Strategic Initiative Paper

Strategic Initiative Paper

Team B

FIN/370

March 15, 2012

Lyle Burkett

Strategic Initiative Paper

Strategic plan is “a general description of the firm, its products and services, and how it plans to compete with other firms in order to sell those products and services.” Tittman, et al (2011). Wal-Mart’s strategic initiative is in creating, and leveraging, a proprietary ecommerce application, called the Social Genome, to its advantage. “It is used to perform deep semantic analysis of social media; the result in turn is leveraged to power a broad array of social commerce application.” @Wal-Mart labs, 2012. This strategy is to help Wal-Mart maintain its dominance of the retail sector, even on the Internet, over its competitors. The old brick and mortar outlets are no more enough, now the company is targeting people who use the social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the blog.

The laboratory has created new software that will, in a matter of seconds, capture communications on these social media networks, analyze them and detect products mentioned in such missive. ““I like salt”, a user enthusiastically tweeted. Within a few seconds, the tiny tweet had arrived at Wal-Mart labs, where it was analyzed in lightening fashion.” With this analysis, Wal-Mart can determine if the ‘salt’ is the movie or the condiment, and can then tweet back with suggestions about the movie product within its inventory. “The Social Genome is a giant knowledge base that captures interesting entities and relationships of the social world.”

This ‘giant knowledge base’ gives the company an advantage over its competitors. As it is a proprietary platform, it cannot be copied or used without its permission. “We then use the Social Genome to perform semantic analysis of social media, and to power a broad array of ecommerce applications.” To achieve the set goal, Wal-Mart labs will rely on “public data on the web, proprietary data, and a lot of social media.”...