University of Texas at El Paso is a Social Business!
At the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), faculty and researchers are using Social Business to track the status of research projects and help facilitate knowledge sharing across campus.
This social business model provides a cost-effective, easy-to-use solution that allows faculty and researchers to share resources and track progress of research projects without clogging up their email in-boxes while aiding in the ever challenging "version control" process for collaborative documents. UTEP has recently expanded its use of Social Business to collaborate with universities across North America who are involved in CASHI, the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions.
CASHI aims to increase the number of Hispanic students who pursue and complete baccalaureate and advanced degrees in the computer and information sciences and engineering. UTEP uses Social Business to collaborate with faculty at other universities, invite users from the other universities at no cost as guests to work on projects together. They can collaborate, manage projects, assign work, and comment directly with each other!
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!
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]
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
3 Cool Social Products!
I discovered these interesting products on social.
I'd love ones that you've seen!
- Higi --It like a Klout score that combines your eating and activity habits, all the while ranking your score, scoring pictures of food for calories and protein , etc. They have 'stations' set up in drugstores so that you can weigh in, test your blood pressure, etc while combining your "community" or friends into your overall score. VERY cool!
- Virtual Receptionist / Concierge -- So you are a smaller or medium company and you cannot afford an assistant, see this video that allows you to have a virtual and smart assistant. Very furturist -- I just landed at an airport and I was directed by an virtual concierge!
- Cuelight Pool Table - Yes, gaming! Cuelight allows you to transform any pool table into a digitally-enhanced video experience. High-definition imagery responds in real-time to every shot. User-selectable themes yield infinite possibilities. It is real and is already in the Paradise Tower Penthouse, Hard Rock Hotel & CasinoTM, Las Vegas and the Esquire SoHo apartment. Check it out!
I am a Serial Social Addict. Harness your social network!
OK. I admit it. I tweet multiple times a day, I have 2 blogs, and I love social. My passion is reaching customers and having them connect with my company in new and smart ways. As such, I experiment, learn from my peers, and measure these new tools for marketing. As an executive at IBM, I have found that these Social 2.0 techniques drive down costs and increase revenue.
IBM's 2012 CEO Survey revealed that 57% of CEO's identified social business as a top priority and more than 73% are making significant investments to draw insights into data. And more than 1,700 chief marketing officers reveal 82% plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years.
This shift of consumer to business networking, known as "Social Business" has become the next big challenge for organizations which are quickly learning that social networks are no longer the new water cooler but rather their new production line, a place where employees, partners and clients connect to share vast amounts of knowledge. The big winners will go those who harness the ability to capture and analyze the knowledge their social network creates and share it throughout the business to accelerate innovation, out-market competitors and remove boundaries internally and externally.
Consider the Social Graph. A Social graph is a graph that depicts personal relations of internet users Understanding the connections of your clients helps you see the networks, where clients are isolated and where connections can drive revenue.
For example, chief marketing officers (CMO) are looking to gain insights from both internal and external data from sources like Facebook, Twitter and public forums to react more swiftly to customer trends and build their brands. HR Leaders are looking to build communities to improve recruiting and talent management services.
By interacting with the video game, students can make real-life business situation decisions. They can see the results of their decisions right away, and if they make a mistake, it’s much more private than “failing” in front of a classroom of their colleagues. Because a love of gaming is shared around the world, professors have told us the game can help to bridge cultural barriers While it’s too soon to measure the full implications, there’s a new business environment emerging.
We cannot ignore the changing group dynamics and social implications. In fact, we should tap into the most innovative ideas to redefine the fundamental nature of educating the market. Just as games present us with situations that invite players to make choices, consider the advantage of using graphics and decision-making steps of games in business. Using Social Media, we could allow decision makers to immerse themselves in the real-world simulations, judging cause and effect before making decisions.
The arrival of Social Business has created an emerging battleground for IT vendors. For example, financial analyst firm CLSA recently cited enterprise social software as one of the top tech trends in 2013 and Forrester Research reports that the market opportunity for social software will exceed $6 billion by 2016.
The City of Dubuque is a Social Business/Government!
Happy Monday! Today's Social Business Coffee Break is focused on a City that has done some amazing things!
The City of Dubuque is a social government! Take a watch and tell me what you think!
[youtube=http://youtu.be/Fak0Hp4SDyQ]
