion in value potential annually within the global CPG sector alone. Approximately $36-46 billion of this figure is derived solely from application of social technologies to business support functions.

One company that has recognised and harnessed this value creating potential is multinational consumer goods corporation Unilever, who are applying social technologies externally in their talent recruitment process and internally via their custom-built social collaboration platform based on the Salesforce platform.

Social Media and Recruitment at Unilever:

Unilever use a variety of digital media outlets to source and match talent to positions globally. These include:

• The global careers website;
• a LinkedIn company page;
• a careers Facebook page;
• a careers YouTube channel;
• and a Careers Twitter feed

The careers website provides two separate links for graduates/students and professionals. It is worth noting the use of the keywords 'opportunities' in the graduate section and 'vacancies' in the professionals section. It can be inferred that Unilever is using the careers website to advertise a long-term career opportunity to students and graduates, as opposed to a position for professionals who have been working within the industry for some time.

Unilever's LinkedIn page is extremely popular with over 500,000 followers which may come as no surprise given the company's global reach and reputation, however in an interview with Global Resourcing Director, Paul Maxin, he revealed that by rolling out buttons in email signatures they went from "40,000 followers to about 235,000 in a period of 10 months". Over this period, Unilever also experienced an exponential increase in page visits and a significant increase in new hires from LinkedIn.

The Unilever Facebook page is also extremely popular with over 200,000 'likes'. Whilst, this page might have a universal URL, the content is specific for each country/region from which an individual is viewing it, thus ensuring this resource is relevant to the user.

The Unilever Careers YouTube channel features a unique 'How far could U go?' branding, however conforms to their Facebook strategy of having country specific channels, relevant to the user. Across all 20 country-based channels, Unilever has amassed an astounding figure of over 200,000 views. Clearly, this video sharing platform has much merit from an organisational recruitment perspective and is useful for more than just the sharing of funny cat videos.

Unilever does not yet have an Australian careers Twitter feed, but has since late August of last year had a global careers Twitter feed which has yet to really take off. However, with 500 followers at this point in time, it serves as a good back up to the other social media channels in widening Unilever's ability to source and match talent.

Through combination of universal and local social technology mediums, Unilever is truly a world leader in 'Glocal' recruitment. Through enhancing the opportunity for talent to hear about current opportunities, Unilever has a much greater chance of finding the right person for the job and taking advantage of the value creation afforded by social technologies.

Internal Collaboration at Unilever:

With marketers, brand managers and partners spread across 190 different countries, Unilever has much to gain from the increases in efficiency that could be attained through implementation of an internal social collaboration tool.  Global management consultancy firm Accenture was hired to develop and implement a digital social platform based on the Salesforce platform that also integrated Salesforce's chatter.

This new platform was developed in a mere 12 weeks and has enabled Unilever's 7,500 marketers to quickly and efficiently share "knowledge, best practices and creative assets across the network". Just like the Salesforce platform, Unilever's platform creates value through enhanced collaboration by providing staff with a secure, central hub for access of resources and collective knowledge.

Question for my Readers: Have you ever used YouTube to learn more about a company's career opportunities? If so, what advantages/disadvantages do you feel this format has in comparison to conventional written job descriptions?

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Social Tools in Action!

As many of us who have experience in the work force would know, the constant barrage of communication never stops. Email has gone from being one of the most efficient methods of communication, to one of the most time consuming activities in a professional's day. Luckily there are solutions to this issue in the form of new communication tools such as Yammer and Asana. In this post I will be taking a look at companies that have taken advantage of modern social tools and how these examples tie in with pertinent Enterprise 2.0 theory.

Case Study 1: Yammer at Capgemini

The first example of Enterprise 2.0 in action that I would like to present is the introduction of social messaging tool Yammer to Capgemini, a multinational IT consultancy firm. 

The Capgemini example ties in well with the four enterprise 2.0 benefit dimensions outlined by Dawson (2008). 

• Productivity & Efficiency
• Knowledge
• Reputation
• Staff Engagement

In an article posted to the London Business School 'Business Strategy Review' blog by Julian Birkinshaw 'What happens when social networking collides with the corporate Intranet?' it is highlighted that prior to Yammer, Capgemini solely utilised a corporate intranet that was centralised and hierarchical. Through experimentation and eventual slow adoption of Yammer alongside the current intranet, Capgemini has successfully decentralised their internal communication channel, engaging and drawing upon the knowledge of the "collective consciousness of the 20,000 people who subscribe to Yammer internally."

Whilst it may first come to mind, that the blurring of boundaries between work and play could negatively affect worker productivity and efficiency, the opposite effect has been seen to occur. The self-governing nature of threads on Capgemini's Yammer tool, has proven to effectively prevent or stop threads that are becoming too 'play' oriented. The media attention resulting from the immediate success of Capgemini's Yammer implementation has also boosted the reputation of the firm not only in the eyes of industry partners and competitors, but prospective employees also.

Case Study 2: Ben and Jerry's 'Do the World a Flavor'

In 2006, Tapscott & Williams defined 'prosumers' in their book 'Wikinomics' as companies that engage in the blending of consumers and producers. A prime example of a prosumer is Ben and Jerry's, an American ice cream company that exports globally. 

As a global exporter, Ben and Jerry's had great reach when conducting their 2010 'Do the world a flavor' competition. Amy-Mae Elliot from Mashable spoke with Head of PR from Ben and Jerry's Sean Greenwood about this people-powered venture in Crowdsourcing Case Studies. The hugely successful competition that focused on raising awareness of Ben and Jerry's use of fair trade ingredients, garnered 10,000 new flavour ideas from the US alone. When asked why they went to the public with this campaign, Greenwood replied with 'It's always a tremendous opportunity to tap into our fan's passions and creativity'. This statement speaks volumes for wikinomics business methodologies, as in my opinion no staged marketing surveys or focus groups can compete with the telling information derived from the collective conscious of the crowd working together to achieve a common goal.

Case Study 3: iChing at Yum Brands

The implementataion of 'Jive' based social tool iChing at Yum! Brands, the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut etc., has proven very successful and fits in well with the S.L.A.T.E.S. paradigm outline by McAfee in 2006 Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. 

This stands for: 

• Search 
• Links
• Authoring
• Tags
• Extensions
• Signals

To ensure that the 6,000 back office workers across 600 different groups could easily retrieve the information they required, a search function was absolutely necessary on Yum! Brand's new social networking tool, especially when you consider the amount of information that has been gathered over the years in such a large organisation. This is where developing a tool that is based on an already existent system, such as 'Jive', becomes so important, as a common search interface tool that has been tried and tested was easily put in place for their custom system.

Likewise, a links option in the navigation menu, was implemented much like in Jive, which allows for users to set links to relevant information in their posts. Much like 'Jive', 'iChing' is based around user-generated blogs, wikis and discussions. This authoring component of iChing, is a key driver in employee participation. The tag functionality embedded in the system enhances the 'search' interface immensely. Through users creating tags on their own posts, the search functionality becomes much more meaningful and powerful, as it does not rely on the centralised setting of keywords. 

Also, built into 'iChing' is RSS capability, which is also derived from 'Jive'. This RSS capability improves search capability further as employees do not have to sift through tags and search results to see new posts that are of relevance to them, as it will be signalled to them in a simple 'news feed' format. This RSS feed is yet another good example of why deriving your platform from an already existing tool, such as 'Jive' is so beneficial, as the implementation of effective RSS capability from software would be a challenging and expensive process.

As can be seen, Web 2.0 applications and ideologies are now well embedded in modern organisations and there are multiple existing tools and platforms available to those organisations that do not wish to be left behind. I leave you my readers with a question to consider....

Question for my Readers:  With open innovation and crowd-sourcing being so convenient and economical in today's digital age, are the traditional marketing techniques of surveys and focus groups becoming obsolete?

References:

Dawson, R. (2008). Implementing Enterprise 2.0. San Francisco; Sydney: Advanced Human Technologies.

Tapscott, D. & Williams, A. (2006). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Portfolio.

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