Happy Monday!
We are continuing our Monday series on Social Selling — today focused on our Tip #4! I am to start the discussion on how you know your prospects and clients.
Tag: wsj (Page 2 of 6)
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:
- Automate the ordinary to deliver the extraordinary
- Collaborate far beyond current comfort zones
- Elevate customer data analytics to an art form
- Aggressively dismantle barriers to change
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!
The level of connectedness today is unprecedented
•Today, over 2.4 billion people are online. 45% are in Asia.
•Experts predict that there will be more than 2.1 billion smartphones by 2015
•Twitter claims to have over 140 million active users.
And, with that connectedness comes power.
•70% of online consumers trust peer recommendations and trust what their peers say more than what businesses claim
•And the trend is not unique to consumers. 77% of business buyers check with their peers before buying
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!!!
Here is the sunset I saw on my vacation. Stop what you are doing!
The same is true in Social! If your company is using social without a social governance policy — stop whatever you are doing and create one!
The Social Business guidelines for your company should be based on your values. Consider following best practices from my book Get Bold.
1. Guidelines should be written by your employees in a social group setting. Those guidelines developed in a participatory fashion will last.
2. Guidelines should state why the guidelines exist; for example, to innovate in a responsible way.
3. Guidelines should be short and to the point.
4. Guidelines should state your position on open dialogue what’s fair game and what’s not (confidential information).
5. Guidelines should state consequences.
6. Guidelines should encourage transparency.
7. Guidelines should state privacy and rights of your company’s partners and clients.
8. Guidelines should guide in adding value and learning from mistakes.
9. Guidelines should discuss time spent in social media.
10. Guidelines should encourage your company’s goals in social techniques.
On http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php you can find a collection of company social guidelines. Read through them and define your guidelines in sync with your culture and goals. For example, in sync with its corporate culture, Zappos’s Social Media Policy is “be real and use your best judgment.” This Social Policy showcases Zappos’s trust in their employees! Intel’s Social Media Guidelines have a few best practices as well. Examples include “be transparent” and “if it gives you pause, pause.” I also love their advice that “perception is reality and it’s a conversation.” I think the key is defining these with a collaborative group of digital citizens throughout your company.
For large global organizations, corporate culture sometimes needs to make way for local culture. For example, at IBM we have a very open-minded culture supported by our senior leadership team. We have sponsorship from the very top of IBM supporting our movement into end-user-generated content to become a Social Business. However, we do understand that there are also cultural differences across the globe. As such, we make sure to understand these cultural differences and embrace them. With IBM operating in more than 170 countries, our team reviews privacy acts around the globe to ensure that we keep the interest of the employees at the center of focus.
Now, find a sunset and ensure your company has a policy!
Happy Monday! Social Business Trends are shaking the world and today’s Social Coffee Break is about our third trend.
Innovation must be part of a corporation’s culture. Things are moving so fast those who can change and adapt will be most competitive. In today’s Social world, innovation is accelerated through social. See how ideation (crowdsourcing) and predictive capability (analytics) accelerate innovation in corporations!
The IBM Tech Trends report is based on a survey of more than 1,200 professionals who make technology decisions for their organizations (22 percent IT managers, 53 percent IT practitioners, and 25 percent business professionals). Our respondents come from 16 different industries and 13 countries, spanning both major and growth markets.
I was surprised that mobile is the largest gap, followed by Cloud. While there is a gap in Social, of the Big 4, it is the best one.
Thoughts? Any surprises to you?!
Wondering what are key trends you need to know when building your social plan? Come find out in these fun/interactive sessions proposed for SXSW 2014!
First, you need to remember that social is a global phenomenon. You can engage with folks in Nairobi, New York or Naples. But… we all have cultural differences, and if you fail to take these into account you run the risk of becoming a social zombie:
Vote now for this session! [http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/23204]
Second, unleash the vast power of social by tying it to those other big trends in technology right now: big data and analytics. Apply social across all your business processes, create an environment of expertise and trust, and develop a corporate culture that embraces collaboration:
Vote now for this bootcamp! http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/23035
Will I see you at SXSW 2014? If so, reach out and let’s chat further!
Everyone always celebrates Friday so I thought today we’d celebrate Monday with a great Social Business coffee Break.
Today we are focused on the 2nd core trend in Socialytics: Marketing not just to a demographic but to the power of 1. (Reminder; trend 1 was the power of information sharing and that driving a need socially to recognize expertise and trust!)
As always tell me what you think!
Ask a social executive, ‘who is the smartest in the room?’ and she will answer: the room. (Now, since she answered this way, does that make her the smartest again?!)
Why? The Fortune 500 lose “$31.5B a year by failing to share knowledge” according to Lisa Quast, Forbes Online. The “room” is the group that generates ideas because they are closest to the clients and the market. But only 25% of companies are good at Idea Generation & Idea Conversion.
So yes, that executive who can harness the power of the room, wins everytime!
I was reading an article in HBR on the elements of successful leadership. It was a great HBR article. And as I read it, I thought that it applied to Social Leadership in the way that Great companies should use social — as a way to build relationships.
Here are the modified Social 3 Gs!
The 3 G’s!
- Gifted. Your social communications needs to be both content rich but engaging. Your gifted communicators need to also be able to master having a strong Point of View and to be able to handle conflict without being offensive.
- Game. In social, you need to be able to fail fast. In Social, you need to have the courage to take risks. Just as a leader needs to be “vulnerable and open to challenge and criticism” , your social engagement needs have confidence. The kind of confidence that allows them to be questioned by others without becoming defensive. This is the way that true innovation occurs!
- Generous. Your social strategy needs to put to ensure the goal is for the good of the overall client ecosystem. It should be good-hearted, mutually respectful, and gracious, resisting the urge to dominate, or take the upper hand. Part of being generous with others also means taking an interest in, learning about, and offering opinions regarding your clients and employees.
I think these 3 G’s should guide the Social Conversations in the Blogosphere. What do you think?