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]
The European Training Foundation (ETF) is a Social Business!
The European Training Foundation (ETF) is an agency of the European Economic Union (EEU) that provides expertise in the area of vocational education and labor market issues to 30 non-EEU countries.
Given that its teams are geographically dispersed, are in different time zones and use different languages, the ETF found it challenging and inefficient to share documents and collaborate on projects. Because information was located in departmental databases or even in spreadsheets, information was hard to find and share. The ETF needed a way in which team members could easily share documents and collaborate while working a project.
The organization is using the Social Business focus to find subject matter experts and create wikis for documents to make documents truly social elements!
Amadori Group is a Social Business!
I am here in Italy with Open Knowledge, a great IBM partner in Milan, London, and US.
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
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.
At Telcommunication Conference - Some Social Stories! China Telecommunications
China Telecom serves over 220 million individuals.
They decided to use IBM's Social Business Platform for ideation blogs to gather information from their customers to identify the most viable new services to offer to the Chinese market. They wanted to invite a broad range of new ideas from the public.
China Telecom enabled consumers to register their ideas, and they encouraged continuous collaboration around those ideas. The wisdom of the crowd helped them select the best ideas to put forward.
China Telecom called their ideation blog, “Voices,” because they were allowing new “voices” into their development process.
Here are some of the interesting points about their solution:
- They received their first idea from a customer a mere ten minutes after launch.
- “Voices” produced over 500 ideas in the first six months
- China Telecom considers a big percentage of the entries to be breakthrough ideas.
- When asked, 88% of the participants said that they believe ideation is fun
The participants identified new product and service opportunities by creating a networked, market- focused culture that makes it easier to bring great ideas to life. This was especially important when China Telecom was working to determine which 3G and 4G services to deploy.
With input from “Voices,” China Telecom has effectively included customers in the gathering of product and service ideas and feedback. That equipped them to develop better products and services. They have also achieved innovation more effectively, and they’ve brought successful new offerings to market more quickly.
China Telecom recognized that the potential of social business extends far beyond simple one to one communications between employees. Social can bring together the whole value chain, including customers, suppliers, consultants or anyone else.
Using Social for Ideation or Innovation is a key ROI social project. McKinsey says that on average a company using Social for Ideation improvements see a 20% success rate improvement in new product, offerings, or program introductions!
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?
Social Business Tip of the Day: Twitter Two-Step Verification
Twitter has introduced a new verification feature, after Burger King, Jeep and the Associated Press have all had their Twitter accounts hacked in the last year. Considering Twitter handles are hacked regularly, you should take a few minutes to set up the new verification system:
First off, you’ll have to:
Once that’s out of the way:
1. Go to your
-
account settings
on twitter.com and check the “Require a verification code when I sign in” box.
2. When prompted, click Okay, send me a message.
3. If you receive our verification message, click Yes (Note: you’ll have to enter your password). Once this is set up, when you log in to your account on twitter.com, a six digit code will be sent via SMS to your phone. You’ll have to enter the code when prompted and then you can sign in. Obviously, if you’ve saved your password and don’t log out often, you won’t have to do this. But if you do log out often (or get kicked out because of a browser update), you’ll have to move forward with entering the randomly generated 6-digit code to log-in each time.
For more on this AND to learn about logging into Twitter on other devices and apps (which has an additional few steps).
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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]
Top 6 Social Business Patterns for ROI!
It's easy to see how the world has adopted social media to help strengthen ties between people all over the world. People like to share and the explosive growth of Facebook and all the other social media platforms out there are surely a testament to the fact that we like to share and discover what our friends are up to. (IBM is, of course, the market leader at applying social techniques to business situations. Our entire Social Business Platform is the best in the market, four years in succession, according to IDC. )
Why these 6 Patterns Matter to Your Company:
While you might see how social could apply in a business setting, and understand that somehow harnessing some of these principles might be beneficial to improving how your organization works, you might not know where to start, or how the common business processes you work with could be transformed with social business. Or you may be looking for the top ROI yields. Or how to embed social without the S word (yes, that's Social that some people view Social as Play!)
It's for these reasons that we have created the Social Business Patterns or Use Cases.
- Identify top ROI cases
- Showcase the value and business outcome with having to use the S word
- Allow you to learn from others
These are a suite of example business processes common to many industries. We show how these processes can be improved using IBM's Platform for Social Business and, most importantly, what return on investment you can expect to realize from implementing the use cases. These are not IT solutions, however. They are examples of business processes which will be very similar to your own. Using and adapting these examples can allow you to improve the communication, collaboration, awareness, knowledge-sharing, morale and efficiency of your organisation in simple but very effective ways.
Over the coming blog posts I will look at each of these in more depth, but let me outline to you the areas IBM's Use Cases fall into:
Finding Expertise
Being able to locate the expertise in your organization is vital in many situations. Almost any service organization relies entirely on the knowledge of its subject matter experts. Manufacturing organizations such as car manufacturers, oil & gas producers and many others need to know how to solve problems quickly and easily without re-inventing the wheel and by accessing the expertise of the right people. Travel and transportation organizations' entire business is built on being safe and reliable. These two facets are based on them being experts in their chosen fields and making the most of their staff's expertise. Finding Expertise focuses on how any organization can make the most of their experts. Whether it's finding the right person in critical situations or unlocking the tacit knowledge in the experts' heads to build the collective expertise of the organization.
Knowledge Sharing & Innovation
Social Business solutions are at the forefront of helping organizations all over the world increase their level of innovation. Social helps to drive the process of innovation by giving ideas and new concepts places to grow and adapt based on the collective knowledge of the participants. Use of social demonstrates how you can create a more nimble and flexible organization with dramatic return on investment opportunities backed by real client examples.
External Customer Insights
Many organizations nowadays have a presence on social media. They now have Facebook and other popular social network accounts, some use these to great effect and are generating real new business. You can boost your selling power by unifying your sales people and distribution chain together with the most important people to your organization - your customers.
There are a set of sub cases around the external focus:
- Customer Service. Since empowered customers with social tools are changing the focus of business from selling to “partnering” , engaged employees lead to…higher service, quality, and productivity, which leads to… higher customer satisfaction, which leads to… increased sales & profit.
- Sales. Using social to better target individuals, not just demographics and segments to better sell to your client.
- Community Building. Using community to target your advocates and drive loyalty into your base or to recruit and learn from a new client set is a powerful ROI case.
Recruiting and On-boarding
Your organization lives and dies by the quality of its people. Attracting and retaining the best people in the market is one sure way to make sure that you are investing for your future. To be able to demonstrates how you can enormously increase the time-to-value of new employees, increase the retention rate of your employees and provide much faster access to experts, highlights the focus on people as an important part of your strategy.
Everyone involved in bringing new people on board, including the new recruit themselves, wants their endeavour to be a success. How do you go about ensuring that happens? More than simply "inducting" a new member of staff, how do you streamline the recruitment, assessment and hiring processes?
Mergers and Acquisitions
Did you know that between fifty and eight three percent of mergers and acquisitions fail? This is an enormous cost for everyone involved, both financially and in terms of morale of the staff and customer and stakeholder confidence. A focus on social in acquisitions can help reduce this failure rate by improving the key business processes involved in mergers and acquisitions. It focuses on the people and the culture associated with the organizations coming together and demonstrates how employee retention, failure rate of acquisition and communication can all be improved.
Safety
Social can assist in helping your organization improve its safety record and have a huge impact on ROI for worker's compensation and injuries. . The social tools within our solution can help you reduce incidents, increase effectiveness for your existing safety programs and accelerate the adoption of a culture of safety amongst everyone concerned. Many industries use simple, but effective and tested approaches to using social collaboration can improve the safety record of your organisation and its reputation.
Join Me
We're going to explore each of these Use Cases in more depth in the coming blog posts here, so I hope you'll join me as we deep-dive into how social business, and IBM's Platform for Social Business in particular can help your organization.
As always, I'd really appreciate your feedback and comments! To get more information, you can get the summary report here!
https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/signup.do?source=swg-US_Lotus_WebMerch&S_PKG=ov14017
6 Minutes on Wednesday: Social Focus
Take 6 minutes today to plan your social approach!
Minute 1: I am known for (two to four things) today. By this time next year, I want to be known for (two to four more things)
Minute 2: My public visibility program includes: x, y, and z . Examples: Buy Google URL, Jump into LinkedIn:, Blog - Be Brave and start one! , Tweet!
Minute 3: Grow a core community of enthusiasts to: Build a loyal brand army that makes your success their cause, Harness their goodwill to generate insight, Increase your engagement in important conversations
Minute 4: Examination: Is social media right for your business? Is your community online? Find out which platforms they prefer and what they need from you.
Minute 5: Engagement: How can you bring value to the conversation? What can you add that will engage your target audience & influencers?
Minute 6: Execution & Experimentation: You need a plan. Start small, but have a roadmap for engagement and experimentation short/long term. Remember that even experimentation is a process - you must have anticipated outcomes and be systematic.