Malaysia Airlines 'Bucket List' Competition, Ill-Conceived and Inappropriate

You would be hard-pressed to find someone who has not heard of Malaysia Airlines following a year of tragedy. For anyone who has avoided all media channels for the past 12 months, Malaysia Airlines is an international passenger airline, based out of Kuala Lumpur, that suffered two high profile disasters in 2014 resulting in the deaths of 537 crew and passengers. At this point in time, it may have seemed that a social media "sharing" competition would be a great way to help rebuild the company's tarnished reputation. A poor choice of words proved that idea wrong.

Enter the "My Ultimate Bucket List" competition, which requires entrants to list items they would like to tick off on their bucket list. A "bucket list" is a list of things you would like to do before you "kick the bucket"(pass away). To help this contest spread, Malaysia Airlines provided the incentive of an additional entry for each share of the contest across a selection of different social media platforms.

Given the recent tragic history of the airline, it takes very little common sense to realise why such a title is terribly inappropriate. With regard to Rogerson's eight ethical principles, this lack of thought on Malaysia Airline's behalf violates the first principle of honour, as evidenced by the public outrage. It seems as though the fifth principle of due care was breached also, as it is not likely this competition title would have gone public, had the best quality assurance standards been adhered to. Lastly, it appears that the sixth principle fairness was not taken into account either, because those who have been affected by the tragedies should have been considered as stakeholders before making the decision to proceed with a potentially (almost certainly) offensive competition title.

Indeed, it does seem ludicrous for Malaysia Airlines to have conceived a title for their competition that has connotations with death and it did not take long for Twitter users to address the obvious concern with the competition title.

In relation to the key risks and concerns proposed by Dawson (2008), the primary consequence of this social media mishap was a further negative impact upon Malaysia Airline's reputation, as evidenced by the flood of negative external comments throughout social media channels. This is the exact opposite of what the airline set out to achieve. The six key risks and concerns of Enterprise 2.0 highlighted by Dawson are displayed below.

No directly measurable consequences of this 'blunder' appear to be readily available, however if the $97.2 million AUD loss in this years April - June quarter is anything to go by, a further dent in the reputation of this already ailing company will not go unnoticed. This is especially relevant given that the full impact of both tragedies is to be realised in the results for the second half of this year. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words; this is certainly the case with regard to the reputation of Malaysia Airlines in the wake of the MH370 disaster.

The failed competition was renamed within two days of the initial release asking consumers now to give their "ultimate to-do list". Malaysia Airlines also offered this statement via their Facebook page:

Such a colossal mistake could have easily been avoided if certain social media guidelines or best practices had been implemented at Malaysia Airlines. Such guidelines should cover quality assurance methodology to ensure that due care is taken before going public with any marketing or promotional material, such as thought and discussion regarding all stakeholders before posting.

Question for my readers: Has the reputation of Malaysia Airlines been damaged beyond repair in your eyes? What would it take for you to fly with them in the future?

References:

Dawson, R., Hough, J., Hill, J., Winterford, B., & Alexandrov, D. (2008). Implementing Enterprise 2.0. San Francisco, Sydney: Advanced Human Technologies.

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Google Apps, a positive ROI solution to patient care

TVR Communications are the largest provider of interactive patient education and entertainment devices in the United States. With large advances in the healthcare market, competition has increased significantly for TVR in terms of both technological sophistication and pricing. As such, in order to continue to deliver state of the art products whilst remaining cost-competitive, TVR had to find a way to reduce costs in other areas of the business.

Internal communication within TVR had been via traditional methods until 2007, with telephone being the primary communication and collaboration tool within the business. TVR had also been using the same dated Microsoft Exchange email platform since it was introduced in 1999. It was only once this Exchange platform started running out of disk space that TVR began looking at upgrading this system. 

It was found that upgrading the Exchange platform would have been costly, so TVR began investigating cheaper alternatives and arrived at a decision to use Google Apps. TVR had two goals in mind when making this decision: 

1. Reduce costs associated with licensing and hardware (tangible benefit).
2. Reduce risk of downtime since Google is a reputable firm (intangible benefit).

Not only were these initial goals achieved, but so were several other unforeseen benefits also:

• IT staff productivity was increased as staff no longer had to spend time managing, archiving and backing up email addresses (intangible benefit).

• Collaboration was improved, as employees were able to communicate and work on documents together in real-time even if they were in separate locations. This not only reduced costs, but also improved worker productivity (tangible/intangible benefit).

• Interaction with customers increased, as it provided an additional channel to quickly and efficiently respond to request for proposals (tangible benefit). 

A study by Nucleus Research found that total benefits from this project amassed to $284,000 with 79% of this total being from direct or tangible benefits and 21% from indirect or intangible benefits as seen below.

The costs of $50,787 associated with this project were accrued in three key areas: 

• Software, which was for the most part licensing costs and accounted for 54% of total costs.

• Personnel, all of which were internal employees charged with implementing the applications and migrating data. This accounted for 23% of costs.

• The remaining 23% of total costs was attributed to training employees in how to securely and efficiently use this new platform.

 Nucleus Research calculated an annual ROI for this project, along with a Net Present Value (NPV) and payback period. This is detailed below:

As can be seen, the implementation of Google Apps has been extremely beneficial for TVR with a 500% annual ROI. Even without considering the indirect benefits, this project still resulted in a 380% annual ROI.

Nucleus Research conducted a very thorough ROI analysis and it is difficult to fault. Of course, the estimates of intangible benefit values are subjective and the ROI would change accordingly depending on how much value is attributed to these intangible benefits.

In addition to the ROI calculations, Nucleus Research has provided an NPV calculation using a discount rate or cost-of-capital of 15%. They found this figure to be an astounding $97,244; finance theory suggests that management take on any project that results in a positive NPV as this represents actual value added to a firm. If any more reassurance as to the success of this project is required the payback period for the project was a mere one month!

All in all, this comprehensive ROI analysis conducted by Nucleus Research speaks volumes for the cost saving and productivity enhancing capabilities of emerging social technologies. In a world where the lines between business and technology are becoming increasingly blurred, solid financial analysis of social technology benefits such as this are no longer only beneficial but necessary.

Question for my readers: If you were an analyst charged with quantifying the benefits associated with productivity efficiencies resulting from increased collaboration, how would you go about doing so?

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OzContacts, a local social technology success story!

OzContacts is an online retailer of contact lenses and related items that began locally in Milton and has now grown to be the fourth largest online retailer in this category. Social technologies have had a large part to play in the success of this company since its humble beginnings in 2009. Particular functional areas at OzContacts that have the most to gain through use of social technologies are "marketing and sales" and "customer service".

What truly separates OzContacts from the competition is customer service that goes above and beyond that which is expected by the customer. One way OzContacts achieves this is through the implementation of Zopim live chat software on their website.

Zopim is a Singapore startup that specialises in providing a live chat platform that can be easily integrated into any website. Additionally, Zopim works well with several other customer-focused applications such as Netsuite and Highrise. Through providing instant online chat to customers using this technology, OzContacts has effectively succeeded in using social technologies to provide customer care, one of the ten value levers outlined in a report by the McKinsey Global Institute. In addition to allowing customers to speak to a real person without picking up a phone, Zopim provides location and device information as well as tracking how a customer arrived at the website. This information allows OzContacts customer service representatives to derive greater insight into the customer from the beginning of the chat.

The CRM system OzContacts currently has in place is Netsuite. Since OzContacts is a business in the growth stage, they could greatly benefit from purchasing the marketing automation extension available to assist with the generation and fostering of sales leads.

The benefits of a system such as this is allowing for potential sales leads to be automatically generated from the company website; these leads can be identified according to multiple pre-identified criteria, including customer insights obtained via Drupal chat. This makes a lot more sense than simply cold calling, for a business that has built its reputation on having an exceptional customer experience. 

Lastly, OzContacts is using popular social networking site Facebook as an extremely effective tool for marketing communication/interaction.

Whilst being only a small company with limited external visibility, OzContacts has garnered more than 4,000 likes on Facebook thus far. In addition to using Facebook as a method to market to both old and new customers, OzContacts also uses Facebook as a medium for providing customer care.

Question for my readers: Have you ever used an online chat function before, either as a customer or retailer? If so, did you find it to be positive or negative experience in comparison to a phone call?

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