Mint, Bric
I learned a new term today -- MINT!
We have been doing strategy around BRIC for so long. BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China. These were the countries that were to drive the growth in the market. I have been to all 4 of these countries and saw the growth engines turning but never the full potential that was projected.
But now there is a new term -- MINT -- Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey. Have you heard of this one? Sure I have been to Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey and loved the. Turkey is very exciting. The tea is very good and the business growing.
But the stability is a question. Turkey and Nigeria have politics that are in turmoil. Indonensia is facing troubles too with investors. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on MINT.
The Gap in skills for mobile, social, analytics continues! VBlog!
Skills have been quite the topic lately. Why? We have such skills gaps that any great company must really address the challenge, with the industry.
Here's the results of the study that show the gaps! Read last week's blogs for IBM's focus with the academic universities in security and analytics!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdnFtmeVqg0&feature=youtu.be]
Winning the war for Skills: IBM Announcement Analytics Talent Assessment
Last week, IBM co-hosted the Big Data & Analytics EdCon event (with Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) and University of Ottawa Telfer School of Mgmt), bringing together leading academic thinkers who are pioneering curriculum in the Analytics space. All are wrestling with how to strike the right balance among interdisciplinary topics to achieve the right blend of market-ready skills in their students.
Data is exploding!
We all experience the explosion of data from my fav social to sensors in factories. Due to this explosion,all companies need more data scientists, analytics professionals and Big Data trained decision makers who can not only crunch data, but turn it into effective strategy.
Creation of a skill gap.
There is a widely-discussed skills gap between the growing number of jobs being created to support Big Data & Analytics and the available talent pool to fill these jobs.This "skills gap" is a significant concern across industries. Our research uncovered a dramatic gap in analytics skills, with only 1 in 10 organizations believing it has the skills it needs to be successful.
Collaborate to win!
To narrow this gap, IBM is collaborating with more than 1,000 academic partners to develop curriculum that reflects the mix of technical and problem-solving skills that is necessary to prepare students for Big Data and analytics careers, across all industries.IBM has a unique, hands-on model for collaborating with universities to build degrees and coursework from the ground up via the Academic Initiative ( this is part of my new role as the IBM General Manager of Ecosystem Development! )
- We provide schools with access to IBM Big Data and analytics software
- We help faculty develop curriculum materials
- We build case study projects for students based on real-world business challenges
- We offer IBM experts who visit classes as guest lecturers
- We make available faculty awards, whose funding fuels new coursework on Big Data and analytics
- Faculty members become part of a global community of educators working together to educate the next generation
Announcing the Analytics Talent Assessment!
The Analytics Talent Assessment offers insight from IBM clients (see the press release below showcasing both Boeing and Nationwide) on what analytics skills drive positive business outcomes.
Using the IBM Analytics Talent Assessment, university students can now gauge their readiness for public and private sector Big Data and analytics careers and gain guidance on ways to develop and position themselves for these in-demand jobs through a simple online questionnaire.
The eight universities piloting the assessment (Fordham University, George Washington University, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts Boston, Northwestern University, The Ohio State University, Southern Methodist University and the University of Virginia) are pioneers teaching Big Data & Analytics skills"
-- Fordham's dual track degrees, which are designed to train marketing analytics professionals
-- GWU's career-track courses support fields such as sports and marketing
-- IIT integrates Big Data and Analytics courses in their Stuart School of Business
-- UMass Boston offers an undergraduate and a graduate concentration in Business Intelligence
-- Northwestern University offers an MS in Analytics as well as an online MS in Predictive Analytics
-- The Ohio State University is partnering with IBM Academic Initiative to develop undergraduate and graduate big data and analytic programs
-- SMART projects with schools like SMU bring bring together a commercial entity with a real world problem that students can then apply analytic skills to solve
-- University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce offers an undergraduate Business Analytics track and they continue to broaden their Big Data and Analytic programs.
This focus is essential for winning the war for talent. With the access of the technology and expertise for the assessment, this initiative provides the insight into today's state-of-the-art curricula, and provides the client insight, technology, and proven outcomes these skills can drive.
Friday Tip: Always on listening
My mom used to tell me that God gave me two ears and one mouth because I was to listen more than talk. In Social Media, listening acts as a guide, through the magical and interesting world of the blogosphere.
Listening should be a passion and an ongoing process that is necessary to keeping your strategy fresh and competitive. It enables you to find opportunities, potential new stakeholders and enables you to proactively manage Social Trust.
The value of listening is that it assists you in understanding your prospects, clients, and of course, your competitors. It leads to action and awareness of conversations which will compel your company to respond.
Since your URL isn’t just your website anymore, but everywhere you are on the web, listening is important to your digital presence. You are building a brand through images and test, and your head is on the "guillotine" everyday if you just rest and don't stay totally tuned in a systemic approach. Business, corporation related and societal events and basically everything is simply interconnected and needs dedicated listening all at the same time.
How do you listen? I use IBM Connections internally, and IBM Analytics externally and also set google alerts, Hootsuite and check Tumblr for trending topics. What do you use?
Happy Halloween! Social Business is creating a Scary number of new jobs
Happy Halloween! Since we had Hurricane Sandy last year, and snow the year before, this will be our first true trick or trick in a while! Be safe!
I was just in a panel with Target Marketing and after the panel got a lot of questions around what are the new job types I should be looking at due to social media dominence.
Don't be scared! There are a few. Your fear can rest if you start looking at the new frontier today!
What are some of the new job types that the Social Era is producing?
- Community manager - A person responsible for building, maintaining, and activating members in an online location around certain topics. Key skills required: Ability to be transparent, drive sharing among members, and listening and shaping conversations. This role has become so popular that a day honoring its professional was created!
- Social Business Risk Manager – A person who is focused on managing the risk associated with clients controlling brand online. The role entails building a risk management plan, selecting a listening tool for ensuring risk is assessed, and ensuring groups of people can rally around a recovery. Key skills required include: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, public relations, and grace under fire of a crisis.
- Reputation manager – a person responsible for building, maintaining and protecting a company’s reputation. Reputation is what clients and potential clients believe to be true about your company. Key skills required: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, marketing, and the ability to position a brand, company or product in a positive light. This role has now outpaced the Risk Manager role, showing that the industry has moved to being much more proactive.
- Social Analytics manager – a person who monitors, listens and analyzes the sentiment (or feelings of people online), and turns the massive amounts of data into insight. This role will become increasingly important as more automated tools are coming into the market. Key skills required: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, business intelligence, and ability to make recommendations on incomplete data.
- Social customer support manager – a person responsible for scouring the blogsphere for customer concerns, insights, and statements. This person’s role will have to extend through multi channels of input – including social tools like Twitter, Facebook, as well as traditional channels of phone which has now become one of many places where listening and turning data into insight will occur. Key skills for this role include: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, customer service, and CRM.
- Social Product Innovation manager – a person who can generate ideas, refine ideas, and solicit valid “votes” on the best ideas that customers will actually buy. With the increase in crowdsourcing or the ability of using crowds in the blogsphere to create and vote on new product concepts, this person becomes crucial to your company’s innovation engine. Key skills for this role include: Ability to understand new social business tools and techniques, product management, and product development.
9 Levers of Differentiation in Big Data (Social creates alot of data!)
What is big data anyway? It is the flood of information that is available today. Did you know that every day, 2.5 billion gigabytes of data are created in a variety of forms, such as social
media posts, information gathered in sensors
and medical devices, videos and transaction records? Why .. that's Big!
Why is Big Data important? Being able to capitalize of that data gives you better insight and makes you more competitive.
IBM's Institute of Business Value just published a study on the 9 Levers of Differentiation for Big Data. The research makes it clear there are specific activities that can help organizations accelerate value creation and simplify analytics implementation.
Those 9 levers are:
1. Know the Source of Value. Focus on actions and decisions that generate value. Organizations realizing value from analytics solutions are those that can readily measure their impact.
2. Culture. Those cultures that support the availability and use of data and analytics see higher value from analytics and data.
3. Executive Support and involvement. Infusing the use of analytics into an organization’s culture typically requires advocacy and action from the most senior levels of
the organization.
4. Measurements. Evaluating impact on business outcomes.
5. Trusted data and data management practices. Decision makers must have confidence in the data before they will use it to guide their actions.
6. Disicplined approach. Leaders use a financial rigor in analytics funding process.
7. A great software platform. You need integrated capabilities delivered by software tools to take advantage of big data.
8. Organizational confidence in the data and the skills.
9. Focus on Skills. Development and access to skills and capabilities. There is a huge analytics skills gap. Those leaders focus on training a great team.
Download the full report: www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/thoughtleadership/ninelevers/
Social Business can save lives! Check out the Boston's Children's Hospital
Yesterday, n partnership with IBM, The Boston Children's Hospital launched OPENPediatrics!
What is OPENPediatrics? It is a Social Learning platform that enables medical personnel to gain expertise, make better decisions, and even share knowledge to save the lives of children.
The hospital has just started using it, but already there are over 1000 nurses and doctors in over 74 countries.
This use of Social Business will completely transform the healthcare industry! What can it do for your industry?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKQ7lEmPyWY&feature=youtu.be]
Are you a Social Showroomer?
What is a social showroomer? With 70% of people trusting reviews by their "friends" than a company's own site, a social showroomer is one who leverages social before they purchase. But they do it in a uniqure way. They come into a real store with their smartphone and scan a product's barcode to see the reviews, and lowest prices for the item. Then they search both online retailers to compare with those of brick and mortar.
First a factoid, 1/3 of showroomers bought from an online-only retailer, the other two-thirds from a multi-channel retailer.
Who are these new social shoppers?
Showroomers are more often male than female with the largest gender gap being in consumer electronics but women are still quite capable of showrooming. In fact,women still constitute 80% of Pinterest users. (Search Engine Journal)
On age & income dimensions, this is not an older group but not particularly young. Most likely to be 26 to 34, however in some categories like consumer electronics, home decor and healthcare, showrooming skews as high as 35 to 44.
The showroomers are also more affluent on average but has quite a contribution from the middle-income group as well.
And the final point, this group is very vocal. 57%, had written a positive review of their online retailer. They are a dynamic group having positive experiences and wanting to share them with their peers.
Are you a showroomer? Tell me about it. What do you think about showrooming? Is it fair to local merchants?
Privacy - Interesting study for your Social Profiles
In an IBM study of the Empowered Customer with a sample size of 28,000 global consumers, a fundamental change is emerging. Customers are increasingly open to providing information about themselves in exchange for perceived benefit such as improved personalization, service, etc. And remember, this is on a global scale .. not something that is a US only trend.
In fact, I was surprised to see that 75% are willing to provide information on media usage and demographics but almost 60% of global customers are willing to provide information about their lifestyle and locations which will enable companies to further tailor the shopping experience.
I think this is significant as 73% of CEOs are investing in customer insights. These factoids tell us that a client would be willing to spend an additional 20 minutes if you provide them with some value.
Social Business Lesson: What is reflected?
As I was at the beach this summer, I caught this gorgeous picture of the moon reflecting on the water!
It got me thinking about how social reflects your company's culture and for you personally, your personal brand. Social really reveals all the parts of your culture -- good , bad, and neutral.
The moon's shine above in the picture is ampliflied by the water, just as your company's cultural elements are amplified by social.
One of my favorite quotes is:
"Social doesn't transform your culture. It reveals your culture."
This fact is why i advise my clients to do a cultural assessment before starting down the social path.
Here's a quick tidbit of that assessment. And I'll leave you with this question. What does social reveal about your culture?!
