Using Technology as a Tool for Change               

IKEA a multinational group of companies, whom designs and sells ready-to assemble furniture, appliances, and home accessories. They are the world’s largest furniture retailer. They employ almost 160,000 across 365 stores in 45 countries.

IKEA set a goal to embed social across their enterprise – Including social media and intelligence. The challenges they faced were, their investments in social media was inconsistent across different markets and departments. Thus each branch received varied communications and data, potentially limiting their understanding of their market audience or preventing Ikea’s interactions with the consumer through their social presence. Secondly, integrating this new social aspect to a firm which is struggling and needs a shake-up, would be an easier task than assigning this new social enterprise to an already successful and well performing company. thirdly, data remained isolated across departments, and information wasn’t shared, whereas departments could have benefited from this info. And lastly, Ikea needed a broader cultural shift to share and govern their social information or techniques.

Following on from this, they sought a solution for their segregated social management. ‘The Socializers’ part of the digital development team at inter IKEA systems created a ‘listening hub’.https://www.distilled.net/resources/how-to-master-social-listening-lessons-from-ikea/

Together they created a listening hub to create very real space for detecting, sharing and distributing insights across the firm. https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/ikea-assembling-a-listening-hub/