Social Lessons from the beach: A little bikini is no match for a big wave!
Yes, both of my daughters love their bikinis on the beach! But as we went wave riding, they learned quickly that that little bikini is no match for the big wave!
The same is true in social! Sometimes the wave is too big for just company spokespeople and with 70% of online consumers trust peer recommendations #1, you will need more than just the "bikini" squad. You need a brand advocate.
A brand advocate is a person who is passionate about your brand and references you as a matter of course. They could be an influencer or a client or an employee. Determining your brand advocates is about listening and selecting based on common interests, knowledge, and other key elements critical for your business.
In addition to seeking out your advocates, it is important to determine your best friends, or your tippers. These are those people who influence your brand online and those whom others listen to about your products.
These key influencers have a set of characteristics. Typically, they are people who have strong relationships, and are an expert or authority in a subject. Sometimes influencers are those who get attention, taking an atypical view, or are just loud. I was recently at a virtual conference and heard a speaker talk about an influencer as someone who is honest, trustworthy, and knowledgeable. They have a consistent opinion that is objective and not influenced by someone paying them! These items drive a level of social trust and that trust persuades another person to take action.
Finally, developing social trust is about showcasing care and value. Listen and change where needed. Always be honest, and demonstrate value-add to your clients and the industry.
These are the top elements of your plan to build your brand advocates:
[lb] Determination of your friends or brand advocates today: A friend is a client, a potential client, or an influencer who recommends your brand, company, or product because they like it so much, they feel compelled to discuss it. Determining those who are your friends or brand advocates is important to your overall social trust plan.
[lb] Determination of your “best friends” or tippers: These are people who influence the rest of the clients and potential clients online and offline, usually about 5% to 10% of your product’s or category’s population. These tippers are important people for your overall strategy and your company will pay extra attention to them.
[lb] Brand advocacy strategy: A brand advocacy strategy is a plan to determine those actions your company can take to build brand advocates, or people who are passionate about your brand and reference you as a normal course of business. Part of this strategy could be in the content that you share, your shared vision of a point of view in the market, or even support of a common cause that is outside the primary goal of making profit[md]for example, making the planet a better place.
[lb] Content activation plan: This is a plan to create content, distribute content, promote content, and measure its success. This content activation plan is usually determined in the Social Business Digital Council. The goal of the content is to showcase your company’s subject matter expertise or point of view (POV). It is critical when starting a community, and for guarding your reputation.
[lb] Determination of key methods to establish social trust in your space: Based on your company’s goals, a trust plan is formed to create and protect trust through online experiences and dialogues with a company, product, or brand.
With this brand army, you can ride the wave with confidence!!!
Social Trend #3: Innovation is accelerated in Culture through ideation & predictive
Happy Monday! Social Business Trends are shaking the world and today's Social Coffee Break is about our third trend.
Innovation must be part of a corporation's culture. Things are moving so fast those who can change and adapt will be most competitive. In today's Social world, innovation is accelerated through social. See how ideation (crowdsourcing) and predictive capability (analytics) accelerate innovation in corporations!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJnafM6HnlA&feature=youtu.be]
Trend #1: Value of Social Sharing is > Information Hoarding
Happy Monday!
Today we are starting a new series of the Top 5 Trends in Social today -- actually involving Social, Big Data and Analytics.
The firs tof the trends is the shift in information value. To illustrate, when I went to school, value was placed on what I memorized. Today, it is about what I share. One of my daugther's assignments at school was to find the answer to a question and prove the answer was from an expert who could be trusted!
Take a look at how this trend applies to business!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYuMSIzuX14&feature=youtu.be]
Sweet tea and screen doors. Social Businesses could learn alot from them!
Yes, I am southern pure as they come! I love my sweet ice tea, grits with butter, screen doors, and Kudzu.
In the summer, the screen door is an essential element of everyone's home. The screen door's entire point is that it's not a barrier. Its job is to open easily. It is a welcome to all visitor's and friends that approach it.
Is your social media site like that screen door? Does it open and welcome others in?
Tips to make your site as welcoming as that Southern Door!
- Do you make people type in that "code" to enter? Don't!
- Is your site mobile friendly and usable?
- Do you have stellar content ? Content is Queen!
- Is Video part of your strategy? Video is the highest trusted media! Use it wisely!
- Do you have a Twitter Widget on your Home page to engage your audience? (Check out my blog on IBM Voices!)
- Can you feature other guests on your site?
- How do you listen? All relationships listen first!
- Are your employees empowered to really represent the brand on your site?
- Have you chosen the right social tools that welcome your audience? For instance, if you are selling to men, Pinerest may not be the best first choice.
- Do you constantly review the feedback and make changes to adapt and change?
Join me July 31st on GET BOLD for Social Business!
Today, everyone is talking about social. You hear about politicians, movie stars, and everyone in between talking about social, using social with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
But you’re a business. What does all this mean to you?
Sure, your business has a website, and it probably has a social media executive responsible for posting and /or monitoring comments about your company that might be posted on Twitter or Facebook by customers. But ask yourself….is your company a social business company? Are you leveraging social to be more customer-driven? Are your employees engaged with social in their jobs? Are you really utilizing the tools and techniques that social offers to improve your business and take advantage of opportunities for growth?
Join me on Wednesday, July 31, on the Victory Circle Radio hour as I talk about my book, “Get Bold”, in which I provide a framework for social. www.victorycircles.com/radio-show
I’ll also share some case studies of companies who have successfully used social technology to connect with customers, helping them create communities and experiences they need. According to a recent study, some 60% of customers use social media to discover new brands and products; 46% of customers use it to strongly influence their purchase decisions; and 40% check social media before making purchase decisions. Your customers are already connecting and talking about your brand. Are you connecting with them so they can become brand advocates? I’ll share examples of customers who have successfully used social technologies to listen to and respond to their customers.
Becoming a social business is about more than simply building a social network. It’s about offering information and services that your customers and partners need. There are companies who have successfully used social technologies and offered meaningful services to their customers, while gaining critical feedback from the customers. It’s about collecting and understanding the data that’s available on the various networks. About 81% of purchasers get product purchase advice from social networks. You need to know who is saying what, and know how to tap into the conversation.
Today, it’s an economic reality that social is here to stay. According to an IBM study, during the next 5 years, 95% of standout organizations will focus on getting closer to the customer. Join me on Victory Circle Radio on July 31 and hear how my social framework can help you become a social business.
Socialytics!
Did you know that CEO’s & CIO’s identified “Insight & Intelligence” as the number #1 focus over the next 3-5 years? Doing Social without Analytics really doesn't make much sense in today's world.
According to IBM's CEO Study, C-level executives are worried about enhancing customer loyalty and better understanding what customers want.
We are calling this Socialytics -- a way that companies can simply collect big data across the social spectrum, and within seconds conduct complex analytics functions that show what your customers are saying and buying. What your competitors are saying and doing. And what is happening in the markets in real time.
It is the combo of Social + Analytics + Big Data!
Essentially we are providing valuable insights and intelligence to business executives so they can make more informed business decisions.
I think this is core to Social -- being able to combine the analytics with the social data.
Sogeti is a Social Business!
Happy Monday! I hope you all had a great Father's day!
Here's Sogeti telling their Social Business story!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV1OnyxuSFo&feature=youtu.be]
Top 6 Social Business Patterns for ROI!
It's easy to see how the world has adopted social media to help strengthen ties between people all over the world. People like to share and the explosive growth of Facebook and all the other social media platforms out there are surely a testament to the fact that we like to share and discover what our friends are up to. (IBM is, of course, the market leader at applying social techniques to business situations. Our entire Social Business Platform is the best in the market, four years in succession, according to IDC. )
Why these 6 Patterns Matter to Your Company:
While you might see how social could apply in a business setting, and understand that somehow harnessing some of these principles might be beneficial to improving how your organization works, you might not know where to start, or how the common business processes you work with could be transformed with social business. Or you may be looking for the top ROI yields. Or how to embed social without the S word (yes, that's Social that some people view Social as Play!)
It's for these reasons that we have created the Social Business Patterns or Use Cases.
- Identify top ROI cases
- Showcase the value and business outcome with having to use the S word
- Allow you to learn from others
These are a suite of example business processes common to many industries. We show how these processes can be improved using IBM's Platform for Social Business and, most importantly, what return on investment you can expect to realize from implementing the use cases. These are not IT solutions, however. They are examples of business processes which will be very similar to your own. Using and adapting these examples can allow you to improve the communication, collaboration, awareness, knowledge-sharing, morale and efficiency of your organisation in simple but very effective ways.
Over the coming blog posts I will look at each of these in more depth, but let me outline to you the areas IBM's Use Cases fall into:
Finding Expertise
Being able to locate the expertise in your organization is vital in many situations. Almost any service organization relies entirely on the knowledge of its subject matter experts. Manufacturing organizations such as car manufacturers, oil & gas producers and many others need to know how to solve problems quickly and easily without re-inventing the wheel and by accessing the expertise of the right people. Travel and transportation organizations' entire business is built on being safe and reliable. These two facets are based on them being experts in their chosen fields and making the most of their staff's expertise. Finding Expertise focuses on how any organization can make the most of their experts. Whether it's finding the right person in critical situations or unlocking the tacit knowledge in the experts' heads to build the collective expertise of the organization.
Knowledge Sharing & Innovation
Social Business solutions are at the forefront of helping organizations all over the world increase their level of innovation. Social helps to drive the process of innovation by giving ideas and new concepts places to grow and adapt based on the collective knowledge of the participants. Use of social demonstrates how you can create a more nimble and flexible organization with dramatic return on investment opportunities backed by real client examples.
External Customer Insights
Many organizations nowadays have a presence on social media. They now have Facebook and other popular social network accounts, some use these to great effect and are generating real new business. You can boost your selling power by unifying your sales people and distribution chain together with the most important people to your organization - your customers.
There are a set of sub cases around the external focus:
- Customer Service. Since empowered customers with social tools are changing the focus of business from selling to “partnering” , engaged employees lead to…higher service, quality, and productivity, which leads to… higher customer satisfaction, which leads to… increased sales & profit.
- Sales. Using social to better target individuals, not just demographics and segments to better sell to your client.
- Community Building. Using community to target your advocates and drive loyalty into your base or to recruit and learn from a new client set is a powerful ROI case.
Recruiting and On-boarding
Your organization lives and dies by the quality of its people. Attracting and retaining the best people in the market is one sure way to make sure that you are investing for your future. To be able to demonstrates how you can enormously increase the time-to-value of new employees, increase the retention rate of your employees and provide much faster access to experts, highlights the focus on people as an important part of your strategy.
Everyone involved in bringing new people on board, including the new recruit themselves, wants their endeavour to be a success. How do you go about ensuring that happens? More than simply "inducting" a new member of staff, how do you streamline the recruitment, assessment and hiring processes?
Mergers and Acquisitions
Did you know that between fifty and eight three percent of mergers and acquisitions fail? This is an enormous cost for everyone involved, both financially and in terms of morale of the staff and customer and stakeholder confidence. A focus on social in acquisitions can help reduce this failure rate by improving the key business processes involved in mergers and acquisitions. It focuses on the people and the culture associated with the organizations coming together and demonstrates how employee retention, failure rate of acquisition and communication can all be improved.
Safety
Social can assist in helping your organization improve its safety record and have a huge impact on ROI for worker's compensation and injuries. . The social tools within our solution can help you reduce incidents, increase effectiveness for your existing safety programs and accelerate the adoption of a culture of safety amongst everyone concerned. Many industries use simple, but effective and tested approaches to using social collaboration can improve the safety record of your organisation and its reputation.
Join Me
We're going to explore each of these Use Cases in more depth in the coming blog posts here, so I hope you'll join me as we deep-dive into how social business, and IBM's Platform for Social Business in particular can help your organization.
As always, I'd really appreciate your feedback and comments! To get more information, you can get the summary report here!
https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/signup.do?source=swg-US_Lotus_WebMerch&S_PKG=ov14017
3 Cool Social Products!
I discovered these interesting products on social.
I'd love ones that you've seen!
- Higi --It like a Klout score that combines your eating and activity habits, all the while ranking your score, scoring pictures of food for calories and protein , etc. They have 'stations' set up in drugstores so that you can weigh in, test your blood pressure, etc while combining your "community" or friends into your overall score. VERY cool!
- Virtual Receptionist / Concierge -- So you are a smaller or medium company and you cannot afford an assistant, see this video that allows you to have a virtual and smart assistant. Very furturist -- I just landed at an airport and I was directed by an virtual concierge!
- Cuelight Pool Table - Yes, gaming! Cuelight allows you to transform any pool table into a digitally-enhanced video experience. High-definition imagery responds in real-time to every shot. User-selectable themes yield infinite possibilities. It is real and is already in the Paradise Tower Penthouse, Hard Rock Hotel & CasinoTM, Las Vegas and the Esquire SoHo apartment. Check it out!
Mobile first. Social Always. Mind the data.
I am here today in Luzern, Switzerland at the Big IBM event with over 1200 companies talking about Mobile and Social!
We have a special Digital Media Room to assist clients getting started with Social. Social has a STRONG ROI component which I find is very appealing to our Swiss clients. And the transformation itself is getting noticed in how it is changing the way we work. Did you know that 83% of gen y has joined a social network and $200B in mobile money transfers by 2015?
IBM believes in this transformation so strongly that Social Business has been a key enabler of IBM's legendary business transformation and global integration. IBM is the most prolific user of enterprise social technologies.
Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees use IBM social technologies, including Connections, IBM's social business platform. As a result, more than 130,000 communities have been developed, 842,000 files shared globally have generated more than 22.1 million downloads. Every day, IBM generates 50 million instant message chats. IBMs recent $1.3B acquisition of Kenexa brings relevant data and expertise into the hands of business leaders within every functional department (marketing, HR, sales, product development).
After the keynote, I'll post our key points for this powerful transformation!