Individual report for INF 120

Registration No: 120167524

Word count: 1196 14.12.12

1.0 Introduction:

ACHE is a small UK animation company with 76 employees. Its main service project is to provide a number of multimedia teaching materials to universities. Nowadays, the company would like to use web 2.0 technologies to create ‘at a distance’ business, in order to expand their business into the US and Australian markets. Moreover, they also prefer to use these technologies to improve their information management. This report is aimed to find the suitable ways that could realize their object. For expanding business oversea, micro-blogs-twitter might be a good choose. While Google docs would have a significant improvement on company’s information management. The report has two main parts. In the first part, it will analyze the importance of Twitter and Google docs in facilitating improvement. Firstly, twitter would be a good platform to publicize company’s products. Moreover, as a new communication channel, it could provide a better communication with consumers and a better service for consumers. Secondly, Google docs will have contribution on collaborative work, sharing private information with cooperators and announcing internal information for company. In the second part, it will suggest some specific ideas, in order to promote the successful use of twitter and Google docs.

2.0 Importance of twitter and Google docs in facilitating improvements

2.1Importance of using twitter

Micro-blogs is a new communication tool which provide a new platform for people to broadcast information. (Zhao & Rosson, 2009). Twitter, as one of the most popular micro-blogging tool, developed quickly and is predicted that, by the end of 2012, will have over 500 million total twitter users with half of them are active users (Bennett, 2012). Culnan et al.（2010）mentioned that it shows a rising trend of using twitter as a business tool. There are several benefits for using twitter in business. Firstly, twitter can build brand and reputation for company and have a good advertising for product (Larson, 2011). As the company is new in the US and Australia, the first and important step is to advertising their company and products. Twitter will be a good advertisement, as there are a great mount of twitter users in united stated and Australia (Evans,2010). The US shows largest populations of using twitter in the world. In 2010, more than half of twitter users are in the USA (Evans, 2010). Although the number of using twitter in Australia is far less than that in the United States, but compare with the growth rate of Facebook users in Australia, the growth rate of twitter users shows a distinct advantage (Granfield, 2009). As a result, when the company uploads their classic and featuring animation or video into Twitter, there would be a lot of American and Australian twitters ‘retweet’ these animated videos. Then it will get good publicity effect on company’s products in the USA and Australia. Company can also use some special promotional methods to help broadcasting their products, like give away coupon codes on twitter. Dell once used this method earned $3 million for his company from twitter (Miller, 2009). Secondly, twitter provides an opportunity to communicate with customers and give them better service (Larson, 2011). In the past, the company did not have a good system to contact with customers and lose the chance to get feedback from them. Now, twitter can solve this problem. For example, if you work in a company, then search for your company on Twitter may appear to hundreds or even thousands of search results, you can get real-time feedback from consumers and understand their views of the company's service and products. Then, you can represent for company to reply these less positive reviews (Kwak, et al., 2010). In this way, twitter is full of all kinds of customer