Year: 2010 (Page 1 of 4)

I love my iPhone and just last night were hunting for my next favorite app!

I came across a great usage of an iPhone app for crowdsourcing…for a greater good.  It is called Creekside .. click here to learn more. 

This application enables everyone to contribute to cleaning up our waterways — crowdsourcing if you would for the world!

What is crowdsourcing?  To me, it is a world of the future.  It involves leveraging the “crowds” or all of us on the blogsphere to enhance products or services, provide a point of view, or even better the world. 

In this example, Creekside involves crowdsourcing problems with our waterways.

How do you get started?  You can download this from the Apple App Store and is free.  It is very easy to use — it took me only seconds!!  

First, you see a waterway — like a creek or lake that I stopped by yesterday. 

Use your iPhone to take a picture and then upload the following information:

What happens next?

This social application then aggregates the data.  You can see what others have uploaded or written — that’s the crowdsourcing magic! 

As the data is consolidated, it is shipped to the water control boards in the local regions.

Watch the why s of the application!

Do you have another great Crowdsourcing Application?  I’d love to see it.

OK!  I admit it.  My arms are sore.  I can’t get “That’s Not My Name” lyrics out of my head.   Yep…I am playing the new WII Dance 2 game with my daughters.

Besides this being absurdly fun and a great way to embarrass the kids while I jam away,  these social games on the WII really enable social interaction unlike games played alone.

Gaming is at a crossroads.   Gaming and Social Media are intersecting — not just at gaming but also in many companies.   Social media will change every aspect of business and their business models just as it will with gaming.  It will change the way we play games .. aka Dance 2, and who plays games aka  me and what a game is.   The world we see today will change in the next 5 years with gaming being part of education for Fortune 500 companies,  enabling the disabled to be better equipped for the world, and for even generating demand for goods and services.

The new generation learns from games … and will expect this style of learning and fun to  be prevalent in all their applications of the future.

Who knew that a simple WII game could impact the world!

What do you think?

The IBM Industry Symposium was in Spain this week — featuring a business development day and 2 days with global clients.

My key take aways from the event:

1.  Smarter Planet is an aspirational goal. Clients see value in the Smarter Planet value proposition and view the goals as their goals.

2.  New language.  LOB is becoming more important as a decision maker and therefore anybody needs to speak their language.  For example, the newly introduce CMO agenda has CMO speak.  The Industry Frameworks are in native language of the industry.

3.  IBM Ahead on the Industry Frameworks.   The Frameworks serve as the cookbook for the focus areas that make a difference. 

4.   Social business is mainstream.  From Air Canada, to IBM, to 1800 flowers, to Oncor, Social business was part of CEO, CIO, and CTO conversations about how to connect to the client of today and tomorrow.

5.  Becoming an Uber Connected Corporation is critical for competitiveness.   The executive focus and dollars invested in the IBM ecosystem was impressive and completely aligned with the IBM strategy. For example, the new SVP Industry Authorization provides partners access to critical “ingredient” assets.  

6.  Analytics is the new black.    Analytics for predictive capability is the way to dynamically reach your clients.   Learn about it and hire the skills now.  Enough said.

7.  Show me the outcomes.  It is now all about business outcomes.  2009 was about efficiencies and cost reduction.  2010 is all about revenue growth.

8.  Industry experts are the new popular kids.   Everyone the industry experts from clients and IBM went, a train of people followed.   This industry expertise is the new hot skill in the market.  Tell your kids.

9.  Tolerance is gone.  Given everyone is used to the interface of the iPad, iPhone, gaming, etc, the new view of IT is that it must be friendly and easy.   I heard this in EVERY industry group I attended.

10.   Vertical is the buzz.   Enough said.

Really?  Oncor — the largest utility company in Texas — and the leader in Smart Grids, not only speak Texan, but social media?  Texas utility Oncor is communicating with customers via social media in order to meet the needs & expectations of their customers!

I am live at the IBM Industry Symposium, and I heard from Mark Carpenter, CTO OnCor Energy.  From knowing ahead of time that the power is out .. (his quote ” We don’t have to wait on the customer to tell us when their power goes out. We already know”) to allowing bill and usage tracking from iPhones, they have embedded social networks in all they do to service clients. 

Mark made some great comments about how they have transformed their customers service and operations by moving to social networks. to meet demand.   Customers don’t want call centers, they want tech centers, and they want the ability to access that across ALL channels through social media.  So Oncor is delivering it in real time in all channels!    They recognize that customer behaviour changing with text, mobile and social media channels.  Do you?

Chris McMann, President from 1800 Flowers, says that Social Media gives his company a competitive advantage.   They use this new dialogue both internally and externally.  

For instance, for their call centers, since they are now remote, they leverage internal communities for keeping in touch with the corporate culture.

Externally, they had people staffing Twitter, Facebook on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day to resolve issues.  Their competition did not leverage this media and their competitors saw their complaints grow, while 1800 Flowers, saw comments on their responsiveness, and care.

So now they Social Media to tell the story about their brand.   They ask their customers to tell everyone about traditions, about their mom’s for example.  They took those stories and placed them in a  book — called “celebrating moms” and creating a space in the virtual world.   They now sell the book as an offer on Mother’s day!

Chris said he is trying to even learn more about his clients and their needs.  He is engaged in the dialogue to ensure he keeps up to speed on what makes people smile!

I was just in China — and missed Tweeting.     In 2009, the China Government disallowed Twitter in the country. 

Whilte twitter brought the concept of the microblog to China, now there is a China version that the people of China showed me.  It is called Sina Weibo.  

Around 3/2010, Sina’s CEO Cao Guowei revealed there were 5 million registered users of the service but claimed in May that  they had doubled the number of members. In comparison, it took Twitter nearly 30 months to attract the same number of users.

From what I saw, the service is a Twitter mini me!  It allows users to post 140  Chinese characters. However, my team in China told me that 140 Chinese characters can say a lot more!!!

I am very interested in finding out more about how this is used.   If anyone has used Sina, could you comment back to me as I’d like to chat to you!

Top 3 Tools for Small Businesses Using Social Media!

So in our latest onine survey of 1000 small businesses, we found that the top social media tools by small businesses were  — in order — are: Linked In, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

• 80% use LinkedIn on a monthly basis, and 56% visit it daily or weekly.
• 68% use Facebook on a monthly basis, and 46% visit it daily or weekly. (YouTube 77%/37% and Twitter 50%/29%)

Results show that partners from smaller companies and in executive roles have a higher usage of these four predominant social networking sites.

Consistent with Experian:

These numbers are on par with new media survey results from Experian Simmons issued this summer.

The survey showed that 66% of all online adults today have visited a social networking site in the last 30 days — and these numbers are up from 53% in 2008 and just 20% three years ago in 2007. (see here!  http://www.smrb.com/web/guest/2010-social-media-report )

IBM has what it takes!

It was also great to see that an overwhelming 97 percent of respondents described IBM’s social computing capabilities as moderately to much better than other competing large IT vendors. It means they value what we’re doing — our expertise and technology.

So we did this video for our IBM business partners on the 5 Don’ts!

I’d love to see your comments!!

Driving new revenue!

We just received results from our online survey of 1,000 of our partners, and we found some interesting results.   45% of our partners — which are primarily small and medium businesses — are beginning to experiment with social media to generate new revenue streams.  Not just to communicate but to actually drive new revenue!

Seeking Education!

The other interesting item was that  74% said that they would seek education in social media because, while they knew it was an effective sales tool,  they are still uncertain of how to apply it.

While the majority agreed that there’s a proliferation of social media outlets and there’s a potential to capitalize on social networking to boost sales, many are still not yet engaging in social media as part of their business strategy.

What’s the reason why they have not deployed more readily?

Our survey showed that Privacy concerns, lack of time, and confusion on how to measure the results were the top three most often-mentioned reasons for a lack of interest in using social computing for business purposes.

One partner wrote: “ With Twitter, there’s no worthwhile business information that can be expressed in 140 characters or less.” This reminds me of early days of the Internet and skepticism we saw then.!

Our announcement today from IBM announces a new Social Media Interactive Series to help our business partners in this quest!

Alex Crompton is speaking about his Social media experiences and sharing best practices!

What’s his challenge?  92% unaided brand awareness but only 6% market share.   His view was that social media could assist with market share!

His view:  Social Media is an engagement technique not a selling technique!

How did he start:  In Australia, he looked at where people went.  In Australia, average time spent is around 6 hours.   You cannot buy people’s time and attention in the SM space.  Interruption marketing will be rejected!  Give them something they value.  Earn the right to sell!

The bottom line:  Alimeter/Wetpaint Market Research:

The most valuable brands in the world are experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement.

Modeled after Obama’s campaign.  The message was the core — the change.   Listened and then changed the core message based on feedback.  The hub and spoke model!   Not back to the old Ogilvy model!

#1 tactic used: SEO — #1 ROI producer for Social Media.  Social Media supports SEO through referred links.