BIZTECHBUZZ in the world of social, cognitive, IoT and startups

Month: June 2009

Difference between If and When …Business 2.0

When you decide to add social media to your company’s strategy, here are some things to think through!

1. Don’t say If we will do social media, but When we do Social Media. “If” implies that you are thinking, “when” empowers people to do something!
2. State your intention. This is why Technology companies announce ahead of time of delivery of the product a roadmap. Be vocal about your Social Vision — perhaps to your team or a cross brand team.
3. Understand your goal. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there! Is your goal new customers? Better support? New product requirements? Make sure you know your goals before you kick off a social media planning!
4. Collaborative Social Media Plan. Step 1 for me is to set up a Social Media Council. I did this at with my IBM SOA team. We had a cross functional team that brought forward case studies, ideas, and passion. This council for me was a virtual group. The council can assist in setting the roadmap!
5. Be students of the game. Learn daily. Post best practices of social media in a WIKI or an internal blog. Mistakes should be expected! Experimentation in Social Media is easy and a way to learn! Experimentation is good (and necessary) but remember that it’s a scientific process – you should have an expected outcome/framework!
6. Listen! You need to be listening to conversations! I just did a presentation with Maggie Fox. I loved her quote of “DON’T ignore negative chatter – it matters, and things move quickly”. If you don’t listen, you will miss 50% of the value of social media!
7. Approach End to End! Approach things from a holistic perspective .. you want to make sure your brand is viewed end to end. That it constantly supports your vision and your goals. For example, a message on LinkedIn and Twitter needs to be the consistent .. perhaps even in your taglines, and naming of your group.
8. Solicit your customers to be your “brand army” of enthusiasts that make your success their cause. We had customers post videos to YouTube on why they loved our products. They became our advocates. RackSpace does an amazing job of this as well! Acknowledge and harness their goodwill to generate insight and return on your investment. For example, we took those videos that our clients did and learned how they discussed our products and used those words to talk to other potential clients.
9. Hybrid Rocks. Don’t forget this is about leveraging social media to supplement your real-world events and experiences. Face to face is still the most meaningful interaction!
10. Digital crisis plan. Have a digital crisis communications plan – being caught flat-footed can do lasting damage. You need to move super fast in this new world be ready. Example of Domino’s Pizza who had employees post pictures of employees sticking cheese in their nose before they put it on a sandwich. Domino needed to move fast!

What is Dialogue?

I’d propose this defnition of a dialogue.

Voicing — explaining, sharing, your thoughts.
Listening — hearing what others have to say on the topic.
Reflecting — thinking through others point of view
Challenging — Discussion the ideas and pros and cons

What do you think of as a dialogue? What did I miss?

Weaving a Social Cloth

Listening is a lost art. Today we are hungry to be heard. We like to talk, tweet, blog a lot. But listening and exploring questions that matter makes a difference.

Think about it. We had 4 women at a table. They each talked on what energized them.. Wendy, the hippie chick, Ann where boundaries are gone, Sandy, empowering others and creating something new, and Trudie working from a challenge into energy. The conversation was great. It was like weaving a new cloth.. each conversation being one thread .. a cloth that will never be woven again.

Interesting how listening does that. Do you do that with your family, with your team, with those in your friend group, or your connections.

When was the last time you listened and reflected? What cloth did you weave?

Did you know? Featured in WITI Keynote Tomorrow — Social Media Statistics!

In preparing for this week’s WITI keynote, I found some great factoids!

First, over 1/5th of the world’s population are online – that’s over 1.2B people. The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the total population of the planet! WOW!

If MySpace were a country, it would be the 11th largest population.
45% of Facebook’s audience is now 26 or older, with women over 55 the fastest growing group!

Between February 2008 and May 2009, the Twitter community grew by over 4,000% to an estimated 20 million+ users. In December 2008, over 14 billion web videos were viewed by 150 million online Americans, an increase of 13% over November ‘08!

People with more than twenty connections on LinkedIn are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.

All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees!

Send me your factoids!!!