This morning I had breakfast with the Dachis Social Business Council group sponsored by IBM at the Enterprise 2.0!  I am so excited with the announcement here from IDC.   IDC has named IBM the market share leader in social platforms for the second year in a row. According to IDC, the worldwide revenue for social software grew by 31.9% to more than $500 million in 2010 and is expected to grow to $1.8 billion worldwide by 2014.

The breakfast was great today and very relevant to myself and the council members were very active in our discussion!

 

We had great folks in attendence like Andy from Lowe’s who told me that the $50B retail chain based in my home state of NC!  had over  45 Million Page Views from Social Adoption and 400 communities internal. Sounds like he has done an amazing job there at Lowe’s! 

My key learning from Andy:   Make sure that you embed social in the workflow, that is natural for your teams.

I also met Kevin Jones.  I loved his comments on learning from mistakes.   His major focus is on culture.   He is a true believer that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” 

My key learning from Kevin:   Don’t be afraid of your social business mistakes!  Learn and move on!

Robert Eastman, from SMB Research, discussed the value of Twitter, especially to the small businesses.    

My key learning from Robert:   Twitter is valuable!   Leverage it!

And finally, I know there were so many others that I didn’t get your business card, etc but loved meeting you!  Overall, I also took away:

  • Match culture to market
  • Technology does make a difference.   However, without the right planning and culture, you will still fail!
  • Value of location based services
  • Regulated industries are different.     They have to have ediscovery, and beyond (by the way, this is why today we announced the partnership with Actiance today!)

 I walked the group through the Social Business Agenda and gave out the first preview of the book!  YEA!

A  – Align your goals and culture to be ready to become more engaging and transparent. Do not underestimate the task ahead of you.  Culture eats strategy for lunch.  Take a look atIBM’s Social Computing Guidelines as a way to get started!

G – Gain Social Trust focuses on finding your fans, friends and followers, and forming best friends from your tippers or most influential clients or outside parties. It dives into what social trust is all about and how you instill it.

E – Engage through experiences focuses on how a company can engage its clients and employees and dives into gaming, virtual gifting, location based, mobile, or other stellar experiences to drive that engagement.

N – “Social” Network your processes. Since this is about business, figuring out how to add social technqiues to your processes is critical. Think about customer service — adding in Twitter to address your customer’s concerns. Or Crowdsourcing for product innovation, or Communities for incrementing your marketing processes around Loyalty!

D – Design for Reputation and Risk Management! This is the #1 areas of focus for the C level — managing the risk of having your brand online, your employees being your brand advocates, and even your clients becoming your marketing department! I think the value outweighs the risk .. but see how to develop a Disaster Recovery plan as you plan for the worst, and expect the best!

A – Analyze your data! Social analytics are the new black! You need to see the patterns of sentiment, who your tippers are, and listen daily !