Social Challenge in an Acronym!

Our challenge --- summary for our Social challenge for companies using the SOCIAL Acronym.

S:     Start now -- personally with LinkedIn or Twitter.   Develop your own digital reputation dashboard.  And don't forget to start in your business.  Remember, Social Networks are the new Production line!  It will transform your business.

O:   Organizations are starting.  79% of companies (according to Harvard Business Review Analytics Services) have started using Social.   Be courageous by having the charged and difficult discussions, keep them alive, amplify them, and raise the level of awareness around them for greater good!

C:  Culture eats strategy for lunch.    The social world requires changes in the way you work and interact.   Are you culturally ready?  Create cultures that encourage a Sparring Culture!

I:  Intelligence that is connectional is crucial.   By unleashing Connectional Intelligence through the Power of Social, people become engaged and energized. Connectional Intelligence (CxQ) is the ability to realize value from networks of relationships, to harness units of knowledge and reuse them to innovate, to convene communities, and to marshall resources for breakthroughs.

A: Allow form to follow function.   Experiment internally first.  Did you know that more companies are using social internally than externally now?   This is to learn the environment, the power, and practice and experiment.    There is value of this employee engagement.

L:  Lead the way!  Social enables you to combine the strength of your team. This ability to take ideas, resources or products and combine them to create entirely new ideas, generate new ways of thinking and produce new results.


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.


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]


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 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.

 


Build a Set of Brand Ambassadors!!

What is a brand ambassador? In the past, a brand ambassador was paid to promote a business or service. Think TV advertising. But a true brand ambassador is a client who shares a positive experience or story about your business or product.

Do you know who your supporters or ambassadors are? Do you do anything for them? Maybe just comment and share their tweets. Perhaps a thanks for commenting on your product. They will appreciate the feedback and would love to know that you knew they liked their post!!!

Rewarding them in some way helps too! On Foursquare, you can offer rewards to your mayor! Yelp does the same. One client I was working with brought in all their "ambassadors" for a brainstorming session. One of my clients does a dinner once a month for his best fans and followers. What a great idea and way to say thanks!

What are you doing for your ambassadors?


Japan is becoming a Social Business!

I was just in Japan for a Social Business Summit. Over 1500 people registered -- more than 2x that of last year.

Did you know that Japan is the 4th largest population of internet users, 3rd in the world for the most bloggers, and 2nd in the Asia Pacific region for online video usage. About 18% of the population leverages social networks like Twitter per Wikipedia.

With over 97% of Japanese consumers using ecommerce, the picture becomes even clearer. According to the IBM CMO Study, 82 percent of CMOs say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years. The need to deliver a seamless mobile experience has also become increasingly critical to CMOs. According to Yankee Group, online commerce is expected to hit $1 trillion by 2014 and mobile commerce $200 billion by 2015. Japan is leading the way.

Japan is transforming both business to consumer and business to business networking.

Japan is starting this revolution. Their citizens and consumers are using these connections as a primary means of communication, in many cases, replacing other more traditional interactions.

It is this newsocial graph which originally referred to the social network of relationships that is now emerging in the business world. The social graph is a powerful illustration of people, their connections, and their networks.

Most organizations have not exploited the power of these connections and applied them to basic business processes. The potential value of these networks to improve business has largely gone unrealized.

An organization that applies social networking tools and culture to business roles, processes, and outcomes to create business value is a social business.   And Japan is truly becoming a social business!!!


Prudential is a Social Business!

Happy Monday!

Our social business coffee break is how Prudential has become a Social Business!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyyEu46J_Bw&feature=youtu.be]