BIZTECHBUZZ in the world of social, cognitive, IoT and startups
From the latest research at the Smarter Planet summit, presented by jon Iwata, IBM’s CMO, provides a way to view social not just for a company but for you as an individual!
66% said social helped in innovation and almost half said it makes you more influential
I just returned from the 2013 IBM Airline Summit in Prague where I met with about 40 senior executives from airlines worldwide. The summit was two full days packed with stimulating panel discussions, group activities and breakout sessions with speakers from airlines, industry analysts, and other consumer-facing businesses such as Coca-Cola and Netflix. I led a discussion about how nimble businesses are using social tools and techniques to help their employees be more effective, innovate, and share their knowledge.
Here are a few take-aways from the Airline Summit:
IBM’s Eric Conrad kicked it off with a fascinating vision for the near term future of travel.
Travel customers expect a truly personalized experience, before during and after their trip. That means airlines will need to become much more engaged with customers by using social business tools, big data and analytics. Eric issued 4 challenges to the group:
New IBM and PhoCusWright study about social business in the travel industry
PhocusWrights’s Norm Rose led a session about the new study PhoCusWright and IBM have launched for the travel industry. The study takes the pulse of the travel industry’s use and abuse of social platforms and reveals the strategies and tactics they are using today. Surveying all sectors of the travel market, the survey will dig deep into their tools, techniques, benchmarks, question marks, successes and flops. If you’re in the travel industry and you’re asked to participate, go for it! Then watch for the results which will be published in a few months.
Why big data matters to airlines
We saw a panel discussion about “Airlines, Big Data & the Customer Experience.” Panelists discussed how airlines can take advantage of analytics to drive revenue growth and reduce costs. The consensus was that many organizations will need to change their culture and how they think about managing information. Here’s a fascinating white paper about Big Data and Analytics for the travel industry.
Saving fuel with analytics
Fuel is a very big deal to airlines, accounting for about one third of their total operating expenses. Air Canada’s Director for Fuel Efficiency, Captain Claude-Martin and IBM’s Lori Brewer presented a session describing how IBM Research and Air Canada have developed a solution using advanced analytics and “Watson-like” technology to provide decision support to optimize fuel usage. Attendees saw a demonstration of the fuel solution, named SIMON. Very impressive stuff!
Lessons from Coke on their Social Journey!
1. We speak in storytelling. We make sure the story is engaging, surprising, and grounded in experience. It is choked full of emotion. The new generation wants to be engaged in something exciting. Coke showed a great video of bringing the world together featuring India and Pakistan. Very Powerful! We strive for Shareability.
2. We embrace our new SalesForce. Most openness comes when something goes wrong. But look at something like TripAdvisor. They have postive and negative. Social networkers are willing to provide feedback both positive and negative. Coca-cola has 24M impressions from themselves, and 124M impressions from consumers.
3. Listen first and then engage. Everyone wants to be heard. But they want a response. If you start you must go all the way! Coca-Cola uses gen y’s to answer the social questions.
4. Speed trumps perfection today. Gave an example of the response of a top retail fashion company and it took 10 days for a response. And it was in the form of a 3 line PR release….not in social! Stock price took a beating while they polished the story. Great example. Oreo cookie speed on their “You can still dunk in the dark” when the lights went out unexpectedly at the US Superbowl. Brillant social marketing in 5 minutes from Oreo! It took over the social conversation — be ready, and give people the freedom to embrace the principle of speed.
5. Allow transparent conversation and play well. Both positive and negative. The way that you handle and manage them really matters. Make sure you establish long term relationships.
I am ending my series on the Trends of Social!
Today we are ending on Social leadership. What are the qualities of the new leader? They seem to be more of servant leader.
Take a listen and tell me your thoughts!
As part of my SXSW speaking proposal on ‘How to Avoid Being a Social Zombie in a Global World’, I recently caught up with Tom Smith at GlobalWebIndex who shared some fascinating insights from their unique and far-reaching study of the patterns of key decision makers: a theme we’ll be exploring further in our session.
The findings are a must-read for anyone who does business globally!
Take, for instance, the GlobalWebIndex finding that those decision makers who interact most on social networks are from emerging markets such as Thailand, Turkey and Mexico. If you are looking to do business in the emerging markets, don’t ignore the local social networks!
Also, when asked what they consider the most influential marketing channel, decision makers overwhelmingly picked ‘Conversations with people from the company/organization on a social network’. Your employees are a more trusted source than than your webinars, sales presentations or events. This is in line with our push here at IBM to become a social business: we have a strong emphasis on employee enablement.
Now, another fascinating finding is that these decision makers make heavy use of mobile technologies to access social networks, whether that be a smartphone or a tablet. Business happens around the clock and these folks are always on. Are you?
You’ll find more even more insights in this 8 minute webinar I recorded with Tom:
We will be diving deeper into this topic during the proposed session http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/23204 at SXSW. Want to hear more? Don’t forget to also see my other session: Socialytics Bootcamp! Social + Big Data + Analytic http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/23035
I look forward to seeing you at SXSW 2014!
As I was at the beach this summer, I caught this gorgeous picture of the moon reflecting on the water!
It got me thinking about how social reflects your company’s culture and for you personally, your personal brand. Social really reveals all the parts of your culture — good , bad, and neutral.
The moon’s shine above in the picture is ampliflied by the water, just as your company’s cultural elements are amplified by social.
One of my favorite quotes is:
“Social doesn’t transform your culture. It reveals your culture.”
This fact is why i advise my clients to do a cultural assessment before starting down the social path.
Here’s a quick tidbit of that assessment. And I’ll leave you with this question. What does social reveal about your culture?!
This week so far I have been asked a dozen times to define engagement. Here’s what I came up with …..
When you look closely, you see that engagement isn’t mostly resulting in better marketing. People are not clamoring for more of that. What’s happening instead is that marketing is being replaced by engagement, by useful assets, by value. In exchange for their data – who they are, what they’re looking for, even where they are standing or driving at this moment – they expect some kind of benefit in return… whether as customers, or patients, or students, or citizens.
Engagement. ]Your emotional connection with your client or employee, usually created by exceptional experiences that are integrated, interactive, and identifying. A Social Business connects people to expertise. It connects individuals whether customers, partners, or employeesas networks of people to generate new sources of innovation, foster creativity, and establish greater reach and exposure to new business opportunities. It establishes a foundational level of trust across these business networks and thus a willingness to openly share information, developing a deeper sense of loyalty among customers and employees. It empowers these networks with the collaborative, gaming, and analytical tools needed to engage each other and creatively solve business challenges.
Engaged Clients. Clients who are attentive, interested, and active in their support for your brand, product, or company. The depth of their conversations online showcases their knowledge and care. They recommend and passionately advocate on your behalf in the blogosphere.
Engaged Employees. Those who know the company’s values and are empowered to leverage those values with their partners and clients. They know their role and understand how to reach out to the right expert. These new social employees are about commitment and success.
Happy Tuesday!
Today we continue our series on the top 5 Trends in Social Business today. As a reminder, our trends so far have been:
1) Information sharing is the new black. Therefore trust and expertise location are essential elements of all businesses.
2) Knowing how to reach a client set of 1 is as important as segmentation and demographics. Social makes this possible. There are “averages.” But the rapid emergence of Big Data, social networks, mobility, location-based tracking is generating a thousand clues about the individual human being. This will bring about the death of the “average” and usher in the era of “you” – the unique consumer, citizen, patient, student.
3) Innovation is a cultural norm for high performers. Decisions will be based not on “gut instinct,” but on predictive analytics and social analytics.
4) Social networks are the new production line.
In 1959, the legendary management guru Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker,” defined as someone who does “non-routine” work… seeks and makes sense of information (he estimated 38% of the worker’s time)… and renders judgment – creating what we now call intellectual capital.
Now consider what that means today. What’s happened to information since 1959? Well, there’s that exponential increase in volume, speed and variety of data that I mentioned. Now think about what tools are available. In 1959 – files, spreadsheets, tabulators. Today, we have advanced analytics… heading toward systems, like IBM’s Watson, that aren’t programmed… they learn.
We also have billions of mobile devices, which are rapidly becoming the world’s primary interface to the Internet. In one study in China, 90 percent of users said they have their mobile device within arm’s reach 100 percent of the time.
Finally, and most importantly, knowledge workers today have 24-hour access to something else: each other.
In a world where value is shifting rapidly from things to knowledge, knowledge workers are the new means of production. And it follows that the social network is the new production line.
This is important. In a social enterprise, your value is established not by how much knowledge you amass, but by how much knowledge you impart to others. We are in early days of this shift. But some pioneers are changing how they actually create value.
Consider the Mexican cement maker CEMEX. The company wanted to create its first-ever global brand of concrete. It would have to accommodate multiple different specifications for concrete in different countries. To develop this, they didn’t build a new lab or production process… they built a social network. It was called Shift, and it connected their product development staff in 50 countries. It grew to more than 400 active communities. They wound up launching the new global brand in a third of the time it used to take them to launch a new product within Mexico.
Now, this new way of operating is spreading across the enterprise. CEMEX is working with IBM Research to deepen the expertise functionality in Shift – to dynamically build heatmaps of recommended experts, materials and activities, so that any CEMEX employee knows how to become an “expert” in a given topic of interest. The first group to make use of the tool was the Alternative Fuels community. The long-term objective is an enterprise expertise model where information is analyzed automatically, content is organized in relevant topics and personalized action plans are created – and where rewards are shaped by who contributes the most and best ideas.
Remember, this is a cement company.
Note: This may have begun as an attempt to enhance connectivity and sharing. But it is taking a crucial next step to the actual creation of expertise… and the actual creation of experts.
Cemex is an example of the social dimension of the Smarter Enterprise. Could every organization follow its example? Could every company hire, compensate, evaluate and promote on the basis of how well one shares and catalyzes knowledge? I believe most can, and will. And we are working aggressively to do this at IBM.
For example, today, every IBMer has a social network page – as well as access to thousands of internal information sources, blogs, communities, wikis and universal instant messaging.
We are now working toward a future – a near-future – in which all IBMers will be rated by their peers and profession, based on how good they are at sharing their knowledge… how good they are at making it useful, consumable… how well they contribute to the community and to our clients’ needs and experience. Five stars? Here’s your bonus. Two stars? You have work to do.
The GLOBAL AIrline Summit.
On September 9, I’ll be talking with senior airline executives from around the world at the IBM Airline Summit in Prague, Czech Republic. The theme of the summit is “Smarter travelers expect smarter airlines: Delivering an exceptional customer experience while optimizing operations.”
Today’s travelers really do expect more from airlines than ever before. Yes, we expect smooth operations, a pleasant flight and good value.
But more and more we expect personalized customer service while we are shopping for a trip and during each step of the journey, delivered consistently through all the devices we use.
The NEW Socially Connected Airlines.
Today, meeting those expectations depends on using the latest social business tools to help the airline workforce keep the planes on schedule and to create exceptional customer experiences.
I recently read a related article in Business Travel News that might interest you by Paul Campion, an IBM colleague in the UK.
The SUMMIT. A Breakthrough Event!
At the summit, airline executives will share their own experiences and hear speakers from other airlines, industry analysts, a leading international airport, Coca-Cola marketing, Netflix, and from IBM.
We’ll be launching some exciting new social business research sponsored by IBM with PhoCusWright – “Social media in travel: mayhem, myths, mobile and money.” The study will provide clear quantitative insights around what travel companies need to manage, mobilize, and monetize their social strategy.
Of course, the Summit won’t be all work and no play. I hear that we’ll take a tram ride and walking tour through Prague’s beautiful old town. Then we’ll share a meal in one of the city’s great restaurants. I’m looking forward to it. Watch this space for my blog post after the event.
The level of connectedness today is unprecedented
And, with that connectedness comes power.
This is Generation C: Connected and in control!!!
Here is how today’s customer behaves.
We know this – we all behave like this. We interact with many different channels and devices in order to make decisions and interact with the companies that we do business with.
And when we interact through all of these different channels, we expect that the business is thinking about experience – not just in a single channel at a point in time but holistically as we interact across the channels to complete whatever it is we are trying to do. We EXPECT that a site will be relevant if we get to the site from a banner ad or search term. We EXPECT that the profile we set up online is the same profile for the mobile application. And, we get a little annoyed when we have to repeat all of our information to the customer service representative after already entering it all through the phone keypad.
However, the reality is that, most companies are extremely siloed. They often have different technology and data that is driving the customer experience. But, even worse, they often have entirely different objectives and are measured in inconsistent, or even competitive, ways.
In four years between 2008 and 2012, the percentage of brands that were rated as having “excellent” customer experience plummeted from 11 to 3 percent.
Being able to use social and omni channel is the solution! More on this next week!!!
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