Building the new social media consultancy services of LiveArea - The PFSweb Agency

Abstract

It didn’t take long for companies to understand the opportunities residing within social media. Quickly, new businesses have been developed to benefit from them like Social Media Consultancy services. It represents, for LiveArea, the opportunity to develop while aligning to its vision of expansion to become a full-range agency. Therefore, this thesis aims to describe the development, the processes and the limitations encountered through a one-year project within the company. This work is composed of three main sections. The first section evaluates the stakes involved with the project through the analysis of both the inner and the outer contexts. Three audits are carried out on the strategy, on the organization and on the information system of the firm. These analyses confirm the need of a new social media consultancy department within LiveArea. The second section deals with the content of the project. Through (i) in-depth analyses of the market and demand for social media consultancy services, (ii) the assessment and selection of the most attractive technologies and (iii) the review of the critical factors of a successful adoption of such technologies, we propose two packages of social media consultancy services and discuss their implications for LiveArea. Finally, the third section describes the change management process put in place. We identify the stakeholders of the project and detail the means put in action to ensure the convergence of their interests in the project.