Impact of 2.0 on Contemporary Marketing

Contemporary marketing recognizes the scope and complexities of marketing activities. It is a multidimensional and a dynamic concept, known as holistic marketing, that asks and allows for the support systems in order to permanently connect to the parties, to create value and long-term relationships among all. In this context, this chapter presents a wide review about conceptualization of relationship marketing and its evolution and integration within the broader concept of contemporary marketing. It highlights that the development of a program for implementing and managing a successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is an essential part of a strategic contemporary marketing plan. Additionally, it is imperative to assess it to better demonstrate its success or failure. The metrics to do this are also revisited in this chapter. Still, the emerging capabilities of CRM systems using Internet technologies are putting tremendous challenges on organizations and their human resources. Reference is made to some social media tools that can be a cheap and useful support in marketing strategies.

Agile Management for Multimedia

The past few years have seen a revolutionary transition in the field of project management that enlightened the strength of agile methodologies as a strategic attack towards the progressively faster development rhythms and growing innovation requirements. In this chapter, the authors present a study developed under this context that aims to discuss the suitability of agile project management to multimedia production through a case study focused on an academic context depleted in management formalities, the Laboratory SAPO/UA. The most prominent project of this setting is the SAPO Campus, and its team is analyzed and subjected to an agile project management model. Consequently, the authors anticipate an enhancement to the studied project and the gathering of arguments that empower a clear perspective on the fitness of agile project management to the context of multimedia development.

Impact of Economic Culture on the Development of Enterprises

Values of individuals, culture of groups, ethics of communities, and the resulting influential norms (i.e. VCEN) are interdependent. VCEN tend to crucially influence development and application of knowledge, skills, talents, and other resources. In the current very competitive and increasingly global economy, organizations and countries become more successful if their economic culture is innovation friendly. Economic culture reflects itself in the economic part of VCEN of nations as well, because organizations, such as enterprises, play a crucial role in a nation’s life. National resources are no longer enough, neither is investment, if it is not innovation enhancing. Thus, a new concept of economic VCEN is going to become necessary for people to find a new positive direction beyond the worrisome blind alley of the current economic crisis. The innovation of VCEN is, again, becoming more important than the technological innovation for development of countries and, indeed, for humankind. The contribution discusses two theses: (1) VCEN in organizations is importantly interdependent with the economic culture, and (2) the change of the economic culture in an organization is connected with the changes of the organizing methods and their management.

Managing “Virtuality”

A wealth of research is associated with virtual teams and collaboration technologies; however, no integrated model is available to guide decision-makers at large organisations in the strategic implementation and management of “virtuality.” Whilst collaboration through technology has become commonplace in modern teams, it is not yet clear if Enterprise 2.0 organisations have made changes to accommodate and support this new mode of work. In other words, managing “virtuality” requires supporting tools and research in order to maximise the benefits and diminish the challenges inherent in it. This chapter presents findings of research relating to managing “virtualtiy” that culminates in the development and evaluation of a management model that guides large organisations in implementing and managing virtual teams. The findings demonstrate that there are benefits associated with virtual teamwork; however, a structured approach is essential to realise and maximise such benefits. The authors uncover several critical success factors in managing virtual teams, and they also learned that the implementation of enabling technologies must be carefully planned to ensure successful adoption by the intended audience. This chapter provides practitioners with a structured approach to implementing and managing virtual teams in an Enterprise 2.0 environment. Essential conditions for success are identified, specific organisational level tasks are presented, a process to ensure the introduction of new technologies is documented, and the critical success factors to create and manage virtual teams are synthesised and presented.

Brazilian Government’s Training Network for Digital Inclusion

This chapter summarizes several previous studies on the analysis of social networks and presents some challenges in monitoring and evaluating large-scale training programs that make use of social networks. The main objective is to understand the dynamics and identify how information is shared among the participating agents of the training program. In this regard, the authors present various algorithms that apply metrics to social network analysis to assess the evolution of networks throughout the training process, and specifically, to discuss the application of these metrics in the evaluation of large-scale training programs for digital inclusion.

Enterprise 2.0 in Engineering Curriculum

Engineering education is facing a challenge to bring e-business closer to student engineers. Enterprise 2.0 application in engineering education advances engineering students’ enterprise for the development of innovative products, processes, and services. The aim of the research is to analyze student engineers’ Enterprise 2.0 application underpinning elaboration of pedagogical guidelines on student engineers’ Enterprise 2.0 application in engineering curriculum. The meaning of key concepts of Enterprise 2.0 and engineering curriculum is studied. Moreover, the study indicates how the steps of the process are related following a logical chain: Enterprise 2.0 ? engineering curriculum design ? modelling Enterprise 2.0 application in engineering curriculum ? empirical study within a multicultural environment. The present empirical research was conducted during the Baltic Summer School “Technical Informatics and Information Technology” in 2009, 2010, and 2011. The findings of the research allow drawing the conclusions that student engineers’ Enterprise 2.0 application in engineering curriculum is efficient.

Valuing Learning Objects Shared in an Online Community

In this chapter, the authors analyze and discuss how the activity inside a social network impacts on the value of a Learning Object (LO) used in a collaborative e-learning platform. Recent works propose metrics for measuring LO reusability based on a variety of approaches. In this work, they combine and extend these approaches in order to design a valuation strategy which helps to identify the usage of LOs inside a social network. Their proposal is to identify the factors that are relevant for the valuation of a LO and determine which of them can be computed automatically from its context of usage, the level of success of its authors and its metadata. The authors’ analysis was performed on a particular social network called LOP (LO Poll) system, which strongly motivates the creation and collaborative valuation of LOs. They present preliminary conclusions obtained from an experiment performed in order to analyze the feasibility of the proposal.

Organizational Learning and Web 2.0 Technologies

The knowledge era redefines companies’ scenarios and workers’ profiles, requiring models and tools for Knowledge Management (KM) and Organizational Learning (OL) to respond to external demands. The growth of the Internet and the emergence of Web 2.0 created the conditions for Enterprise 2.0. This chapter analyzes Web 2.0 usefulness in the workplace and presents a software application for KM and OL that aims to support the software development process in software houses. The conclusion discusses controversial issues related to collaboration and competitive markets and presents some reasons for the apparent negative reaction of companies to adopt systems based on social networks.

Visibility of the Airport Sector

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the use of social communication media and Web 2.0 tools at airports to determine whether these technologies are being used as a means of raising the airports’ visibility, enhancing their level of e-participation and improving corporate dialogue. In addition, the authors seek to determine which variables influence the use and development of these tools. The results obtained reveal a moderate use of Web 2.0 tools by airports, with the most noteworthy finding being their presence in social networks and the use of the latter as channels through which to increase e-participation.

How to Value and Monitor the Relational Capital of Knowledge-Intensive Organizations

Knowledge management systems are a way to help tracking and keeping organizational knowledge. Typically, organizations value is greater than their tangible assets value. Human, structural, and relational capital is essential knowledge but difficult to evaluate because it tends to be tacit and spread in different organizational elements. The relational capital, as tacit knowledge, is not possible to capture its value as from accounting systems. There is a lack of models to evaluate the relational capital of organizations in a network perspective and this research question is: What is the value of this social network? SNARE (Social Network Analysis and Reengineering Environment) is a framework with engineering artifacts that can answer this question. With the aim of evaluating the relational capital of organizations, the authors develop three SNARE components: (1) SNARE-Language – a descriptive UML-based method that provides a representation of an abstract social network structure able to be extended and applied to organizations; (2) SNARE-RCO – a model to determine the relational capital of organizations; and (3) SNARE-Explorer – based on SNARE-Language, is a tool for social networks visualization able to simulate or use real social network scenarios. It also uses SNARE-RCO model to compute the value of the organizational relational capital. The chapter presents an approach for the measurement of the value of organizations' networks.