Companies that provide traditional products and services can harness IoT sensors and data to create value and generate new revenue through platforms. Before deciding how to proceed, they must assess their ability to collect sensor data, the data's value, and their ability to orchestrate data exchanges among users.
When Reckitt Benckiser (RB), a leading consumer goods company, first entered China, it encountered significant challenges. RB's strategy relied on selling high margin products supported by cost-effective advertising and distribution, but the highly competitive Chinese market made it hard to sustain high margins, inflated television advertising rates made marketing expensive, and an inefficient distribution system increased costs further. In 2010, RB managed to overcome these constraints for one of its brands, Durex, the best-selling condom brand in the world, by leveraging Chinese social media platforms and investing in offline and online distribution. The new strategy paid off - Durex condom sales increased threefold in China and market share increased by over 10%. RB now wanted to generate the same results for its other brands in the country, and needed to decide how to balance investments in offline distribution, social media campaigns, and e-commerce in order to keep growing not just in China, but in other emerging markets as well.
In April 2013, Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, vice president and general manager for Learning@Cisco Systems, was planning the future of the Cisco Learning Network, an online platform hosted at Cisco.com. Since its launch in 2008, the Cisco Learning Network provided content to prepare networking professionals for certification exams, as well as social functionalities to let users interact with each other. To help realize the company's vision for "The Internet of Everything (IOE)," a world where nearly all physical objects, places, people, and processes were connected through the Internet, Cisco estimated that 75 to 90% of all IT workers needed to be re-skilled. The Cisco Learning Network played an important role in that process, helping to train networking professionals to design, build, and manage more complex networks. Aware of just how much was riding on the success of the learning platform, Beliveau-Dunn needed to decide whether to invest heavily in content-and have Cisco employees post videos, tutorials, and study guides to the site-or invest in more social networking tools to enable the community to produce content and help one another master the material in preparation for new certifications.
In spring 2012, Yammer was on track to become a highly successful standalone company. Yammer was a leading Enterprise Social Network (ESN), providing companies a private social network in which employees could collaborate securely and efficiently. However, later that year, Microsoft executives unexpectedly reached out with an offer to acquire Yammer for $1.2 billion and integrate Yammer into the Microsoft Office division. An integration with Microsoft would have a profound effect on Yammer's scalability, software development, and organizational culture. David Sacks, CEO of Yammer, debated the challenges and opportunities related to competition, product, and culture as he thought about the offer on the table.
In October 2006, Wikipedia was the largest volunteer-run on-line encyclopedia which could be freely read and edited by anyone with internet access. Within almost six years of its founding in 2001, the project had attracted hundreds of thousands of editors who had written over 1.2 million articles in English alone. Almost 10 percent of world-wide internet users accessed Wikipedia at least once a month. Just as Wales was stepping down, the editor community was collecting opinions to decide whether to close down an informal association of Wikipedia editors called Esperanza. Some Wikipedia editors, including some of the most prolific ones, really enjoyed the programs. Others firmly believed that Esperanza made editors socialize at the expense of creating content for the encyclopedia. As the editor community was making the final decision on what to do with Esperanza, observers could not help but wonder what effect the decision would have on the types of editors Wikipedia would attract and the content they would produce.
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) Group was an early adopter of social media, boasting a robust presence on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Now the company is seeking to evolve the Group's efforts from social media to social strategy - and start moving both revenue generation and strategy integration into HBR's core. To that end the company created two parallel projects, each tasked with developing two concrete new offerings that leveraged social dynamics on social platforms, while at the same time creating revenues or slashing costs for HBR. Now it has to choose between four different projects.
Nike, which first started experimenting with social media and networking in 2004, has been consistently reducing its spending on traditional advertising. Yet, Nike has not pulled back on its overall marketing budget, instead opting to focus on "nontraditional" advertising through new mediums. In doing so, the team hoped to build online communities to foster a closer relationship with its consumers. By 2012 Nike had committed to a social strategy that linked product with experience. Soon the company will discover if this strategic jump will be reflected on the bottom line.
American Express has developed a number of strategic partnerships with Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter to improve their card members experience and lower its customer acquisition cost. The case details the history of these partnerships, examines American Express' own social platforms, and talks about American Express' future plans in the realm of social strategy. It then presents students with two options related to Amex's future options and asks them to pick one.
Although most companies have collected lots of friends and followers on social platforms such as Facebook, few have succeeded in generating profits there. That's because they merely port their digital strategies into social environments by broadcasting their commercial messages or seeking customer feedback. To succeed on social platforms, says Harvard Business School's Piskorski, businesses need to devise social strategies that are consistent with users' expectations and behavior in these venues-namely, people want to connect with other people, not with companies. The author defines successful social strategies as those that reduce costs or increase customers' willingness to pay by helping people establish or strengthen relationships through doing free work on a company's behalf. Citing successes at Zynga, eBay, American Express, and Yelp, Piskorski shows that social strategies can generate profits by helping people connect in exchange for tasks that benefit the company such as customer acquisition, marketing, and content creation. He lays out a systematic way to build a social strategy and shows how a major credit card company he advised used the method to roll out its own strategy.
The cofounders of foursquare are deciding how to respond to competitive threats and scale up the organization. Foursquare was a location-based online service that allowed users to "check in" to a location using an application on a smartphone. Foursquare kept track of a user's check-ins, shared them with users' friends, and unlocked "Specials" that gave users discounts at nearby locations. Within a year and a half of its founding the company had 45 employees and over 5 million users and was valued in excess of $100 million. However, many competitors, including Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp, developed competitive services requiring foursquare to respond.      
CEO is deciding between international expansion and increasing the number of publishers to strengthen the company's advantage in the mobile advertising industry. AdMob displayed advertising on global devices, and powered 6,000 websites and 1,000 applications, and served over 6 billion advertising impressions a month to 25 million unique visitors. AdMob's success attracted numerous competitors, such as Millennial Media and Quattro Wireless, both of which were expanding quickly and had raised considerable capital. The company now needs to allocate its limited resources wisely to position it for long-term success.
AdMob's CEO is deciding between international expansion and increasing the number of publishers to strengthen the company's advantage in the mobile advertising industry. AdMob displayed advertising on global devices, powered 6,000 websites and 1,000 applications, and served over 6 billion advertising impressions a month to 25 million unique visitors. AdMob's success attracted numerous competitors, such as Millennial Media and Quattro Wireless, both of which were expanding quickly and had raised considerable capital. The company now needs to allocate its limited resources wisely to position it for long-term success.