Top 3 Factoids for Social Selling
1. Leads developed through employee social marketing convert 7x more frequently than other leads (Source: IBM)
Wow! Employees are becoming the new sellers!
2. Sales reps using social media as part of their sales techniques outsell 78% of their peers (Source: Forbes)
Developing a relationship online makes a big difference!
3. 77% of buyers are more likely to buy from a company whose CEO uses social media (Source: MSLGroup)
It starts Top Down!
Who Packed your Parachute?
I heard a story about a war hero who did amazing things for his country. One day while having dinner, a man he didn't know came up to him and asked if he was that "famous" hero He replied yes, but how did the man know?
The man explained that he had packed the parachute used in that particular occasion.
The hero went home but was haunted by the young man's comments. Had he acknowledged this man when he passed him before? Why didn't he know who packed his parachute and prepared him for the adventure?
As I heard the story, I thought, do we acknowledge those who pack our parachute? For example, our parents who prepare us for life our assistant who prepares us for the day, the VC who took a chance and funded us , or the developer who coded that great app you sold and the list goes on.
So on this wonderful Friday, I want each of you to thank one person who 'packed your parachute'.
Just for developers - a Quickie Guide to Why these partnerships matter! Box, Docker, and Apple
I am here in London at the Cloud Forum! I had a great set of roundtables yesterday and got asked from many developers what do these announcements do for me!
So I took a stab at a high level view of the value!
Box
- Existing Bluemix developers can now leverage the world class Box cloud storage API and services for their mobile and web apps! (Box API will join the rest of 100+ Enterprise developer service tile on our Bluemix service specifically made for develoeprs)
- And existing Box developers can now enjoy the speed of creating new mobile and web apps integrating Box API on Bluemix developer cloud
- What’s more, IBM has built an extensive Enterprise Content Management capabilities
- content capture, extraction, analytics, case management and governance, that are complentary
- these solutions were already deployed in many large enterprises,
- now Box developers will be able to tap into these rich enterprise content
This is particularly interesting for developers want to get into a few specific high barrier-of-entry industries including healthcare and financial industry, because in the past, the data of these enterprises are held in a vault that is difficult to get.
For example, startups can create apps using IBM ECM API to extract contents data to feed into Watson, and then allow researchers to collaborate on Box platform using the insights generated from Watson.
Docker
By helping making Docker as the standard of "write code once, and take it anywhere", it removes the lock in that many developers had to spent lots of time when they start their development on the cloud. (for example, it usually takes a couple of days to redeploy an app from developer's own machine to AWS cloud)
Through this new partnership, IBM offers "IBM containers" for developers deploying their apps onto Bluemix (public cloud) and PureApp (private cloud) and the tools managing the containers,
For the large companies that are very picky on how/where apps get deployed, this new container eliminate the extra work developer need to spend to figure out how to deploy their apps into large enterprise's private cloud.
Apple
To the iOS developers who wish to create enterprise apps which require server side data integration - the new IBM MobileFirst for iOS solutions extends IBM’s strengths of providing services and middleware with back-end support.
For many iOS apps that requiring backend services, regardless it is nodejs, Ruby on Rails or Java, Bluemix on the other hand provides composable service side app creation and deployment capabilities in an open and common environment.
For Developers who live and work with Xcode (the standard iOS app development tool made by Apple), the Mobile first and Bluemix provides common services such as Enterprise Cloud storage (include Box), backend integration, and Analytics (Watson) right inside Xcode. (btw, this is how IBM created 100+ native iOS apps for IBM enterprise clients)!!
The key here is Bluemix bring enterprise level integrity to the apps created on open source platform such as Cloud Foundry and Docker.
Social Sentiment for Jurassic World! Fun with Watson!
We love to show the power of Watson! And I loved the MOVIE!!!
So we uploaded some Twitter data about Jurassic World into Watson Analytics, IBM’s natural-language cloud-based analytics service.
There were some interesting insights:
- The country with the most tweets so far is Chile;
- Women are tweeting more than men
- Portugal has the highest number of positive tweets, but also the most negative.
- Overall, sentiment for the movie was positive, which was to be expected. However, there was no appreciable change in the order of sentiment over time. Positive was highest for each day, followed by neutral, then negative and then ambivalent.
- The global volume of all tweets (whether positive or negative) surged during the last five days of the month.
Wimbledon And Bluemix! The IBM Hackathon that disrupts the Fan experience!
I am live in London for the excitement in the developer and entrepreneur communities. Monday June 15th kicks off London's Tech Week!
But we have been busy ahead of time!
For two days, IBM invited developers to rapidly build new ways to create an even more exceptional experience for fans on site at Wimbledon. The coders used IBM Bluemix,our Cloud platform that is the fastest growing developer platform in the world!
The winners were serial Box which was all about automating the ticket resale process!
Check it out!
https://storify.com/ibmevents/ibm
TGIF: Don't automate the personal touch!
Our Friday Short piece of Social Advice is Let your brand shine through!
I love this advice that came out of the Social Shakeup in Atlanta! " Never automate the personal touch, When you put out content, your personality and value comes in and you don’t want to automate that."
You can automate amplifications, but you cannot automate relationships.
How do you let your personality shine through? Identify your power users and influencers, understand who they are and build real relationships with them.
Your Secret Weapon: Video is about engagement and retention!
I love video blogs! Video is so trusted and engaging! Now I know that retention is also stronger!
Use video whenever you can !
