個案總覽

Fresh data on internet user behaviors around the globe show an East-West divide.

This note outlines the process of designing a social strategy.

In January 2010 Mark Pincus is deciding how to double the number of Zynga games' players to 500 million without sacrificing profitability. These ambitious growth plans required changes to product, corporate strategy, and customer acquisition and retention. With regard to product Pincus needed to decide to invest in evolving the successful games or develop new games. With regard to corporate strategy, Pincus had to choose whether each game should compete on its own, or force every game to build functionalities that support other Zynga games too. Finally, to ensure customer acquisition and retention Pincus faced the choice between deepening commitment to Facebook or developing its own distribution channels.

Twitter is a micro-blogging company that allows users to send short text updates to others. The site is used by people, including celebrities, government officials, and businesses. It helps to raise money for non-profit organizations and provides first-responders with information during a natural disaster. Even though almost 10 million people visited the site in early 2009, the site had no strategy for monetizing the traffic. The case allows students to examine potential monetization strategies for Twitter.

Meetup, an on-line company providing means of arranging face-to-face meetings, is deciding between two options of increasing its revenue by investing to: (i) increase new sign ups, (ii) improve the engagement of existing users.

Less than a week before Barack Obama was due to be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Obama for America (OFA), the president-elect's official campaign organization, announced the formation of a post-election organization, Organizing for America. The new organization would keep the campaign field team offices open after Obama took charge of the country for the express purpose of influencing supporters to back his administration's agenda. The case describes the activities of the Obama for America campaign and asks whether the new president should use social media tools to activate the grassroots, or whether he should abandon these unconventional tools in order not to upset politicians in Washington.

Zopa, a U.K.-based peer-to-peer lending company, connected individual lenders and borrowers via an online interface. The company charged a small fee for completed loan transactions but has not turned a profit. Zopa offered two platforms, Markets and Listings. Markets was an automated system that assembled loans by combining lowest loan offers from different Zopa lenders. Zopa Listings allowed prospective borrowers to post eBay-like listings explaining who they were, how much money they needed, and how they would use it. Lenders then made offers specifying how much they were willing to lend and at what rate. Neither platform met with much success. In February 2009, the CEO of Zopa is considering withdrawing from Listings, and focusing on Markets, even though a company in the U.S., Prosper, had attracted many users with a product akin to Zopa Listings.

Yelp was a popular on-line destination for reviews of local establishments, written by volunteer Internet users and read by 20 million people per month. However, the company made meager profits. The CEO needs to decide between two options to increase the revenue. First, the company can maintain its existing monetization model and quickly build a massive sales force to enroll many local business owners as advertisers and sponsors. The second option was to change the monetization model completely and charge readers for access to Yelp reviews.

Kasahara, the founder and CEO of mixi, the most successful Japanese on-line social network, is deciding between two strategic options: (i) B2C or (ii) C2C, to leverage the power of the social network. In the B2C option, mixi would become a portal for on-line shopping for both digital content and tangible goods and charge the business sellers a fee. In the C2C option, mixi would facilitate exchanges between mixi's members through on-line flea markets or auctions and charge the members for successful transactions. In choosing between the two options he has to consider other upstart networks, particularly in the field of mobile social networking.

eHarmony's CEO needs to decide how to react to imitations of its business model, encroachment by competing models and ascendance of free substitutes. The case provides four options to address these threats and asks students to choose one after they analyzed the company's strategy. The analysis begins with understanding of value proposition, as derived from failures of substitutes. It proceeds to examine industry structure and important differences across its different niches. Students can then analyze the essence of a focused differentiation strategy and understand the importance of costly strategic trade-offs. They can also estimate the size of eHarmony's competitive advantage over two other competitors before articulating threats to sustainability, all of which will help them choose one of the four options.

The case, set in late 2007, examines what MySpace-the largest online social network-should do to respond to its agile competitor, Facebook. Since its inception MySpace had experienced phenomenal growth, acquiring 20 million members in its first 20 months of operation, and another 70 million a year later, to become the most visited website in the United States. Its growth stalled around mid-2007, just a few months after Facebook had released its programming platform which allowed outside programmers to build applications using its social network data. The wealth of new applications on Facebook allowed the company to increase its membership by more than 15 per cent in one month. To remain competitive MySpace had to release its own platform, and now it needs to decide whether to build its own proprietary application platform or join OpenSocial, a Google-sponsored open source platform.

As Facebook topped one billion monthly users in October 2012, the online social network continued to face questions about how best to monetize its surging traffic. The company could invest further in new advertising products, which represented the majority of the revenue thus far, or concentrate on the Facebook Platform and help third-party developers create and distribute their own applications. After a highly anticipated yet largely disappointing initial public offering (IPO), Facebook's stock price steadily declined. It became critical for the Facebook team to identify sustainable growth opportunities, particularly as more of its user base accessed the site via mobile devices.

Introduces students to the study of corporate strategy, while providing an overview framework for understanding international strategy. Focuses on questions of scope and ownership. Examines both horizontal and vertical integration. Underscores the point that economies of scope, or the existence of relationship-specific investments, are insufficient to explain effective corporate strategy unless there are important obstacles to contractual solutions.

In response to a huge crisis in 2000, the new CEO of Procter & Gamble has to decide whether to continue with an unusual organizational design or to revert to the old matrix organization. Describes all the organizational designs used by Procter & Gamble from the 1920s onward, including geographic, product, and matrix architectures. Market development organizations, global business units, and global business services unit, each of which is heavily interdependent with the others and none of which has a clear decision-making advantage, comprise the unusual organizational design. Examination of the different organizational designs, trade-offs associated with each organizational architecture as well as the accompanying implementation problems.

An abstract is not available for this product.

An abstract is not available for this product.

In January 2006, the president of Friendster needs to choose between two strategic options to revive the company. Friendster started the social networking industry in 2003, but has been overtaken by MySpace and Facebook. The two options are: 1) offer new features to help members enhance their offline lives, such as arranging events with their friends; and 2) offer features, such as the ability to import friends' blogs, pictures, recommendations, and feeds, to help members manage their experiences with their online friends. The two choices have very different value propositions and have very different competitive implications. Also describes the dynamics of relationships inside Friendster and discusses how these dynamics prevented Friendster from maintaining its leadership position. As such, allows for integration of organization and strategy in an entrepreneurial setting, and should be taught with LinkedIn (A) to facilitate cross-case comparisons.

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In the summer of 2005, LinkedIn, a two-year-old start-up, was choosing between two options to monetize its 5 million business people network. Members could contact each other through trusted intermediaries on the network to offer or seek jobs, consulting engagements, expertise, and financing. The company had outpaced its competitors by building the most populous online business network, but it had little revenue to show its investors. The first revenue option entailed keeping the existing features unchanged and rolling out a bundle of eight new services for a monthly fee of $15. These services would be targeted at network members who had forged many connections, logged in frequently, and viewed the profiles of many other members. The second proposal involved changing a basic design feature of LinkedIn by allowing members to contact each other without intermediaries for a fee. Fewer members would avail themselves of this feature, but those who did would be willing to pay as much as $5-$15 per message. This option ran a substantial risk of alienating members and would prompt some to abandon LinkedIn.