Social Business Sandy

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

Category: Marketing 2.0 (Page 30 of 33)

Social Business Tip of the Day: Twitter Two-Step Verification

May 28, 2013 / / 3 Comments

Twitter has introduced a new verification feature, after Burger King, Jeep and the Associated Press have all had their Twitter accounts hacked in the last year. Considering Twitter handles are hacked regularly, you should take a few minutes to set up the new verification system:

First off, you’ll have to:

Once that’s out of the way:

1. Go to your 

  • account settings

 on twitter.com and check the “Require a verification code when I sign in” box.

2. When prompted, click Okay, send me a message.

3. If you receive our verification message, click Yes (Note: you’ll have to enter your      password). Once this is set up, when you log in to your account on twitter.com, a six digit code will be sent via SMS to your phone. You’ll have to enter the code when prompted and then you can sign in. Obviously, if you’ve saved your password and don’t log out often, you won’t have to do this. But if you do log out often (or get kicked out because of a browser update), you’ll have to move forward with entering the randomly generated 6-digit code to log-in each time.

For more on this AND to learn about logging into Twitter on other devices and apps (which has an additional few steps).

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Top 6 Social Business Patterns for ROI!

May 23, 2013 / / 6 Comments

It’s easy to see how the world has adopted social media to help strengthen ties between people all over the world. People like to share and the explosive growth of Facebook and all the other social media platforms out there are surely a testament to the fact that we like to share and discover what our friends are up to.  (IBM is, of course, the market leader at applying social techniques to business situations. Our entire Social Business Platform is the best in the market, four years in succession, according to IDC. )

Why these 6 Patterns Matter to Your Company:
While you might see how social could apply in a business setting, and understand that somehow harnessing some of these principles might be beneficial to improving how your organization works, you might not know where to start, or how the common business processes you work with could be transformed with social business.  Or you may be looking for the top ROI yields.   Or how to embed social without the S word (yes, that’s Social that some people view Social as Play!)
It’s for these reasons that we have created the Social Business Patterns or Use Cases.

  • Identify top ROI cases
  • Showcase the value and business outcome with having to use the S word
  • Allow you to learn from others

These are a suite of example business processes common to many industries. We show how these processes can be improved using IBM’s Platform for Social Business and, most importantly, what return on investment you can expect to realize from implementing the use cases.  These are not IT solutions, however. They are examples of business processes which will be very similar to your own. Using and adapting these examples can allow you to improve the communication, collaboration, awareness, knowledge-sharing, morale and efficiency of your organisation in simple but very effective ways.

Over the coming blog posts I will look at each of these in more depth, but let me outline to you the areas IBM’s Use Cases fall into:
Finding Expertise
Being able to locate the expertise in your organization is vital in many situations. Almost any service organization relies entirely on the knowledge of its subject matter experts. Manufacturing organizations such as car manufacturers, oil & gas producers and many others need to know how to solve problems quickly and easily without re-inventing the wheel and by accessing the expertise of the right people. Travel and transportation organizations’ entire business is built on being safe and reliable. These two facets are based on them being experts in their chosen fields and making the most of their staff’s expertise.  Finding Expertise focuses on how any organization can make the most of their experts. Whether it’s finding the right person in critical situations or unlocking the tacit knowledge in the experts’ heads to build the collective expertise of the organization.

expertise
Knowledge Sharing & Innovation
Social Business solutions are at the forefront of helping organizations all over the world increase their level of innovation.  Social helps to drive the process of innovation by giving ideas and new concepts places to grow and adapt based on the collective knowledge of the participants.  Use of social demonstrates how you can create a more nimble and flexible organization with dramatic return on investment opportunities backed by real client examples.

ideation

External Customer Insights
Many organizations nowadays have a presence on social media. They now have Facebook and other popular social network accounts, some use these to great effect and are generating real new business.   You can boost your selling power by unifying your sales people and distribution chain together with the most important people to your organization – your customers.

There are a set of sub cases around the external focus:

  • Customer Service.  Since empowered customers with social tools are changing the focus of business from selling to “partnering” , engaged employees lead to…higher service, quality, and productivity, which leads to… higher customer satisfaction, which leads to… increased sales & profit.
  • Sales.   Using social to better target individuals, not just demographics and segments to better sell to your client.
  • Community Building.  Using community to target your advocates and drive loyalty into your base or to recruit and learn from a new client set is a powerful ROI case.

expertise

Recruiting and On-boarding
Your organization lives and dies by the quality of its people. Attracting and retaining the best people in the market is one sure way to make sure that you are investing for your future.  To be able to demonstrates how you can enormously increase the time-to-value of new employees, increase the retention rate of your employees and provide much faster access to experts, highlights the focus on people as an important part of your strategy.
Everyone involved in bringing new people on board, including the new recruit themselves, wants their endeavour to be a success. How do you go about ensuring that happens? More than simply “inducting” a new member of staff, how do you streamline the recruitment, assessment and hiring processes?

new hire

Mergers and Acquisitions
Did you know that between fifty and eight three percent of mergers and acquisitions fail? This is an enormous cost for everyone involved, both financially and in terms of morale of the staff and customer and stakeholder confidence.  A focus on social in acquisitions can help reduce this failure rate by improving the key business processes involved in mergers and acquisitions. It focuses on the people and the culture associated with the organizations coming together and demonstrates how employee retention, failure rate of acquisition and communication can all be improved.
Safety
Social can assist in helping your organization improve its safety record and have a huge impact on ROI for worker’s compensation and injuries.  . The social tools within our solution can help you reduce incidents, increase effectiveness for your existing safety programs and accelerate the adoption of a culture of safety amongst everyone concerned.   Many industries use simple, but effective and tested approaches to using social collaboration can improve the safety record of your organisation and its reputation.

safety
Join Me
We’re going to explore each of these Use Cases in more depth in the coming blog posts here, so I hope you’ll join me as we deep-dive into how social business, and IBM’s Platform for Social Business in particular can help your organization.

As always, I’d really appreciate your feedback and comments!  To get more information, you can get the summary report here!

https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/signup.do?source=swg-US_Lotus_WebMerch&S_PKG=ov14017

6 Minutes on Wednesday: Social Focus

May 22, 2013 / / 3 Comments

Take 6 minutes today to plan your social approach!

Minute 1:    I am known for (two to four things) today. By this time next year, I want to be known for (two to four more things)

Minute 2:   My public visibility program includes: x, y, and z .  Examples:  Buy Google URL, Jump into LinkedIn:, Blog – Be Brave and start one! ,     Tweet!

Minute 3:  Grow a core community of enthusiasts to:   Build a loyal brand army that makes your success their cause, Harness their goodwill to generate insight, Increase your engagement in important conversations

Minute 4:  Examination:  Is social media right for your business? Is your community online? Find out which platforms they prefer and what they need from you.

Minute 5:  Engagement: How can you bring value to the conversation? What can you add that will engage your target audience & influencers?

Minute 6:  Execution & Experimentation:  You need a plan. Start small, but have a roadmap for engagement and experimentation short/long term. Remember that even experimentation is a process – you must have anticipated outcomes and be systematic.

In the Future, CMO buys more than the CIO. 2017 right around the corner. Per Gartner.

May 21, 2013 / / 1 Comment

One of the major reasons is that CMOs will be leveraging big data, mobile and social.    Social Media becomes a word of mouth channel. 

This new channel drives understanding of customer behavior and allows you to determine if you want to approach them and how you should approach them, respecting their privacy throughout the process.   Through real time social media techniques, like blogging or online chat, you can determine if someone needs assistance, or if they are really focused on a particular topic.  It offers an opportunity to interact with a person in a nonthreatening manner.

During the process, there is an opportunity for a transformation to occur with the person — from information gatherer, shopper, potential prospect and then ideally into a customer.  In addition, real time chat enriches the customer experience. At IBM, for example, its online chat capability increased its leads, improved customer satisfaction, and drove up sales productivity In the first 3 months of operation on the IBM SOA site, there were over 2,845 chats, resulting in 182 validated leads!  Online chatting provides assistance “just in time” not waiting in a reactive mode where someone has to click on a button to ask for someone to contact them at a later time.  It gives you the ability to have a conversation with your prospects when they’re most receptive — while they are on your website or on your Twitter Channel actively gathering information.  For example,  a manufacturing company has been using conversations on Twitter to drive sales.  In the first year since utilizing Twitter as a promotional tool, the company generated over $500,000 in revenue in sales of refurbished systems.

Guiding principles:

  • Skills matter.  The presence you put out there in front of prospects is very important, so you want your best and brightest reps doing the real time chats.  They need to be very knowledgeable about the products and services not simply communicating at a high level.
  • You need to understand the etiquette for inviting people to chats and for chatting with them once they accept.  For example, don’t immediately pop up an invitation within the first 30 seconds that a person is on your site — it’s pushy.
  • New Customers.  Social media is a way to reach new customers.  For Dell, Twitter represented a new way to reach customers and they claim that per their latest surveys, a significant portion of people who bought through Twitter were not aware of the Dell Outlet before Twitter.

I am a Serial Social Addict. Harness your social network!

May 14, 2013 / / 1 Comment

OK.  I admit it.  I tweet multiple times a day, I have 2 blogs, and I love social.  My passion is reaching customers and having them connect with my company in new and smart ways.  As such, I experiment, learn from my peers, and measure these new tools for marketing.   As an executive at IBM, I have found that these Social 2.0 techniques drive down costs and increase revenue.

IBM’s 2012 CEO Survey revealed that 57% of CEO’s identified social business as a top priority and more than 73% are making significant investments to draw insights into data.  And more than 1,700 chief marketing officers reveal 82% plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years.

This shift of consumer to business networking, known as “Social Business” has become the next big challenge for organizations which are quickly learning that social networks are no longer the new water cooler but rather their new production line, a place where employees, partners and clients connect to share vast amounts of knowledge. The big winners will go those who harness the ability to capture and analyze the knowledge their social network creates and share it throughout the business to accelerate innovation, out-market competitors and remove boundaries internally and externally.

Consider the Social Graph.  A Social graph is a graph that depicts personal relations of internet users   Understanding the connections of your clients helps you see the networks, where clients are isolated and where connections can drive revenue.

social graph

For example, chief marketing officers (CMO) are looking to gain insights from both internal and external data from sources like Facebook, Twitter and public forums to react more swiftly to customer trends and build their brands.  HR Leaders are looking to build communities to improve recruiting and talent management services.

By interacting with the video game, students can make real-life business situation decisions. They can see the results of their decisions right away, and if they make a mistake, it’s much more private than “failing” in front of a classroom of their colleagues. Because a love of gaming is shared around the world, professors have told us the game can help to bridge cultural barriers   While it’s too soon to measure the full implications, there’s a new business environment emerging.

We cannot ignore the changing group dynamics and social implications. In fact, we should tap into the most innovative ideas to redefine the fundamental nature of educating the market.  Just as games present us with situations that invite players to make choices, consider the advantage of using graphics and decision-making steps of games in business. Using Social Media, we could allow decision makers to immerse themselves in the real-world simulations, judging cause and effect before making decisions.

The arrival of Social Business has created an emerging battleground for IT vendors. For example, financial analyst firm CLSA recently cited enterprise social software as one of the top tech trends in 2013 and Forrester Research reports that the market opportunity for social software will exceed $6 billion by 2016.

Happy Mother’s Day to my “non social media” mom! Can you share your MOM stories?

May 10, 2013 / / 9 Comments

Today I want to celebrate my mom.

I know you may argue but my mom is the best in the world.

  • She loved me regardless of what I accomplished just because.
  • She gave me encouragement in just the right doses.
  • She supported my efforts but showed me how to improve my weaknesses
  • She listened to me.  really listened to me!
  • She is my mom AND my friend.   But Mom first.
  • She taught me all the “selfs” — self confidence, self reliance, self esteem
  • She showed me fun!

Now, she won’t read this as she is not a social media mom but I love her just the same  (  smile!).

I’d love to hear about your mom.  Tell me why she was GREAT!

mom and i

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