Task 5, Question 7- Ideas for Customer Blog

Task 5, Question 6 - What concerns would you have with the wikis? What could you do to minimize your concerns?

I suggest we initially plan on allowing everyone to edit the content of our wikis. We will have to spend time monitoring the sites for spam, inapropriate language and incorrect content. We can consider limiting access at a later date and, if necessary, interview those individuals who express an interest in contributing or require users to register with us before we allow them to edit content.

In the meantime, I think our community of users will do the necessary editing necessary to keep the information on the wiki accurate as it is very common for other readers to make changes to information posted as they think necessary. We should rely on the community to accept, change or reject posts as necessary. We will ban users who vandalise or try to destroy our wikis.

Another risk associated with wikis is that they can take on the collective personality of the group and the groups perspective might sway from the cafe's desired perpective. I think this is an acceptable risk as we should encourage all ideas and opinions and not limit them to just those that we agree with or that serve our purpose.

Task 5, Question 5 - You would like to implement wikis at The Broadway Cafe. How would you use them to help grow your business?

We should establish several wikis to allow customers, employees and business partners to share information. We should set up wikis for several of the cafes main areas of interest including one each for the music center, art gallery, book clubs, coffee sampler, community events and brewing courses.

We should monitor the content in order to obtain feedback and learn whether we need to change or modify any of our promotional activities. We will encourage customers who visit our wikis to create presentations and tell digital stories to help make their points and share their experiences. We expect the brewing courses wiki to become a knowledge base as customers share thier brewing experiences.

Task 5, Question 4 - What additional benefits could a customer collaboration tool provide that could help you run your business?

Additional benefits a customer collaberation tool provide include:
- Use as a project management tool to help identify and track the IT projects we are undertaking to bring the cafe into the 21st century.
- Use for document management, sharing files among employees and archiving records.
- Managing employee scheduling, work management and employee training programs/information.
- Online webmeetings and conferencing with suppliers and business partners.
- Use to create an employee intranet.
- As a tool to automate workflow solutions.

Task 5, Question 3 - How could you use the tool to facilitate planning, product development, product testing, feedback, etc?

We can use whiteboards for employees to brainstorm for ideas on new products and use microblogging to pass along ideas to all employees quickly.

Planning can be done through an events management calendar. Our partners will have access to view our calendar and submit requests for events through a private calendar. All employees will be encouraged to provide feedback on prospective events, including whether they think the event is a good idea, how best to structure and market it and to consider whether the event might be a good opportunity for any of our other business partners to participate in.

We will set up a private blog for employees and business parters to provide feedback on all aspects of our operations. Employees will be encouraged to respond to other employee and to business partner feedback in order to encourage open communication about events, ideas and programs. We will encourage comments about what worked, what did not work and how to make improvements.

We will also establish a public blog for customers to provide feedback and suggestions about the cafe. Employees will be encouraged to monitor and respond to comments. Business partners will also be encouraged to respond to customer comments.

Task 5, question 2- 2. What type of collaboration tool would you build?

I suggest building a web-based, open-sourced collaboration platform that can be used by employees, customers and business partners as a community platform for all of our users. The platform will be used to build relationships, foster ideas and provide information among all of our stakeholders. We will use it for many purposes, inluding hosting our blog, event management, calendar of events, project management, file sharing and archiving, contact management, an online bulletin board, and for a private microblog for employee communications. We will also use the site to provide marketing materials and training videos to customers.

task 5, question 1- What can you do to continue collaborating with the community without losing revenue or goodwill for the cafe?

These are just ideas... and hopefully include some good ones that will spur elaboration and/or refinement.

- Promote a section of the cafe as a meeting area for local schools, school boards, sports teams, charities, fair and concert organizers, book clubs and other local organizations. Make several tables and up to 10-15 seats available for free.

- Create an advertising or message board for local schools, school boards, sports teams, charities, fair and concert organizers, book clubs and other local organizers to advertise.
- Allow customers to leave their e-mail addresses to be added to an organizations mailing lists and maybe even allow customers to leave detailed questions that we could forward to the organizations every day.

- Set up one dominant/visible, but not overbearing area that local organizations can use for prime advertising of upcoming events. Do for free as long as the organization serves the community and is not a for-profit entity.

- Set up a tab/section of our website that links to these local organizations websites so our cutomers can access the local organizations sites from our site.

- Continue selling the coupon book but sell it to the participants for $16 instead of $15 to improve our chances of losing less than $3.50 per book.