Community Management - New Results and Best Practices! Rachel Happe, and other thoughts! #community #
I love communities and I am thrilled with the new research from Rachel Happe on Community Management!
First, a community is a group of people that join together around a common interest or goal. It provides an excellent way to connect members of a team and help them to stay in touch and share information. Communities can be public or restricted, allowing community owners to control who can join the community and access community content. They provide a central place where individuals new to the organization or discipline can quickly find others or conduct events and training course designed to bring people together and make them aware of individual and collective experience.
A success factor for communities is having a great community manager! A question I get all the time is Who do you hire? My advice?
- Someone who knows Web 2.0 tools and uses them naturally
- Believes strongly in your company and mission
- Passionate about the brand/interest area/focus
- Strong listening skills
- Motivates others in a cause
Jeremiah Owyang initiated Community Manager Appreciation Day in 2010. People are encouraged to send “Thank You” notes to their online community managers. People using Twitter include the #CMAD and #CMGR hashtag in their tweets about this event. Many online community managers and vendors in the social media marketplace post blogs in appreciation of their community managers. Cities with large concentrations of Social Media focused businesses hold in-person meetup events to celebrate and honor those who represent and support their online communities
The top lessons for communities are to
- Set clear goals and metrics
- Be there for the community – listen and be honest!
- Network and train!
Rachel has a new maturity model for building a community.
Key themes from the Community Research which Rachel will discuss on Wednesday during Brainyard's Seminar are:
Today at #ibmimpact 10:45AM PST Delfino 4105! TD Bank will share their #socbiz Best Practices! #forbes #ibm #ibmsocialbiz
Today at IBM's IMPACT conference, Wendy Arnott, VP Social Media and Digital Communications at TD Bank, will speak with me at 10:45AM in Delfino 4105.
Wendy is so dynamic! Her story at TD Bank equally dynamic! Wendy and TD Bank set out on their internal Social Business journey by focusing on /three key imperatives: 1. aligning to TD’s core values, 2. delivering real business outcomes, and 3. acknowledging and facing the risks head on.
Along the journey that question became, can a bank be social? And so today she will answer that question! Going social inside gave TD the know how, experience and confidence to take greater leaps outside. They have a growing presence on many key social networking sites. Excited about the future, but that’s another story for another time!
Their story started while they were trying to decide if they should keep their branches open on Sundays – a big step in the Canadian marketplace. It made sense to provide a competitive advantage. However, their employees were a little less keen on the idea.
They leveraged Social to listen and act. How did TD get 25,000 people to warm to the idea of working on Sundays? They made their employees part of a highly transparent decision making process. She told me, “Believe me, our employees didn’t hold back their opinions – but we were able to surface and address their concerns early on. In fact, through social, many employees joined in the conversation, advocating the change – very helpful. And by the time we launched seven-day banking, the sentiment had shifted to pride and excitement about being open on Sundays for our customers a fantastic business outcome, achieved by encouraging transparency and asking for feedback.”
Focus on business outcomes. But the aim was not merely to communicate more clearly with the employees. It is to create and improve business outcomes — and embedding social capabilities in the business processes makes that possible – and maybe even expected. For exampke, their Customer Experience. Everyone knows what a suggestion box is, and they always used that approach to find out from front-line employees how to improve processes
For example. We added social to the suggestion-box to address a long-time pain-point. A customer service rep, in a small town miles, from head-office shared an idea to transfer a paper-based process to online. He got hundreds of supporting votes from across the country. Before you knew it, that idea was on the radar of senior executives. It’s now implemented and is delivering impressive productivity gains and most important, a much better customer experience. The idea wasn’t revolutionary, it had come up before, but until social amplified it, there was no business case. And this is just one example of the opportunities we anticipate by embedding social in business process.
Another good example happened when TD was introducing a TD mobile banking app –they first launched it to the employees. They tested it and rapidly leveraging social, identified opportunities. Their feedback allowed us perfect the app before it app reached customers.
Another example Wendy showed me was their Women in Leadership work, and their WOW Board, where their employees post their best stories helping clients out!
WOW moments. Wendy has been collecting WOW moments of success! Check it out!
Wendy shared her 5 practical things learned from my social business experience at TD:
- Leadership commitment is crucial. Without strong support at the top, this can’t be done. In our case, the entire Senior Executive Team believed in and supported IBM Connections from the very beginning.
- Dedicated social business team. Someone should be waking up every morning thinking about how to make this a success.
- Great partnerships. Things don’t just “happen” at a large organization. Many groups need to be at the table — including Legal, Compliance, HR, Communications, Privacy and Marketing. And one of the biggest and most important partners is IT
- Know it is about transformational change. It will rock the boat, you can expect resistance. To build support and foster lasting adoption devote resources. Get into the weeds with some business teams – help them discover how social will address business challenges and how to get started. Then showcase their success – so it can be leveraged by others.
- Leverage your employees. They get it and they can advocate on a larger scale more quickly. TD Bank created a volunteer Connections Genius team and provided them with special resources. They helped lead the change.
Social Makes You Happy! #ibmsocialbiz #socbiz #ibm #ls12 #ibmimpact
I am a very happy person! Is part of that because I am a social business evangelist?
Consider these facts!
-
Researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego concluded that happiness is also a collective phenomenon that spreads through social networks like an emotional contagion. In a study that looked at the happiness of nearly 5000 individuals over a period of twenty years, researchers found that when an individual becomes happy, the network effect can be measured up to three degrees. One person’s happiness triggers a chain reaction that benefits not only their friends, but their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends. The effect lasts for up to one year.
-
Blue Shield discussed recent research that showed the power of social connectedness in improving health outcomes. They found that gamification Boosts Employee Health Behavior.
-
People are 16% more productive browsing Internet social sites for 10 minutesthan taking a personal rest break. According to a new study, Web browsing can actually refresh tired workers and enhance their productivity, compared to other activities such as making personal calls, texts or emails, let alone working straight through with no rest at all. (The study, "Impact of Cyberloafing on Psychological Engagement," by Don J.Q. Chen and Vivien K.G Lim of the National University of Singapore, presented at the Academy of Management)
-
Accordinging to Framingham Study, happiness spreads through social networks.
-
And the Virtual Happiness Institute, there is a strong association between "social community" and helping with psychological well-being.
Monday's Social Business Coffee Break! How #socbiz helps in Mergers and Acquisitions! #ibmsocialbiz
Social Businesses do better in mergers and acquisitions due to the stronger social collaboration that is available in onboarding new employees, elimination of redundancy in systems and people, combining of teams, activities to create a single culture and corporate objectives.
Tell me what you think!!!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnr6hhv9nkI&feature=youtu.be]
Social Business Best Practice B2B! Avnet Connectville! #socbiz #avnet #ascendant #ibmsocialbiz
I am always hunting for the best of the best practices out there on Social in the B2B world! Avnet is a value added distributor and a Social Business.
Take a look at Avnetconnect!
AvnetConnect Ville, is a Smallville type of map where each icon (building) represents a specific community. Most of the icons represent what the community is. For example the police station is for the security community, power plant is the power i/p community, bank – finance/banking industry etc. When placing your cursor over an icon, a bubble pops up with the name of the community.
There are two ways users can access the community. They can either click the community name from the legend on the left or they can click on the icon.
As one of the "Social" executives Fred Cuen commented:
They set up a Community for their B2B resellers to drive:
- Sharing of information
- Driving innovation
AvnetConnect Facts(as of 3/15/12)!
- 107 total communities
- 59 public communities (including subcommunities, for Anet and business partners)
- 48 private communities (Avnet internal only)
- 300 users and growing daily (Feb -27 requests to join, March – 50 users request to join. Includes 40 for the new private NGP community)
Their most popular communities are around the top areas of interests to their clients -- the resellers! Storage, Destination Analytics Cognos, Destination Industry (retail, government, finance/banking, healthcare, energy)
Social business and small / medium companies - example Bumbu Desa! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ibm #indonesia
Savvy businesses know that creating an online presence can heighten awareness and ultimately bring in new business. What’s often ignored, however, is that small and medium businesses can leverage Social Business techniques to drive growth! Social techniques are a great equalizer! A great example is a cool restaurant in an interesting place!
In Indonesia, Bumbu Desa, a very cool restaurant, is leveraging social business to expand its business. Everyone is heading to this restaurant chain, with new locations expanding into Singapore and Malaysia. Growing from three branches five years ago to 38 branches in 2010, the different franchises of Bumbu Desa were having a hard time staying connected with one another. With Social Business (from IBM SmartCloud!) they can now quickly share information regarding new menus, new ways to greet guests, and other restaurant-related issues.
Each Bumbu Desa franchise can now submit their daily sales reports to franchise headquarters, a method that was previously handled using fax or overnight mail. Bumbu Desa is also embracing food reviewers as well to come and explore what they have to offer!
With more and more organizations looking at social media as a way to outpace competition and reap rewards, it is now the era of social business. Social business goes beyond Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. A social business recognizes that people do business with people (the value is in people and the interactions that they have) and optimizes how people interact and then leverages those interactions to create business value and gain competitive advantage. A social business also embraces the shifts in the way employees, customers and partners engage.
Bumbu Desa is a great example of a small business embracing Social Business to grow!
Social Business and Big Data! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ls12 #ibm #bigdata
I am getting a lot of questions about the relationship between Social and Big Data!
Here's my view. An effective social business can't exist without a strong set of analytics resources and know-how behind the scenes. A social business is about more than just collaboration; it's about applying social technologies to business processes in order to radically improve the way organizations operate.
In 2010, Gartner predicted that social analytics would be one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011. This comes as no surprise. Look at the explosive growth of social networking with 700 million on Facebook, expected to reach 1 billion in 2011.
There is an untapped power in the "data" generated by social networking sites. 80 percent of this data is unstructured, and typically takes the form of a conversation among customers on a message board. This represents a challenge for organizations trying to learn from it or use it to make decisions. With social analytics, companies back make sense of this data, unlocking a valuable asset. By scanning the data of the social networks (from both inside and outside the organization), you can interconnect the key data by applying analytics.
For key business areas including Marketing, social analytics plays an important role. Social analytics tools can deliver insight on visitor marketing and purchasing behavior. They can also help organizations personalize the online environment for each customer, create a “multichannel” environment, justify social media as a marketing tool, and influence browsers. Social analytics enables organizations and marketers to better understand their constituents in order to take the best next course of action so maximum business results can be achieved.
Big data and Social are linked I believe forever.
What's your Point of View?
You're able to gain insight into things like general attitude towards your brand, preferences and even gain insight into buying behaviors. With this insight, you can make intelligent business decisions.
Social Business Drive Success at Cemex! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ibm #ls12
Happy Monday! I am a bit jet-lagged from my trip to Paris and Asia but jazzed to talk today about the value of Social Business at Cemex!
Some best practices from Cemex who won the Harvard management 2.0 award were:
Performing this mapping allows CEMEX to understand which business units are taking an active hand in their global initiatives, which countries they come from and even the particular individuals most involved.
Can you do this?!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94kHjVGZALo&feature=youtu.be]
Serious Gaming Examples for this Social Business Coffee Break! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #gaming #ls12
I am in Malaysia and was surprised by the number of Asian companies already using Gaming as a part of their Social Business Strategy!
Social gaming adds competitiveness! Take a listen!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZGdJLgkwPg&feature=youtu.be]
Social Business Coffee Break ! Maximizing Intellectual Capital through Social! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ls12
Happy Monday!
Today's Social Business Coffee Break is on Maximizing Intellectual Capital (or your best practices!) through Social Tools! Many companies have employees retiring, or employees change roles frequently and sharing those best practices will make a huge difference in the outcome of businesses. One company told me that they have a potential of 50% of their employees to retire by 2015!
Social tools can greatly drive a company to collaborate differently! Take a peek!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec6gZf7psYg&feature=youtu.be]