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DCU Business School MSDM (Masters in Digital Marketing) students recently went on the programme’s annual India trip. Read their third blog about their visit to Wipro:

On our last day in Bangalore, we got the opportunity to visit the Wipro headquarters in Bangalore India. We were greeted at the gate by two graduates who had recently started working with there. We were brought into a conference room and had various talks from different people in the different sectors of the company such as marketing, IT, management and HR. It was really great to gain some insights into the marketing that is performed by Wipro.

Worldwide, Wipro employs over 170,000 people. Between the two campuses in Bangalore over 20,000 people are employed. The campus itself was extremely impressive. It had a number of restaurants, a gym, many different offices, a swimming pool and also. a butterfly garden where he said that they encourage their employees to go for a short time each day to reflect and relax Our guide brought us on a tour and described the working environment to us. The campus is open 24-hours a day with a rotation of employees working at various times throughout the day.

Shortly after our tour of the campus we were brought to was the ‘Technovation Centre’. This is where they develop and test their newest innovations. They first talked us through the process, then showed us some of the innovations they had been working on. They work a lot with virtual reality, sensor control, and advancing technology to make business easier. The first innovation we looked at was a floor map that was controlled by hand sensors. You could scroll through a map of a mall, search for products you wanted for example, clothes, household items etc. and select them, they then popped up as an image which you could select then it would take you to the relevant store and show you a map based on where in the mall you currently where.

The next innovation we were shown was virtual reality glasses. Two members of DCU MSDM got the chance to try them out. The setting was a store where you could select items to put in your basket then bring to the checkout. They are working with stores to develop a virtual world of the store and enable customers to shop like this in the future. The next innovation we were shown was a phone app that allowed you to scan the content of a box and project a 3D image of the contents so you could see actually size and dimensions.

After the technovation centre, we went back to the first conference centre where they had kindly put on a high tea for us. It was great and we got the opportunity to get to know the recent graduates. Over all the industry visit to Wipro was a fantastic trip that gave us the opportunity to learn about Wipro as a business and was also a great opportunity to network.

MSDM Wipro Bangalore

Click here to learn more about carrying out a postgraduate degree in DCU Business School.

DCU Business School MSDM (Masters in Digital Marketing) students recently went on the programme’s annual trip to India. Read their second blog about their ‘Industry Day’:

As part of our MSDM trip to Bangalore we got the opportunity to visit IBM Bangalore and also Christ University. These industry visits gave us a great opportunity for networking and also to learn what it is like to do business in Bangalore. Our first industry visit of the trip was to IBM. In IBM we got the opportunity to visit the data centre and also gain some insights into cloud computing in IBM. This was very interesting for us and gave us the opportunity to learn about the power of cloud computing and that latest cloud computing technology.

MSDM IBM Bangalore (1)

Our next stop was to Christ University in Bangalore. Here we were invited to a conference called Unlearn Digital Marketing. We started off the day with an introduction and were welcomed to the University. Our own lecturer Graham Hunt was then invited to speak at the conference. He spoke digital marketing and how it operates in Ireland. After this we then gained some great insights into the differences in how digital marketing works in India.

A panel discussion was next where the floor was opened up for different questions. Some of the different questions that were asked were do with different digital marketing tactics that can be used in start ups, how to deal with ad blockers, the power of periscope and  much more. This was an opportunity for us to understand the differences in digital marketing in India.

Unlearn Digital Marketing

After the panel discussion the MSDM class were all asked up on stage to introduce themselves and to tell the indian students about MSDM. We were also asked to speak about our experience in India and were then presented with a gift for visiting the university. After this we got the opportunity to network with the indian students and learn about the different courses that they were studying. We finished off the day with dinner with the alumni of Christ University.

Click here to learn more about carrying out a postgraduate degree in DCU Business School.

DCU Business School MSDM (Masters in Digital Marketing) students recently went on the programme’s annual trip to India. Keep an eye out over the coming weeks when they will be sharing their experience of the trip by providing tips, informative blogs and photos.

Check out the trip video made by MSDM students:


Click here to learn more about carrying out a postgraduate degree in DCU Business School.

Recent research conducted at MIT and Harvard University found that organisations with successful digital strategies were 26% more profitable than their industry competitors and generated 9% higher revenue from their employees and physical assets’ (Westermann et al, 2014).  In an age of disruptive technologies, constant global and organizational change, and the fast-paced erosion of competitive advantage, the implementation of a successful digital strategy promises enormous returns on investment for management.  McKinsey estimates that digital technologies have the potential to unlock between $900 billion-$1.3 trillion in value for work organizations (Bughin et al, 2012).

Digital strategies refer to the deployment of information technology (IT) systems, which combine social media tools, e.g. Facebook and Yammar, mobile computer applications, e.g. smartphones and tablets, and virtual data analytics, e.g. cloud computing, to leverage organizational value.  Successful digital strategies are allowing organisations to transform their entire customer experience, exploit greater value from organizational operations, and create new business models that reorder value chains and offer sustained competitive advantage.

Yet, despite such promises we know very little about successful digital strategy implementation, the key challenges organizations are confronted with in introducing digital technologies or the choices management must make to align customer and organizational needs with digital capabilities in order to maximize return on investment.  Considering the potential yields for ROI cited above, it is important that organizational leaders can embrace the opportunities inherent in a digital era whilst avoiding the pitfalls that can be disguised in such opportunities.

In order to answer some of these questions and further explore digital opportunities for Irish companies, last November the DCU Executive MBA programme, as part of the Enterprise Engagement module, visited digital companies in the San Francisco bay area.  Throughout the week our MBAs met with digital leaders from innovative companies such as RocketSpace, OnlyCoin, Cloudflare, and WePay and from more established technology-based companies such as Oracle, Salesforce, and Google.

dcu mba international trip

A key learning across all visits was the importance for organizations to rethink how their strategies can be leveraged to yield digital advantage.  Digital leaders need to move beyond the pursuit of a sustainable competitive advantage and recognize the transformative and ubiquitous nature of digital in restructuring organizational boundaries and hierarchies, recreating entirely new business processes, and creating a porous synergy between all organizational and societal stakeholders in order to support new value propositions and the development of a more transient approach to strategic advantage.

John Loonam is a Lecturer in Management on the Executive MBA Programme at DCU Business School.  He is currently a Special Issue Senior Editor on “Enterprise Social Systems & Organizational Change” with the Journal of Information Technology.

To download the Executive MBA brochure, fill out this quick form:

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The widespread adoption of social media is transforming the consumer-brand relationship. Social media is allowing consumers connect with other users, create, consume and control access to content (Hoffman and Novak, 2012). Research suggests that social media increases brand relationship depth and loyalty, and generates incremental purchase behaviour (Laroche et al., 2012; Kim and Ko, 2012; Pooja et al., 2012). It is not surprising therefore that commentators suggest that marketers should target social media users who are more likely to exert an influence on their network in order to facilitate brand recommendations (Iyengar, Han, & Gupta, 2009). But who are these influentials? Goldenberg et al. (2009) suggest that there are only two types of influential that impact information diffusion – innovators and followers.

influence definition

 

Our study looks at early users or in Goldenberg at al.’s terminology, innovators, of two social networking sites, Twitter and Google+, and the effects of personality and mode of information sharing on social influence scoring. Specifically, we look at:

1. How does (i) extraversion, (ii) openness and (iii) conscientiousness influence:

  • Information sharing behaviour
  • Rumour sharing behavior

2. How does (i) information sharing behaviour and (ii) rumour sharing behaviour impact social network site influence scores?

Early Twitter users were identified through a public list and through the joining date listed on user public profiles. As the study occurred during the Google+ closed field test, all users were deemed early users. Two discrete survey instruments were designed, one for Twitter and one for Google+ to provide for different SNS validation checks. To assess the personality traits of respondents, we tested extraversion, openness and conscientiousness with the scale of Gosling et al. (2003) while information and rumour sharing scale were extracted from Marett and Joshi (2009). The SNS score was the independent variable in our model and this was measured using two commercial SNS influence score providers, PeerIndex and Klout.

Our study hypothesized that that Extraversion and Openness were two personality traits that should positively influence both Information and Rumor sharing behavior (H1 and H2), while Conscientiousness would have a reverse effect on Information (+) and Rumor (-) sharing behavior (H3 and H4). We also hypothesized that both Information and Rumor sharing behavior should positively influence social network influence scoring. A structural equation model using AMOS was used to test these hypotheses.

AMOS

 The model suggests:

  • Early users of social network sites who are more extrovert or more open or more conscientious are more likely to share information
  • Information sharing and rumor sharing should be treated as two distinct constructs in the discussion of social network influence.
  • All three traits were negatively related to rumor sharing. Only the effects of extroversion and conscientiousness were significant.
  • Both information sharing and rumor sharing impacted positively and significantly on social network site influence scores.

While previous literature has suggested that it is difficult to identify market mavens (Goldsmith et al., 2006), early users of social media can be identified easily and conveniently. This may provide firms with the opportunity to target potential innovators and early adopters much more efficiently and thus accelerate diffusion of marketing messages. Our study suggests filtering these adopters by messaging behaviour may also be of assistance with a greater of emphasis of resources being placed on those social network users who share information rather than rumor. While identifying these potential influencers would seem to be more efficient than identifying mavens, further research is required to understand the most effective way and time to engage with them. Finally, it would seem social network influence scores provide useful signals for identifying social media users likely to share information. Social media users characterised by a combination of high influence scores and propensity for information sharing are powerful assets for firms, particularly if they have relatively large social networks. Engaging with these influencers represents a relatively low cost mechanism for indirectly reaching target markets through word of mouth on social networks.

The research was conducted by Dr Theo Lynn (DCU Business School), Dr Laurent Muzellec (UCD), Dr Barbara Caemerrer (ESSCA), Prof. Darach Turley (DCU Business School) and Bettina Wuerdinger (DCU Business School).

This blog post was originally published on The CrowdResearch.org blog, Follow the Crowd

DCU Business School offers full and part time Postgraduate Courses in Digital Marketing. Fill out the short form below to get Course Information:

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Paul Berney is the Co-founder, Managing Partner & CEO EMEA of mCordis with almost 10 years of experience in mobile marketing. Previously as Chief Marketing Officer & Managing Director of the EMEA branch of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), Paul lead the MMA’s global marketing efforts and more specifically the activities involving more than 150 member companies in EMEA. Paul is a guest lecturer on our Digital Marketing Programmes

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t almost every presentation and meeting I have been to in the past 10 years people have asked me what do I think will happen next in mobile. My answer is normally to ask the person asking the question to think back five years or to when they got their first smartphone and ask if they could imagine the change it has brought to them personally? Could you have predicted five years ago just how much mobile has changed your life let alone how the functionality has changed. Think forward another five years from today and the possibilities of mobile seem almost endless.

Mobile or rather mobility is having a profound affect upon all of our lives: it has caused an enabled an irrevocable change in our behaviour. As an always on, always with us companion it has become our primary means of staying connected to the world. In the course of this, mobile has become the remote control of our lives, the connector between the digital and physical worlds and we are all becoming mobile consumers. This change is global. Very shortly there will be more mobile phones than people in the world and once we start the add in all the objects like cars, fridges, fitness trackers and everything else that is becoming connected, we start to see a world where mobility and connectivity are integral to our lives.

Mobile technology is constantly evolving and we are changing our behaviour as a result. I chose the world ‘evolving’ deliberately. Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” As we evolve into a mobile centric world you need to respond to that change personally and professionally. If you want your career or your business to thrive rather than just survive then your focus should always be on the behaviour not the technology. Think about what mobility means to your target audience? How is it affecting the way they behave? How is mobile changing their expectations? Remembering that those expectations and needs are not just built on their mobile interaction with you but on every mobile interaction they have.

What does this have to do with you? Well it means that it has become imperative for you as a marketer to understand mobility and to learn the skills you need to use it. Regardless of whether you think you are a marketer or whether marketing is in your job title, you need to understand how to connect, engage and influence your customers with and through mobile. These skills will become essential to everyone in business because as I already said, the changes brought about my mobile are irrevocable.

So I cannot tell you exactly how mobile is gong to change the world in the next five years. I can only advise you to look at the direction the world is going (towards greater connectivity and mobility) and the speed at which that is happening (fast!) and ask you in return, can you afford not to make mobile marketing an essential skill in your job?

If you are interested in studying Digital Marketing in DCU Business School, fill out this quick form and we’ll be in touch:

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