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

Month: August 2012

Social Business Coffee Break! For Social, should you do an Open Pilot or Closed Pilot? #ibmsocialbiz #socbiz

Happy Social Business Coffee Break!

Due to the announcement yesterday, our Coffee Break is today — Tuesday!

I focused on the question from our crowd sourcing of topics you guys were interested in! 

Our next crowd sourced section is “do you recommend an Open Pilot or a Closed Pilot for a social project!”  Thanks for the input! 

 As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts”

IBM announces intent to acquire Kenexa: Social Business ! #socbiz #ls13 #IBMSocialBiz #smarterworkforce

A Social Business Announcement today!     We (IBM announced) our intent to acquire Kenexa, a leading provider of recruiting and talent management solutions. This acquisition complements our existing social business capabilities. while gaining actionable insights from the enormous streams of information generated from social networks every day.

Over the last few years, social media has become a very important consumer phenomenon!  IBM believes that the real value is generated through application of the technology to transform the front office, like SOA did to the Back Office.  Our leading clients generate successful business outcome and ROI like Cemex which was able to deliver its first globally branded product in 1/3 the time, or Reliance who reduced their operating costs by 30% by integrating social business into their branch based operations.

CEOs understand they need to more effectively leverage their human capital to create competitive advantage.   Leaders are looking for new ways to transform their front office processes by enabling a smarter more effective workforce.  People focused businesses generate 26% more revenue per employee and had 40% lower turnover rates!

Through our leadership in social business, IBM has developed a unique perspective on what is required to enable a smarter workforce!    As a recognized leader in end to end talent management solutions, Kenexa brings capabilities required to enable a smarter workforce.

 Kenexa  has more than half of the Fortune 500 companies.   It supports the Social Business strategy of bringing relevant data and expertise into the hands of business leaders within every functional department.   How?  To help create a Smarter Workforce!

1.  It helps companies to build skills by assessing interactions to identify how value is generated to create compensation plans and to analyze data across teams to understand trends and adjust skills base.

2.  It helps to transform culture and processes.   By understanding the sentiment to identify issues and influencers to improve your culture and processes.

3.  It helps to better engage clients.    By evaluating sentiment to address issues, and analyzing transactional data and big data to understand what your clients need before they do!

With this announcement of IBM’s intent to acquire Kenexa, we will help organizations to engage and enable a Smarter Workfoce!

 

 

 

SXSW 2013! I cannot wait! 4th Brand Era #sxsw #ls13 #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz

At my book signing at SXSW12, I was asked a very pertinent question by someone in the audience. “Who owns the brand experience?”

The brand has never been more important today and has never been more complex in all of it’s interactions. If you look back in time, your brand experience was determined by a one to one relationship and it’s influence was relatively contained. We are, however in the 4th Brand Era where the focus has shifted from one of individual experiences, to brands as a continuous, social, collective experience including customer, company and community. It’s no longer enough to have a few brand stewards resting within marketing or sales, the social layer demands company wide adoption.

Companies need to assess first if they are culturally ready to listen and interact with this complex ecosystem and then determine their plan. How is this plan then integrated into, not only their marketing, but sales and IT too? How do they measure the brand discussions, assess favorability and mitigate a crisis that could potentially affect revenue.

How can companies take this one step further and collaborate with their customers to influence product development?

Companies who float on autopilot like jellyfishes on the currents of the day will end up unable to stay ahead. Do they have an underpinning social strategy or do they just look at social as a flimsy and check list layer?

These were some of the discussions that seeded my session idea for SXSWi 2013. The panel picker just went live yesterday and I would be most honored if you voted for the session and in addition left a comment on what you are looking to get from this session.   

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/855

Accidental Social! #ls13 #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz

The 1988 film, “The Accidental Tourist,” is about a writer of travel guides for reluctant business travelers, which detail how best to avoid unpleasantness and difficulty.   Are you “The Accidental Social Business Manager”, who has been asked to step in and migrate what was initially a casual solution to an intentional Social Business solution bridging departments and spanning within and external to your business?

If so, I do think that the Social Business Agenda can help shape where you need to go.  Today, I spoke with 2 clients via phone who were that “Accidential Social” and were being asked to pick up the pieces.

The Social Business Agenda’s objective is to help companies develop process patterns for 5-10 use cases that will drive strong business outcomes based on your goals and culture. 

Part 1: Align Goals with Culture (this involves a cultural assessment survey)

Part 2: Gain trust through the development of  a Trust plan and identify your Influencers based on your goals

Part 3: Engage the employee and client! Create an engagement plan taking into account gaming, mobile, portal, etc that appeal to the audience and goals

Part 4: Networked Processes. Select the highest ROI business process to start — select metrics for the KPIs by process

Part 5: Design a Risk Mitigation and Reputation Management Plan

Part 6: Analytics, Social Analytics as the focus

From the movie, Leary was set in his ways. The way he lived, thought, and worked. He imagined that it would always be like that. Until an unusual woman showed him the way it could be!!   Let us help you!

Going for the Gold in Social Business! A list of companies #socbiz #ibmsocialbiz #ls13

I am back in London and caught the excitement of the Olympics!  Here’s my pass from the airplane flying home of some favorite

Gold Version of Social!  

Retail:  Lowe’s Work Out Loud Initiative and RTM Huddle!

Europe Finance:    Royal Bank of Scotland’s Community Oriented Employee Engagement!

NA Finance:    TD Bank’s Wow Moments!

Industrial:  Cemex who won the Management 2.0 award for their IDEATION!

Technology:  IBM’s gamification and ideation!

Healthcare: Premier’s use of Social for its Community Management

Restaurant:   Bumbu desa’s use of social to share best practices across ALL their employees!

Insurance:  Standard Life’s Engagement with Clients

University:   Seton Hall in New Jersey — Using Analytics to drive new students to Seton Hall!

Electronics:  Panasonic’s Employee Engagement

Government!  Speed in assisting on Haiti Government!

 

Who else is your Gold Medal example here?