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

Month: April 2012

Social Business Best Practice B2B! Avnet Connectville! #socbiz #avnet #ascendant #ibmsocialbiz

I am always hunting for the best of the best practices out there on Social in the B2B world!    Avnet is a value added distributor and a Social Business.  

Take a look at Avnetconnect! 

AvnetConnect Ville, is a Smallville type of map where each icon (building) represents a specific community.  Most of the icons represent what the community is.  For example the police station is for the security community, power plant is the power i/p community,  bank – finance/banking industry etc.   When placing your cursor over an icon, a bubble pops up with the name of the community.

There are two ways  users can access the community.  They can either click the community name from the legend on the left or they can click on the icon.

As one of the “Social” executives Fred Cuen commented: 

“We are excited about the early traction we are experiencing with AvnetConnect.  AvnetConnect, built on IBMs premier collaboration software, IBM Connections, provides Avnet a scalable, secure environment to engage with our partners and accelerate their ability to deliver IBM solutions to the market. Our new site map, AvnetConnectVille, will allow Avnet to highlight focused communities in AvnetConnect, as well as giving our partners an easy way to navigate to those communities.” 

 They set up a Community for their B2B resellers to drive:

  • Sharing of information
  • Driving innovation

AvnetConnect Facts(as of 3/15/12)! 

  • 107 total communities
  • 59 public communities (including subcommunities, for Anet and business partners)
  • 48 private communities (Avnet internal only)
  • 300 users and growing daily (Feb -27 requests to join,  March – 50 users request to join.  Includes 40 for the new private NGP community)

Their most popular communities are around the top areas of interests to their clients — the resellers!    Storage, Destination Analytics Cognos, Destination Industry (retail, government, finance/banking, healthcare, energy)

Click to Join Avnet’s Social Business Community
 
Do you have a great B2B example?  I’d love to hear about it!

Social business and small / medium companies – example Bumbu Desa! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ibm #indonesia

Savvy businesses know that creating an online presence can heighten awareness and ultimately bring in new business. What’s often ignored, however, is that small and medium businesses can leverage Social Business techniques to drive growth!   Social techniques are a great equalizer!  A great example is a cool restaurant in an interesting place!

In Indonesia, Bumbu Desa, a very cool restaurant, is leveraging social business to expand its business. Everyone is heading to this restaurant chain, with new locations expanding into Singapore and Malaysia. Growing from three branches five years ago to 38 branches in 2010, the different franchises of Bumbu Desa were having a hard time staying connected with one another. With Social Business (from IBM SmartCloud!) they can now quickly share information regarding new menus, new ways to greet guests, and other restaurant-related issues.

Each Bumbu Desa franchise can now submit their daily sales reports to franchise headquarters, a method that was previously handled using fax or overnight mail. Bumbu Desa is also embracing food reviewers as well to come and explore what they have to offer!

With more and more organizations looking at social media as a way to outpace competition and reap rewards, it is now the era of social business. Social business goes beyond Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. A social business recognizes that people do business with people (the value is in people and the interactions that they have) and optimizes how people interact and then leverages those interactions to create business value and gain competitive advantage. A social business also embraces the shifts in the way employees, customers and partners engage.

Bumbu Desa is a great example of a small business embracing Social Business to grow!

Social Business and Big Data! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ls12 #ibm #bigdata

I am getting a lot of questions about the relationship between Social and Big Data!

Here’s my view.  An effective social business can’t exist without a strong set of analytics resources and know-how behind the scenes. A social business is about more than just collaboration; it’s about applying social technologies to business processes in order to radically improve the way organizations operate.
In 2010, Gartner predicted that social analytics would be one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011. This comes as no surprise. Look at the explosive growth of social networking with 700 million on Facebook, expected to reach 1 billion in 2011.
There is an untapped power in the “data” generated by social networking sites. 80 percent of this data is unstructured, and typically takes the form of a conversation among customers on a message board. This represents a challenge for organizations trying to learn from it or use it to make decisions. With social analytics, companies back make sense of this data, unlocking a valuable asset. By scanning the data of the social networks (from both inside and outside the organization), you can interconnect the key data by applying analytics.
For key business areas including Marketing, social analytics plays an important role. Social analytics tools can deliver insight on visitor marketing and purchasing behavior. They can also help organizations personalize the online environment for each customer, create a “multichannel” environment, justify social media as a marketing tool, and influence browsers. Social analytics enables organizations and marketers to better understand their constituents in order to take the best next course of action so maximum business results can be achieved.

Big data and Social are linked I believe forever. 

What’s your Point of View?
You’re able to gain insight into things like general attitude towards your brand, preferences and even gain insight into buying behaviors. With this insight, you can make intelligent business decisions.

Social Business Drive Success at Cemex! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ibm #ls12

Happy Monday!  I am a bit jet-lagged from my trip to Paris and Asia but jazzed to talk today about the value of Social Business at Cemex!

Some best practices from Cemex who won the Harvard management 2.0 award were:

•Social Network Analysis – mapping relationships to create a Social Graph
•Shows who is collaborating with whom
•Shows which business units are most collaborative

Performing this mapping allows CEMEX to understand which business units are taking an active hand in their global initiatives, which countries they come from and even the particular individuals most involved.

Can you do this?!

Social Business Coffee Break ! Maximizing Intellectual Capital through Social! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ls12

Happy Monday!

Today’s Social Business Coffee Break is on Maximizing Intellectual Capital (or your best practices!) through Social Tools!  Many companies have employees retiring, or employees change roles frequently and sharing those best practices will make a huge difference in the outcome of businesses. One company told me that they have a potential of 50% of their employees to retire by 2015!

Social tools can greatly drive a company to collaborate differently!  Take a peek!

Don’t do “Jellyfish Social”!! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ls12 #gitomer

My daughter’s science project was on Jelly Fish this term.   (She is 13!). While helping her I learned some interesting facts about Jellies!

Top 3 Factoids:

1.  Jellies have no brains

2.  They consume too much and then spray out !

3.  Do not learn.

As she completed the project, I thought about the implications of “bad”social – which I will call Jellyfish Social!

What is Jellyfish Social?

1.  Brain not used.  Some companies still seem to not use their brains in doing social!   Gang, social is not about control.  Those days are gone! Yesterday a company spammed Twitter with their “message”. The comments were direct back to the company!  LIsten to us, talk to us.  Don’t just do your normal 1 way message.    Social means engagement.  That’s two way discussions. Not just pushing your message.

2.  Consume and spray!  No interaction.  Jellies really don’t interact with anything!   They just spray their waste and go!   The best social businesses interact.   They get them to Comment (hint hint!) , Share, ReTweet,  Vote, Badge, Watch a Video, or do something!!!    You need move folks from being a spectator to being a participant.  Maybe with a reward — and that will be most for tomorrow !  Gamification to reward for action!

3.  Do not learn.  Those worst practices don’t learn from the information they gather.  Social is an innovation ignitor!   The best companies innovate with their employees and clients.  Yesterday I did a Coffee Break on TD Bank, a great example of listening and then changing.  Sunlife, IBM, Cemex, Lowe’s and others know that social can drive innovation.  It helps turn an organization into a learning machine!

So my daughter did great on her project (thanks for asking!).   And here she is!!!

 

Social Business Coffee Break! Transparency is key to Success! See it in TD Bank! #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #tdbank

Today’s Social Business Coffee Break is on the value that Social brings to every business!  Transparency is essential in a successful Social Business!

Transparent is defined as being:  Open and with a propensity to freely share skills, knowledge, and talent, and always learning. One who is transparent therefore believes that there should be no boundaries between experts inside the company and experts in the marketplace. Transparency embraces the tools and leadership models that support capturing knowledge and insight from many sources, allowing for quick sensing of changes in customer mood, employee sentiment, or process efficiencies. It utilizes analytics and social connections inside and outside the company to solve business problems and capture new business opportunities.

See how TD Bank puts this into practice!