What are the benefits of becoming a social business?

In most of the visits I do with companies on social, the big question I get asked is what is the benefit of becoming a social business? 

Here are a few great benefits that I see:

  • Stronger employee engagement.   Stronger employee engagement leads to great client engagement.  In a social business, employees are smarter, more loyal, and engaged because their organization uses social networks, collaboration systems and shared messaging services. 
  • Great talent in and around!  A "social" approach enables employees around the world to tap into each other’s expertise and connections. Companies can attract top talent and give employees the social tools they need to work together. Executives can layer analytics on top of social technologies to make sure their companies have the right skills and expertise to meet market demands.
  • Exceptional client service.  A social business is also one where customer service is exceptional because the company reaches out to customers through social networks, Twitter and blogs in innovative ways and acts on the insights it pulls together about consumers.   That way, customer service teams have the insights and the analytics they need to predict and resolve problems before they happen.
  • Personalized.   Value in a Social Business is created not for 'market segments' or demographics but for individuals.  Companies can dish up more targeted offers to customers and respond more quickly to their problems. R&D can gain new sources of inspirations and insight from customers and employees so that the products customers want are the ones that get to market ... customized to their particular need, even made to order!

What are your thoughts on the value you see in Social?


Social Business Tip of the Day! LinkedIn Mentions

Social Media Tip of the Day!

Did you know that LinkedIn just announced a new function – mentions – which makes it easier to engage with your network by mentioning connections and companies in conversations on LinkedIn. Just start typing the name of a connection or a company in your status update box or a comment field and select the person from the list that appears in the drop-down.

The person or company you mentioned will receive a notification that they have been mentioned. Mentions will be rolled out to English-speaking members first.


Social Business Coffee Break! Adoption Best Practice: Reverse Mentoring

Happy Monday!   This is our 8th Best Practice for Social Business Adoption.

It is all about Reverse Mentoring -- a great best practice!

Tell me what you think!

http://tinyurl.com/aptbknh


Happy Friday! What is a Social Business Anyway?

Please forgive me if you know this but I have had so many questions at SXSW on "What is a Social Business" that I jotted down my thoughts to share!!!

If you are 201, please skip but I am hoping this is helpful to a lot of you!!

1. What is social business?
A major change is taking place in social media these days: leading-edge companies are moving from "liking" to leading.

Social media has become an extension of traditional paid media with many companies broadcasting messages, from traditional to innovative. The next step will be much deeper as the leaders recognize that social engagement is an opportunity to redefine the client service experience, be proactive in delivering customer care and differentiate in new ways.

We call this social business. And just as social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest changed the flow of information by helping people share insights, opinions, and news with anyone anywhere, social business is changing the way people connect with companies and inside of them and how organizations succeed.

What is a social business? It's an organization that integrates social technologies with critical business processes to improve the productivity of its workforce and create exceptional customer service.

Forrester Research estimates the market opportunity for social software is expected to rise 60% annually from 2010.

2. How is social business different from social media?
Organizations have quickly learned that a Social Business isn't a company that just has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. A Social Business means that every department in the organization has embedded social capabilities into their traditional business processes to fundamentally impact how work gets done to create business value. A Social Business utilizes social software technology to communicate with its rich ecosystem of clients, business partners and employees.

Three shifts are creating an opportunity for social technology to create real business value

  • Pressure to build and share expertise for competitive advantage
  • Increasingly influential and vocal customers
  • Growing demand for 24/7 and mobile connectedness

Leaders in every industry are leveraging Social Business technology to disrupt their industries and create competitive advantage. They are improving productivity and unleashing innovation by tapping into the collective intelligence inside and outside their organizations. With social, they're creating a smarter workforce.

3. What are the benefits of becoming a social business?
In a social business, employees are smarter, more loyal, and engaged because their organization uses social networks, collaboration systems and shared messaging services.

A "social" approach enables employees around the world to tap into each other’s expertise and connections. Companies can attract top talent and give employees the social tools they need to work together. Executives can layer analytics on top of social technologies to make sure their companies have the right skills and expertise to meet market demands.

A social business is also one where customer service is exceptional because the company reaches out to customers through social networks, Twitter and blogs in innovative ways and acts on the insights it pulls together about consumers. That way, customer service teams have the insights and the analytics they need to predict and resolve problems before they happen. Companies can dish up more targeted offers to customers and respond more quickly to their problems. R&D can gain new sources of inspirations and insight from customers and employees so that the products customers want are the ones that get to market.

4. Example of social business transformations.
Teach for America: Teach For America, a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with communities to expand educational opportunity for children facing the challenges of poverty, is using IBM's social business platform to help bridge the gap in educational inequality for 600,000 students nationwide. Teach For America's 40,000 teachers, alumni and employees are accessing a digital network built on IBM's industry leading social
networking platform to share best practices and innovative teaching techniques in the classroom, across school districts, and state borders. Teach For America's digital portal, TFANet, allows incoming and current teachers, alumni and staff to connect and share knowledge, resources and guidance to help deepen their impact as educational leaders. All 40,000 corps members, alumni and staff have access to discussion forums, blogs, wikis, videos, and user profiles to exchange information and insight across the organization's 46 regions. IBM social networking technology has allowed Teach For America to build a network and digital experience for its teachers and alumni that includes a resource exchange with over 30,000 user-generated classroom materials focused on classroom management plans and worksheets, lesson plans, and new teaching techniques to help increase efficiency and learning in classrooms across the country. Members can access more than 600 content-specific communities, nearly 20 blogs, and 500 video clips and virtual classroom visits, providing Teach For America members with vital advice and insight from their colleagues to help advance their performance in the classroom.

LeasePlan: LeasePlan, one of the leading vehicle leasing and fleet management companies in the world, is using IBM Connections across the multi-national company of over 40 subsidiaries, in 30 countries and over 6,000 employees. LeasePlan is using IBM Connections for knowledge retention, optimizing workflow, increasing innovation, and transforming business processes. Nearly 800 communities have been formed, 400 blogs, and over 800 forums are all helping the organization decrease the amount of emails sent and received, helping the workforce easily find expertise and saving employees valuable time. Wim de Gier, LeasePlan’s Senior Global Project Manager Corporate Strategy & Development says, “LinkedPeople makes it easy to find people with specific expertise. Employees create personal profiles that include information such as their background, expertise, and links to articles or papers they have written. By searching tags, users can locate specific information and find colleagues suited to answer particular questions. Users can also find questions relating to their expertise that they can answer.”

Electrolux:  Electrolux is powered through the innovations of its employees to create products that consumers need.  Because of this, the ability for employees to access content and collaborate on the fly is crucial. Using IBM enterprise social networking software, Electrolux employees can now easily find experts and gain valuable insight from information and data. They are engaging in over 1,000 collaboration spaces, including 100 information portals managed by more than 450 editors and visited by employees 15,000 times a month and 9,000 times a day.

CEMEX:  Speeding innovation and time to market
CEMEX is the third largest building materials company in the world, with employees in 50 countries. To meet business challenges, it had to bring its global community closer together, so it created a social network initiative, called Shift, for open collaboration across its entire workforce. Within a year, over 20,000 employees were engaged, over 500 communities had formed, nine global innovation initiatives were underway -- and ideas started flowing around the world among specialists in all areas and levels of the company. Wikis, blogs and communities became links between operating units around the world, and the collaboration among employees led to impressive results -- for instance, the launch in under four months of the first global brand of CEMEX's Ready Mix special product. If the same level of collaboration now enabled by Shift were conducted today through traditional meetings by phone and travel, CEMEX would be spending an additional US$0.5 to US$1 million per year.


Big Data & Social Analytics are a powerful multiplier in predicting & preventing acts of violence

In the US, we have experienced some acts of violence. As President Obama stated shortly after a recent tragedy, “We won’t be able to stop every violent act, but if there is even one thing that we can do to prevent any of these events, we have a deep obligation, all of us, to try.”

What if there was a new emerging technology that has proven that some of these violent acts can be detected and prevented before they occur? 

Over the past eight weeks, several violent acts on school campuses throughout the United States & Canada have been successfully stopped through the use of “Social-Network-Intelligence-Policing”.  For example, last week at City University New York in Staten Island, a student was arrested after threatening to shoot and kill students at the CUNY campus in Brooklyn, New York.[i]  No students or faculty were injured.  On February 8th, 2013 in Kerns, Utah a high school student was arrested after he threatened to blow up his high school.  School police checking out the threat found a photo of explosives and put the school on lock down.[ii]  No students or faculty were injured.  On February 5th, 2013 in Murrieta, California a high school student threatened to kill his teacher.  The student was arrested before he could carry out his planned attack.[iii]

Research data shows that individuals, or groups of individuals who plan to conduct violent acts, most likely will post their intentions or a manifesto on public (non-private) social network sites just prior (8 – 72 hours) to initiating these violent acts or attacks. A small window of time exists where law enforcement and school faculty can legally monitor, detect and interdict these events before they occur.

In all three of these recent cases, the GEOCOP System (www.geocop.com) alerted law enforcement or school faculty to these emerging violent acts before they occurred.  GEOCOP stands for Geospatial-Common-Operations-Picture and it fuses social network monitoring and analytics services with geospatial data to give law enforcement predictive insights into emerging threats and events.

The recent emergence of “Big Social Network Data Monitoring, Analytics and Collaboration” technologies provide law enforcement and government agencies a powerful and legal force multiplier in predicting and preventing acts of violence on our school campuses.  Several State Police agencies across the United States use this system.  The GEOCOP system is another fantastic example where innovation and enterprise social network technologies are making a real difference in protecting our children and school campuses.


[i] http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/cuny_slay_threats_nZzeA3eQZCSORE3tZuKdBL?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Local

[ii] http://www.nbc11news.com/news/nationalnews/headlines/Police-Student-to-face-felony-for-Twitter-threat-190389291.html

[iii] http://murrieta.patch.com/articles/student-arrested-for-alleged-online-threat-against-vista-murrieta-high-schoolteacher#comments_list

Note – The GEOCOP Solution is owned by Global Technologies Solutions (GTS Corporation) and is exclusively sold by HMS TECHNOLOGIES CORP.  The GEOCOP and TACTrend Solutions are built on IBM’s Social Business Software Technologies which include WebSphere Portal, SameTime, IBM Connections and IBM Analytics Technologies.

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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/cuny_slay_threats_nZzeA3eQZCSORE3tZuKdBL?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Local

[1] http://www.nbc11news.com/news/nationalnews/headlines/Police-Student-to-face-felony-for-Twitter-threat-190389291.html

[1] http://murrieta.patch.com/articles/student-arrested-for-alleged-online-threat-against-vista-murrieta-high-schoolteacher#comments_list

Note – The GEOCOP Solution is owned by Global Technologies Solutions (GTS Corporation) and is exclusively sold by HMS TECHNOLOGIES CORP.  The GEOCOP and TACTrend Solutions are built on IBM’s Social Business Software Technologies which include WebSphere Portal, SameTime, IBM Connections and IBM Analytics Technologies.


#SXSW here we come! Sign up for ... #socbiz !

I LOVE Austin! As a former Austin resident, I relish the chance to visit any time and hope to make it my home again some day.

If you are new to visiting Austin, or are back again for South by Southwest (SXSW), you can never run out of places to see, eat, drink, shop and enjoy. Next week, I will have a blog focused on how to make the most of your SXSW visit providing you a list of some of the places that truly make Austin the crown jewel of Texas. It will mostly be focused on dining, but I will also include some not to miss shopping, outdoor favorites and places that help to "Keep Austin Weird."

A great place for unique Texas fare is Lambert's Downtown Barbecue. They serve up an original twist on BBQ in a vintage downtown Austin building with an uptown vibe.

Join me at Lambert's on Saturday, March 9, where I will be participating in a panel discussion called Just Add Followers -- The Key Ingredient to Telling Your Brand Story and Getting Results, along with Shoutlet and Bare Escentuals, moderated by TechCrunch. This should prove to be a very lively and interesting session! The details are below. It would be great if you could join us. Please come early as there is limited seating on a first come basis. http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5497186232#

Just Add Followers -- The Key Ingredient to Telling Your Brand Story and Getting Results

Gone are the days when brands used a brochure or static website to tell their story. Today, social media provides a platform where brands can communicate their story through the way they engage and interact with followers. And often, those interactions shape the brand in new ways, too. Join TechCrunch, IBM, Bare Escentuals and Shoutlet as we take a look at social storytelling and provide practical tips and tools for the job. You’ll hear a robust discussion on how to effectively manage online communities, listen to fans and impact buyer behaviors and preferences. More details here.

What:    Panel Discussion with Shoutlet, IBM and Bare Escentuals, moderated by TechCrunch
When:     Saturday, March 9 from 2:00 - 4:30 pm
Where:     Lambert's Downtown BBQ -- 401 W 2nd St, Austin, TX 78701


The Scottish Qualifications Authority goes Social! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ibmconnect

The Scottish Qualifications Authority- the body which creates and manages exams for Scotland's schools and further afield -  have become a social business with the rollout of the first part of their Staff Social Portal - IBM Connections.  Using Connections they are better able to communicate, collaborate and share information across their 800-strong workforce.  Even before going live there were nearly 400 initial users, and 138 communities set up, dealing with work and socially-focused activities (like their ever-popular jogging club).

As I discussed with Rob Gibson, he commented " This has been a thoroughly enjoyable project from start to finish.  We spent a lot of time researching how to best sell this type of solution to the organisation and then setting up an "Early Adopters" community to test the set up and iron out any issues before we opened up to everyone else.  

The other main task for the Early Adopters was to populate the system and get the conversation going ahead of general opening. This created a substantial amount of momentum which we have carried on past the launch day.  We started with around 15 Early Adopters and grew to nearly 400 in around three months (approximately half of the organisation).

The system is in full swing with all manner of conversations and networks being built.  I am delighted with the overall response so far but we have some ideas about how we can reinvigorate the system should it require a helping hand in a few months time.  We also have a planned upgrade to a future version of Connections later in the year.  This will give users a great uplift and help to keep the interest levels high."

A big "well done" to Alan Hamilton (@alanghamilton) at IBM Premier Business Partner Seric Systems (www.seric.co.uk) who used our 10 step Adoption methodology to becoming a social business!
scottish

Twitter: fastest growing social platform +40% Q2 to Q4 2012 #socbiz #ibmconnect

Check out the new infographic from my favorite Global Webindex.

twitter stats


New "Thumb" for #socbiz Collective Intelligence! #ibmsocialbiz

Thumb is based on the concept of crowd sourcing.  Crowd sourcing is tapping the collective Intelligence which leverages the wisdom of the crowd to generate new ideas and to refine ideas that exist, as well as vote on the “best” idea.

Thumb uses personal crowdsourcing.    For example, my daughter doesn’t know what to match with her new skinny jeans.  She can upload a pic to Thumb and then use collective intelligence to source the best match.

It appears like even simple questions typically generate hundreds of thumbs up or thumbs down, plus comments, sometimes within minutes.

The site has very high engagement of its users with 4 hours a month of use by its members, which is second only to Facebook!

Have you tried it?  Your kids?!


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!!!