Many organisations have their own ways in applying social technologies with their businesses (e.g. building online customers’ base communities, getting the customers involved with the sets of the company’s campaigns). These create ‘value’ to the companies, and it can come into the form of the improvement within enterprises’ processes/services as mentioning in the McKinsey Global Institute’s 2012 report. According to the following report, I decide to use ‘Operation and Distributions’ (one of the main organisation functional areas) and discuss on how it can be or has already been applied to my chosen organisation, ‘World Blood Bank’.
Illust. by Sarun Y.
About WBB (World Blood Bank), it is an organisation that built for the blood charity purpose. Its main service is to co-operate with those who prefer to donate their blood and list their names to patients who need blood. The organisation also allows its service to be open for various groups, institutions and organisations to join it with identities’ guarantees (e.g. requiring donor’s approval).
WBB has tried to engage online communities with the use of social technology like Facebook (official page and group). Currently, this is the only online communicating channel for WBB to inform the public about the blood donation news, the update of its organisation and services. By considering to apply my selected function area (Operation and Distributions) to WBB , I think that the organisation can be able to add more ‘value’ to itself and its communities as follows:
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Providing more online channels – WBB needs to get its hands on other alternative social technologies such Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. This is to create supplementary channels, where donors and patients can be able to reach its service and receive helps as immediate as possible. With this way, it also helps WBB in spreading any related blood donation news/information to communities as well as keeping tracks for whether each blood enquiry is received and sent in appropriate processes or not.
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Building connections – By using the social technologies, WBB may have more chances to explore and make connections with other related charitable organisations, groups or institutions that share ideas/goals in common (e.g. preferring to help the society, acting as a medium between donors and receivers). This can strengthen up the network in which all members try to help each other in what they do best to meet their shared goal. Joining hospitality groups such UMass Memorial Medical Center (as an online community) is an example on how WBB may possibly learn and share some useful facts about blood/donations to members in its community, then let them crowdsource these knowledge/information back to their societies. It can be counted as another way that helps WBB in emphasizing its organisational goal to the public on how donating blood is important to every single life.
Creating ‘value’ to the organisation is not always about prices. Sometimes, it can be anything that the organisation returns to its society and causes the positive change of the society, or helps people to have better lives’ quality through communities, no matter how big or small of that thing is.
Sarun Yingprapaporn 
One of the things I love about social media is the ability for it to share a messaging with millions and millions of people all around the world in a matter of minutes. I hope WBB can tap into this and emphasise to the public how critical those donations are
Hi Ben,
It indeed likes what you have mentioned in the comment. By gaining mass numbers of social media users, anything can be possible if the organisation learn how to manage this ability appropriately. As additional to this, I think that the reputation of the organisation is another issue, and it might affect the way of gaining trusts from the users as well as making their decisions for whether they want to co-operate with the organisation or not. That is also why building the digital presence becomes important and should not depend on just one single channel to spread the organisation’s identity. Thank you for your comment and visiting my post, Ben 🙂
Nice posts, I really like the simple layout and the black and white theme, which you have kept consistent with the images. I totally agree with your last remark regarding creating value and not fixing it to a specific cost.
Hi Wong,
I believe that each organisation has its own goal in generating its own ‘value’ to either itself or people in its community. The following ‘value’ can also come into the form of the improvement in customer services/products’ development like your case study of DealExtreme (http://bit.ly/1822ZJh) 🙂 . About my blog style, I try to make it simple as well as keeping the consistency between the layout and the content. I can see these elements in your blog as well. Thank you for your feedback, Wong
Hello Sarun,
Nice clear and easy to read post, I especially like the idea of crowdsourcing to collect ideas and ways to encourage WBB to achieve their goals of getting the message out that donating blood is important to every single life.
Thank you, John 🙂
I like the idea of the data collection from the crowdsourcing method too. In order to accomplish that, WBB has to manage its own communicating channel with its targeted audiences first. This means WBB should set up its official account with informing the users about the donation news from the use of social technologies rather than expecting the users to access and share the link from its website (http://bit.ly/16BKKsG) for gathering the users’ group.
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