This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2011. I attended a keynote session on “Becoming a Social Business” It was led by Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President, IBM Software Solutions Group and featured a number of IBM clients, as well as IBM itself: Jon Iwata, Senior Vice President, IBM Marketing and Communications, Gilberto Garcia , Innovation Director, CEMEX, and Greg Welch, Vice President Corporate Branding and Creative, State Street Bank.
I did some work with CEMEX in the early 2000s and was very impressed with their innovations then so I was looking to seeing what they are doing now. Mike started with some of the challenges businesses face today: information overload, complexity and connections. How can you address this? We can learn from what some firms have done already and that is the focus of the panel today.
How to get clients to talk with each other, can I resolve call center questions faster? How can I drive operational efficiency? How to get new products to market faster? How can I listen to the market better? How can I optimize on a global scale? How to deal with governance issues with the implementation of social tools?
A firm digital reputation is more important than ever. Over 25% of links around a brand are to user generated content. Consumers have more power than ever? How can you deal with sentiment analysis? How can you anticipate and deal with the new legal issues with social business?
Jon Iwata spoke next. He spoke about the mid-90s when people laughed at the idea of using the Web for business but IBM and Lotus pushed into this space. He said there is another moment of change now around the Web for business. The world is becoming more connected through more devices and smart phones will out paced PC sales by 2012. This sets up the potential for a smarter planet. There is also the ability to analysis the content within social media to monitor these conversations, On the Web, 22% of traffic is for social networking.
IBM is using new business model to be more connected and collaborative and this is providing greater efficiency. There are new ways for collaboration within the enterprise. It gets more challenging outside the enterprise. How can a firm get its employees to use the Web strategically and responsively. They launched the Social Business at IBM to make their employees smarter and more effective in this space. They are enabling all IBMers to work better facing their markets.
Now the client panel arrived and joined Jon and Mike. Both have used social media for increasing employee collaboration. State Street wanted more employee expertise involvement. They also wanted clients to have a single view of their bank. At IBM 43% of marketing investments are in digital. Clients also have greater power in their hands. CEMEX found the business case for social business by connecting their employees globally to gain operational efficiency. They found this efficiency. They also wanted to find radical innovations and they found these as well. They wanted to unlock the collective wisdom of their employees.
State Street needed to convince employees within their firm to better convey their vision. They worked on their intranet to make it more attractive. They also articulated a strategy for governance. This is still a work in progress and includes both monitoring and supporting. Even at IBM there were challenges to get senior management to turn on the social side in a market facing manner.
Mike asked how do bank deal with the regulatory issues when turning to social media? Greg said they were nervous about this because of potential exposure. But they decided to switch risk avoidance to risk management. There are some areas within the bank that cannot talk to each other for regulatory reasons also they needed to deal with this. Also certain countries in Europe have strict privacy requirements for employees and they need to deal with this. They needed to have all the stakeholders at the design phase. This was also the case at IBM. The CFO said that social media that needs to be addressed because of the opportunity and they just have to figure out the risk because it needs to be done.
CEMEX has been expanding around the globe. Their social media initiative took off very fast. They engaged top management and this helped. They developed communities before going viral. Then they got critical mass but still needed to convey the business value as this was for business not just for fun. Great session.
Comments