The Next Organization

The 6 Dimensions of Social Commerce - Mark Ellis, Syzygy

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The Real Life Social Network (v2) Presentation

The Real Life Social Network v2

Groupon Business Model and Market Analysis

Groupon is a deal-of-the-day service in North America. According to Wikipedia, the company offers one "Groupon" per day in each of the markets it serves. The Groupon works as an assurance contract using ThePoint's platform: if a certain number of people sign up for the offer, then the deal becomes available to all; if the predetermined minimum is not met, no one gets the deal that day. This reduces risk for retailers, who can treat the coupons as quantity discount as well as sales promotion tools. Groupon makes money by getting a cut of the deal from the retailers.

Here's Groupon's description of the service

Groupon is emerging as a new monetization model for online community and social network. In the following slides, Christian provided a concise analysis of the revenue model and market analysis.

How to make Social Networking work for Service Organizations

While Social Networking is getting into daily discussions everywhere, social network analysis is gaining acceptance as an effective organizational tool. However, there is still scattered knowledge about how to bring these two seemingly related issues together in organizations. This post summarizes and points out some new ways service organizations can capitalize on these trends to address new challenges.

Major challenges to service organizations
Today's service organizations are facing high demand for knowledge-intensive works. However, ever changing knowledge and skills in the service areas require organizations to maintain current business while learning and unlearning at an unprecedented pace. It is only efficient if organization members can together create and learn from their colleagues. In another word, service organizations need to retain talents and be learning organizations to be competitive in the long run.

This great challenge is complicated by the fact that service organization's workforce is often distributed in time and location. By the nature of service business, a part of the workforce is spending significant time on site, or working in time shifts. Many large organizations have branches in many locations, sometimes countries and regions. As works are getting more complex and demand becoming unpredictable, many organizations choose to employ contractors to gain access to skills and at the same time maintaining a certain number of employees for the stable part of the workload. Together with flextime, remote working and outsourcing, these factors make traditional learning and information exchanging methods ineffective.