I don't want to be a Manager. 75%? Really? Can Social Help? #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #mobile #cloud
I was reading an article by Paul Kix where he looked at the research done by OfficeTeam, a California company that focuses on job placement. The research showed that 76% of employees had no interest in becoming a manager. The issue? The X generation wants to have a great job but also have time for family.
In order to do this, these Generation Xers need flexibility. According to Neil Howe, an expert on generational differences, these Gen Xers need and want a new way of working. Technology plays a role for sure. Mobile devices and access at home help but is there another play?
Is Social a player in this new way of working? The payoffs of working smarter and overcoming these deficiencies are tremendous. Think about the opportunities before us if we can work smarter delivering flexibility. To work smarter, we need smarter organizations – enhancing and benefiting from their people’s expertise, enterprise and creativity, rather than inhibiting them. We need to change the where and how decisions are made.
One compliant is that today's organization are: "20th century relics, reliant on a regimented routine in a centralized location."
Social changes the mix.
Social is about connectedness. Tapping into the knowledge of people we know and don’t know to extend expertise. And we can do this in a way that optimizes cost for our organizations. It is not in a centralized location -- it is everywhere. Bringing the right people together from anywhere at any time to increase people’s productivity.
Social is about leveraging relationships. It is not about being isolated but about being people centric.
And it is all about Agility. It is about transparency that drives information sharing in all different ways, top down, bottom up, and everyway you can imagine. It is about the corporate lattice as Deloitte entitles it. Technologies like mobile and cloud give you that flexibility.
How do you see Social Impacting the way you work?!
Happy International Women's Day! Become a Super Social Woman - Start Today in 5 Easy Steps! #ibmpartner #witi #catalyst #socbiz
Happy International Women's day!
To all .. yes, because whoever you are this day applies as you have a wife, mother, daughter or are a Super Women yourself!
In celebration, I wanted to focus on Social Media and Women!
First, A few observations:
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Large Numbers. There is a huge audience of women on social networks. There are a huge number of contributors in Social by women. From BlogHer, Inc.,and Nielson, * one of my favorite groups and conferences, interesting stats are below with over 80M women using social monthly!
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Differences. There are differences in how women use the tools. On Twitter for instance, women comment on things, men reference things. And Men are followed and re tweeted more than women.
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Age does not matter. Women over 50 are one of the fastest growing groups online. Women under 30 are embracing! Are you?
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Social brings power to women. Depending on where you are in the world, it brings business to a woman's world, it provides a voice, and it enables impact.
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Women lead. Woman are leading in many areas. For instance, Lady Gaga has the most followers on Twitter!
How do you become a Super Social Woman?
Beginner?
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Set your goals! It is personal? Business? Developing a new subject matter expertise? If you have no destination, any road will get you there! Make sure you know your direction!
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Get Started! Get a Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn id. Set up a common picture, profile, and information that will become your personal brand.
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Listen and follow to decide your "network". Use tools like Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Klout to find out who to listen to. This will depend on your goals for going social!
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Contribute. Comment on areas in your area of expertise. Yes, we all have one! I know you do too! Tweet me at sandy_carter if you can't find yours and I bet I can help!
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Get educated. Go to a lunch and learn, ask your nephew to teach you come to the WITI event in June and I'll walk you through a workshop! Don't just sit there!
Advanced:
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Measure your contribution and influence. Use Klout for your personally, or engagement DB for companies or Dachis Groups metric. But know the impact of your social efforts.
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Contribute. Make sure you are sharing your knowledge and expertise. Sharing your expertise is the best way to drive trust!.
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Drive valuable women's content. As an advanced user, help other women. The research shows that more people retweet men, not women! Teach a class, adopt a newbie, help out!
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Set a goal to drive up your influence and reach. Be purposeful. Set a goal and work toward it!
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Experiment with new tools and techniques. Share your experiences.
The Stats for Fun! 
From BlogHer, Inc.,and Nielson, * one of my favorite groups see above! * Source: Social Media Matters 2011, BlogHer Inc., Nielsen US Total Online Population sample, N = 1,771; Weekly or more Social Media Activity; Total online raw numbers based on Nielsen Online @Plan
From SheSays, we find that 86% women use social networking. Women over 50, grew from 31% to 70%. Women under 30, have a 96% participation rate on social networks!
And from the Harvard study
"...there are more women on Twitter than men, women tweet about the same rate as men, but men's tweets are followed by both sexes much more than expected by chance.“
* women create fewer links in their tweets than men.” "Women actually say things, guys give references to other things.“
But even accounting for these differences, the researchers still saw differences between how men and women are followed, perhaps pointing to a fundamental representation of the role of men and women in society.
Pinterest: Very intriguing - Have you tried it? #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ls12
So, I just tried out Pinterest. It is very cool. It just launched in 2010, and now has 10M registered users. I read that it is one of the top 10 websites in the world!!!
It is intriguing to me! Here's why!
- Power to Women! I was interested when I heard it called "Tumblr for girls." Yep, women drove its popularity and now its is sending and receiving more traffice than the 100M users on Google + ( more male dominated?!)
- Addicting. I wanted to try this out and ended up spending 2 hours exploring and learning.
- Value. About 9% of the top online retailers are offering Pinterest pins on their sites. I saw reference libraries for tech products, recipe folders for Food companies, Gift Selections for retailers, and the list goes on. WOW!
- Easy! If you haven't used it, watch this one![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQP2dBMoCQ0&feature=player_embedded]
- Fun. I had fun. I love social and I love my social tools. This is one of my new Favs! What I loved tonight is the "bucket list" "recipes" "Top places to visit" etc.
Have you used it?
Top 3 TRENDS: Hot off the PRESSES! #ibmsocialbiz #socbiz #ls12 #
Our Monday Social Business Coffee Breaks! I love having coffee (or Tea!) with you each Monday!
One of my favorites -- the Top 3 Trends! Your thoughts? What surprised you?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSpDzlKv_3M&feature=youtu.be]
Friday Friday Friday! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ls12 #friday
So I was looking at analytics and it appears that if you use FRIDAY in your Blog title, especially on Friday, the number of viewings increase.
I wanted to test this one today --- on Friday with Friday in the title.
I was just watching a TED talk on viral videos, and saw more proof today! This was the tracking of the song Friday and the blips that occured on Fridays! What do you guys think?
Is FRIDAY the day?!
The Oscars, Baseball, Protein Folding, Football: What's in Common? Social! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ibm #ibmpartner
Wow! Social has come a long way! Many Universities are now using social to drive innovation! Can you believe that social is the tie that binds football, baseball, the Oscars, and Protein Folding? ! Read more!
1. University of Washington. The University of Washington Department of Computer Sciences was looking for new way to solve a problem that has challenged life sciences researchers for many years: examing and figuring out the right shape and the right function for proteins to try to cure diseases. The problem itself had millions of possibilities and many nuances that created a problem that was simply too difficult to solve with computer algorithms alone. It really needed human ingenuity. Some problems have point solutions that are fairly obvious to people but not so for software.
To tackle the problem however, they needed many people to first understand how to solve the problem and try different permutations, without requiring an extensive scientific background to do so. What the University of Washington team was create a serious social game with simple rules on how to fold different shapes of proteins. Using a mass group of 57,000 players from a variety of educational backgrounds and locations on this game, they were able to solve in 3 weeks a problem that vexed scientists for years. It simply took the social collective intelligence and effort of many individuals to deliver effective solutions in at least one fiftieth the amount of time. The Solutions that resulted from the analysis of the game play provided important insights into development of new retroviral drugs.
2. University of Southern CA. And students at the Annenberg Innovation lab at Souther Cal working with IBM, have turned twitter information into meaningful data with a Social Sentiment Index.
IBM SmartCloud for Government! #ibmsocialbiz #socbiz #ls12 #cloud
All! I am back from vacation -- went to Dominican Republic! More on that later!
Today, I will focus the Coffee Break on the SmartCloud for Government!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTUIzHeVF0w&feature=youtu.be]
2 Social Ecosystems Will Emerge?! China and Rest of World #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ls12
I was awaiting Tom Smith's new Global Web Index and I found the results fascinating. I'll blog for the next 3 days on surprising results from the survey!
The first surprise to me, is the progression of China in Social. In fact,
Some interesting facts:
- China is up to 50% active users
- China social technology is on par with the rest of the world.
- Question: Will their technology spread to the rest of world? The report argues that China has the most competitive platform in the world.
- Officially, Facebook, Twitter & Google+ are banned in China; unofficially, via V.P.Ns and mobile, they are growing.
http://www.slideshare.net/Tomtrendstream/global-webindex-6-trends
TD Bank and Social Business! Revolutionizing the World with 5 Lessons! #ibmsocialbiz #socbiz #ibm
I traveled to Toronto Canada last week and met with Wendy Arnott, VP Social Media and Digital Communications at TD Bank.
Wendy is so dynamic! Her story at TD Bank equally dynamic! She told me her story! 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.
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!
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 Business Coffee Break! Do you have a digital council?! #ibmsocialbiz #socbiz #ibm
I think one of the best practices in becoming a Social Business is to form a digital council to guide social activities embedded throughout the organization. Take a listen and tell me about what you do in this area!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMPJ2Z4rDr0&feature=youtu.be]