Charlene Li's "Orchestrating Your Open Strategy" lays out the different ways that companies are using "open strategy's" to reach their customers and to handle their business process. Li touches on how important it is for companies in today's society to know their customers and to know what they are doing. Social media is now making it easier for companies to break down the former barrier and to reach out and find ways to understand all of their stakeholders. This is showcased in the multitudes of firms that are using social media tools to attempt to understand their customers. Companies are using "social monitoring" to observe what their potential buyers are doing online. People are now getting paid to not even blog and tweet but just to observe, so they can help predict the behaviors of their customers.
Different companies are deploying different open strategies because the same one won't necessarily be applicable to each. For example Coke cannot respond to each person that interacts with them on Facebook or Twitter because of the share volume of responses Coke gets but Kohl's can. Li states that communication is pinnacle to the open strategy. Stakeholders should all share a common goal. This makes perfect since because for a company to truly achieve success, everyone affected by it should be on the same page. If every stakeholder is happy then the company will receive nothing but success and good fortunes.
I am a fan of the "Organic" strategy. I feel that Microsoft effectively uses it to reach out to all of its customers. In an organic system different parts of a company are doing different things in the social media realm but in a way that makes sense to the company as a whole. Microsoft has bloggers and not every manager knows the contents of the blogs but the system still works because it doesn't force every person in the organization to take place in the blogging. Starbucks found success using a "centralized strategy." Starbucks only lets a select few people interact with the social media and they are reaching many people by this strategy. Starbucks has some of the most Facebook and Twitter followers out of any company that is using social media. This shows how sometimes it is better to just let a few people handle a task instead of adding too many people to it, thus creating confusion and chaos.
From reading this article I gathered that there is no recipe to picking an open strategy. Different strategies will work for different companies and it's up to the companies to experiment and find out which system will work the best. I wonder which strategy is the most effective overall and which one is used the most? This chapter was somewhat confusing to read and at times I didn't fully understand what the author's main purpose was. I learned a lot from reading this chapter but it was boring and dull so I rate it a 4/10.
To be honest, I didn't see much value in the Organic Strategy. It sounded like "do whatever you want" - which in my mind results in lots of repetition and much less efficiency. I do see how it works with Microsoft, I just see it being a strategy that can be easily messed up if not properly monitored. I like how you explained your evaluation of the reading. The chapter did have a lot of lists of different factors needed to create a good open strategy which (the author even said this) makes it seem like its a lot more work than its worth. However, I did like the case examples used in the reading.
ReplyDelete-Meredith