Thanksgiving Reflection - Social Helping on the first Thanksgiving
It is interesting to learn that on the Mayflower there were 24 families that arrived in the New World on November 11, 1620, first stopping at Cape Cod, MA, after 66 days of sailing across the Atlantic. A couple of weeks later they sailed to Plymouth, where they began to build their rustic homes. It was the beginning of Winter, and it was not long before the settlers began to get sick and die.
By Spring of 1621, of the 24 women, 4 survived; of the 24 men, 11 survived. All of them were from the working class, town laborers ~ people who knew nothing about farming and cultivating the land. They were faced with the task of growing enough food to last a year. They would have failed had it not been for two people who came to their aid. Two Native Americans came out of the forest to help the dying settlement.
The astonishing thing for these pilgrims was that these Indians, Samoset and Squanto, spoke English! If we probe how it was that these two Indians coming from the forest could speak English, we get to one of the important meanings of our Thanksgiving celebration.
Samoset and Squanto had been captured by English soldiers and made slaves on a British warship. The history books do not tell us how they escaped. What we know is that there on that inhospitable shore, two strands of humanity met, both of whom had been much defrauded and abused. These two peoples the dying group of pilgrims and the escaped North American Indians found each other, as brothers and sisters, in the same human family, recognition born of their common experience of tragedy and misfortune.
The first Thanksgiving was a thankfulness not for abundance, but that God had kept their settlement from extinction through the gift of two strangers who shared their knowledge and their friendship. The power and the gift here lay in the respect for equality and mutuality of two races, two peoples, who needed each other in order to survive.
This story tells us that survival and nurturing on our Earth is a function of our relationships. When people come together, reach out to one another in the spirit of mutual care and concern, it is in that Spirit that our world will endure and from which thankful hearts will be born!
Black Friday offer for Get BOLD! A big Social Business THANKS!
It's that time of year again....the sights and sounds of the holidays, everyone full of good cheer and planning holiday dinners with family and friends.
But wait!!. Let's not forget Black Friday and Cyber Monday! While many of us decry the early shopping times now available at so many stores on Thanksgiving, I and many others will head to the stores come Black Friday. It's almost a tradition now in some families to start shopping as early as Thanksgiving, and continuing on through Black Friday and of course, Cyber Monday.
IBMPressbooks.com is joining the foray for power shopping this week with a special offer for several books, including my best-selling book, "Get Bold", which has been translated into 9 languages. "Get Bold" provides tips, hints, and an agenda on how you can leverage social tools to transform your business operations while improving client and workforce relationships, while improving the bottom line.
Don't miss these sweet deals to grab a couple books for yourself and for your friends on your holiday list!
Black Friday (November 24-30) Offer: Buy 1, Save 30%; Buy 2, Save 40%; Buy 3, Save 50% with coupon. Products included: books, eBooks, and full-course video tutorials
Happy Thanksgiving!!!!!
Levels of Maturity for Communities
Communities are essential for Social Businesses. All communities go through a community maturity model.
1. Potential: Planning phase of maturity. It typically involves setting up the community elements required for long term success such as roles and responsibilities, strategy, mission, membership planning and activities.
2. Formation of the community. Having a great community manager is a key factor of success. During the formation, the initial members and influencers
3. Building and Evolving. The community builds and evolves as it forms. The best communities stick to their goals but evolve in the way they reach them. Typically building and evolving involves driving traffic to community and increasing member participation. The topic of content curation is also one that grows and questions of contribution of content and consumption is reviewed. The community may review how to improve quality of content and how to train the leaders.
5. Adaptive. This final phase is where the community now takes on the personality of the members. It enables the community manager to drive the goals to the next level.
At IBM, we do Health Checks for our communities.
- Ensure the communities have the design for success
- Clearly defined strategy and active plans
- Produce Healthy communities
- Utilize the Brokerage Service to ensure long term vitality and maturity of the community
One Week Before Black Friday .. did you know Social's role?
Holiday season is upon us! Black Friday is one week away. I am already planning my Thanksgiving dinner, my Christmas cards and caroling, and New Year's Plans!
So let's start thinking about this holiday season!
Did you know that people use social differently during the holiday weeks?
They increase their searches on social networks around products and potential gifts, recipes, and fun. This typically occurs starting now through early January. Their use of mobile goes up using the mobile device to show online and compare when they go into the store.
And don't discount Twitter it plays such a role! So get ready!!!
Top 3 Social Media Accidents and how to avoid them!
I was driving home tonight and had to avoid a highway due to an accident. It got me thinking about how to avoid Social Accidents.
The Three Most Common Social Accidents:
1. Talking only about your offering, service, product. Social media is about forming relationships and every relationship is about both listening and speaking!. Did you know that you can spot a healthy relationship by paying attention to how well the two people listen to each other!. Don't have an accident and have everyone avoid you by only talking and not listening. Share other's content and promote others' ideas as well as your own.
Action: If you communicate 6 things socially, 4 of those 6, or 67% should be showcasing content from your influencers. The other items you should be showcasing are your Point of View or Subject Matter Expertise . Something of value!
2. Being inconsistent. What an accident occurs when you have a professional picture on LinkedIn but a causal beach pic on your facebook? Be consistent with your brand just as you would consistently in person. Remember, every experience with your brand is non neutral so make each one count toward your brand goal.
Action: Think through purposefully what you want your brand to stand for. Always ask "is what I am doing right now consistent with that brand value"
3. Not having a social media policy. Companies who do not have a policy usually do not have strong employee usage of social because no one knows what they can and cannot do. A policy empowers employees to speak on your brand's behalf. And employees are your biggest brand ambassadors!
Action: Create a Social Computing Policy! Check out IBM's! http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html
What a Social Media First Aid Kit would look like ...
I went to pick up my daughter tonight at basketball practice, and I spotted a First Aid Kit. Inside were the right tools, an instruction training manual of what to do when, and medicines with a timetable of when to take them.
It got me thinking about what would be in a Social Business First Aid kit! Here's my top 3!
1. The Right Tools based on what you are trying to cure!! If your social strategy is not working, you need to check out the tools you are using. For instance, Pinterest tends to be very image focused , Google + tends to be more used by men, and LinkedIn tend to be focused on business users. Knowing who you are trying to attract and add value too, is critical for success.
2. Skills and training. I think it is essential to have your team training on social. Lunch and learns, learning by experimentation, and other ways are required to execute a successful strategy.
3. Ways to listen and determine key influencers . Just like a stethoscope and thermometer signals where there are good signs or a problem, every social strategy must include a way to Listen and to determine the right influencers to engage. I have been playing with several tools lately to engage the right audience like Klout.com, Communi.it and others. Commun.it even suggests the right doses and timings for interactions.
Here's a real case study from IBM on these 3 elements!
In IBM, our ibm.com team must attract a high volume of leads from a new set of customers. Since Social has become a tool for getting information on products and services, we wanted to explore how to leverage word of mouth.
We determined that for a focused product, that Twitter and LinkedIn were tools these buyers used most frequently. For instance, after a Twitter search or deeper conversation in a LinkedIn group or forum, potential buyers might ask companies for more information, but they also often turn to their peers, other clients and trusted advisors.
So our ibm.com team decided to go social. Our inside sellers drove prospects to their Rep Pages –- personalized ibm.com pages that play a “virtual business card” role for inside sellers. These pages have relevant information to clients, enhance the relationship, and give clients one-click access to interact with their reps.
After training on how to engage and nurture potential clients, the ibm.com team built Twitter profiles to establish a presence in the social networking world. The ultimate objective of this pilot was for sellers to use social media to add value to conversations and build a pipeline of leads.
We (IBM) also worked to identify the most prominent influencers in the our space, so sellers could then follow them and comment on or retweet their posts and learn and connect. We developed a unique engagement strategy for each influencer, based on their activity and what they were saying.
To make it easy to maintain their Twitter presence, sellers also have a social message calendar, accessible via the feed reader function within Lotus Notes. The calendar features time-sensitive messages reps can tweet, with enough content for three tweets a day.
Over a 7 month period, these ibm.com teammates increased their Twitter followers by 5X
In the first two weeks of this effort, sellers’ Rep Page visits rose by 106 percent –thanks to a systematic pattern of Twitter mentions. The sellers reached 1.9 million contacts.
As we move ahead, social selling success will be reflected by the rep’s Klout score, which gauges influence in the social world, an increase in the number of direct Twitter followers, and relationships developed with key influencers.
ABCs of Exceptional Digital Experience!
One of my top questions that I am getting from my clients is what does an exceptional digital experience look like?
An exceptional digital experience delivers a compelling, relevant, empowering, and consistent experience across multiple touch points breaking through the silos of multi-channel interactions and drawing customer insights to ensure a company is exceeding customer expectations and aligned with rapidly changing interaction preferences of customers.
Here are the 3 ABCs that I begin my client discussions with!
Autonomy: This attribute is both a digital and attitude focus. Autonomy changes how employees view customers–and how customers view employees. For instance, at the Ritz Carlton for many years have given their staff $2,000 of discretion (yes, this is per employee per guest) to be used to solve any customer challenge in the manner the employee feels is appropriate. Digitally this means that you need to enable Autonomy. Top performing companies spend more on empowering their workforces with mobile devices than the rest. And since 81% of purchasers get advice from their social network, there is a requirement to participate in social networks and support audience communities.
Bold Personalization: 83% of customers say they are more likely to do business with brands that allow them to personalize and control where, when and how they interact through their preferred channel combinations. And customers are willing to spend up to 20 minutes configuring a personal profile in exchange for better experience. Personalization techniques focus on understanding the customer, context, location, and device to customize content, offers, products, and even site layout
Compelling and Consistent. Part of being compelling today is the ability to understand customers and employees as individuals. 84% of businesses today are using web analytics. Bringing together the right set of capabilities to reach and understand the digital user is now the new norm. In addition, there is a requirement to deliver an immersive experience of interactive information to drive compelling offers.
Consistency must exist across the multiple channels that clients use. When we interact through all of these different channels, we expect that the business is thinking about experience – not just in a single channel at a point in time but holistically as we interact across the channels to complete whatever it is we are trying to do. We EXPECT that a site will be relevant if we get to the site from a banner ad or search term. We EXPECT that the profile we set up online is the same profile for the mobile application. And, we get a little annoyed when we have to repeat all of our information to the customer service representative after already entering it all through the phone keypad.
These ABCs require a great combination of strategy, culture, and technology.
The Gap in skills for mobile, social, analytics continues! VBlog!
Skills have been quite the topic lately. Why? We have such skills gaps that any great company must really address the challenge, with the industry.
Here's the results of the study that show the gaps! Read last week's blogs for IBM's focus with the academic universities in security and analytics!
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