This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year. It covers “Social Business for SMBs,” (Speakers: IBM Clients - The Law Offices of LaVan & Neidenberg, Czarnowski, and others).
Ed Brill hosted the session. IBM has been a provided to SMB for a long time. Now the analysts say it will be a 7B market for social business. Cloud will be big in the SMB market for both cost and staff savings. Roxanne is CIO from the Fashion Institute in the Los Angeles area. They have 1200 employees and 78 IT people. Ken LaVan is from law firm LaVan & Neidenberg. They represent Vets for disability claims and this is a very good cause. They are in Fort Lauderdale. There was also John Roling from The Chicago trade show firm, Czaronowski.
Roxanne said they use a lot of IBM products. They have several WebSphere portals. They use Rational now and will start a pilot of Connections soon. Ken said they are growing the firm and found they had too many different apps. They have spent the past two years getting entire business into a unified IBM software platform. The trade show people are big on mobile and have a BYOD policy. They are using a lot of IBM mobile products including video chat.
Roxanne said their students and employees are pushing for more social tools and also BYOD. Ken said their goal is to make sure people are productive and take a very social approach that is different from the legal industry in general. They use SameTime for quick exchanges. John said once they rolled out BYOD the mobile adoption rates shot up. They are half Android, quarter Apple, and quarter Blackberry.
Ed asked about the role of business partners for SMB. Roxanne said having a trusted partner is critical. These are co-creative relationships. Kevin said the partnership was critical for close support and John said they have a trusted partner to supplement their own efforts. Roxanne invites IBMers and partners in for timed presentations and sharing. They also do conference calls with multiple partners for idea sharing. John said they know the relevant IBM people on Twitter and they can ask questions from these people, usually getting quick responses.
Roxanne was asked about the concerns over going with one vendor. What about best of breed? Roxanne said they like the integration with a single vendor and will go with IBM even if not top rated on that app as long at it is near the top. So far that has been the case.
It was asked about social technology use. John said they have a pilot for Connections scheduled. They have 450 desktops and thought they might be too small for Connections but with their 15 different locations it is now important for these social capabilities and Connections now comes into play. They have been using SameTime a lot and the mobile access was huge.
Trade shows manage Facebook pages for themselves and their clients and public facing blogs that have driven traffic. They also tweet and get feedback through this channel. Roxanne said they have college Facebook pages, as well as teachers doing blogs. They are looking at Cognos for sentiment analysis of this social activity. The law firm has several blogs, as well as Twitter and Facebook. This drives about 20,000 new people looking at Web site and they get about 800 leads from this traffic. It was a big investment at first but the rewards are great. Roxanne said they use YouTube and students have created videos.
The law firm has about 120 employees with a two person IT department. They look for ease of use and management. They blog a lot, giving advice to Vets. They are developing XPages for clients to look at just their own content. The ability for remote wiping was raised. The law firm was unaware of this but the others do it.
I asked about wiping out email from an eDiscovery and compliance perspective. They pointed out that the data is still on the server, not on the individual device. Of course, but I did say this was likely a naïve question. The law firm said they installed analytics to decide on what clients to take on as part of an intake wizard they developed with IBM and they have doubled their new clients. By making business operations more efficient they grew clients by four times and staff by three times. Lotus Notes is their main collaboration tool.
Ed asked what they have heard this week to help SMB? Roxanne was impressed with the activity stream as the glue to pull everything together. Also, the ability of Notes to be viewed through a browser will be great. John also said the activity stream and all the things you can do with it. I agree. The activity stream is especially useful for small businesses as I have directly experienced. In my own case even working with the group of four people in the same city but different locations, I found that social tools and especially an activity stream is a big time saver and takes a lot of stuff out of the siloed hallways of email. It was a useful session.
f systems that will rely on Social CRM but be lots more. And they are coming in the next 5-8 years (before you laugh, remember that I wrote about collaborative customer service, social-powered customer service, and real-time customer service some 5-6 years ago). Sección Amarilla
Posted by: Sección Amarilla | December 18, 2012 at 03:26 AM