Happy Monday! This coffee break is dedicated to those companies who always put the client first!
Category: IBM (Page 41 of 55)
One of the Top 5 questions people ask me is does it matter if your leaders are sold on social and the answer is YES!
Getting your executives to buy into the concept of a social business in most cases is something that they will either get straight away or not. Those who are switched on to “modern” technology will not need much convincing that implementing social technologies in the workplace will improve communications and enhance productivity. Those who don’t see the need for it, of course, require a little more persuasion.
However you arrive at their participation, they will most likely be nervous about stepping into a less controlled environment. It’s a bit like them going to the local swimming pool where all the employees swim. There’s no hiding!
How do you approach executives who are not Social?!
My advice to getting them into the water is to let them observe for a while. Get your enthusiastic evangelists publishing and propose that your leader checks in on these things. With their permission ask a public question. By that we mean something they will be happy to answer in public. Encourage your other trusted evangelists to do likewise. Use the fact that you have a team of enthusiastic users to vary the method of interaction. Ask in a forum post for a suggestion, ask in a micro-blogging entry something else.
Make it easy for your leader to get into the water by making it easy for them to answer. A couple of short sentences for the first few answers to things is all that’s needed.
Once you have the leader taking part, albeit on a light basis, we need to convince the leadership team that they too should look at taking part. That team will only see value in doing this if they see the chief doing it.
The leadership team will likely be nervous about what their own areas of the organization are putting into the social system – they will be concerned that their dirty laundry might be getting washed in public. Try to quash this concern. Remember that a social business is one which is engaged and transparent (and nimble).
Show your leaders that by participating in the system and answering cross-departmental or cross-organizational issues their area of the business shows its value. Remember – your value is in what your share – not what you know in a social business.
Commitment
Altimeter’s report shows that only about 1/2 of executives are engaged. How do you get that commitment in your organization?
Having a strong commitment among the leaders in the organization sets the tone, volume and enthusiasm for the use of the system. Remember that in any organization the leadership team are essentially “celebrities” and when they post information or participate in the system the staff become engaged. As an analogy to this, while many people consider the old-fashioned two-page memo from the chief executive setting out policy and priorities to be deadly boring, everyone reads it. Everyone engages. So to get the engagement, to cross the social chasm, you need your leaders to start becoming more transparent.
You can facilitate this slowly by driving engagement from your core Social Business team from below. Encouraging the execs to take a more active role in forum discussions, making the technology available to them on their chosen mobile device and empowering the gatekeepers to your execs – the secretaries – are all good ways of driving top-down participation which in turn drives bottom-up engagement.
Reverse mentoring as a technique for helping with engagement. You should, however, consider preparing the ground by producing some executive training materials. An executive handbook – amounting to a maximum of 5 pages of tips and tricks, some one-to-one time, and perhaps a presentation provided to them on paper or some other medium to help them get into the concept are all good approaches. Above all show them that these are “special” materials – these are designed only for them. They are intelligent people and like to be treated that way. Give them the facts in tweet-size points.
Ask if you can check in on them from time to time. If you get their approval then MAKE SURE YOU DO IT REGULARLY. But not too regularly to avoid getting on their nerves!
I recently participated in a webinar with some top executives from SAP, Chubb Insurance, CitiMortgage and nonprofit Human Rights Campaign along with the Editor-in-Chief of Target Marketing Magazine, Thorin McGee.
We got together at the Union Club in NYC to discuss some of the questions about managing multichannel marketing in today’s business environment — utilizing the latest social tools and techniques, addressing new audiences such as Generation C and millenials, and how to stay ‘connected’ both internally and externally.
We’re taking the topic further this week in a FREE webinar sponsored by Target Marketing, where we’ll explore more on this topic, including testing new channels and using metrics to determine success. I hope you’re able to join me for this free webinar on Wednesday, December 4, starting at 2:00 pm ET.
Register NOW and don’t miss “The Secret to Managing Multichannel Marketing”. Bring your own questions to the webinar .Click here to register!
Happy Monday!
Skills is such a hot topic. Business analytics is required not just for its insight but is a cross road for social and mobile value as well.
See what you can do!
Communities are essential for Social Businesses. All communities go through a community maturity model.
1. Potential: Planning phase of maturity. It typically involves setting up the community elements required for long term success such as roles and responsibilities, strategy, mission, membership planning and activities.
2. Formation of the community. Having a great community manager is a key factor of success. During the formation, the initial members and influencers
3. Building and Evolving. The community builds and evolves as it forms. The best communities stick to their goals but evolve in the way they reach them. Typically building and evolving involves driving traffic to community and increasing member participation. The topic of content curation is also one that grows and questions of contribution of content and consumption is reviewed. The community may review how to improve quality of content and how to train the leaders.
4. Operationalization. A community that has made it to this stage, has begun to do analysis adn use the insight to drive to its strategic objectives. Typically, the metrics are around Collaboration, Consumption, and Contribution. Opportunities, Risks and learning are then applied. This is the time to develop detailed action plan to achieve goals, maintain and monitor activity plan and content strategy, identify potential content gaps to feed to harvesting plans
and to train community members on social.
5. Adaptive. This final phase is where the community now takes on the personality of the members. It enables the community manager to drive the goals to the next level.
At IBM, we do Health Checks for our communities.
These health checks do the following:
- Ensure the communities have the design for success
- Clearly defined strategy and active plans
- Produce Healthy communities
–High volume of collaboration, contribution and consumption
–Connecting people to experts and people to quality strategy content
–Ensure Community roles and responsibilities are clearly defined
–Facilitate business benefits that lead to important organizational value
- Utilize the Brokerage Service to ensure long term vitality and maturity of the community
–Consistently high participation, collaboration and contribution and consumption from the community members
Holiday season is upon us! Black Friday is one week away. I am already planning my Thanksgiving dinner, my Christmas cards and caroling, and New Year’s Plans!
So let’s start thinking about this holiday season!
Did you know that people use social differently during the holiday weeks?
They increase their searches on social networks around products and potential gifts, recipes, and fun. This typically occurs starting now through early January. Their use of mobile goes up using the mobile device to show online and compare when they go into the store.
And don’t discount Twitter it plays such a role! So get ready!!!
I was driving home tonight and had to avoid a highway due to an accident. It got me thinking about how to avoid Social Accidents.
The Three Most Common Social Accidents:
1. Talking only about your offering, service, product. Social media is about forming relationships and every relationship is about both listening and speaking!. Did you know that you can spot a healthy relationship by paying attention to how well the two people listen to each other!. Don’t have an accident and have everyone avoid you by only talking and not listening. Share other’s content and promote others’ ideas as well as your own.
Action: If you communicate 6 things socially, 4 of those 6, or 67% should be showcasing content from your influencers. The other items you should be showcasing are your Point of View or Subject Matter Expertise . Something of value!
2. Being inconsistent. What an accident occurs when you have a professional picture on LinkedIn but a causal beach pic on your facebook? Be consistent with your brand just as you would consistently in person. Remember, every experience with your brand is non neutral so make each one count toward your brand goal.
Action: Think through purposefully what you want your brand to stand for. Always ask “is what I am doing right now consistent with that brand value”
3. Not having a social media policy. Companies who do not have a policy usually do not have strong employee usage of social because no one knows what they can and cannot do. A policy empowers employees to speak on your brand’s behalf. And employees are your biggest brand ambassadors!
Action: Create a Social Computing Policy! Check out IBM’s! http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html
I went to pick up my daughter tonight at basketball practice, and I spotted a First Aid Kit. Inside were the right tools, an instruction training manual of what to do when, and medicines with a timetable of when to take them.
It got me thinking about what would be in a Social Business First Aid kit! Here’s my top 3!
1. The Right Tools based on what you are trying to cure!! If your social strategy is not working, you need to check out the tools you are using. For instance, Pinterest tends to be very image focused , Google + tends to be more used by men, and LinkedIn tend to be focused on business users. Knowing who you are trying to attract and add value too, is critical for success.
2. Skills and training. I think it is essential to have your team training on social. Lunch and learns, learning by experimentation, and other ways are required to execute a successful strategy.
3. Ways to listen and determine key influencers . Just like a stethoscope and thermometer signals where there are good signs or a problem, every social strategy must include a way to Listen and to determine the right influencers to engage. I have been playing with several tools lately to engage the right audience like Klout.com, Communi.it and others. Commun.it even suggests the right doses and timings for interactions.
Here’s a real case study from IBM on these 3 elements!
In IBM, our ibm.com team must attract a high volume of leads from a new set of customers. Since Social has become a tool for getting information on products and services, we wanted to explore how to leverage word of mouth.
We determined that for a focused product, that Twitter and LinkedIn were tools these buyers used most frequently. For instance, after a Twitter search or deeper conversation in a LinkedIn group or forum, potential buyers might ask companies for more information, but they also often turn to their peers, other clients and trusted advisors.
So our ibm.com team decided to go social. Our inside sellers drove prospects to their Rep Pages –- personalized ibm.com pages that play a “virtual business card” role for inside sellers. These pages have relevant information to clients, enhance the relationship, and give clients one-click access to interact with their reps.
After training on how to engage and nurture potential clients, the ibm.com team built Twitter profiles to establish a presence in the social networking world. The ultimate objective of this pilot was for sellers to use social media to add value to conversations and build a pipeline of leads.
We (IBM) also worked to identify the most prominent influencers in the our space, so sellers could then follow them and comment on or retweet their posts and learn and connect. We developed a unique engagement strategy for each influencer, based on their activity and what they were saying.
To make it easy to maintain their Twitter presence, sellers also have a social message calendar, accessible via the feed reader function within Lotus Notes. The calendar features time-sensitive messages reps can tweet, with enough content for three tweets a day.
Over a 7 month period, these ibm.com teammates increased their Twitter followers by 5X
In the first two weeks of this effort, sellers’ Rep Page visits rose by 106 percent –thanks to a systematic pattern of Twitter mentions. The sellers reached 1.9 million contacts.
As we move ahead, social selling success will be reflected by the rep’s Klout score, which gauges influence in the social world, an increase in the number of direct Twitter followers, and relationships developed with key influencers.