What is a Smart Workforce? Social is the difference. #ibmsocialbiz #kenexa #socbiz

One of the emerging trends my clients are telling me about -- as they adopt social business and really embed social in their business processes -- is the idea of a "Smarter Workforce."

One attribute of an organization with a Smarter Workforce is the way they build their teams.

The way we recruit people has certainly changed.  It wasn't that long ago that the Sunday newspaper came thick with job want ads, since recruiting in those days meant lots of expensive advertising and endless rounds of interviews.  The advent of online job postings streamlined that process for sure, and saved a lot of trees, but there's an even newer trend we're seeing, as social business works its way into the business processes of leading organizations.

Especially at one end of the job market -- when you're after recent graduates and people in the earlier stages of their careers -- newspaper ads won't reach them, and even online job postings are just "meh." 

My most successful customers tell us they need to attract talent, not recruit it, and there's a big difference.  I think social is that difference.  Do you agree?

Attracting top candidates is more than just awareness -- sure they know you're hiring, but now what? 

The trick is to attract the right candidates, who have the strengths, career aspirations and personalities your org needs to succeed -- and them match them with the right roles, the right parts of your org, and the right place in your organization's culture.

What do you do at your company?  How do you find the right candidates?  How do you use social to match the people you attract with jobs you and they want?


Happy Valentine's Day! Social-ize it!

Happy Valentine's Day!  Some of my favs for this special day!

1)  Make a Valentine's Day card by hand for your kids!   Write a special note on how much you love them!

2)  Send a note of appreciation to those special.  Join the Note Project.   http://noteproject.com/

3)  Tweet today your love to brands that care. and people that you care for!

4)  Send an ecard to your parents.   Did you know that the largest growing group on Facebook is AARP!!

5)  Don't forget your spouse.   Family is so important    -- how about a Pinerest Project as a "book of memories" around special moments.

We can show our love for another in so many ways on February 14th.

Please consider making your love count by doing some social good this Valentine`s Day.

Last year, I loved that many contributed ideas for giving a gift that changes the world on Valentine`s Day


The Marble Effect! Build an Intentional Social Business Ecosystem! #ibmsocialbiz #socialbusiness #socbiz

 

 

marbles

 

The Marbles have 300% more surface area!!   So what does this have to do with Social?

Your voice gets magnified the more people in your network.   Your POV and listening impacts the best solution.

Take a look at this picture where you have a tiered Marble impact.    The upper tiers have impact and have direct linkage and work with a Social Business Manager.  The term “brand ambassador” has been a round for ages, but do we really want to create brand ambassadors?  The analogy isn’t quite right.  Nor do we want to put pressure on people to mindlessly share content on their personal networks.  So you need a bit more of a nuanced approach.   An intentional social enablement system!

multiply your impact

IBM has been working on a bunch of different enablement tiers that create an ecosystem of social enablement for IBMers.  Starting with a foundation of guidelines and policy – see our Social Business Coffee Break from yesterday blog post!  – and moving up to general education about social media, cybersecurity and reputation for all IBMers in the Digital IBMer hub.  From that tier, IBMers can move into the Forward Thinker Program which enables them to be surfaced on ibm.com and other external experiences – and also to be identified for the IBM Select program, which is a small group of high-tough, bespoke plan enablement for the top tier.  All of this is managed by people from many different areas within IBM – the social business managers…we’re not suggesting that we create a whole department of social business managers, but this is definitely an emerging set of skills that people need!

I'd love your thoughts on this approach!!!

 


Social Business Adoption Best Practice #3: Governance and Policies are crucial! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #socialbusiness

We have documented a great set of best practices for Adopting Social Business.   With only 22% of managers saying they are "ready" for social, we need to focus on the governance and policies to enable the organization to drive success.

Take a listen to our third best practice!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBI3eEca2b4&list=UU5uf_n9qa5yQOGEXdGn2uKw&index=1]


How do you balance Social and the Workday?

I love to multi-task and social really enables me to do more than one thing at a time.

However, the study by (Visual.ly) showed that

  •  The typical worker is interrupted once every 28 minutes on average.
  •  28% of the average work day is spent on interruptions and recovery time.
  •  45% of workers believe they are expected to work on too many things at once.
  •  And tasks done in parallel take on average 30% longer to complete than those performed in a sequence

So what are my secrets to getting more done with social:

  1. I schedule social time in.    15 minutes at the start of the day, middle and end so that I can focus on listening and learning.
  2. I plan my social calendar.   On the weekend, I plan my blogs my subjects to focus on, and even the tools of the week.
  3. I focus on what's important with social analytics tools that help me sort through the rivers of information.
  4. I focus on the relationships and engagements.
  5. I love experimenting and look for surprises and learnings in everything (like see my last blog on the Ducks!)  If you don't look, you won't see it!

What would you add?


Social Business Adoption Top 10: #2 - Create a customized experience #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ibmconnect

We began a journey of the Top 10 best Social Business Adoption Practices!

Here is best practice #2 -- Customizing the experiences!  The experience is part of helping people to learn to work differently.  It appeals to the person to help them be more productive and efficient -- in essence , it helps them work the way they want to work!

I'd love to hear your comments on this adoption best practice!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So3-Y9Xd2lY&feature=youtu.be]


Social Business Coffee Breaks: Adoption Best Practice 1 #socbiz #ibmconnect #ibmsocialbiz

We at IBM have a great set of Adoption Best Practices for companies both who are early adoptors and more advanced!

I will do a series of 10 of these each Monday!  My goal is to help you with your adoption!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBaKXHEX9gE]


Social Business Hot Tip: It's not about age! #ibmsocialbiz #ibm #socbiz #marketing

Gang,

I hear all the time about the Gen Y in Social Business.    They are really important!   This new consumer group representing more than 95 million in the U.S. alone is referred to by the media as ‘Generation Y’.  A retailer I talked to today called them the ‘Future of Retail.’

But they are not the only future of Social!!!

A fact!  Did you know that there are 47.7 million adults 50-plus visiting Facebook in October of this year alone, according to ComScore.  WOW!  Did you know that the AARP is on the way to having over 1M members on Facebook?!

It is not about age but whether you are a digital immigrant learning or have an interest in social!

Advice:

  • Target by Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants -- not by age!
  • Look at behaviors not age
  • Go personal!
  • For example, millennials have the opportunity to become your loyal customer with literally the swipe of a finger. Doing things like offering free WiFi in stores, mobile checkout, free delivery and social sharing are just a few ways retailers can begin to attract this new consumer group.
  • For example, according to AARP, they found that their fans, love anything that happens in the news. Anything current, timely and really visual works. For the last year, AARP has been focused on figuring out a way to tell interesting stories through photos and videos, because these types of posts perform four to five times better than others.
  • Learn your audience!!

Coach -- Crowd Sourcing with Social Media - Know of anyother great examples?

The Coach team crowd sourced its product development of a Tote while holding onto to their brand.  I heard from Vanessa Flaherty, Jamie Dicken, and Stephanie Rohlfs on Coach at BlogHer!

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A Simple, crowd sourced campaign.

Coach wanted to reach a new and younger market. They wanted to engage the younger generation in a new way. They wanted the consumer to put their DNA onto the next bag. They launch a "design the next Coach tote" contest. It was a completely viral campaign. They received 3200 entries in less than 6 weeks.

People were spending the whole night on designing bags. They replaced focus groups with the natural language. They were about the distribution not the destination. They wanted everyone to use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. It traveled across 8000 URLs in 6 weeks.

BrickFish's Viral Map:

Key bloggers wrote about the contest. There were over 30 blogs that constantly commented on it . The image was that Coach Cared about what their clients wanted. Brickfish Tracked a viral map of each entry and where all the interactions happened with the brand.

They generated over 6M customer images over 6 weeks! On average people spent 7 minutes on the site and each person influenced over 1,729 people with the viralness of the campaign.

Coach was brave in the way they allowed people interacted with the brand. They ended up on the front page of Google.

They sold out this bag in all stores (small runs!) and the designer's name is inside the bag itself!

Is this long lasting?

Is this novelty or long lasting? I think that people like to co create. We are now in the Generation C world. Generation C is different than the baby boomers, and gen x. Generation C wants to co create, collaborate, etc. I think this will become more important important in fact, perhaps being the primary form of product development.Others doing this?

Do you know of other co creation case studies?

  • IBM with development of its WebSphere sMash product.
  • NFL football on their advertising.
  • aDiasas on their viral campaign with University students
  • WD40 on their work on a product for women.

Check it out here!

http://www.brickfish.com/fashion/Coach?tab=overview


BlogHer -- Fiskar's Use of Fiskateers!!! Great social networking case study!

Fiskars! 360 year old brad is the second case study at BlogHer. Three talented women spoke: Angela Daniels,
Carrie Woodward, and Suzanne Fanning

How did social media start at Fiskars? They started with what do people think of when they think of the brand Fiskars. They wanted to build an emotional bond with Fiskars.

They decided to go after the passion about scrapebooking and sharing their lives. Fiskars used Brains on Fire to find 5 people that are passionate about scrapebooking. It was kind of like like American Idol!

They found 5 top women and brought them up to Fiskar to teach them about Fiskar's products. They met with all the key folks there and they were able to "play" with the materials for scraping! We got to see our business through their eyes. These women were so excited to see the building, the development, and it was that moment of seeing their excitement that I knew we had done the right thing!

Now, they paid their advocates because of the amount of time they would spend on this project of blogging about the Fiskars products. They paid them for 20 hours, but they loved it so much they did more than 80 hours. They were clear in their disclosure on the blog itself. They are not paid to positively blog about the company. They are paid to plan contests, crafts, and projects.

Interesting point to this case study. They created Fiskar- Teers! They gave these cool and different scissors -- so that even when someone didn't want to talk about the Social Network and Blogs on Fiskar, people would ask...where did you get those scissors? (Note over 60K comments about the coolness of the scissors!!)

The Fiskateer site launched in 2006! They wanted 200 people to talk about their products. They had 200 within the first 24 hours. 1100 by the end of 2006 and today they have over 6417 active Fiskateers -- 70 countries and all 50 States!!!

Gallery of pictures gets 11K comments, and 7K uploads of pictures of the work itself.

Fiskar increased their brand image a lot! 600x mentions in other sites outside their own site!!! WOW!

Fiskar started this as a PR action. However, now they use the information in product development, marketing, and service and support.

Another great case study! Stores that had Fiskar participants had 3x the sales for the company!!

They are using as well in some of their other areas. Examples included teacher community but not a special group.

Their best advice...they did this from the grassroots effort. They did a countdown to the FiskarTeer launch! They had 24K visits in the first day! What did they do to get people there? They did a grass roots effort. They reached out to those who were excited about their program.