Category: Uncategorized (Page 59 of 72)

I was here today in Boston (yes, in person!! but with my purple paisley cane!) to keynote at MarketingProfs B2B Conference.

  This conference is an exciting one as B2B marketing is using more and more social technqiues.  There were over 30 sessions having lessons learned and case studies on uses in real companies today.   There are over 300 great marketeers here learning and eager on these areas.

Roy Young kicked off the day at breakfast.  Do you know Roy ? He is brillant and has a lot of insight!

Key points of far!

• Culture eats strategy for Lunch!
• 15% of your followers are your tippers!  Find them, share with them, and make them your best friends!
• Engagement requires interactive experiences.  Consider mobile, gaming, location based, video, and virtual gifting.
• Embed social into your processes for impact!  15% revenue increase on average for adding social to marketing and sales.
• Have a risk migration plan.
• And don’t forget the Analytics!  Social Analytics are the new black!

More later!

Sandy

 All:

I love the reports and research done by GlobalWebIndex, a company based in the UK, lead by Tom Smith! 

Here’s what I learned from my weekend reading and learning!

1.  GLOBAL USE IS GROWING!

1.  The Asian markets — China, Japan and South Korea still have a strong blogging platform focus.

2.  Growth markets of  Brazil, India, Malaysia, Poland and Russia:  Leading in the social networking and microblogging world.

3.  Developed Markets – UK, the US or Canada, – microblogging and social networking strength

2.  REAL TIME is where the growth is!

I also found the thoughts on the growth in real time interesting.  They defined real time as Twitter, Facebook news stream, RenRen in China. 

The stats they shared were: 

• 10% of all web users are updating their social network profile on a daily basis , 24% on a weekly basis.

• Micro-blogs are still updated daily by 5% of all web users. 

• Almost 17% of 16-24s are updating their social network on a daily basis.

• Personal pictures, while still the number one action on a micro-blog, fell by 5% in the period, while links to external news stories increased by 17%.

• Over 70% of users that post more than once a day have streamed a TV show ondemand or live in the last month.

• Mobile users moved from 25% of web users to 33%

3.  Moving to ENTERTAINMENT!

The biggest reason to get social is ENTERTAINMENT — Films, TV, Music, Gaming, etc. growing motivations to use the internet are “finding  Their claim “A clear demonstration of the new age of entertainment that is driving change in how we use the web.”

Since I hurt my back (funny story in an of itself!), I have been grounded from traveling for 8 weeks!  GULP!  How can I manage my job without traveling?

Well, I have been faring pretty well in the first 5 weeks by leveraging Video as part of my Social Business.

My Tips for Using Video Effectively?

1.   Make sure you test the technology.   I am lucky in that I work for IBM and we have 2 options for Video Conferencing:   IBM Sametime and IBM LotusLive Conferencing.    I always tested the technology so that regardless of where we were using it, it worked!  I always connected 15 minutes early, checked everything out, and had someone local just validate volume, video, and motion was looking good.   I usually had a backup system in play as well, in case something went down.

2.  Choose the RIGHT meetings.   I didn’t use video for ALL my meetings.   I did have substitutes for some situations.  However, here is where I used video:

•  Internal Keynote Address to a Room of 400 people.  We practiced with the video and since it seemed to work well  with the charts on another screen, we did this for an internal enablement session.  It also demonstrated the Social Business Concepts that I was talking about and made it real. It was a success.
• External Keynote Address to a Room of 100 people.  Again, we practiced with the video, and we set up a hashtab in Twitter so that all there could ping me throughout the session.  I posted on the number of Tweets, and the response from the attendees. All positive.  However, it would have been better if I had been there in person just for the networking!
• Client Meeting:  1: Many >20 .   I used video for a client meeting between myself and 20  business associates from a client.   We didn’t have the big projection screens, but more of an intimate video setup.  It worked very well. 
• Client Meeting:  1:Many <10.  Here I actually went for Teleprescence so that the video was not one way, but a two way conversation.   In this case, I had NOT met everyone yet so I felt this was more appropriate for the situation.       I will do this again on Monday of next week.   Obviously I had to leave my home office, but not fly (that is what the doctor meant right?!)

 3.     Non verbal Communitions.  This part was the toughest for me. How do I read the room?  I had no idea how much I changed and altered what I did based on what I saw!    I had local teams in the room so the were instant messaging me the happenings in the room like: who was head nodding, who walked out of the room, where to speed up, and other non verbal signals. This to me was critcal. In fact, in the External Keynote, I had twitter on and asked the attendees to tweet me. That made all the difference in the world

Conclusion

Video was a great way to work in fact, I want to incorporate Video into more meetings.  I think Social Businesses will leverage more video.  I used these in meeting above in Germany, Argentina, US, and Canada.  

 However, the trick is that nothing can replace an in person meeting so perhaps this is best on second or third meetings.   The technology was very easy to work with but still requires pre testing due to so many different firewalls, and settings.  When the video and sound are good, I found this was very effective and the focus was on what I said, vs the tool!   

What do you think?   Do you use video?  When should you use video? 

I’d love to craft a set of best practices on WHEN to use this media successfully.  Let me hear your thoughts!

IBM France (@henririmbaud) has launched a fantastic initiative, a video where IBMers talked about their use of  Twitter, and how it helped them in their daily work.    AT IBM Marketers, Sales, Technical Sales, PR Teams are using Twitter to communicate, share, learn, and contribute.

It’s a fact : IBM is present on the social web. The example of Twitter is inspiring : We have over 25 000 IBMers actively tweeting on  Twitter (source: @adamclyde) and counting… Not only we are present on Twitter but we also have over 300,00 IBMers on Linkedin, 198,000 on Facebook, and growing.

“Be yourself.”  It’s one of the rules of social media:

At IBM, we  don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID.  “We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”

Thousands of IBMers are the voice of the company.  

Thousands of Voices

• 17,000 internal blogs
• 1 million daily page views of internal wikis, internal information storing websites
• 15,000,000 downloads of employee-generated videos/podcasts
• More than 400,000 Sametime instant messaging users, resulting in 40-50 million instant messages per day
• 400,000+ employees can access IBM Connections (internal social networking  platform)
• Thousands of external bloggers

Thank you to  @henririmbaud for this fantastic project which featured fellows IBMers , to name a few:  @IBMJoel, @JCDichant, @renaudraffaelli, @nicod92160, @milcent, @benoitbossuet

The video « Twitter en bonne compagnie. L’envie d’échanger » can be found on IBM France and on Youtube  –

I have been thinking alot of about the new Social Client that Social Businesses will be serving!

Have you thought about the new processes? The new expectations?

I’ll also discuss more about this Social Client in my new book “Get Bold!”

You can order at Amazon.com!

I presented in Argentina this week on Social Business to the Entrepreneur Community there. Since I had an injury, my doctor would not allow me to travel but instead of canceling, we decided to host the meeting via Video, and use video for the presentation, Twitter and Instant messaging to take questions. It was a small but very influential group — so this was a test to see how “Social” we could be!!

I received very good feedback from different sources. I wanted to share with all of you the report with the twitter stream received from Community Manager — this is a best practice .. having a GREAT community manager — but more on that topic in another blog!
Click me and see the TWITTER STREAM !

Very interesting way to know how they received our messages and to know the ones engaged (& twitter enabled!). We have 27 different twitters, wich generated 122 messages with this trending words: #socbiz, el, rt, de, social, @sandy_carter, la, #ibm, en, del, mundo, y, business, @acroglia, via

Question & Answer with Sandy Carter and Judith Hurwitz
I am thrilled to be here today with Judith Hurwitz, a dear colleague and friend, in the IT industry. She is an amazing woman with lots of knowledge to share . Today is the launch of her new book, Smart or Lucky? How Technology leaders turn chance into success!
Let’s hear what she has to say of this intriguing new book and title!!

Q: Judith, tell us about your day job.A: I am technology consultant and strategist and CEO of Hurwitz and Associates. I differentiate myself by being a thought leader in the space of Cloud, Social Business, Service Management, and Enterprise Computing. I have been doing this for way too long – greater than 20+ years of experience. I wrote this book based on my experiences in the industry.

Q: I know you’ve written other books. Tell us about them.I have written four “Dummies” books: SOA for Dummies (two editions), Service management for Dummies, and Cloud Computing for Dummies and I am now working on a Private Cloud for Dummies. I love to write and share knowledge so in addition to these books I have written lots of customized books on demand that allow managers to quickly understand the importance of emerging technologies to their business.

Q: Why this book? What was your inspiration?The inspiration came from decades of working in the industry. I have worked with so many companies who started out with a bang, and then ended up not making it. And then I have also worked with many companies who started more methodically, and ended up being big and successful. I noticed that the ones that failed didn’t pay attention to the signs of danger. They often didn’t plan well enough in very competitive markets.

In the technology market, entrepeneurs seem to be starting to repeat many of the mistakes of the past decades. It seems to me that the many emerging technology leaders have very short memories! So I wanted to make sure that I documented the best practices and worst practices so that others can learn from the experiences. I wanted to share what I had learned over many years and put in a form that entrepreneurs could use.

Q: Since I am a Social Business Maven, any Social Business stories that you could share?Actually yes! There is a company that I wrote about called Agillion that came to market with a product offering and strategy to create marketplaces based on collaboration. They had all the makings of a Google success but they were 10-12 years too early. There was no infrastructure in place to support the idea. One of the lessons that entrepreneurs need to learn is that there can be an idea that is before its “IT” time!

Q: What are the top 3 Ahas from the Book?Well that’s a tough one! (Pause) But I’ll try to choose from the many in the book!
1) There is nothing new under the sun. All of the new ideas can be traced back to a past innovative idea!
2) We all fall for the bubble or the silver bullet solution to solve a problem. Nothing is ever as easy or simple as it seems but it seems that history does repeat itself and that we continue to believe that it is easy!!
3) The companies who focused on solving the problem of the client were the winners. The loser’s secret? Focus on their technology – not the problems they were trying to solve.

Q: Coolest companies you wrote about?I do compare Google and Netscape. I titled that chapter “the Google Sneak Attack”. The major point is that Netscape did a frontal attack on Microsoft, the #1 leader, and of course, Microsoft attacked back. Google’s approach was “we are just a little ole search engine not really hurting anyone”! Things would be different if they have done a frontal attack by going for world domination!

Q: Anything I didn’t ask you about that you want to tell me about?Yes! I do have a chapter that covers two companies that were on the verge of collapse but have recovered today! I wrote about both IBM and Apple in the chapter called “You are not dead yet”. I discuss how both were able to recover and share the lessons that can apply to others today.

Judith, it sounds like a terrific book! Can’t wait for you to sign my copy!

Sandy

Please join me at the B2B MarketingProfs Forum in Boston!  I’ll walk through the Social Business Agenda!

#socbiz #ls11 #ibmsocbiz