Does Social Require you lose control (of your brand?!)
Is losing control of your brand a good thing or a bad thing?
We are used to operating with the idea that we have to protect the brand. How do we lose control of our brand so that our customers have a role in shaping our brand as much as we do?
Well, we know that your brand is not what you say it is, but what everyone else decides. Social enables you to influence your brand and engage where and how others want to talk. You can identify and engage influencers and unleash your employees as a “digital army” by building with customers and convert them to brand ambassadors
If you use Social Analytics to identify needs in the marketplace for specific products, features, or process enhancements by listening and this could allow you to tweak your brand value prop. Leveraging crowdsourcing to engage employees, partners, and even customers in innovation discussions increases the number and sources of new ideas; but also enables the best ideas to become more visible and mature through collaboration.
I LOVE having brands be leveraged by clients is great -- and I don't think that it is anything new. Companies now orchestrate and can shape the brand not based on what we are selling but on their character, their interactions, their experiences.
Check out our IBM CMO Jon Iwata!
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/62205426]
Clash of Civilizations - email in a Social World!
Global E-mail Patterns Reveal “Clash of Civilizations”
The global pattern of e-mail communication reflects the cultural fault lines of thought to determine future conflict, say computational social scientists.
Researchers analyzed a global database of e-mail messages, and their locations, sent by more than 10 million people over the space of a year. The results suggest that the pattern of connections between these people, clearly reflects the host civilizations. In other words, the way we send e-mails is a reflection of the mesh of civilizations that is an important driver of future conflict.
Social Business Governance: Relationship over Rules
Being inclusive means engaging stakeholders early and broadly to build shared understandings and expectations. Responsiveness provides for clear accountability and speed in decision making. The challenge is to build governance structures and processes that accomplish both.
Having a relationship with your employees not just rules makes a huge difference in how successful you are!
Achieving the transformative value of becoming a Social Business involves connecting all parts of the organization (including channels, partners and customers) in new ways. It often requires quite new ways of managing people, flatter organizations, and significant cultural change. While becoming social provides individual flexibility, it’s important that the change achieves the unifying value for the company of the new goals and culture.
A strong governance program facilitates coordinated change. The governance is led by two complementary leadership groups who’s members include the major “organizational structures” (e.g., LOBs, Finance, Supply Chain, HR, Channel Management, …).
The first, the Executive Sponsor Group, defines the strategic linkage and goals of becoming a social business. Members are leaders across the organization. The second is a Digital Council. These are executives who are responsible for the organization-wide, execution creation of the Social Business plan. The representatives are often the social business leaders in their respective LOBs and functional areas, which ensures focus on the vertical and horizontal needs.
The Digital Council focuses on the key areas of a social program:
- Community Management – Provides a common approach to drive change and adoption at and across the LOB and functional level. It includes actions like community management, Content Management, community analytics, and best practices. While the focus is value at the LOB / functional level, the governance processes has a Center of Excellent that shares best practices to create a common social voice and approach across and outside the organization.
- Metrics and Measurement - Covers all elements of data and measurement. Starts with analytics / listening to guide the where and how to engage socially. This includes internal analytics of social networks, expertise, and projects, as well as the external listening and analytics. This group also is responsible for creating and automating the overall program measurements to track success, progress on the plan, and social return.
- Reputation and Risk Management – Focuses on 3 main areas: 1. regulatory risk and compliance(if relevant), social record retention for general discovery, and other legal and financial risks; 2. policies, guidelines and processes for the organization and associates to participate in social media (for example, IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines); and 3. proactively managing the organization’s reputation and having a defined plan to respond to various levels of negative media or emergencies.
- Standards – This group focuses on process and technical standards for a social business. While LOBs, major business functions, etc. require the freedom to build their social programs tailored to their needs, the Standards group ensures that the overall company can be nimble in connecting across boundaries in ways not always anticipated. Standards for brand and ways of connecting with partners, channels, clients, etc. ensure that the company is viewed as coordinated and focused on needs vs. a “collection of parts.” On the technical side, a common social business framework enables the new ways of working.
Social Business Adoption Best Practice #9: Brand Army!
Happy Monday and grab that coffee!!!
Today's Social Business Coffee Break is about forming that important Brand Army!
Let me know your thoughts!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vN8JO6lmvg&feature=youtu.be]
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!
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.
Case Study: Create a great EVENT using Social! #ibmconnect #socbiz
I love to share case studies and here is one from our superstar IBM team in Europe! Mark Osborn's (@mark_osborn) leadership was the driver to a very successful joint Sales and Technical Education event .
He leveraged Social to drive all the core and key elements in the event:
- Ideation: Creation of the agenda based on the team's suggestions. First requests for topics were collected in an Activity. Common themes were organised into tracks and relevant speakers identified. Everyone voted for speakers and topics
- Continuous Improvement. The speakers could see the requirements from the team and posted draft agendas back to the Activity for comment, further honing their pitch.
- Realtime Reaction. During the event agendas and updates were made available via an event wiki.
- Immediate Usage. After the event speakers posted their presentations on Connections Files with the event tag, creating an event presentation feed. Several of our speakers, were virtual and presented via LotusLive & Sametime Web Meetings
- Best Social tools used! Leveraged IBM Connections
The team in Europe created a 'Ideation Blog'. This is a blog set up for using the collective intelligence of an entire team to create ideas and build upon each others thoughts. They took the suggested with the highest number of votes to create the agenda - there was a very high number of topics that were very popular!
And this was the Feedback from the team on this years event 97% satisfaction This demonstrates that the social approach to planning the event was not only highly effective, but created a much stronger sense of ownership with the participants, encouraging them to feed-back.
Social Business Coffee Break: Adoption Best Practice #6 - Evangelism! #socbiz
Happy Monday!
Today, we continue our 10 step Adoption best practice! Today we are going to focus on Adoption Step #6. Evangelism! The video below will go into details on how to do this to be effective in adoption throughout your organization and your clients.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooEKghzFqtA&feature=youtu.be]
#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