Social Forum: Social Makes me Happy!
Happy Monday! And I am happy! I am home from my 2 weeks in Asia and Africa with great meetings with clients and great changes in the market. What a difference that a year makes!
Here's your request on this week's video which is an update on Social and Happiness! What do you guys think?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjOADyQjyMs&feature=youtu.be]
The European Training Foundation (ETF) is a Social Business!
The European Training Foundation (ETF) is an agency of the European Economic Union (EEU) that provides expertise in the area of vocational education and labor market issues to 30 non-EEU countries.
Given that its teams are geographically dispersed, are in different time zones and use different languages, the ETF found it challenging and inefficient to share documents and collaborate on projects. Because information was located in departmental databases or even in spreadsheets, information was hard to find and share. The ETF needed a way in which team members could easily share documents and collaborate while working a project.
The organization is using the Social Business focus to find subject matter experts and create wikis for documents to make documents truly social elements!
Amadori Group is a Social Business!
I am here in Italy with Open Knowledge, a great IBM partner in Milan, London, and US.
So today I thought I would highlight an Italian company that has cross the Social Business mark.
Amadori Group wanted to market its poultry and pork products to evolve with the ever-changing modern lifestyles and dietary needs of young consumers. It sought to create fun ways to engage its target segment by exploiting online marketing and social media. The company sought to use online resources to gain new insights into its target consumer base to help boost brand visibility, encourage customer loyalty and gauge consumers' reactions to its products and marketing campaigns.
This leading food company in Italy gains an unprecedented ability to track and visualize consumer conversations, transforming speech patterns into marketing insights and identifying those who can drive its business.
Influencing consumers’ culinary choices is not an easy task because taste and preferences vary with each person, lifestyle and dietary needs. This food company listens to and learns about its consumers’ culinary needs and desires in near-real time with a combination of innovative solutions. The company uses a powerful web development platform to quickly create highly interactive websites that are tightly integrated with social networking sites for targeted campaigns. It then exploits sophisticated predictive analytics to track and visualize what is said about its brand and products on social networking sites, blogs and forums—in near-real time. Gathering user data from multiple sources, the predictive analytics capture unstructured text and ingeniously separate consumer sentiments from all the chatter. The solution then analyzes the free text against structured data such as user profile information, revealing hidden attitudes and opinions that the company uses to identify consumer buying propensities, foster those who influence others’ purchasing decisions and refine the company’s digital marketing campaigns to generate more sales.
Real Business Results
Social Business Coffee Break: Regeneron is a Social Business!
Regeneron is a Social Business!
Take a listen on how the Smarter Workforce impacts financials!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_E5JaX5zNY]
Social Media Tip of the Week – 5 Tips for Using LinkedIn Contacts
A few weeks ago, LinkedIn announced its new feature LinkedIn Contacts, giving you enhanced functionality for better managing your relationships and social engagement. As the feature is now being rolled out, we have gathered a few tips on how to get the most out of LinkedIn Contacts.
1. Import your contacts – You have multiple options to do this with LinkedIn Contacts. Go to contacts in your LinkedIn profile and then to setting. You will be able to import your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook and iPhone contacts among others.
2. Set reminders to connect – Whilst making a first connection is easy, it’s far more difficult to keep it alive. LinkedIn Contacts offers a solution for this by giving you the opportunity to set a reminder to follow-up with your connections.
3. Merge duplicate contacts – LinkedIn now shows you all profiles they believe to be duplicates so that you can merge them by simply unclicking those names on the list that are actually two different people.
4. Tag your connections – Make the effort to accurately tag your connections. This will help you to better organize your contacts and find them again easily.
5. Note relevant information – If you didn’t know yet, profile notes are private to you. So, when making a connection, you should make use of the notes feature and write down important information for later use.
At Telcommunication Conference - Some Social Stories! China Telecommunications
China Telecom serves over 220 million individuals.
They decided to use IBM's Social Business Platform for ideation blogs to gather information from their customers to identify the most viable new services to offer to the Chinese market. They wanted to invite a broad range of new ideas from the public.
China Telecom enabled consumers to register their ideas, and they encouraged continuous collaboration around those ideas. The wisdom of the crowd helped them select the best ideas to put forward.
China Telecom called their ideation blog, “Voices,” because they were allowing new “voices” into their development process.
Here are some of the interesting points about their solution:
- They received their first idea from a customer a mere ten minutes after launch.
- “Voices” produced over 500 ideas in the first six months
- China Telecom considers a big percentage of the entries to be breakthrough ideas.
- When asked, 88% of the participants said that they believe ideation is fun
The participants identified new product and service opportunities by creating a networked, market- focused culture that makes it easier to bring great ideas to life. This was especially important when China Telecom was working to determine which 3G and 4G services to deploy.
With input from “Voices,” China Telecom has effectively included customers in the gathering of product and service ideas and feedback. That equipped them to develop better products and services. They have also achieved innovation more effectively, and they’ve brought successful new offerings to market more quickly.
China Telecom recognized that the potential of social business extends far beyond simple one to one communications between employees. Social can bring together the whole value chain, including customers, suppliers, consultants or anyone else.
Using Social for Ideation or Innovation is a key ROI social project. McKinsey says that on average a company using Social for Ideation improvements see a 20% success rate improvement in new product, offerings, or program introductions!
Build a Set of Brand Ambassadors!!
What is a brand ambassador? In the past, a brand ambassador was paid to promote a business or service. Think TV advertising. But a true brand ambassador is a client who shares a positive experience or story about your business or product.
Do you know who your supporters or ambassadors are? Do you do anything for them? Maybe just comment and share their tweets. Perhaps a thanks for commenting on your product. They will appreciate the feedback and would love to know that you knew they liked their post!!!
Rewarding them in some way helps too! On Foursquare, you can offer rewards to your mayor! Yelp does the same. One client I was working with brought in all their "ambassadors" for a brainstorming session. One of my clients does a dinner once a month for his best fans and followers. What a great idea and way to say thanks!
What are you doing for your ambassadors?
Rheinmetall is a Social Business!
Happy Monday and welcome to our Social Business Coffee Break!!!
Rheinmetall is a client that has become a social business! Listen to their story!
[youtube=http://youtu.be/vkCjf6PJOt0]
Japan is becoming a Social Business!
I was just in Japan for a Social Business Summit. Over 1500 people registered -- more than 2x that of last year.
Did you know that Japan is the 4th largest population of internet users, 3rd in the world for the most bloggers, and 2nd in the Asia Pacific region for online video usage. About 18% of the population leverages social networks like Twitter per Wikipedia.
With over 97% of Japanese consumers using ecommerce, the picture becomes even clearer. According to the IBM CMO Study, 82 percent of CMOs say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years. The need to deliver a seamless mobile experience has also become increasingly critical to CMOs. According to Yankee Group, online commerce is expected to hit $1 trillion by 2014 and mobile commerce $200 billion by 2015. Japan is leading the way.
Japan is transforming both business to consumer and business to business networking.
Japan is starting this revolution. Their citizens and consumers are using these connections as a primary means of communication, in many cases, replacing other more traditional interactions.
It is this newsocial graph which originally referred to the social network of relationships that is now emerging in the business world. The social graph is a powerful illustration of people, their connections, and their networks.
Most organizations have not exploited the power of these connections and applied them to basic business processes. The potential value of these networks to improve business has largely gone unrealized.
An organization that applies social networking tools and culture to business roles, processes, and outcomes to create business value is a social business. And Japan is truly becoming a social business!!!
Social Business Tip of the Day: Twitter Two-Step Verification
Twitter has introduced a new verification feature, after Burger King, Jeep and the Associated Press have all had their Twitter accounts hacked in the last year. Considering Twitter handles are hacked regularly, you should take a few minutes to set up the new verification system:
First off, you’ll have to:
Once that’s out of the way:
1. Go to your
-
account settings
on twitter.com and check the “Require a verification code when I sign in” box.
2. When prompted, click Okay, send me a message.
3. If you receive our verification message, click Yes (Note: you’ll have to enter your password). Once this is set up, when you log in to your account on twitter.com, a six digit code will be sent via SMS to your phone. You’ll have to enter the code when prompted and then you can sign in. Obviously, if you’ve saved your password and don’t log out often, you won’t have to do this. But if you do log out often (or get kicked out because of a browser update), you’ll have to move forward with entering the randomly generated 6-digit code to log-in each time.
For more on this AND to learn about logging into Twitter on other devices and apps (which has an additional few steps).
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