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?
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
In the Future, CMO buys more than the CIO. 2017 right around the corner. Per Gartner.
One of the major reasons is that CMOs will be leveraging big data, mobile and social. Social Media becomes a word of mouth channel.
This new channel drives understanding of customer behavior and allows you to determine if you want to approach them and how you should approach them, respecting their privacy throughout the process. Through real time social media techniques, like blogging or online chat, you can determine if someone needs assistance, or if they are really focused on a particular topic. It offers an opportunity to interact with a person in a nonthreatening manner.
During the process, there is an opportunity for a transformation to occur with the person -- from information gatherer, shopper, potential prospect and then ideally into a customer. In addition, real time chat enriches the customer experience. At IBM, for example, its online chat capability increased its leads, improved customer satisfaction, and drove up sales productivity In the first 3 months of operation on the IBM SOA site, there were over 2,845 chats, resulting in 182 validated leads! Online chatting provides assistance “just in time” not waiting in a reactive mode where someone has to click on a button to ask for someone to contact them at a later time. It gives you the ability to have a conversation with your prospects when they're most receptive -- while they are on your website or on your Twitter Channel actively gathering information. For example, a manufacturing company has been using conversations on Twitter to drive sales. In the first year since utilizing Twitter as a promotional tool, the company generated over $500,000 in revenue in sales of refurbished systems.
Guiding principles:
- Skills matter. The presence you put out there in front of prospects is very important, so you want your best and brightest reps doing the real time chats. They need to be very knowledgeable about the products and services not simply communicating at a high level.
- You need to understand the etiquette for inviting people to chats and for chatting with them once they accept. For example, don't immediately pop up an invitation within the first 30 seconds that a person is on your site -- it's pushy.
- New Customers. Social media is a way to reach new customers. For Dell, Twitter represented a new way to reach customers and they claim that per their latest surveys, a significant portion of people who bought through Twitter were not aware of the Dell Outlet before Twitter.
Portico is a Social Business!
Have a coffee and sit down and listen to how Portico became a social business and what they do to help others in this quest!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Z-rPHQNic&feature=youtu.be]
Mobile first. Social Always. Mind the data.
I am here today in Luzern, Switzerland at the Big IBM event with over 1200 companies talking about Mobile and Social!
We have a special Digital Media Room to assist clients getting started with Social. Social has a STRONG ROI component which I find is very appealing to our Swiss clients. And the transformation itself is getting noticed in how it is changing the way we work. Did you know that 83% of gen y has joined a social network and $200B in mobile money transfers by 2015?
IBM believes in this transformation so strongly that Social Business has been a key enabler of IBM's legendary business transformation and global integration. IBM is the most prolific user of enterprise social technologies.
Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees use IBM social technologies, including Connections, IBM's social business platform. As a result, more than 130,000 communities have been developed, 842,000 files shared globally have generated more than 22.1 million downloads. Every day, IBM generates 50 million instant message chats. IBMs recent $1.3B acquisition of Kenexa brings relevant data and expertise into the hands of business leaders within every functional department (marketing, HR, sales, product development).
After the keynote, I'll post our key points for this powerful transformation!
Social is Personal. My story. It is powerful.
The power of social is everywhere.
But no where as relevant than in personal life.
My dad was placed in the hospital for emergency brain surgery. I got the news while in Vegas, and booked the first flight out. I had to wait for the plane for over 6 hours -- hoping to get home in time.
I was going crazy in the wait -- and really needed to talk to someone.
So I did something I usually don't do -- I posted something very personal on Facebook about my dad. Much to my surprise, within minutes I had response from friends all over the world. The outpouring was overwhelming --- over 500 comments plus dozens of calls.
- I had calls from friends that I had not heard from since High School.
- Prayers poured in
- Comments of encouragement came in texts, comments, tweets
- And I didn't feel alone
No one gave up either --- days and weeks went by ..... and the love flowed in through twitter, facebook and beyond.
I talk about the power of social in business -- and the power there is very strong and real. But this personal impact -- priceless.
Video blog from Social Business Coffee Break Series! Social Selling!
Happy Monday!
Today in our Social Business Coffee Break series we will focus in on the value of using social in your sales process.
I'd love your thoughts as well!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQdKGyCit0s&feature=youtu.be]
