Social Media Tip of the Week – Facebook introduces hashtags

Facebook has just announced the introduction of hashtags. Similar to other social platforms like Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, you can now use hashtags to add context to a post or indicate that it’s part of a lager discussion. Clicking on a hashtag will take you to a news feed containing all posts of users and pages on that particular topic. This will help you to get an overview on a topic or find out what other people think about it. Hashtags won’t affect your privacy settings – you can still decide whether you want to share your posts with the public or your friends only. In the future, Facebook plans to introduce trending hashtags and deeper insights to help people discover more conversations.


Colleagues in Care (CIC) is a Social Business!

Colleagues in Care (CIC) is a global health network of approximately 200 doctors, nurses, medical personnel and other volunteers working together to provide quality health care services, telemedicine, knowledge and training to aid the poor and those suffering. The nonprofit organization is strategically focused on Haiti and is striving to bring a high-quality standard of care that reflects best possible practice in a resource-challenged environment.

In order to better connect the hundreds of medical worker and volunteers, CIC today is using  Social Business to provide the global network of healthcare volunteers with immediate access to critical data and information for the current healthcare needs of the Haitian citizens. With Social Business, the volunteers and those on the front lines taking care of patients are armed with an online medical knowledge system that includes treatment options, clinical pathways, and best practices specific to the situation in Haiti.

Through social networking, Web-based meetings, activities, and forums, the volunteers are sharing ideas and information as if they were in the same room.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37743.wss


University of Texas at El Paso is a Social Business!

At the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), faculty and researchers are using Social Business to track the status of research projects and help facilitate knowledge sharing across campus.

This social business model provides a cost-effective,  easy-to-use solution that allows faculty and researchers to share resources and track progress of research projects without clogging up their email in-boxes while aiding in the ever challenging "version control" process for collaborative documents.    UTEP has recently expanded its use of Social Business to collaborate with universities across North America who are involved in CASHI, the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions.

CASHI aims to increase the number of Hispanic students who pursue and complete baccalaureate and advanced degrees in the computer and information sciences and engineering. UTEP uses Social Business to collaborate with faculty at other universities, invite users from the other universities at no cost as guests to work on projects together. They can collaborate, manage projects, assign work, and comment directly with each other!


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]


Premise: If social is the new operating system, what is the installation kit?

THINK THE CHANGE
If today’s company structures are often obstacles to smarter, more collaborative organizations, only a systemic perspective to social business transformation can succeed. How should we think and understand the business change in a systemic approach?

The key to any Social Business strategy is understanding how it will align with core business objectives and organizational goals.  You also need to understand your current culture and any specific desired or required shifts to enable a social workforce, social partnerships, or social customer engagement.  Gaining trust is another critical component of social transformation, which is closely tied to the need for transparency in a social business.  Engaging participants through exceptional experiences, gamification, and mobile increases their participation in the transformation; and networking social capabilities into existing core business processes and business systems further increases both the use of social and the key linkages back to fundamental business goals.  A successful program also needs to anticipate and mitigate potential risks and regulatory requirements, and analytics will be required for monitoring the social transformation as well as the associated business benefits as they are realized.

ACT ON THE CHANGE
How do we concretely manage a transformative experience that is able to lead companies from their current limits to fully embracing social? How can we execute a disruptive business strategy that can benefit the organization in the near future?

Your Social Business strategy will determine whether your start internally or externally, and will ideally identify specific roles or business activities that will quickly generate demonstrated value.

Based on your understanding of your unique culture, draw from our experiences with early adopters to increase the pace of adoption across the enterprise.  At different times in your transformation,  some of these will be particularly valuable, and they can provide support for programs as they are just beginning or once they have matured.  We also host an Adoption Council who's members provide peer-to-peer guidance from their prior experiences with social.

  • Create a New Way of Working -- Integrate into Processes, Customize the Experience, Drive Culture with Governance, Hire Social Job Roles
  • Launch with Top and Groundswell -- Leaders Show the Way, Evangelize and Enable
  • Engage to Fit into Work Style and Culture -- Motivate and Engage, Reverse Mentor Leaders, Raise an Internal Brand Army, Show Metrics and Value

EVALUATE THE CHANGE
The social business process has its  measures and KPIs, but the idea of ROI as a silver bullet often underestimates the complexity of evaluating the impact of innovation. How do we assess and prove the value of the social business transformation?

While there are many KPIs that are critical to maintaining the health of a social program and individual communities, the ROI of social needs to derive from core business metrics.  With a properly structured Social Business strategy, clear alignment to revenues and expenses should be identified and subsequently monitored.  You also have the opportunity to leverage social business patterns captured from the experiences of early adopters in social.  The first six patterns provide top ROI, touch 70% of our clients, and show the value of social without the “S” word.  IBM's proprietary research along with leading management consultancies including McKinsey have also provided support for substantiating the value of social business transformation.

  • Find Expertise
  • Knowledge Sharing and Innovation
  • External Customer Insights
  • Recruiting and Onboarding
  • Mergers and Acquisitions
  • Safety

 


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!

• Reduces risk and waste by centralizing documents associated with a project in communities, making it easier for team members to access information
• Helps team members find subject matter experts easily using profiles
• Enables users to create wikis for group editing of and collective input to documents associated with a project

Amadori Group is a Social Business!

I am here in Italy with Open Knowledge, a great IBM partner in Milan, London, and US.

italy 1336

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

•Boosts by 100 percent the company’s ability to monitor and learn about its brand health in near-real time using sentiment analysis
•Improves the company’s social media presence by 100 percent using near-real-time marketing insights, gaining 45,000 Facebook fans in less than one year
•Establishes direct communications with the target segment by 100 percent through web integration with social media

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.