Portals and KM

Measuring the Full Impact of Digital Capital

I hope you are having a nice summer. This is McKinsey week on Portals and KM as I look back at what is happening in new technology. The first two posts this week covered Accelerating the digitization of business processes and Reinventing IT to support digitization.  In addition to meeting customer needs buy reinventing IT, companies also need to cover the topic of this third report, Measuring the full impact of digital capital.  Otherwise how are you going to measure all that is happening?

McKinsey noted that about a year ago the US Bureau of Economic Analysis released, for the first time, GDP figures categorizing research and development as fixed investment. It joined software in a new category called intellectual-property products. In our knowledge-based economy, this is a sensible move that brings GDP accounting closer to economic reality. It is sometimes that the knowledge management people have been talking about for over twenty years. I am amazed but not surprised that it took so long to recognize this.  

There is a broad mismatch between our digital economy and the way we account for it. The report notes that conventional accounting treats these most IT capabilities as expenses and not as company investments. This means that their funding isn’t reflected as capital. Since the amounts spent aren’t amortized, they take a large bite out of reported income. Spending on those capabilities sometimes should be treated as capital, though, since they can be long-lived. Viewing IT investments in the new digital world as assets rather than additional areas of spending requires a new set of management and financial lenses. It is time to move out of 19^th century industrial revolution and into 21^st century digital transformation. 

Reinventing IT to Support Digitization of Business Processes - McKinsey

Here is another McKinsey report that complements the one I discussed on Monday,  Accelerating the digitization of business processes. They recently discussed - Reinventing IT to support digitization.  They write that, “more connected consumers, automated processes, and sophisticated analytics place unprecedented demands on IT functions. Many companies are struggling to cope, and they seek to deliver on new demands by adding piecemeal elements to their existing operations. Yet what’s really required is the reinvention of IT entirely.” However, this is not an easy task. I have found that there is too usually much vested interest in maintaining the fiefdoms and processes that support current IT management.

The increased digitization of business processes more sophisticated technology, greater IT delivery efficiency, and, most importantly, “digitization means that IT must prepare for much greater business engagement and oversight from senior management.”  This last requirement is fundamental to any IT change but even more important when it comes to the transformation of business processes. Do not start with the technology.

McKinsey offers seven elements of a reinvented IT function. These include clear, central business leadership on digital business, agile development and rapid releases, rapid innovation architecture supported by stable services, and high-quality integrated data. To achieve these goals you need to combine a start-up mind-set with enterprise accountability and make IT a top business priority. There is much on the report on how to make this happen. 

Accelerating the Business Digitization Processes - McKinsey

McKinsey recently issued a useful report - Accelerating the digitization of business processes. The growth of efficient online businesses has raised the expectations of customers for service and product quality. McKinsey reports that, “many traditional organizations can’t meet these expectations. As a result, attackers born in the digital age can swoop in and disrupt the market through rapid delivery of digital products and services combined with advanced algorithms and full access to information.”

They go on to add that, “To meet these high customer expectations, companies must accelerate the digitization of their business processes. But they should go beyond simply automating an existing process. They must reinvent the entire business process, including cutting the number of steps required, reducing the number of documents, developing automated decision making, and dealing with regulatory and fraud issues. Operating models, skills, organizational structures, and roles need to be redesigned to match the reinvented processes. Data models should be adjusted and rebuilt to enable better decision making, performance tracking, and customer insights. Digitization often requires that old wisdom be combined with new skills, for example, by training a merchandising manager to program a pricing algorithm. New roles, such as data scientist and user-experience designer, may be needed.”

Sounds like a great opportunity for consultants. I hope that it goes beyond that to not only enrich the consultants but also help the consumer and employee. I have seen great successes and failures in the drive to improve business processes through technology. McKinsey offers some advice that I agree with. First, start at the end state and work back. Second, Tackle the end-to-end customer experience. I would also add to include the end-to-end employee experience and make sure it is aligned with customer needs.  The report goes on to offer some useful advice. 

New Study: Top Charities Master Visual and Social Media

Nora Ganim Barnes and The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently conducted an in-depth study on the usage of social media by the top charities and nonprofit organizations in the United States. The study was conducted using the 2013 Philanthropy 400 list.

They found that 98% of the charities studied are using at least one form of social media. Most use several.  Eighty-one percent link their social media to their homepages, providing immediate access to all their outlets. For these successful nonprofits, YouTube, web video and video blogs are the tools of choice for communicating with their constituencies with 97% using some type of video to help inspire their audience.  Facebook enjoys popularity with 92% using it and Twitter is used by 86% of the charities studied.  While these three platforms have strong usage across many sectors, it is interesting that nearly 3 in 4 of these nonprofits have boards on Pinterest and half are posting on Instagram.  

In contrast, studies on social media in the business sector (Inc. 500 and Fortune 500) show much lower levels of usage of these particular tools even though their usage is increasing dramatically each year.

A common measure of effectiveness on Facebook is the number of Facebook Fans an organization has.  National Public Radio enjoys over 3.6 million fans on Facebook, over a million more than the second place US Olympic Committee.  The Humane Society, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, the Wounded Warrior Project the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the others listed below, all enjoy over a million fans on Facebook.

A new metric was added to Facebook in October, 2012.  “People Talking About This” is the number of unique users who have created a “story” about a page in a seven-day period. On Facebook, stories are items that display in News Feeds.  People Talking About This is an important metric because it emphasizes interactions beyond an initial Facebook Like. Pages that create posts that fans enjoy will benefit. When people interact with pages in ways that generate stories, pages reach an audience beyond their existing fan base. Again, National Public Radio leads the way with over 500,000 engaging with the organization on Facebook.

I recently saw that three of the six most wealthiest men made most of their money through Facebook, Larry Page of Google tops that list. I hope these four men are putting some of their fortunes into these charities.

Twitter followers provide an important metric both internally and externally.  Of the organizations studied, the Metropolitan Opera Association and the Wounded Warrior Project have the most followers, both with over 96,000.  Charities and nonprofits were asked about all the different ways they provide content to their constituencies.  Eighty-nine percent of those studied write their own original content for their platforms.  Nearly half report gathering it from other sites.  Sixteen percent purchase content for their platforms.

Thanks to Nora Ganim Barnes and The Center for Marketing Research for providing more useful insights on the use of social media. 

2013 Inc. 500 and Social Media Report from Nora Ganim Barnes

Here is another very useful report from Nora Ganim Barnes and Ava M. Lescault of The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. I have written about Nora’s studies on many occasions (see for example this report on Social Media and Fortune 500). The longitudinal aspect of them makes them very useful. This new study revisits the Center’s work on the Inc. 500 social media usage for the seventh consecutive year, making it a valuable and rare longitudinal study of corporate use of new communication tools.

This research presented here was conducted using two approaches.  First, every company named to the 2013 Inc. 500 list was examined in order to determine which social media tools they were using.  Each homepage was reviewed in addition to the entire site (since some did not link to their accounts from the homepage).  Search engines were also utilized to find an online presence if none was obvious after reviewing the website.

Their second level of research involved interviewing a random sample of executives from the Inc. 500 list to ask questions with a specific focus on issues like social commerce, mobile, online crisis management and social media policies. One hundred and eighteen interviews were conducted (24% of the Inc. 500).  While some issues are new to the 2013 study, several were researched in 2012 as well, in order to provide trend data.

The use of LinkedIn by Inc. 500 companies grew to 88% this year, maintaining the number one spot.  Facebook saw a resurgence to 84% after dropping 7% in 2012. The following also saw increases: Twitter (7%), blogging (8%), Pinterest (15%) and YouTube (20%).  This is the first year the study has included Google+ and Instagram.  Increases in YouTube and Pinterest along with the use of Instagram, show that the visual media platforms are becoming increasingly more attractive to the Inc. 500.

In 2007, the Center’s first study of this group and their use of social media was released and revealed that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the revenue based Fortune 500 in their use of social media.  For example, at that time, research showed that 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500.  This trend has held steady for the past 7 years with the Inc. 500 continuously out blogging the Fortune 500.  The most recent data collected on both groups suggests that the pattern holds with 52% of the Inc. 500 blogging and 34% of the Fortune 500.  Both groups however, continue to increase their use of this mature but valuable tool.

They are now seeing the incorporation of new platforms and tools as well as an increased use of others.  The only tool with a decrease in usage is FourSquare.  Ninety-five percent of the Inc. 500 are using at least one of the tools studied (a 3% increase since 2012). 

One of the new issues they examined this year in their interviews was the company’s involvement in social commerce. Executives were asked which social media platforms they felt has the most potential for sales growth for their business.  Sixty-one percent feel Twitter holds the most potential for sales growth.  Fifty-five percent see Facebook as the platform for growth and 31% believe Pinterest will benefit them.

There is much more in the report and I encourage you to check it out. I really appreciate their continued efforts. 

The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization – Part 2: New Features

Jane McConnell, Netstrategy/JMC, has recently published her excellent annual report, The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization. Jane conducted her 8^th annual survey of organizations and had 314 respondents. Here are some of the highlights of the results. The full 198 page report goes into great detail on the findings and how they impact the organization. I was pleased to receive a review copy of this valuable document. The report can be purchased online at this site. This post covers some of the new features and my prior post summarized the highlights. There are three main new features this year.

The Digital Workplace Scorecard is based on nine dimensions of the digital workplace model Jane offers in the report. The three main categories are: capabilities, enablers, and mindset and each is further divided in three dimensions. The Scorecard provides a self-assessment tool that should prove essential to building a roadmap for establishing a digital workplace that plays an essential and strategic role in the organization. The scores are calculated based on several hundred data points from responses to online survey questions. All participants privately receive their own scorecard and can benchmark themselves to the rest of their industry. All industry scorecards are published in the report.

This year, the digital workplace is put into the context of the organization. It provides an understanding of how the digital workplace impacts and is, in turn, impacted by organizational processes, structures, leadership, culture and mindset. The survey covers these points in addition to traditional questions about people capabilities, mobile services, finding expertise, and sharing knowledge. 

There are twenty-three "In practice" cases that are developed in more detail than in previous years. Organizations included in these cases stood out during Jane’s data analysis process of the 314 organizations that responded to her survey. They were chosen as examples because of high scores or because their comments and examples are relevant to challenges many organizations face today. 

The case studies and other data show that the “digital workplace helps organizations enable their customer-facing workforce, helping them interact with customers in real-time with up-to-date information. An effective digital workplace facilitates fast reaction and proactive initiatives when an organization is faced with unexpected events such as environmental emergencies, challenges from competitors or global market shifts.”

I highly recommend this document to who wants to stay competitive in today’s market and who desires to attract and retain an intelligent workforce.  

 

 

The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization – Part 1: Highlights

Jane McConnell, Netstrategy/JMC, has recently published her excellent annual report, The Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization. Jane conducted her 8^th annual survey of organizations and had 314 respondents. It was first done in 2006 and is a comprehensive and highly useful document for anyone working in digital media within the enterprise.  I was pleased to receive a review copy of this valuable document. The report can be purchased online at this site. The 198 page report goes into great detail on the findings and how they impact the organization.

Jane begins by pointing out that, “the digital workplace is much more than technology. It is a blend of Capabilities, Enablers and above all, Mindset - all essential perspectives in how organizations work.”  In organizations that are effectively using digital technology, there are new virtual structures such as communities. “Cross-organizational communities are playing a long-term strategic role as custodians of knowledge, thus complementing traditional hierarchical structures. “

In addition, new processes such as crowd-sourcing, “Internal crowd-sourcing is now deployed enterprise-wide in over half the Early Adopters who report “transformational” or “significant” impact on their organization.”

Successful early adopters are operating within an open and participatory leadership model. These early adopters report a much higher rate of top management as a “driving and active” force in their digital workplace initiatives. They also have organizational cultures that are more open and based on teamwork. Top managers, as well as Communication, IT and HR managers, are more “open and participatory” in their leadership styles and ways of working.

The vast increase in workforce mobile services is also transforming business processes. Jane found that, “Mobile services for the workforce will be deployed in 30 to 40 percent of organizations by the end of 2014.”

The top two strategic drivers overall for the digital workplace are “increasing organizational intelligence” and “gaining efficiency and cost-savings”. The first is number one for early adopters. It makes sense as these innovators are often attracted to initiatives that increase their effectiveness. The second is number one for the majority of organizations who more often wait to be attracted by bottom line results.

It is interesting to note that physical workplaces are slowly evolving toward more “non- territorial” workspaces, encouraging the flow of ideas and information among people.

I highly recommend this document to who wants to stay competitive in today’s market and who desires to attract and retain an intelligent workforce. This is the eighth year Jane has conducted new research and published her report on the findings and recommendations.  In my next post I will review some of the new features in this report. 

Tweetzup Creates a Blogger Page

Going into 2014 I remain very much a part of Darwin Ecosystem and excited about our latest offering, Tweetzup. The Darwin’s organic temporal curation engine improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking by including in real-time collections of correlated tags (Keyword Memes) from current tweets -- You have seen them in action on our tweetzup.com and TheEnergyPulse.com sites. Here is a post on Darwin Ecosystem’s Keyword Memes™ Drawn From Tweets.

Now they have introduced a Blogger Page. It allows you to follow topics that you are interested. I created a page for the hash tag #nola – for my home town New Orleans. It is hash tag I follow in Tweet deck but is hard to get an overview as tweets flash by. With Tweetzup you can see and explore trending topics. Below is a screen shot of the hash tag on December 6. The major topics of that day centered around the re-trail of NOPD officer David Warren in the shooting and subsequent cover up of Henry Glover’s death. This makes sense. This real life event was also part of the story line in the excellent HBO series Treme. 

For more information, please contact our CEO, Thierry Hubert, directly as we are seeking strategic clients and alliances to bring this next-generation SEO improvement innovation to the market. You can reach him at [email protected]. 

Improve Your SEO with Darwin Ecosystem’s Keyword Memes™ Drawn From Tweets

I remain very much a part of Darwin Ecosystem and excited about our latest offering, Keyword Memes™. The Darwin’s organic temporal curation engine improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking by including in real-time collections of correlated tags (Keyword Memes) from current tweets -- You have seen them in action on our tweetzup.com and TheEnergyPulse.com sites. Below is the Tweetzup site.

Here also is the Energy Pulse site as an industry focused example of the technology.

Our newly announced API harvests the correlated keywords associated with the movement of tweets to deliver Keyword Memes that can be added to your web pages’ meta data. These Keyword Memes provide clustered keywords that are representative of the crowd's current association with the keywords that best complement the topic of your web pages. 

Our API increases relevance based on emerging social expressions. Our temporal curation algorithm and engine allows us to produce these Keyword Memes on demand and without manual input and costly research.

Darwin Ecosystem now offers Keyword Memes for SEO solutions through our API subscription and integration services.  Companies interested in complementing and improving their search engine pages’ ranking can now be relevant to what matters based on people’s correlated expressions.

This is a strong contrast from today’s SEO spamming practices that only seek keywords that are highly ranked regardless of their relevance to your pages’ content. Search engines know this and seek to penalize pages using this misleading practice. Darwin’s approach combats this risk as our tags are automatically correlated, unbiased and truly relevant to the expressed interest of the moment.



For more information, please contact our CEO, Thierry Hubert, directly as we are seeking strategic clients and alliances to bring this next-generation SEO improvement innovation to the market. You can reach him at [email protected]. 

College Presidents Blog and Tweet Much More Than Corporate CEO’s

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research have published an on going series of studies of social media in both business and higher education. Nora and Ava Lescault recently published an interesting report, College Presidents Out-Blog and Out-Tweet Corporate CEO’s 
as Higher Ed Delves Deeper into Social Media to Recruit Students.  This latest study (2012-2013) analyzes the most recent trending of social media adoption among four-year accredited institutions in the United States. A proportional sample of schools in all 50 states was utilized resulting in 26% public schools, 71% private and 2% describing themselves as “for profit institutions.”  They range in size from 40 to over 37,000 undergraduates.

The highlights included the finding that over half of college presidents studied are posting on Facebook (58%) and tweeting (55%), while 35% host their own blog. In comparison, 40% of Inc. 500 CEO’s are on Facebook along with only 8% of Fortune 500 CEO’s.  Twenty-nine percent of Inc. 500 CEO’s tweet and only 4% of the Fortune 500 CEO’s tweet.  Seven Inc. 500 CEO’s host a blog and only 1 Fortune 500 CEO has a blog.

 

Schools also show an interest in new tools including Pinterest (31% adoption), Google+ (25% adoption) and Instagram (16% adoption). Over two-thirds of US colleges and universities have some official school blogging activity on their campus.  Forty-one percent of school officials believe they can directly attribute an increase in enrollments to their social media efforts.

Some schools (30%) report spending less on printing, newspaper ads (23%), television (17%) and radio (16%) as a result of increased online presence. Thirteen percent of schools report researching students through their social networking sites as part of the admissions process.  Last year 19% made this claim. Thirty-eight percent of school officials reported they monitored the internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their institution, the fifth straight decline since 2009 when 73% reported monitoring their school’s name online.

Even though there is enormous activity, much of it by students, half of the schools surveyed report that they do not have written guidelines for acceptable online behavior. This needs to change. It is great to see this ongoing research in social media. I look forward to more. 

Darwin Ecosystems Moves Forward with Tweetzup

It has been almost a year since I reported on Darwin Ecosystems at the 2012 SF TechCrunch Disrupt where it won the 2012 SAP Big Data Start-up of the Year award for its Tweather offering. This latest achievement goes along with its win of the KM World Trend Setting Product in both 2011 and 2010 and the Most Promising Software award in 2010. Darwin was also named to the 100 companies that matter in 2010 by both KM World and eContent Magazine.

Since TechCrunch Disrupt Darwin has been hard at work and have dramatically improved on its new site, now called TweetZup, as well as its mission.  I am still connected to Darwin and excited about what is happening.

TweetZup’s real value is to give users the ability to discover content that is emerging.  What better source than Twitter to do that? In fact, Twitter has been great for self-promotion and pushing content out, but it lacks in offering a comprehensive discovery of what is emerging. No wonder why they are having a hard time with advertisement since they have not really developed user’s receptiveness to content. Instead brands and companies have been the real consumer of Twitter content, not the every day user.

 

Darwin has created www.tweetzup.com as a truly dedicated site to see what is emerging right now about topics that you may care about. Furthermore, you can create alerts for emerging themes of interest. These alerts can be pushed on your behalf to your twitter account, or be sent to you via email. Tweetzup also correlates the emerging twitter themes to find the most relevant videos. It is search without search offering true contextual discovery.  You can drill down to explore a topic, like art, with suggestions or determine your own preferences. 

 

We all know that search engines do a poor job at revealing what we don’t know, and therefore it is hard to know what you are missing.

The Tweetzup service is free and in Beta. But please feel free to play with it, create your own ZUPs (queries), set alerts, and share your finding.

Also know that Darwin is about to publish an API that will allow developers to tap into its temporal curation intervals, This capability is what allows the tag and clustering animation on the site, to performs tasks such as trend-based SEO, analytics, and predictive computing. A service/user can extract the metadata and improve their SEO by adding KW to their content that reflects the trending and associated keywords. See Thierry Hubert’s recent post, Announcing our new Emerging Organic Metadata Tags for SEO API for more details. 

In an effort to support the protection of our homeland, Darwin has created several pages where you can start to see what topics are emerging relating to terror threats.  You can also create your own alerts when keywords of interest are piping-up in significant numbers over different periods of time.  The URL is http://www.tweetzup.com/tw/home/home?filter=Terror%20Threat  or go to www.tweetzup.com and select the Terror Threat category.  You can also create your own topics to monitor by registration via a twitter account. It is a free and open website.

Does Self-Obsession Relate to Social Media Use?

I have written about how Our Obsession with Scoring is Now Taking on Individuals on the Web. In that post I covered the growing movement behind such tools as Klout and Peerindex. It is about all of us getting a number for how important we are. There I argued that the number is relatively meaningless measure, just as Robert Parker’s attempts to quantify wine seems superficial to me. I recently saw an article that addressed a highly related issue.

A strong correlation to our obsession with measurement is our obsession with ourselves, that is exhibited through social media. Measurement of self-importance feeds right into what researchers from the University of Michigan found. Their research measures the connection between narcissism and social media use. They examined two ways of measuring Facebook and Twitter use by testing the hypothesis that social media use is positively associated with narcissism. They also explored the relation between these types of social media use and different components of narcissism within college students and general adult samples.

Their findings suggest that for college students, “posting on Twitter is associated with the Superiority component of narcissistic personality while Facebook posting is associated with the Exhibitionism component. Conversely, adults high in Superiority component of narcissism post on Facebook more rather than Twitter. For adults, Facebook and Twitter are both used more by those focused on their own appearances but not as a means of showing off, as is the case with college students. Given these differences, it is essential for future studies of SNS use and personality traits to distinguish between different types of SNS, different populations, and different types of use."

Study researcher Elliot Panek told CBC News in Canada: "Young people overvaluate (sic) the importance of their own opinions." On Twitter, the younger students felt like they were broadcasting their views and felt that they have a lot to say about a lot of different topics. On Facebook, Panek says, "Middle-aged adults usually have already formed their social selves and they use social media to gain approval from those who are already in their social circles."

This all makes sense to me. As you mature, you hopefully gain and more humble view of yourself. At the same time you gain communities of similar interests that you want to have a positive relationship with. 

2013 Fortune 500 Expand and Branch Out in Social Media: Google+, Instagram, Foursquare and Pinterest

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth have released another of their very useful studies: 2013 Fortune 500 Are Bullish on Social Media:
Big Companies Get Excited About Google+, Instagram,
 Foursquare and Pinterest. For this work they looked at social media use by all 500 of the 2013 Fortune 500 companies. The types included blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, Google+, Foursquare and Instagram were added for the first time this year.

I always find their work especially valuable as they have been doing this research for some time and have a longitudinal set of data for comparisons. Here are some recent ones: Social Media Continues to Increase in the 2012 Fortune 500 and Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500: A Longitudinal Study (2011). In the 2011 Fortune 500 they found a leveling off of blogging with only 23% hosting a public facing corporate blog.  However, things changed in 2012 as 28% hosted public facing blogs. This surge continues with their latest iteration showing 34% of these large enterprises creating and sharing content through blogs.  Consistent with this is the fact that in 2013, 79% of the Fortune 500 blogs are kept current, take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions.

This was the largest increase since 2008. They concluded that, “signals the return of the online in depth conversation, thought leadership and original content development that was popular a decade ago with early corporate adopters of blogging like IBM and Ford Motors.” I first hand that this is a goal for IBM and supports their strong move into social business (see; My IBM Connect 2013 Session Notes: Complete Listing).

These large firms are twice as active on Twitter as 77% of the Fortune 500 have corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days. This represents a 4% increase since last year. These 387 corporations with corporate Twitter accounts come from 72 of the 75 industries represented in the Fortune 500. They also found that those companies ranked higher in the 2013 Fortune 500 are more likely to adopt Twitter than their lower ranked counterparts, following the same pattern as blogging.

Facebook presence is also prominent with 70% of the Fortune 500 on Facebook., a 4% increase since last year. Other social media tools are also being used extensively. There are now corporate YouTube accounts were found in 69% of the 2013 F500. This is a 7% increase from last year. Pinterest accounts are found in 9%. Google+ accounts are operating for 35%. Instagram and Foursquare accounts are operated by 9% of the 2013 Fortune 500.

The researches conclude that these results show “an interest in experimenting with new tools.  Only Google+ shows evidence of a significant number of open, but inactive, accounts.  In every other case, there is current activity and vibrant engagement of their audiences.  The use of blogging, after years of low and stagnant adoption has continued its steady move forward with over 1/3 now providing original content and using their blogs to promote causes, establish thought leadership and to better understand their target markets.”

I am very pleased to see an increase in blogging were more in-depth and interactive conversations can occur beyond what the other, more broadcast media allow. Thanks to Nora Barnes and her team for another piece of useful data. 

SAP and MindTouch Work Together to Enhance Customer Experience

This week I will be looking again at new technolgies. MindTouch now has a partnership with SAP so its offering is used to complement SAP cloud solutions, including SAP Cloud for Service and SAP Cloud for Social Engagement, to provide customers self-service with an integrated help system that offers the latest and most relevant product information. A major area of concern for companies with large customer bases is the consistency and quality of the information a company provides.

MindTouch solutions aggregate product data from different information silos to distribute the most relevant, accurate and up-to-date product information to a wide spectrum of users, ranging from employees to customer support agents to end-user customers. For example, it can use content from Facebook, Twitter, CRM agents, websites and other communities to create a comprehensive profile of the customer’s product history. MindTouch then delivers this information through a variety of channels, including call centers, the Web and mobile devices.

This aggregation helps companies gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs so they are able to provide a delightful service experience while reducing response times and minimizing ticket generation. Service agents are also able to help customers take advantage of up-sell and cross-sell opportunities at the right time.

We have come a long way since I first got started in call center support work. In the 1980s, call center agents said they often learned about their companies latest offers form the customer who called after seeing them on TV or in the newspaper. Providing more effective call center support can offer significant financial benefits. In the late 1990s telecom looked at the ROI on its upgraded call center agent knowledge system. This that used it had three times the cross-sell rate, greatly reduced call escalations to managers, fewer repeat call son the same issues, and other improvements.

 

Now solutions like MindTouch’s offer multi-channel distribution of relevant and up-to-date product and customer information to both agents and customers. It also provides enhanced customer intelligence gleaned from MindTouch tools and analytics, which helps drive marketing, product and customer experience initiatives to better serve customers. This would have seemed like “Star Wars” in the 20^th century. Now we have these capabilities thanks to partnerships like the one with MindTouch and SAP.  

Forbes Reports Top 20 Female Social Media Influencers

PeekAnalytics, a social audience measurement solution, has partnered with Forbes to compile a list of the “Top 20 Female Social Media Power Influencers.”  Here are the top ten. You can find the rest in the Forbes article, The Top 20 Women Social Media Influencers. I interviewed number six, Renee Blodgett, in 2005. Here is a summary of the interview: Blog Cases from 2005: Renee Blodgett on Communications and Marketing.

#1. Ann Tran. Ann blogs about travel and leisure, and provides cutting edge advice to social media users in all market. Like a lot of power influencers she is also a power user – 100,000 tweets so far.@AnnTran_

#2. Jessica Northey. It’s a trend this year, leading influences whose base is in a specific vertical For Jessica it is music. She also says she’s moving away from blogging towards Google +. @jessicanorthey.

 #3. Mari Smith. Mari is a leading Facebook marketing expert and one of the top 10, overall from last year. She’s also the author of The New Relationship Marketing. @marismith.

#4. Liz Strauss. Liz runs successful-blog.com. She’s currently taking on the challenge of cancer. Best wishes. @lizstrauss.

#5.  Pam Moore. Covering Facebook, Google + and the business of social. @pammktgnut

#6. Renee Blodgett. Deep seated social media marketing expertise with a long chain of references and endorsements from mainstream media. @magicsaucemedia

#7. Eve Mayer. Officially a LinkedIn expert writes about a diverse range of social media issues and tools – Pinterest, Instagram, Google +.@linkedinqueen.

#8. Kim Garst. Advice on a mixture of social media tools: Google Hangouts, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram etc. @kimgarst

#9. Lori Ruff. LinkedIn specialist who recently launched a new advisory service to guide companies on the use of the LinkedIn platform. @loriruff

#10. Ann Handley. Ann manages the content factory that is marketingprofs, a site that is producing better and better social media content, as well as being a content marketing expert in her own right. @marketingprofs

 

Newsgator Integrates Social Software into Core Work Process

I have written about NewsGator on a number of occasions (see for example: NewsGator Enhances its Social Sites 2010 Platform for SharePoint). I recently spoke with their new CEO, Daniel Kraft, as well as Stefanie Lightman who runs marketing and corporate strategy. NewsGator is a long time Microsoft partner for enterprise social on SharePoint with millions of active users of its Social Sites offering. Now it is moving beyond SharePoint to reach other work processes. To set the foundation for this new strategy they interviewed hundreds of customers and dozens of senior execs.

When asked how can NewsGator make social more useful, they were told to integrate it into work processes. This was already happening for some work with their SharePoint integration. SharePoint is not really social software but a system of record, in this case, documents. NewsGator provides a system of engagement to go with this system of record and make it really social.

Now they are expanding beyond SharePoint to other systems of record that tie in with an expanded sets of business process. NewsGator is preparing to create an even more robust social platform that taps the entire Microsoft ecosystem, as well as other enterprise-spanning applications. So they are now connected with such systems as: CRM, ERP, and HR through such products as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and MS Dynamics.  This is a wise move and one I have written about before (see for example: Putting Social Media to Work and Giving Social Media a Good Job). Here is a sample Social Sites interface.

Daniel mentioned that transactions systems such as SAP work fine as long as the answer to a process action is: yes or no. It is the exception handling that can bring productivity to its knees. This is where social can provide a huge productivity boast. If you take an exception into the social space, collaboration can be more efficient. More importantly, you have a record of the issue and the solution. This can be both reused to reduce the pain next time. More Importantly, it also serves as a diagnostic for where changes need to be made in work processes or peak demands anticipated. Below you can see a sample workflow request.

 

Social Sites can work with the enterprise apps in two ways. First, you can bring a transaction into Social Sites and work in this environment. You can also have a Social Sites activity stream appear as a notification bar within an enterprise app such as SAP.

Social Sites also works to support the individual worker who faces the huge increase in incoming content. They offer intelligent filters to help determine what is really important.  People have different personas depending on which projects they are working on or even the where they are in a business quarter. For example, as Daniel mentioned, a sales person will be taking a board view of the market for potential prospects at the beginning of the quarter and then zero in on a few highly qualified prospects as the quarter comes to a close. Here is a sample sale enablement screen.

NewsGator has also greatly expanded their mobile offerings to bring in all the social capabilities. Now an employee can do all their processing on their smart phone or tablet and not even have to deal with a traditional computer. See below for a sample mobile screen shot.

Getting employees to make productive use of the social capabilities requires more than installing software. The real benefits come when it impacts work processes. This requires changes in the way work is done. NewsGator also worked with their customers to create an adoption framework that they offer on an Open Source basis. It covers people engagement, business alignment and technology enablement.  

These are all great moves and I can certainly see why Social Sites is meeting new success. McKinsey has predicted huge productivity boosts from the connected enterprise. Social Sites is certainly a way to realize these projected gains.

 

Social Business Has More Work to Gain Real Satisfaction

Prescient Digital Media has released its latest useful report, Social Intranet Study. They interviewed participants in 651 organizations. Social media is becoming widely adopted as they found that most organizations (71%) have at least one social media tool available to some or all employees. The most popular social media tools are instant messaging, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and user commenting. Here is my post on their excellent 2011 study.

However, the average respondent organization gives their internal social media efforts a failing grade.  This can be a result of insufficient investments in both tools and adoption efforts. Prescient Digital Media found that failing grades show a direct correlation to investment where the average company spends about $10,000 or less on their internal social media (intranet 2.0).

To be specific, the five most popular social media tools are instant messaging, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and user commenting:

• 76% of organizations have instant messaging.
• 75% of organizations have blogs.
• 70% of organizations have discussion forums.
• 67% of organizations have wikis.
• 67% of organizations have user commenting.

The investments have been very modest. Most organizations spend little or nothing on their enterprise social media tools. This may explain the lack of satisfaction. Many organizations that implement social media tools spend less than US$10,000:

• 47% have spent less than US$10,000.
• 30% have spent between US$10,000 and US$99,999.
• 23% have spent US$100,000 or more.

Prescient Digital Media found that executives and employees alike are less than thrilled with their enterprise social media. To be specific:

• The average rating of internal social media by their host organization is 4.5 out of 10
• Only 22% of organizations rate employees' satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good.
• Only 17% of organizations rate executives' satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good.

I do not see this as an failing of social business but a failure in how it has been used in most organizations. As I have written many times, for social business to succeed it need to be integrated into work processes (see for example: Putting Social Media to Work and Giving Social Media a Good Job. That is not going to happen on these limited budgets.

 

Governments are Leading Many IT Innovations

This week I am back to covering emerging technologies and their practical uses. I have been seeing some innovative social business efforts from government for some time so this post, Governments Are Out Front in IT Innovation, was not a surprise. It mentions President Obama’s campaign to see innovation in IT, ranging from its use of big data to open source technologies. On his first day in office, the President also pledged to make the federal government a model for open data. It will take time but there is progress. The use of big data by his re-election campaign to target get out the vote efforts  remains a model for this space.

Innovation is also happening at the city level. New York has its own chief digital officer.  The article writes, “cities and states are not only making use of open source tools, they’re also walking the open source walk by participating in open source communities and contributing their work back to open source repositories such as GitHub.”

It goes on to add that, “in addition to releasing data that citizens can use, governments are increasingly making themselves more available electronically to help them fight crime, by predicting where crime is likely to occur.” I have seen the IBM ads on this type of effort. It makes a lot of sense. Below is an excerpt from a post I wrote after attending Lotusphere 2011. I t shows another innovative effort by government.

Tracy Hackshaw, is the Chief Solution Architect for iGov for the government of Trinidad and Tobago. Tracy discussed how the government is using social business for more effective e-government efforts. There are 1.3 million people in Trinidad and Tobago. A main goal is to increase the engagement of these people with their government and have them more satisfied with what the government is doing. They often look for what the people want and more interaction was a request.  Another was the simplification of information, which became another goal.

Within the country there is a high percentage of access to mobile phones so this was one channel they focused on. They wanted the user experience to be similar to what was offered on computers. One popular example was maps with the location of government offices and transit information on to reach them. Another was the reporting of such things as broken street lights or potholes in the roads. They have reduced the time that these issues are reported.

The different government agencies were each providing their own siloed source of information. So they consolidated this to offer a single, consistent point of access.  Different agencies could collectively created content that they shared with the residents. They also built in more interactivity to get greater feedback. They wanted the government to be more accessible so they created interactive town hall sessions.  They have achieved a 90% satisfaction rating from the residents and this is remarkable for government services. As you will see, each of these cases in their own way demonstrates the value of social business but, of course, I was already convinced. It is nice to see these tangible examples. 

Top 100 2013 Knowledge Management Influencers on the Twitter Hashtag #KM

MindTouch has a history of researching and producing lists of influencers. They recently shared their internal annual report of Techcomm influencers that they produced using LittleBird. This year, MindTouch also analyzed Knowledge Management influencers. It appears that they used the Twitter hashatg #KM as the basis for their research. While this captures some knowledge management people who use Twitter, specifically those who use the KM hashtag.

Here are the top eight on the list and there are some very good people here. I know all but the top one very well and they all deserve their rating.

1.  weknowmore
2.  David Gurteen
3.  Dave Snowden
4.  Stan Garfield
5.  Nancy White
6.  VMaryAbraham
7.  Jack Vinson
8.  Euan Semple

Here’s the entire list of 100 names to know in #KM. To be fair Aaron Fulkerson acknowledges, “We know there are several profoundly influential people not represented here. However, it should be clear that this list constitutes a core group of influencers in the KM space on Twitter.” I would agree that there are many influential people on the list and also that many are missing.  Those missing must not use the KM hashtag much.

Any list of top KM people that does not include Luis Suarez, Tom Davenport, Larry Prusack, and Clara O'Dell, to name a few, shows the limitations of sticking to one medium. Luis, for one, is very active on social media so he is the one I am most surprised to not see. This is not a criticism of the current list and Aaron does acknowledge the limits of the research. I commend them for making us aware of these 100, some of who I did not know before. 

We just need to be careful how we generalize from these lists. For example, I have ended up on some lists of top influences on things like SharePoint where I was not sure how I got there, even though they were algorithm based.  I am not surprised or concerned to not be on this list as I now write much more about social business and enterprise 2.0 than knowledge management and rarely, if ever, use the KM hashtag, even thoguh I rermain a strong supporter of KM. 

MindTouch plans to make available their list of top 100 influencers in customer support and customer experience. 

Darwin Ecosystem Rolls Out New Awareness Product, TweetZUP

I continue to be connected with Darwineco Systems and have been pleased with their progress. Last Fall they launched a new product under the name Tweather. It received “SAP Big Data Startup of the Year” award at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, held Sept. 10-12, 2012 in San Francisco. This latest achievement goes along with our win of the KM World Trend Setting Product in both 2011 and 2010 and the Most Promising Software award in 2010. Darwin was also named to the 100 companies that matter in 2010 by both KM World and eContent Magazine. The name has been changed to TweetZUP and the capabilities continue to be expanded.

TweetZUP.com is a free Web awareness utility, supported by online advertising, for anyone wanting to know and share in real-time “what’s up with tweets?”  With TweetZUP, users can create, save, set up alerts, and share their own ZUPs (pages) about any topic they care about on Twitter. For researchers, brand promoters, and anyone else who wants to find out what’s going on in any subject, identifying emerging, spiking and trending issues within a ZUP topic is easy, and alerts inform them of movements in the subject matter of interest. ZUP page sponsors can create self-reinforcing communities of users who are already interested in their product category.

Here is a blog post that shows how the tweets around the recent bombing in Boston evolved as the news emerged. It is free and I encourage you to give it a try.

 

Data is Made to be Shared

As reported in Information Week, a survey, Fostering a Data-Driven Culture, by the Economist Intelligence Unit indicates that executives who feel their organizations handle data collection, analysis and sharing well are also more likely to feel that their companies outperform their industry peers.

Specifically, 75.5% of those who indicated their organizations were "substantially ahead of peers" financially also said data collection was "very important/essential" in their organizations. In contrast, half of the executives who ranked their companies as "substantially" behind peers in data collection also indicated their organizations were "somewhat" behind financially.

I think that is it not just collecting the data but sharing it is key here. The report noted some interesting results in this issue. There is a double curve as smaller organizations believe in wide sharing, but sharing tends to tighten as companies grow and data-governance rules are applied. However, with really big companies data sharing opens up again.  The new digital workplace allows this sharing to occur, even in the largest organizations making them in some ways as nimble as the small ones.

In general there is a positive feeling for data usage on the job as 84% said "most to all" employees should work this way. Data is an asset that grows in value as it is used. The more people who see it the more valuable it becomes and more ideas can be generated from it.  You also need to educate workers to get the most from the available data. The research indicates that companies that invest in training for data skills perform better than their peers. Now that is a good finding that makes sense. 

Bloomfire Provides Comprehensive Knowledge Connections

Bloomfire is a relatively new offering in the knowledge management space, founded in 2010, that is meeting a need that has remained with us for some time: how do you connect people with the knowledge they need to accomplish their work tasks? This need has been made more acute with the advent of easy-to-use knowledge tools on the consumer Web. For the past few years, workers have become accustomed to accessing better knowledge tools in their personal life than in their work life. The goal of Bloomfire is to provide tools to close that gap. I spoke with Craig Malloy, CEO of Bloomfire, to get an overview of their offering.

Craig provided some stats on the knowledge-sharing problem. Knowledge workers spend up to 30% of their working day looking for data and only 44% of corporate users can find the (internal) file they’re looking for compared to 86% of similar internet users. I can relate to this as I have often asked audiences at knowledge talks to raise their hands if they can find content easier on their enterprise systems than on the Web. No one has ever raised their hand.

There are also issues with enterprise learning systems. Craig showed data that said more than 70% of important job-related knowledge comes from other workers or learning on their own rather than employment-related courses. I have seen more extreme stats that showed that 90% of knowledge came from informal sources. Bloomfire, unlike many social business systems, combines learning capabilities with social networking, content management, and cloud-based file sharing. I like this move.

There is great opportunity here as McKinsey has projected nearly a trillion-dollar market opportunity around creating better-connected enterprises. The convergence of social features, mobile capabilities, cloud storage, and new content tools, creates a compelling stage from which to address these benefits, which is where Bloomfire plays. Their mission is to “help businesses create, capture, display, save, and share information, connecting people who have knowledge with those who need it.” Through application integration, Bloomfire wants to be the “primary location to access relevant content, and the primary communication channel for noticing, collaborating, deciding and acting on information and knowledge.”

Bloomfire has successfully acquired more than 220 active customers to-date and raised $18 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures and Austin Ventures. Their two main use cases are social knowledge creation and sharing, as well as delivering social capabilities to enhance sales enablement. They integrate with popular CRM systems, such as Salesforce, to address the latter and have designed an easy to use a system designed for individual work groups, rather than enterprise wide implementation. This simplifies the adoption process and enables business users to gain quick access to Bloomfire’s capabilities. You can see a sample of their home page below.

The essential elements of the newest release of Bloomfire include a multimedia content engine, a social engagement system, an analytics dashboard, and enhanced iOS app and new Android support. The content generation includes co-authoring, drag and drop file management, and intelligent search. The social engagement features include Integration with LinkedIn so users can bring in their profile and not have to re-create profile information. There is also recognizing and mining expertise and recommendations. 

I was impressed by the comprehensive nature of Bloomfire’s analytics feature, including the ability to indentify content that provides the most benefit, as well as the content related activities of community members; there is also a “hands on the buzzer” measure that tracks the average time it takes to get an answer to a question. Craig said that their current time for internal use is two hours. Here are some sample analytics screens.

With the new mobile capabilities you can stash content on your smart phone by storing what you would like to read later and save it locally to your iOS device to  retrieve and view anytime, anywhere, regardless of connectivity options. Bloomfire will also release a full-featured mobile app for Android devices in Q2 2013. You can see a sample mobile interface below.

Bloomfire focuses on content management and knowledge sharing, rather than activity streams. There are notifications of several types and a notifications tab within the interface.  It also has strong capabilities for handling video as the team has deep experience in this space. You can see a sample video handling screen below.

I like the combination of features and the clarity of their goals and messaging. I can see why Bloomfire has attracted strong attention in a short time. I wish had these capabilities within a tool when I was implementing knowledge management systems a few years back. 

How Can a Restaurant Use Social Media?

Paul Beaulieu asks the question, Why is social media still underutilized by restaurants?, on the Smart Blog on Social Media.  He sites some useful stats such as: consumers are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals, 1% of U.S. survey respondents say friends’ social media posts have directly influenced a purchase decision, and 15.1 million consumers go to social media channels before making a purchase decision.

Paul does not provide data on the use of social media for restaurants. I do know some that are using Twitter, for example. It is very popular with food trucks as a way to reach a mobile audience. He does offer some ways for restaurants to use video and mobile. 

Here is a successful example for 2005 when the main form of social media was blogs. At the time Ben Williams ran a restaurant, Horsefeathers in North Conway, New Hampshire with his partner Brian Glynn. Ben writes a blog, “Horsefeathers Restaurant: It all about the food folks” to support his place.  The blog is no longer up so I cannot give you a link but it worked well then.

Ben started the blog to provide a more immediate presence than a static web site. He wanted to promote a loyal following and get regular return customers to the restaurant.  A restaurant needs steady customers to sustain itself.  Ben saw the blog as a way to create closer on-going ties to the local people and frequent visitors to the tourist area where they are located.  He was also not a technical person so the ease of use of the blog was appealing.

The effort has been reasonably successful when I spoke with Ben in 2005. The number of unique daily visitors was over a 100 and growing. He also noticed that the number of blog visitors fluctuates with the different highs and lows of the multiple tourist seasons in the mountain area.  It also peaks on Thursday when people are generally planning their weekend. These patterns suggested that visitors appear to be mostly potential restaurant customers and not simply web surfers. 

The success was also measured directly from the great feedback that Ben got from his customers. Ben wanted to use his blog to start conversations that will be continued at his place. Customers responded and talked about content in the blog when they came in to eat or listen to the music. Ben went beyond the traditional restaurant site content of menus and schedules and added regional information to give customers something to talk about and to promote more regional visitors. He wanted people to go to his site to find out what is going on in the area. The region has several seasons, summer hiking, winter skiing, and late fall seasonal shopping at the outlet stores. He focused content consistent with these seasons and wanted to be the trusted resource for area news.

Ben was also interested in getting more women to read his blog so he asked them for suggestions. He also tried to appeal to the many second home owners who want to stay in touch with the area so they will then think of his place when they return. When we spoke Ben was looking for new features and the blog currently includes current views of nearby Mount Washington, current weather in the area, news of the area, their live music schedule with pictures of the performers, cook books “from their prep tables,” and menus.  The posts include pictures and cover a variety of topics that would interest people who like food and like the area.  Their mission statement is to be “the greatest neighborhood eatery in the known universe.”

Now you can go beyond blogs and use other tools, as my favorite neighborhood, Chiba, does with Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, and Google+ recommendations.

 

April Fools: Facebook Fake Friends

Happy April Fool’s Day. Here is a good story for today. Unfortunately, it is real and a sign of the times like the PeerIndex offer to give you rewards for tweeting about products and their whole offering in general which seems easy to scam.  David Lee wrote about how you can buy Facebook “friends” in his story, Fake girlfriend: I paid for make-believe love on Facebook.

David found that for $5 you can hire someone to be your girl friend on Facebook. In fact, there are many people offering this online escort service. For example, one site, Fiverr, has many women - and some men - offering services relating to relationship activity on Facebook for $5. The US-based lists many things people are willing to do for $5.

He selected one and then interviewed her after a bit. David found that “Sophia” has made hundreds of dollars selling her "relationship status." He added that, “twenty-four-year-old Sophia is smart, pretty and has hopes and dreams of getting to grad school.” She also told him that, "the whole Sophia thing is just my marketing username. Nothing on that Facebook profile is real! My photos on there are really me, but nothing else is." Sophia started writing love notes on David’s Facebook page until he confessed that he was a journalist and interviewed her.

This is like all those services that offer you Twitter followers. I get suspicious when some has tens of thousands of followers so no obvious reason. All of these services discredit the value of followers and miss the point. I wrote more about this a while back, see my 2011 post - Our Obsession with Scoring is Now Taking on Individuals on the Web. BTW my Klout score is 56 but I have no idea in what that means nor have I looked at it since I wrote the post in 2011 when it was 55. I tried to find my PeerIndex score but I could not get the site to work. Perhaps it is still mad at me for what I wrote in 2011 when I was a 59. 

Wrike Provides Mobile Visualization of Project Schedules on an Interactive Timeline

Wrike offers on-demand, online project management and collaboration solution that helps both co-located and distributed teams work together in real time.  I have written about it several times before (see Wrike Provides Mobile Project Management). Here is Wrike’s Andrew Filev presenting a demo at IBM Connect 2013. Wrike integrates with IBM Connections to become more social.

Wrike's product vision is based on the innovative "work graph" model, connecting all work in one central hub that is comfortable to manage and navigate. Adopting the features of the "social graph" to the project collaboration space, Wrike allows users to bring together as many projects as they need and work on them in a scalable environment.

Wrike is now offering a dynamic Gantt chart as part of the latest version of its mobile apps for iPhone and Android smartphones.The mobile interactive timeline, one of the core planning tools that project managers rely on, inherits the key functions from Wrike's web app. Even when they are in the field, users can easily browse project plans from a bird's-eye view or in more detail, and quickly adjust them with a few taps. Just like on the Gantt chart in Wrike's web app, mobile users can reschedule tasks by dragging and dropping them, convert them to milestones, and change other details, for example, assignees.

Ready for installation from the App Store and Google Play, users can also, in three easy steps, configure Wrike's free mobile app to receive push notifications of project updates. As with the software's web-based version, schedule changes are readily visible in real-time to all team members.

 

JackBe Enables Business Intelligence to be More Accessible and Robust with Recent Moves

I have covered JackBe for a number of years and like their evolution from a mashup engine to making use of this capability for bringing business intelligence to the average business user (see for example, JackBe Expands Real-Time Operational Intelligence with its New Offering and JackBe Presto Provides Self-Service Business Intelligence on a Mobile Basis). I spoke with John Crupi, their CTO, and Sandra Hamorsky, Director, Product Marketing about their latest moves.

Presto 3.5, their latest release, provides business users with direct access to real-time KPIs and analytics through ease of use features, allowing them to move quickly without the need for IT support. This enables users to assess the business impact of changing conditions as they happen. Sandra gave a great example, a dashboard for hardware stores to best serve their customers during a storm situation. In this case it was Hurricane Sandy. Sandra had recently joined JackBe and saw the need to help hardware stores as she was having trouble getting the right tools in preparation for the storm.

This is a good example of a highly important support tool that is urgently needed quickly but will only be used for a short period. It is not a good candidate for a long wait for IT to produce something. So Sandra developed a dashboard in 45 minutes to help stores track the storm using the new DIY features of Presto 3.5. You can see the results below.

There are inventory checklists, along with the probable impact on supplies for each store, weather forecasts, a Twitter feed on the storm and other relevant data sources. This was all very useful as Sandy brought rain to the East and snow to the Midwest. I know these transitions from personal experience as I drove through the entire length of Sandy moving my belongings from Cambridge MA to New Orleans (see Driving Through Hurricane Sandy To New Orleans).

With Presto 3.5, business users can easily create real-time operational and key performance indicator (KPI)-driven apps and dashboards such as the one above that combine data from many live enterprise and social media information sources. John said that they had learned from customers that their IT departments were often not able to keep up with the demands of business users. Once the IT security, governance and protocols are in place - users can take advantage of Presto's self-service capabilities without having to go back to IT every time  they want to create new real-time apps and dashboards.

Presto 3.5 extends its user-friendly interface to include new options to create dashboards through drag-and-drop, to add custom visualizations as easily as plugging in the view, and to customize Presto with a customer’s own logo and colors. There are also pre-built KPIs.

Once created, all Presto dashboards are portable with HTML5 apps that run anywhere, including SharePoint, portals, websites, tablets and mobile phones with the same look-and-feel of the native device. Presto 3.5 also has enhanced security for mobile devices and a more secure single-sign-on experience for social media sites. This includes support for OAuth, used by many social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook. It allows you to combine social media with your enterprise data securely. The interface adapts to multiple devices. You can see the tablet and smart phone interfaces below.

John also covered their latest news, the collaboration with Terracotta to provide better support for the use of Big Data using the Terracotta BigMemory, capability. Big Data is an in-memory solution that delivers performance at any scale. The JackBe-Terracotta collaboration provides compatible tools and a platform for real-time Big Data analytics with:

• Real-time Big Data visual exploration, using in-memory analytics
• Analytic snapshots for instant visual trending and KPI insights
• Apps that visualize live and historical enterprise data mashed with Big Data
• Dashboards that business users can easily assemble quickly and share, with no programming

John said that Presto 3.5 with Terracotta BigMemory can make use of input from Hadoop, as well as other data sources including, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Windows Azure. Users are able to construct and make use of data directly from multiple sources without having to set up and feed a data warehouse. This is a huge time and cost saver.

John feels that analytics are the killer app for both social media and Big Data and I would agree. Putting the creation and use of business intelligence apps under the control of those who understand and need them is the key for adoption. JackBe is making great moves in this direction. 

The Need for Smarts as Well as Data

Rich Beatty published a nice article, Data Guides, But the Gut Decides, on how CMOs need to balance art and science in their decision making. The rise of social media is making conversations in the marketplace much more transparent. The corresponding rise of big data has got a lot of senior executives excited about getting access to what their customers are saying. But this data alone is not enough.

Rich found after in-depth interviews with more than 50 CMOs, “that CMOs who have successfully evolved their role in the organization have done so not through data and analytics alone, but by blending the art and science of marketing.” Rich concludes that “data is a commodity that can be had for a price, but art cannot be replicated. Science and art are important alone, but combined, they are the foundation and the accelerant for growth.” I certainly agree.

As a research scientist I was always taught to keep the results section of a research report separate from the conclusions section. This way readers could come to their own conclusions about the data. Also, it required the scientists to think about the implications of the findings. The same holds for the use of data in business. Thought is still required.

In North America in particular, there is an obsession with numbers. Numbers are good but they have their place. In an analogous way some people blindly rely on Robert Parker’s numbering system to tell them if a wine is good. However, as Adam Gopnik in the September 6, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”

In a similar perspective, Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article,Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. I would add: and what Robert Parker did for wine.  Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”

Personally, I think a little ambiguity and complexity is good. This is where creativity creeps in. Science does have its place and I was a scientist myself in a past life. Now I am a painter, as well as a writer. Both give you a perspective. I am glad to see Rich Beatty’s research supporting the need for a balance in facts and thought.

 

Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013: Part Three – Selected Details

As I wrote in the first part of this series, I recently received a review copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 by Jane McConnell. Jane has conducted the annual surveys since 2006 and published reports every year since 2007. My last post begin to look at some of the details in the report. The report is over 150 pages long so I will only scratch the surface. You can purchase the report through its web site, www.digital-workplace-trends.com. As I wrote, if you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy.

I was pleased to see a section on Process in the report. I think this is key to getting real value out of the digital workplace. As I wrote, it is integrating the interactions with the transactions and tying the social to business process where real change will occur. A post by Andy McAfee that made a similar point. He, in turn, quotes a post by Laurie Buczek, The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business. “Culture will change as a result of the pervasive use of social tools.  Lack of cultural change is not social business’s biggest failure.  The biggest failure is the lack of workflow integration to drive culture change.”

Jane found that there is much to do to solve this challenge. She reported that, “very few organizations have embedded social capabilities into enterprise processes. However anecdotal evidence suggests that social integrated into processes can successfully change the way people work.” She offers a lot of detail on to make this happen.

In the investment section, Jane reported that, “mobile is the priority area for investment for 2013-2014, with enterprise social networking and information architecture also at the top of the list.” I think that information architecture is a top priority. In addition to addressing the important people issues (so they are open to connecting and willing to step out of organizational silos), there are some essential technology ones, it is also necessary to get the applications connected so conversation do not occur in technical silos. As I wrote in Putting Social Media to Work, to be effective these systems that support interactions have to be integrated with the systems of record that support transactions. The social tools also need to be integrated with each other or companies are simply creating more silos of disconnection and benefits are not realized. Application connectors are a major key realizing the business benefits of the digital workplace.

Having said that technology is critical, so are people issues and Jane has a section on Change. She writes that, “resistance to social collaboration comes from perceptions about lack of business value and waste of time.” She also found in early adopters resistance tends to come from middle managers while in the majority it comes from senior management. I think this is because in the early adopters the senior managers have bought in so things are starting to change and hitting the middle management resistance. In the majority things have not progressed far enough for middle managers to really worry. Jane offers a lot of useful content and case examples on making change happen.

Jane appropriately concludes with a section on finding your direction.  She states that no journey is the same. However, there are some common directions to take. She encourages organizations to build a digital mindset and start with a big picture and use it to bring the diverse initiatives together. You need to focus on capabilities and not tools and define governance based on “freedom within a framework.” Always think integrated. There is much more. This is a very useful report.

 

 

Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013: Part Two – Selected Details

As I wrote in the first part of this series, I recently received a review copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 by Jane McConnell. Jane has conducted the annual surveys since 2006 and published reports every year since 2007. My last post provided an overview and this one dives into some of the detailed findings. The report is over 150 pages long so I will only scratch the surface. You can purchase the report through its web site, www.digital-workplace-trends.com. If you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy.

The report is organized into eight sections: transformation, mobile, social collaboration, process, experience, investment, change, and finding your direction. Transformation is going to happen and Jane found that most organizations are moving to the digital workplace concept but at different speeds – only 3% believe it does not concern them. I think this transformation will equal the significance of the industrial revolution and the related thinking of Fred Taylor but reverse many of its impacts. Collaboration tools can turn Taylorism on its head so learning goes up and down the enterprise and the whole structure is connected. The large can become nimble, as IBM has found out. Jane found that “early adopters differ from the majority of organizations in that their senior managers play an active role and are often the driving force behind the digital workplace.” Jane offers a number of excellent case examples in this and other sections.

Jane found that 2012 was the year mobile became a strategic priority for the digital workplace with 41% of organizations planning investment next year. The mobile initiatives tend to be focused on the needs of senior executives, those on the road and the field workers.  While this makes some sense, I think that everyone is a mobile worker now, even those with a desk. They often use their mobile device rather than their desktop one, even in the office. I imagine that there are few mobile workers without a mobile device. Jane did find that BYOD is widespread in the early adopters, with over 70% permitting or tolerating it. The others are catching up. However, as I mentioned in the last post, the mobile services offered today are limited in scope, with only 20% of organizations providing task-based or collaborative capabilities. The opportunity for value and competitive edge is very high here with these low numbers.

Jane found a wide range of social collaborative capabilities in place, with a high increase in interest in the past 12 months.  This corresponds to the work of Nora Barnes at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts who has also been looking at the business use of social media over the past few years. For example, Nora found that now 92% of the Inc. 500 are using at least one of the social business tools she studied such as blogs, and networks.

Jane found that the transformative capabilities are those with the highest gap between deployment and adoption. These include commenting, user- generated content, crowd-sourcing and social networking. They are disruptive because they challenge traditional roles and hierarchies in organizations. Yet I would add they are exactly the initiatives that will provide the most value.  Like all of the sections, the one on social collaboration is full of useful details that I will let you find in the report. This disruption impacts all of the efforts as Jane found that while early adopters have significantly more deployment, they still struggle with adoption. In many cases, even where social networks are deployed, they are not yet actively and broadly used. I do not see this as a shortcoming of the digital workplace, and a call to return to the old ways, but rather a challenge that the winners will overcome.

Let me digress with a story. When my grandfather was a country doctor in Oklahoma before it was a state, he would drive his horse and buggy for hours doing rounds. When he was finished and exhausted, he would throw the reins over and the horses knew the way home. Then he bought the first car in the county. Part of the deal was that the salesman lived on the farm for two weeks teaching him how to run and maintain the new machine. However, he kept falling asleep at the wheel and the car did not know the way home. Fortunately the roads where still related to the old means of transportation and the car would just stall in the wagon runts. He was ready to go back to the horse when he got the idea to teach one of his daughters to drive the car. She cam along and took over when he got tired. We need to figure out how to get along with our new technology, because, like the horse and buggy, the old technologies days are numbered.

This is enough for one post. I will finish my coverage of the selected details in my next post.

 

Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013: Part One – Overview

I recently received a review copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 by Jane McConnell. I have seen prior reports and was very impressed so I was pleased to get this latest version. I am going to review it in several posts since the 150+ page report deserves this type of coverage. I met Jane at KM World. She has 14 years of extensive hands-on consulting experience with intranet and digital workplace strategy in large, global organizations.  Jane has conducted the annual surveys since 2006 and published reports every year since 2007. Data for this report was collected in the fourth quarter of 2012. The findings are based on an online survey of over 100 questions with participants from 362 organizations around the world, from a wide range of industries.

The report indicates that, “the top two goals of the digital workplace - rated equally important - are “organizational intelligence” and “efficiency and cost savings.”  This corresponds to McKinsey’s 2012 Projected Business Value of Social Business at a Trillion Annually. In 2010 they reported, Enterprise 2.0 finds Its Payday where they found significant quantified benefits from the business use of social media. Similar results were found in 2011.

Jane writes that the digital workplace is a work in progress with different dimensions, not all equally mature. They include managed information and processes, structured collaboration, social collaboration and a mobile dimension. She adds that it is transformative and I would certainly agree.

Jane makes several predictions. First, 2013 is the year where mobile takes off. She found that 60% of organizations consider mobile to be important and have already made “significant” or “some” investment. Last year the figure was just under 40%. There is still much to be done here as Jane found that 45% of organizations offer either no mobile or simply access to email. Only a third offer “basic services,” such as calendar, directory and news. An even smaller number, 20%, have provided mobile access to work tools for collaborative, HR and other task-related needs. This is where the real value that McKinsey talks about will occur.

Jane also found that, “adoption lags far behind deployment for the social capabilities that empower individuals and self-organizing communities and challenge traditional hierarchies and roles within organizations.”  She adds that enterprise social networking is deployed in 70% of the early adopters and 35% of the majority. However, it has not reached a critical mass of usage even for many of the early adopters.  I think realize that the change to social business is going to happen. As I saw recently at IBM Connect 2013, IBM is betting the company on it and I think that is a wise move.  But most organizations still do not really know how to do it.

Leading the resistance to change are the middle managers, not the senior officials but that has probably been the case since the Roman army. Jane found that the most effective change driver is “colleague and peer” behavior. At the same time many senior managers have embraced the reality of the digital workplace. I think one of the threatening aspects of the digital workplace to middle managers is that it shortens the distance between employees and senior management, taking out the gate keeper and filtering role that many middle managers play. However, companies are going to have to deal with this as middle managers are the backbone of the organization and change will generally not happen without their engagement.

The report is organized into eight sections: transformation, mobile, social collaboration, process, experience, investment, change, and finding your direction. I will cover some of the details in my next post, Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 – Selected Details. You can purchase the report through its web site, www.digital-workplace-trends.com. If you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy. 

Social Media Settles into the Inc 500 in 2012

Nora Ganim Barnes at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has released another very useful report, 2012 Inc 500 Social Media Settles In. This time it was co-authored by Ava M. Lescault who is also at the center as Senior Research Associate and Associate Director.  Here are some recent other reports (Social Media Continues to Increase in the 2012 Fortune 500 and The Enduring Nature of Blogs and Blogging.

The latest study looks at the Center’s work on the Inc. 500 social media usage for the sixth consecutive year. This longitudinal data makes it a valuable study of corporate use of these new technologies. The new study compares social media adoption among the 2012 Inc. 500 with previous years.  For example, the Center’s first study of this group in 2007 showed that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the based Fortune 500 in their use of social media. In those early years of social media, 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500. This difference continued in all subsequent years and the 2012 data suggests that pattern holds with 44% of the 2012 Inc. 500 blogging and just 23% of the Fortune 500. 

In addition, the study found the incorporation of new platforms and tools including FourSquare and Pinterest, an increased use of LinkedIn and blogging, along with a drop in the use of YouTube and Facebook. Now 92% of the Inc. 500 are using at least one of the tools studied.  The research questions continue to evolve with the market. For example, they dropped wikis as they are used more as a collaboration tool than a communications/ engagement tool and divided the social networking category into specific tools and platforms. 

Some of the key 2012 findings include the rise of the Marketing department as the group responsible for social media and a continued increase in blogging by the Inc. 500. The rate moved from 37% to 44%. I like to see this trend as blogging remains very relevant for anyone wanting to get a substantive message out and start conversations. My own work with AppFusions and the AppGap brings this home to me.

There are other tools with an even stronger usage base. The platform most utilized by the Inc. 500  in 2012 is LinkedIn. With 81% usage it replaced Facebook as the tool of choice for these fast growing companies. The use of Facebook has dropped 7% in the past year while both LinkedIn and Twitter have gained users. In 2011, Facebook was being used by 74% of the Inc. 500 and Twitter by 64%. In 2012, 67% of the Inc. 500 used each of them. Looking at some new tools, 28% are now using Foursquare and 18% use Pinterest. 

Spending on social media seems to be leveling off. 2012 found 44% now looking to spend more on social media vs. 71% in 2011. At the same time 41% (vs. 25% in 20122) say their level of investment will remain the same as last year. It was interesting to see that the Inc. 500 appears to be growing less attentive to their social monitoring activity with 63% engaged in it compared to 68% in 2011 and 70% in 2010. I find this puzzling as part of the real value of social media is making conversations in the market more accessible to companies.

Looking at ROI remains less of a priority with only 33% reporting the ability to financially determine the return on their social media investment. Of those, 19% believe they have cut recruiting costs due to their social media investments. This may be tied to the increased use of LinkedIn.  There is much more in the free report and I highly recommend looking at it. 

Meltwater Enables Effective Media Listening, Outreach, and Management

Meltwater is dedicated to helping you find relevant media contacts, manage outreach campaigns, monitor and analyze what is being said in the traditional press, and help engage and drive campaigns in social media. It was founded in Norway and is now a global company headquartered in San Francisco.  I am currently using one of their products, Meltwater Press. I recently spoke with Pauliina Rauhamaa about their two public relations solutions, Meltwater Press and Meltwater News.

Meltwater Press offers a media contact database, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) search engine to locate relevant press contacts, and a press release distribution and management system. I have used it to easily create a number of media contact lists on relevant topics to my work. Meltewater Press is organized around finding relevant reporters, both in traditional media and key bloggers, rather than around general topics or beats that can be incorrect or out of date.

You build your media lists by first picking key terms. The NLP search engine returns relevant journalists and bloggers who have written articles discussing those topics, ranked by their relevance. You can then see either all of their work or the work relevant to your topic and select the time period to cover. You can click through to see the actual articles. Here is sample set of returns below.

Once you find a relevant reporter, it is easy to add them to an existing list or create a new one. The reporters are described and contact information is usually available. You can then contact them through Meltwater individually or as a group. There are useful tools within Meltwater to manage this process. You can also export the lists to other applications such as Excel. Below is a sample media list.

You can embed images in your outreach. The media distribution tools include the ability to see who does and doesn’t read your email or press release. You can use graphic analysis to get an overview of journalist memes, users; and identify and understand trends.

We next looked at Meltwater News, a real-time media intelligence platform designed to enable you to monitor your brands presence across online media, as well as follow relevant topics. While Meltwater Press is organized around reporters, Meltwater News is organized around topics. They monitor over 200,000 online news sources worldwide, including several blogs that I write for.

You can set up searches based on keywords and use Boolean logic to refine these searches. You can also select what types of news sources you want to include such as top tier journalists, news from relevant countries, or even drill down to track a specific list of outlets you are particularly interested in. The searches can be on your brand. For example, I was able to see spikes in mentions of my topics and then drill down to see what sources and content caused these spikes.  

The reports can also be on relevant topics. For example, Pauliina showed me how to set up daily reports on topics of current interest. If the results are too broad, you can add filters to narrow them down. There is an intelligence dashboard that gives you a multidimensional overview of the latest trends. Automated sentiment analysis gives you an overview of media tone.

In addition to traditional media, Meltwater News looks at social media conversations on more than 200 million blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other sources.  The volume of content on the Web is ever increasing with more content generated every few years than in the entire prior history. Tools with the capabilities of Meltwater are essential for keeping up with what is relevant and taking advantage of it for both business intelligence and media outreach.

They also offer Meltwater Buzz specifically targeted to social media and social media marketing. My experience with Melwater Press suggests that this entire suite of products is both easy to use and comprehensive. 

 

 

 

My IBM Connect 2013 Session Notes: Complete Listing

Here is the complete listing of my notes on IBM Connect 2013. I was very pleased to be back again after the last two years thanks to IBM’s support. Here are my notes from 2011 and 2012 

 IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Opening Session

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Monday Morning Press Q&A

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Four Major Trends Shaping Social Business in 2013

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Creating a Smarter Workforce – Panel

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Tuesday Opening Session

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Reinventing the Inbox – Ed Brill

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Wednesday Opening Session

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Getting Social in the Cloud – Rebecca Bulsan

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Social Business Goes to School

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Innovation Lab

Here also are several recent posts on IBM.

IBM Global CMO Study: Highlights

Social Business – What Works and How: Highlights of IBM 2012 Social Technologies Study

IBM Connections 4.0 Expands Its Social, Integration, and Analytic Capabilities

 

IBM Connect 2013: Ed Brill on Reinventing the Inbox

This is another in a series of my notes on IBM Connect 2013. I am very pleased to be back again after the last two years thanks to IBM’s support. Here is a summary of my notes for 2012 and 2011. These notes cover the Monday Press Session: Reinventing the Inbox with Ed Brill, Director, Social Business & Collaboration, IBM.

I first meet Ed Brill in person at the 2011 Lotusphere. He remembered our phone interview six year earlier when I was collecting cases for blog book. Here is that interview: Blog Cases from 2005: Ed Brill on IBM, Collaboration, and More. Ed said he liked the case as it showed that he was talking about social before the term was commonly used. I would certainly agree that he was ahead of most people in using social apps.

Before I get into the session I want to mention, Ed’s excellent new book, Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager. I had a chance to preview the first few chapters. As I wrote in response to this preview: Opting In is an important book that takes social business beyond external marketing to provide practical guidance on how to drive significant business value through enhancing human interactions within the enterprise. McKinsey's research has demonstrated many quantified benefits here and Ed shows you how to realize them. I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

Ed runs product management for messaging, collaboration, and unification. The two big new things this year are improvements to existing apps through Social Notes 9.0 and IBM docs.  Ed said that email has become dysfunctional and needs to be transformed. Adding social capabilities will greatly increase its efficiency and I would certainly agree. Some of the content that used to be in broadcast emails has already moved to social apps for good reason. But there needs to be changes to email itself. This is happening in several ways.

There is embedded experience so that email alerts can come into other apps you are working on. You can respond to the email without leaving the other app. Another major change that is coming is to use analytics to prioritize your mail so the most relevant messages come to the top of the email inbox, replacing the simple chronological order that has been standard for some time. There could be several different types of filters for this prioritization such as skills, team membership, location, or relevance to a project you are working on. Ed said that one challenge will be getting people to trust the prioritization.

Within IBM as an organization, Connections has replaced the portal as the first place people go. Now you can have mail within Connections so you do not have to leave it. There is also a discovery engine that teaches people how to use the new features. One capability I really like, is the ability to act on a message directly. For example, you might get a request from HR in an email that requires using an HR app. You can respond to the request directly in the email without having to go to the app.

We talked a bit about activity streams as they also have this embedded ability to respond to requests from apps. Email and activity streams are now two parallel communication channels. Activity streams are for public information, as many people can see them. Ed said they can be useful for discovering new information. Email remains the channel for private communication. It is still necessary but some of its uses have moved to better tools. Here is a list of features for Notes 9.0 from the IBM product page.

• Provides an easy-to-use, single point of access to everything you need to get your work done quickly, including business applications, email, calendars, feeds, and more.
• Lets you tailor your work environment with widgets that bring social communities that are important to your job, both within the enterprise and across the Internet, right into your peripheral view.
• Enables you to work with people right at the point of context with social tools weaved into the work experience, allowing you to pivot to the tool you need, such as business cards, presence awareness, instant messaging, and more.
• Helps you quickly locate the people and content you need through integrated access to social tools from IBM Connections and IBM Lotus Quickr® software, including profiles, activities, team places, and content libraries.
• Offers advanced replication technology to enable you to work with email and applications even when disconnected from the network.

Sometimes changes to becoming more social can have unintended consequences. For example, Ed mentioned a CEO who started a blog to more directly communicate with his workforce and allow for two-way exchanges that email messages did not promote.  Employees were so pleased to have a communication channel with the CEO that many comment threads got pushed into topics unrelated to his post. So he set up a second app, called the Speaker’s Corner, to allow for these comments. This allowed his first blog to stay more on topic.

Ed said that Notes use remains very active. In fact, many clients who let their Notes licenses expire are coming back. The added social features are one driver of this re-engagement.

IBM Docs also has integrated social features. You can open a document and invite others to collaborate on it in real time. In traditional word processing you designate a file name and place it in a file structure. It is document oriented. IBM Docs is more people oriented. You open a document and place in a location such as a team workspace within Connections, not an abstract file structure. Then others can be invited into this workspace. I see this people orientation as a great improvement and one of the shortcomings of MS Word and SharePoint. IBM Docs can work in the cloud as IBM SmartCloud Docs is a cloud-based office productivity suite, which allows users to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents. Here is a sample screen.

Notes can also be in the cloud. IBM recently did a study on the cloud and found that organizations – both big and small, across geographies and in virtually every industry – are embracing cloud as a way to reduce the complexity and costs associated with traditional IT approaches. Almost three-fourths of the leaders in their survey indicated their companies had piloted, adopted or substantially implemented cloud in their organizations – and 90 percent expect to have done so in three years. And the number of respondents whose companies have substantially implemented cloud is expected to grow from 13 percent today to 41 percent in three years.

There is also extensive mobile support including client and clientless (HTTP, browser based) access options and seamless network connectivity as you roam. There is optimized network utilization to reduce data transmission and connection costs. Notes Mobile Connect also supports a wide range of device types - mobile, desktop, laptop - for security-rich connection into business infrastructure. It is nice to see that Notes in alive and well and entering the social age. This move should ensure its longevity. 

IBM Connect 2013: Tuesday Opening Session Notes

This is another in a series of my notes on IBM Connect 2013. I am very pleased to be back again after the last two years. Here are my notes from 2011 and 2012. Bob Piccano, IBM General Manager led the opening session. The theme was the rise of social business - moving from liking to leading. These notes are real time so please forgive any typos. 

    
Bob Piccano opened the session. He mentioned that this was the 20^th year of this conference.   He has moved to a new post leading the big data efforts across IBM.  He introduced Adam Klaber, Managing Partner, New Markets, who is working on big data among other things. IBM is moving from systems of transaction to systems of engagement. This has major transformation implications. I have written about this concept a bit (see for example, Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions and Integrating Transactions and Interactions: A Fable).

Adam said that customers are leading the conversations that define brands. Partners are interacting to accelerate business value. Employees are using social media in all aspects of the their lives, including work. Organizations are crowdsourcing ideas to bring better solutions.

Adam mentioned the four Is: Interact, inform, integrate, and innovate. Each builds on the other. This shift is enabled by technology supported social interactions. They are releasing a study on how companies are moving forward in social. Over half of the organizations are shifting their investments to social technology. They are also looking at the cultural change. IBM is doing more than technology but also helping with the social change.

They have formed a cross-disciplinary group on front office transformation and a center of competence in this space. He moved to client examples in healthcare, retail, and government. He began with healthcare,

Dan Pelino came out to discuss healthcare. There is now a huge increase of people getting healthcare benefits in the US.  Thirty million new people are coming into the system. It is the largest single change for any industry. It will change everything including the use of technology.

Dan began with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. I was a subscriber of this Blue Cross for years when I lived in Cambridge until I recently moved back to New Orleans. Bill Fandrich the CIO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts spoke. They have been dealing with universal coverage since 2006 when Massachusetts passed the first laws in this area. When they started today’s smart phones were not in the market, yet these devices are now the primary ways members access their benefits.

There is now a new paradigm, out pacing Moore’s law on change with growth of over 45% per year. The real question is whether they are getting insights from the massive amounts of data or is this just an expense. There was now coverage for 411,000 uninsured residents and only 1.9% remain uninsured. They are the glue that connects members and providers. They look at all the touch points in the process.  They keep a 360 view of their members to provide better care at less cost. They want to provide more personalized health care. I have received calls on some of the issues he raised.

Next, Maree Foti, HR manager at David Jones, a department store in Australia, They have 36 stores with 8,000 employees. They are the older department store still on their original name.  They started a working group to have more two way communication with employees. They need a platform with two-communication, anywhere, anytime while complimenting existing infrastructure. They have started a pilot of IBM Connections with 1,000 employees. They have 65% take up in three months. There are also behavioral changes.

Usage is strong with 64% access the system several times a week. More than 55% believe it will enhance two-way communication. The top three benefits; Increased knowledge of the firm, more direct link to leadership team, and a greater sense of community and collaboration. Her three top tips: bring the platform to life for users, focus on content, content, content; and engage champions at all levels of the business.  Moving forward their focus in changing to find ways to obtain business benefits. They want to create platform for social business.

Dan next introduced the government example. Municipalities affect how we live so better participation in good for everyone. Jeff Rhoda, General Manager, IBM. We are all touched by government. The issues that have been discussed all apply to government: big data, collaboration, analytics, cloud, and mobile. For example, police can use analytics to predict where crimes will occur to prevent them before they happen. I have seen the TV commercial about this.

Dan introduced Mike Van Milligen from the city of Dubuque to discuss how they engaged citizens to help with local challenges. They have come back from population loss to create a growing community that is sustainable. They use smarter technologies to give new information to citizens and business to save money. If you give people the right information, they will make smarter decisions. Water was the first example. Thee hundred volunteer households were given a portal looking at water use. It resulted in a 7% reduction in water use and 800% increase in water leak detection. The also did a smarter electricity study with over 1,000 participants. They received a 4 - 7% cost savings in electricity. Over 70% took actions to converse electricity. The state officials in Iowa to look for sate wide use. Next they are wrapped a smarter travel study. They are developing better bus routes.

Mike said the lessons include:

• Incremental change is best
• Synthesize and analyze large amounts of data from unrelated and unstructured sources
• Reach people on through multiple channels

They are focused in creating sustainable model for cites under 200,000 where 40% of the US population lives. They revamped their riverfront. They have a population of 60,000 but 3 million live within a 100 miles.

Dan concluded the three part case examples and Bob came back to wrap up the morning session. He began an architectural discussion with systems of record. There are now machine-to-machine interactions. At the top end of the stack you have systems of engagement.  A big data platform links the two. Content is curated and made useful for analytics and subsequent decisions. They are releasing a new version of IBM social analytics, formerly known as Cognos. It will be available on a SaaS model. The platform allows big data can be used at the point of impact.  There is interaction data, attitudinal data, behavioral data, and more.  An airline manufacturer saved 36 million in shorter service calls, another client process 17 billion bits of data on a daily basis. They have now 300 business partners in this space and have released their Stored IQ product. 

IBM Connect 2013: My Monday Opening Session Notes

This is the first in a series of notes on IBM Connect 2013. I am very pleased to be back again after the last two years thanks to IBM’s support. Here are my notes from 2011 and 2012. These notes are real time so please forgive any typos. Alistair Rennie, IBM General Manager led the opening session which began with a very loud and good rock band. They said this was the earliest performance in 30 years. The band was They Might Be Giants.

Alistar asked if we were awake after the performance. This is the twentieth year of Lotusphere. In the next 20 years IBM is going to focus on how to empower people. I was at the 2000 Lotusphere with a client presenting one of the first SameTime and Quickplace implementations with Ryder.

He then introduced the actor, Joseph Gordon Levitt who started a web site, HitRecord.org, to promote creativity. You can upload music and videos. Then anyone can download it and build on the creation. This is to promote collaboration. One of the videos was “A man with a turnip for his head”. The moral was live with what you have and do not try to hide it. They have created a positive community around the site. This is counter to what happens sometimes in Hollywood. It was started by Joseph and his brother it started slow and positive. He rewarded good work, rather than trash stuff. It makes people feel good and willing to put their art on the site.

He also said much creativity is built on past work. So people need to let go of their sense of ownership, at HitRecord.org when you upload material, you give others the non-exclusive right to build on it. For example, “A man with a turnip for his head” was a poem. Gary Oldman read the poem and they took audio and put it on the site. Then he requested the community to make illustrations, then another request was made for an animated film based on the narrative and the winning illustration. Then he asked for music and that was added. 29 different people contributed and they contribute the profits to this group. They have about 150,000 members. At each step members vote on everything, including how much each contributor should get.

Alistair took a video of the crowd to contribute to HitRecord.org. He said “The site is a great living laboratory for collaboration”. He then talked about being a member of bike riding community. There is an online community to support their efforts and other riding groups. Looking at what others are doing, encouraging them to start performing better. Community plus competition can drive performance. Getting everyone involved is key. Connection is key. I would add that application integration is an important part of this connection.

The IBM Social Business Platform is now licensed by 60% of the Fortune 500. This platform was featured next. Sandy Carter and Jeff Schick demonstrated the social platform. Sandy said that social is a life style change. So IBM did both technology and a methodology. Now they have introduced a best practice adoption program.

Luis Benitez showed how a sales manager can be supported to run his team. He built a sales hub for his sales team community using out-of-the-box capabilities. Their content “gets social” to obtain the collective wisdom of their group. There is multi-way video for conversations available for laptops and tablets. Next, an interactive table top by Foresee, where you can see and manipulate the content through multiple means including drawing on the table. You can drag people into the team and then provide them with guidance. Luis next showed Notes 9.0 Social Edition that combines mail with social. Email messages can be made social. File Sync allows you to integrate with iPad, Mac, Windows, etc. IBM Docs will allow multiple users to edit docs at the same time.

Sandy said that an IBM study found 57% of CEOs believe social is a key driver. One senior exec said social revealed one company’s culture. Connections will have another release, as will SameTime. Everything will be available in the Cloud. They also have Adoption Services & Strategies along with Customer Council.

Bosch’s use of social was the next topic. Their CIO spoke. Bosch offers automotive, industrial, and consumer products. I had a Bosch dishwasher, washer, and dryer recently and they were the best examples of those appliances I have owned. They promote collaboration and diversity through a social business strategy. IBM Connections is their platform for this company wide collaboration. They started with pilots, but will open it to everyone soon. Community managers are key to success for this to work.

Craig Hayman next spoke about Steam-punk, a new trend. They found this using social analytics. Customer experience is more important than ever before. You need to turn them into advocates by listening for what they want and then acting on it. For example, 50% of customers are using mobile devices in stores.

Social analytics were demonstrated using a climbing gear company, Greenwell Sports, case example. I am very familiar with this space as my daughter is the Editor of Alpinist Magazine. There is a lot of gear talk in this space and much discussion on the Web. The firm using Facebook, Twitter, and other means to link back to the right gear on their site. It has resulted in huge increases in sales. They built a community around canyoneering with Connections.

ING is a company that looks at where abandonment occurs and built in remedies. Expedia and Shop.ca, did the same thing. Jeff Bowman from Caterpillar next spoke. Now customers often start online. This undermines their traditional face-to-face selling approach. So now they are adding social online to remain competitive.

Social recruiting was next covered to demonstrate some of the Kenexa capabilities. The applicant starts with an assessment. Then analytics are used to find the best match. Once selected an on-boarding portal streamlines the process. There are collaborative social learning experiences to share expertise. The many resources that are available are easy to find. Questions can have a video context to better explain what is needed and get better answers.

Mike Rhodin spoke next. He said it is the 11th time he has spoken here. Introducing Neil Armstrong was his best experience. IBM now works as social enterprise. I have interviewed Mike on a number of occasions and really appreciate his big picture thinking. He said that big data is allowing us to see patterns that were not thought of before. This is allowing businesses to transform and re-invent themselves. They can target individuals rather than simply segments. Mike said that analytics is key and I could not agree more. Social opens up content to be mined through analytics. Mike said analytics is the new language of business and IBM is investing heavily here.

Blog Cases from 2005: Ed Brill on IBM, Collaboration, and More

This is another in a series of case studies from people I interviewed in 2005 about their blogging efforts. Now as we move to 2013, I find it interesting to look back at the early days of business blogging. I will only include cases from people who are still blogging now. These cases have not appeared on this blog before.

I am pleased to be at IBM Connect 2013 today and thought Ed Brill’s blog would be an appropriate case to share. It is my third year attending the event formerly known as Lotusphere. Here are my notes from Lotusphere 2011 and Lotusphere 2012. I will be providing my notes from this year's session over the next weeks. 

I first meet Ed Brill in person at the 2011 session. He remembered our phone interview six year earlier. Before I get into the interview I want to mention, Ed’s excellent new book, Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager. I had a chance to preview the first few chapters. As I wrote in response to this preview: Opting In is an important book that takes social business beyond external marketing to provide practical guidance on how to drive significant business value through enhancing human interactions within the enterprise. McKInsey's research has demonstrated many quantified benefits here and Ed shows you how to realize them. I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

When I spoke with Ed in 2005 he was the Business Unit Executive, Worldwide Notes/Domino Sales and had been with IBM Lotus for over ten years. He still has a senior leadership position at IBM and is now Director, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, IBM. He is responsible for the product and market strategy for IBM's messaging, collaboration, communications, and productivity products, including Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM SmartCloud Notes, IBM Sametime, Lotus Symphony, IBM Docs, and other related social business solutions. Ed also continues to writes the blog, Ed Brill, Collaboration, technology, travel, and more.  The latest tagline also includes the word Chicago after travel.

Ed supplied an excellent summary of his blog experiences in a December 26, 2004 post, The blogging year in review. “When I started blogging a little over two years ago, I had little sense as to where the endeavor might lead.  I've enjoyed writing all my life, and initially, I thought that this would be little more than an online journal, gratifying to compose. In the first year in review posted in 2003, Ed said, “I didn't talk much about the professional aspects of blogging.  At the end of the second year, it is hard to consider much else.  For 2004 is when this blog turned a corner from outlet to focal point, from hobby to vocation, and from carefree to considered.”

Ed said in our 2005 interview, ”Some of that transition started the very week after I penned the 2003 retrospective, as I entered a time which was personally very intense, leading up to and beyond Lotusphere.  More of it happened during widely-watched blog world activities in the second half of 2004.  As I re-read all my 2004 blog entries over the last few days, it became clear that my blogging style has changed considerably in that time.”

This late 2004 post continues with an excellent summary of his activities. By then he had about 10,000 hits a day and was in the top 1% of Technorati ranked blogs. Ed reported that he initially began blogging, to have an outlet for writing about new products, market trends, competition, but also about general life -- travel, marketing, even family.  Ed felt that his original objectives for his blog have been met, as they were fairly narrow in scope. He added, “I've made blogging an integral part of my communications.” 

By the time we spoke Ed’s blogging objectives had evolved substantially.  His readership had become broad and diverse, but 90% composed of IBM customers/partners.  As such, Ed had to narrow the topical focus -- He mostly wrote about the collaboration software market the time, with occasional travel or other life tidbits thrown in.  The blog now had an impact on the market, so it was no longer simply a hobby for Ed.  Within that context, his revised objectives continued to be far exceeded -- reaching more customers than he thought possible, with more positive impact for IBM than expected.

Ed’s biggest challenge came when he went through a period of time that all bloggers do, where he felt like he was a slave to the blog.  Ed reported that he had the standard feeling that if he wasn't updating daily, he would lose the readership.  Ed had gone through "dry spells" where he didn't think he has enough interesting content.  

Ed found that his challenges were just a blogging maturity issue.  As the readership grew, and the technology used to read blogs (RSS) became mainstream, he didn't feel as much pressure from the blog.  He felt that, “RSS is a very "forgiving" technology -- gives readers more control over what they want to read, and gets me away from the "must blog to keep readership" mindset.”

Ed maintained good relationships with his communications and legal teams to ensure that any questionable content could be discussed openly.  Since Ed was, and still is, an official spokesperson for IBM, he has been "press trained" and is very aware of what is or is not appropriate to say in public.   

Ed advocated the need for companies to have some kind of open-yet-controlled policy towards blogging.  Ed commented, “Blogging is not a fad, and it can be incredibly advantageous to corporations.  There's a way to make it useful yet not porous.”

Whne we spoke in 2005 about half of Ed’s content was commentary on other web content -- usually press articles about IBM, Microsoft, and other major collaboration vendors.  Another 30% was original content about things going on within IBM or the market.  The remaining 20% was the human face -- travel adventures, new geek toys, people news.

Business owners can find a variety of useful information on Ed’s blog.  If they are a software consultancy, they might learn of new opportunities to leverage IBM software.  If they are more like a law firm or doctor's office, he believed his blog would be of less value.

Ed read the blogs of small or independent consultancies in his marketplace.  Ed found that their perspective wasn't always mainstream, but he usually learns of interesting projects.  He did find that in 2005 that too many of the small/solo consultancies in his field who blog, spend too much time straying off topic.  He felt that maybe that will change.

Ed enjoyed reading the blogs of his customers and business partners. Outside of that, he read a few blogs that are more general IT industry focused. During the 2004 election, Ed was quite addicted to some of the political blogs. In 2005 Ed also wrote for Chicago version of metblogs.com, a group blog about life in Chicago. I notice that the topic, Chicago, has been added to his own blog since the interview. Ed found this an interesting format, but he was not sure how broadly they were developing readership.

Ed offered the following advice to have for others in large organizations thinking about starting a personal blog?

1. Focus.  Make sure you have a topic or topics in mind and try to stick to them.  Stray too far a field and you'll lose readers.
2. Stay within the lines.  Blogging must still respect an organization's business conduct guidelines.  Don't disclose anything you wouldn't want to show up in the Wall Street Journal -- even un-attributed.
3. Remember that "lurkers" far outnumber those interacting with you on your blog.  What you write can echo far beyond who you think will see it, and lives forever in Google.
4. Watch for slang and colloquial expressions -- you are writing for an international audience.  
5. Measure the weight of your words.  I rarely make negative comments about my customers or partners, even when they do stupid things (and they -do-).  To say anything negative has a silencing effect on a much broader population.  Conversely, I have found that people take my recommendations more strongly than they deserve -- apparently a place on my "blogroll" is coveted, which I never expected when I started it.

I think his advice is still quite relevant. It is great to see that Ed continues to publish his blog despite what must be a very busy schedule. 

 

The Joy of Getting Disconnected

Happy Holidays. Time to disconnect. There have been so many surveys about the addictive power of social media and the need to stay in touch with email.  For example a 2009 study found that It found that their sample used social media in the car (over 35 – 9%, under 35 – 40%), at work (over 35 – 29%, under 35  - 64%), on vacation (over 35 – 41%,  under 35 - 65%), on a date (over 35- 9%,  under 35 - 34%), and after sex (over 35 - 8%,  under 35 - 36%).  More recent studies find the numbers growing. With email it is even worse,

The New York Times addressed this issue recently with, The Workplace Benefits of Being Out of Touch. Sounds good to me. The problem is that most of us feel that if everyone else is available 24 hours, then we have to be, too. The article quotes, Dalton Conley, dean for the social services at New York University and author of “Elsewhere” (Pantheon, 2009), “Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — if we’re always available, then we’re expected to always be available.”

However, the article goes on to say that companies are increasingly realizing that employees need to be disconnected from time to time and that “giving workers time to chill helps ultimate long-term productivity.” A survey of 1,600 managers and professionals and found that only 2 percent turned off their devices, even while on vacation.

There is a two-edge sword here. Having device to remote access allows for longer time spent away from your normal work place. I spent a month in Greece in April because I could be connected when I wanted to but I was disconnected for most of that time. Then I went to New Orleans for three weeks because of the same benefit. But you cannot stay connected the whole time or you might as well stay home. I also found that being disconnected for long periods of time opens me up to new ideas.

A few companies are recognizing this value as reported in the Times article. The Boston Consulting group is now giving team members a night off while others cover for him or her. You need to strike a balance here. The key is being in control. As someone who works part time, I now work online extensively for certain periods of time and then take whole days off and disconnected. While a full time worker may not be able to do this they can, and should take some nights and major portions of weekends away from electronic devices to participate in the real world.

Having written this post, I am going to reward myself with a long bike ride, but one enhanced by my iPod and leave my iPhone behind. 

 

Why I Still Like Text Over Slides and Video on the Web

I have written on this blog and elsewhere that the phonetic alphabet was the greatest ever breakthrough in information technology. I still think is the best medium for the Web. Now I would add that it is best supplemented with images but images without text frustrates me. When I get a link to a slide share or a video I frequently do not bother the look at it. Here are some reasons.

You cannot grab quotes or paste into another doc.

Text is very scannable – according to Jakob Nielsen users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average site visit and 20% is more likely but it is easier to come back with text.

Text is easy to distribute – It’s easy to cut and paste it and send it somewhere or to clip and re-syndicate it via email, RSS or social networks

Text is easy on the workplace – It’s much easier for cube-based workers to read text on the screen and get away with it vs. watching long videos.

Search results are still largely made up of text and better SEO is good thing if you want to get your message out.

Now the ancient Greeks who came up with the phonetic alphabet probably did not think about these implications. It is the invention that keeps on giving. The concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science among other things. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. The first thing put into text was an epic poem but soon text inspired documents appeared.  But there is more.

Like many great inventions, the uses of text slowly evolved. In fact, it appears that reading was often done aloud until after the 6th century. Ivan Illich relates that St. Augustine refrained from reading after his brothers went to sleep for fear of waking them. After the 6th century, silent reading became more commonplace, and such techniques such as tables of contents and indexes first appeared over a thousand years after the phonetic alphabet first emerged. These new devices allowed for random access to text information, a concept we take for granted now.  Now people were free to read their emails and blog posts without disturbing their neighbors. What will be next for text?

 

 

Social Media and the Boardroom: Much Work Remains

Richard Levick recently wrote an interesting article in Fast Company, Social Media And The Boardroom: Critical Questions Directors Need To Ask. There is a convergence here of increasing responsibilities for boards of directors and the increasing power of social media. As Richard wrote, “from Sarbanes-Oxley to Dodd-Frank, directors have been subjected to new liabilities and new mandates for elevated levels of transparency and accountability.” At the same time social media has emerged from its niche marketing role to impact every company in many ways.

Richard writes, “Social networks are the venues where purchasing decisions are increasingly made, investment opportunities are increasingly weighed, and corporate adversaries--such as social activists and the plaintiffs’ bar--increasingly gain public support for their agendas.” Yet directors are often not looking at its impact. He reported on a study by Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance that asked 180 top CEOs, senior executives, and corporate directors how they approach social media’s opportunities and risks.

There is an awareness of what social media is and its potential impact but few pay attention to it as 90% report a basic understanding of this now established fact. However only 32% of their companies monitor social media to identify risks and only 14% measure social media sentiment about their organization. It gets worse, as only 24% of senior managers and 8% of directors actually request regular reports on their company’s social media engagement efforts and stakeholders’ social media sentiment. Then about half of the respondents do not even collect this information.

These are people who use social media as 65% of use social media for personal purposes and 63% utilize them for business purposes. Of that group that uses social media, 80% maintain a LinkedIn account and 68% are active on Facebook. It is surprising that they cannot connect the dots. This is not rocket science.

If they do manage to take their head out of the sand or off their own Facebook page (note 350 million suffer from Facebook addiction), Richard offers ten useful questions for them to ask gathered from three PWC audit people: Catherine Bromilow, Chris Wood, and Neil Manji. I will not steal their thunder or Richard’s as he lists them with commentary but they all make common sense.

Basically, boards need to take a comprehensive look at all aspects of usage within their organization, including how they, themselves, are using social media and its impact on their organization.  Otherwise they will get some personal surprises and their organizations will fail. 

Stand Out Social Marketing: A Review

I was pleased to receive a review copy of Stand Out Social Marketing by Mike Lewis. The full title is: Stand Out Social Marketing: How to Rise Above the Noise, Differentiate Your Brand, and Build an Outstanding Online Presence. It provides “tactics for standing out and drawing positive attention in the already overcrowded social web.” The book provides case studies and interviews of social media leaders on ways that the most powerful brands have succeeded in this area.

Mike is the Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Awareness, a company I have covered a number of times (see for example, Awareness Provides Social Marketing Automation and Awareness Report on Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital). The book covers several aspects of standing out in the social media world: paying attention, stimulating and engaging in interactions, creating content, developing a distinctive presence, managing the process, creating an audit, and measuring ROI.

As anyone who looks at the Web knows the social media space has gained legitimacy and investments in social media marketing continue to rise every year. That is the good news. The difficulty that this book addresses is how to stand out in a crowded field. We are generating more content every year or two that ever before and much of this is through social media.

While you can buy Twitter followers, and Facebook likes, as well as use other tricks and short cuts for some measures of impact, the meaningful measures cannot be faked but are based on creating good content and promoting it well. You need both sides of that equation and this book is a good primer to be successful at both.

You need to be seen as unique. Then if you are successful, expect to be copied so you need to unique again. You need to be in a constant state of innovation. Mike offers the Levis Friends Facebook Store as an example. Once you enter this online store you get a personalized shopping experience based on the likes and recommendations of friends. They placed a Like button next to the SKU for each item in the store to encourage participation. It is a good idea and I can see how this would work for Facebook addicts. I can imagine that many of the people who flock to Facebook would want to know what jeans their friends like.  Personally, I tend to look for bargains but then I also do not spend much time in Facebook. But then 350 million suffer from "Facebook addiction." 

Time Magazine named “you” as the person of the year in 2007 put a mirror on the cover. These types of tactics will appeal to those interested in the social mirror. I have to admit that while clothes may not be where I focus, I am intrigued by what people do think in areas of interest to me such as social media or even art.

Each chapter has specific guidelines. For example, there is a detailed set of steps and processes for paying attention to the right things that impact your brand. First, you need to identify where the relevant conversations are happening. Then you need to refine these conversations to see might ones have impact through what Mike calls an “attention matrix.” Third, you need to measure your efforts. Each chapter ends with useful actions and takeaways.

I recommend the book for anyone interested in social media marketing. I would recommend using social media marketing for anyone serious about gaining visibility for their brand, so that casts a wide net for this book.  

CIO Job Requirements 2012

Rob Preston recently wrote about What CIOs Want In Their Successors in Information Week. Rob talked with four CIOs in the U.S. about the attributes they're looking for in a successor.  First, they want multidimensional leaders. This makes sense as the IT scene is getting increasingly complex with a number of transformative trends such as consumerization, the cloud, and mobile.

Dave Bent, CIO of United Stationers was quoted, "They may be brilliant technologists, but without the business engagement and leadership skills, they will not make it to the higher level." I would agree that it is increasingly hard to make it on tech skills alone.

Even within tech skills, you cannot be a specialist. Another CIO, Jerry Johnson, CIO of Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, emphasized the breadth of IT experience required: software development, infrastructure, operations, architecture, and project management. This implies that future CIOs need to move around their department and gather a variety of skills and perspectives.

Customer skills are particularly important for CIOs at technology companies, where the CIO is often asked to speak on the products use within the company. IBM is a big believer in testing inside first, then releasing a product to the public. Of course, not ever tech firm has over 300,000 enterprise users to serve as a means to test and refine products.

This need to speak to customers can extend beyond the tech sphere. For example, Rob writes about Kent Kushar, CIO of E. & J. Gallo Winery, who is comfortable at wine-tasting events discussing vintages and palate taste zones. Not a bad job to have.

Future CIOs also need to be team players. Then need to be able to stand up as peers to others in the C-suite and be respected for their leadership skills. They also need have brought home a number of projects successfully. In addition, they need to be self-starters and be willing to take a stand on an issue even it is counter to the prevailing views.

I would add that CIOs need to understand the rising ability of the business units to go around IT if they cannot get their needs met. They need to serve as a leader but not a dictator or they will lose quickly. They also need to understand the power of social busines

Social Media before the Web

I recently came across an interesting article, Social Media Before the Internet: Tales of Victorians, Comic Book Fans, Phone Phreaks and CBers. It notes that “long before the rise of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, people found innovative ways to use technology to interact.” One example was of a marriage ceremony conducted over the telegraph. The bride was in Boston and the groom was in New York. Telegraph operators transmitted the couple's vows and the words of the magistrate performing the ceremony over the wires. This may have been the first electronic marriage. There are many more interesting ones in the article.

Here is another example, in the late 1890s my great aunt liked to listen to music but the only place that you could hear music was the saloon in her newly-organized town in the Oklahoma Territory. In her day, this place was not appropriate for young single women. Fortunately, she was the first telephone operator in the town. So she called the saloon and left the line open, getting “piped in” background music, while she worked, whenever the band played.

Her finance worked at the bank. My great aunt would call him and leave the line open so they could talk between their work tasks. Thus their courtship, like the couple above had an electronic assistance.

There was an added benefit to this technology. She was able to also hear whenever a fight broke out in the saloon, a frequent activity, and notify the local police. These features, piped-in music and location monitoring, have taken on new forms and become disaggregated from her primitive phone lines. But now the smart phone is bring these capabilities and much more back to the phone.

 

The Growth of Personal Cloud Storage

I keep reading about more uses of the cloud and it all makes sense.  Now it is moving from the business world to the consumer world.  Although aspects of the cloud have long been in the consumer world also.  As Brandon Butler writes in Network World, Gartner predicts that 1/3 of consumer data will be stored in the cloud by '16. Social media sites like Facebook are the near-term repositories for cloud-based data storage, but other vendors will have opportunities to grab consumer market share, Gartner predicts

Now only about 7% of personal data is stored in the cloud. However, Gartner researchers note that the ability for consumers to capture data on their smartphones and tablets, using cameras and video recording devices, will drive the data storage requirements beyond the capacity of a personal computer hard drive or an external hard drive. In addition, the arrival of technology allowing data to be automatically uploaded to the cloud, supports their predict that 36% of consumer data will be stored in the cloud within four years.

Brandon quotes Gartner principal research analyst Shalini Verma, "Cloud storage will grow with the emergence of the personal cloud, which in turn will simplify the direct-to-cloud model, allowing users to directly store user-generated content in the cloud. As storage becomes a part of the personal cloud, it will become further commoditized. Therefore, online storage and sync companies need to have a strategic rethink about their future approach."

One vendor to take advantage of this trend in Carbonite. Carbonite provides online backups for your personal computer. It works in the background when you are connected to the Web but not using a Web application so as to not reduce performance. I spoke with David Friend, CEO of Boston-based Carbonite in 2008. He got the idea when a series of mishaps occurred in 2005. David looked into the market research and found that for consumers and small businesses only 3% do a good job of backing up files. When people have to actively do something like export files to an external hard drive, they generally do not do it. So he and his partner, Jeff Flowers, designed an online backup service that works in the background with the price point of $50 a year for unlimited storage.

David said they have now backed up over 3.5 billion files and are adding 32 million files a day and this was 2008. The company had double digit month over month revenue growth for the past 22 months at that time. I see their ads on TV now and I am sure they are continuing to grow. I still use an external drive for back up but I may add the cloud for redundacy. 

 

The Rise of the Networked Gig Economy

Rob Paterson offers us a very useful book, You Don't Need a Job (The Rise of the Network). Of course, he does not mean you don’t need an income but there are others ways to earn an income that as a salaried job with an employer.  Instead he is talking about what I have been doing since 2004 and an increasing number of others are doing. You can work for yourself as a contractor on multiple projects, initiatives, assignments, or other gigs. Some people started this way to earn a living because they lost their job, others, like Rob, started it because they wanted a change.

One thing that enables this means of earning a living is the rise of networks. Now networks have always been about, it is just that they have been extended through the Web. I worked with Rob for several years writing on the FastForward blog before we met at a conference sponsored by the blog. Then we worked together on another effort without meeting in person during its duration. In this case Rob was serving as a contractor and he made use of software from my company, Darwin Ecosystem, as he served the St. Louis PBS affiliate as they explored ways to integrate social media with traditional broadcast TV. We were both still doing the FastForward work, along several other assignments at the time.

Rob has an interesting chart that shows that in the early 1800s over 80% of people earned their living as free agents. After the industrial revolution took hold, the number dropped well below 20%. Now it is back over 40% as free agency is growing once again in the networked world. The focus has shifted from top-down command and control hierarchies to networks of skilled participants. This change is even happening within companies and those that adopt it will be the leaders of the next economy. Rob’s book provides some very useful historical context so we can see how we got to where we are now and how we can progress beyond it.

I recently re-watched an excellent video produced by the BBC in 1997, Intellectual capital: The New Wealth of Nations. The film portrayed the industrial revolution as a plague on people where workers were treated as mere extensions of machines. Charles Handy makes the same point as Rob, when the workers own the means of production they will be in control. But unlike Karl Marx, Handy was talking about the machines but the intellectual assets within people’s minds that provides them flexibility to move from company to company or become free agents.

Corresponding to this change is the rise of the percentage of enterprise wealth driven from intangible assets. Now the percentage of tangible assets in the corporations in the S&P 500 has shifted from 66% in 1982 to 16% in 1999 and likely continues to fall (see Juergen Daum, Intangible Assets and Value Creation). In its place is the rise of intangible assets as the creators of wealth (over 84% in 1999). These are mostly the ideas in people’s minds. Yet many organizations are still managing people as though the wealth was created by tangible assets, machines, and people are just servants of these machines. It is the network within and outside the enterprise that releases this potential for wealth. Now, as Rob, argues, the network increasingly allows you to do not need an enterprise to create a living.  It is increasingly possible to escape the yoke of top down authority by simply working as a free agent.

Moving form historical context, Rob offers a lot if practical advise on how to survive and prosper in the new networked world. You can join a community of free agents to share possibilities and collaborate on work. There are Web sites that support this networking. You can turn a hobby into a living. You can learn something new. He offers a number of useful sources to further your ability to thrive in this new world. I highly recommend the book, whether you are inside or outside an organization. It contains survival skills for all of us. 

Social Media Continues to Increase in the 2012 Fortune 500

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth have been dong a number of studies on social media and organizations in various populations. One series covers the Fortune 500. See for example, Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500: A Longitudinal Study (2011), Twitter Moves Ahead of Blogs in Fortune 500 (2010), and Fortune 500 Blogging Study (2009). The latest is Social Media Surge by the 2012 Fortune 500: Increase Use of Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and More by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ava M. Lescault, and Justina Andonian.

While last year’s F500 study found a leveling off of blogging in the Fortune 500 with only 23% hosting a public facing corporate blog in both 2010 and 2011, in 2012, 139 companies (28%) had corporate blogs providing the largest increase in use of this tool since the 2008 study of the F500. It was also found that 54% of the corporate blogs come from companies ranked in the top 200 on the list.  Rank influences blogging more than it does the use of any other tool studied. Telecommunications leads the pack with 40% blog usage. The 17 industries with no blogs include Forest and Paper Products, Railroads, Tobacco, Toys/Sporting Goods, Real Estate, Building Materials/Glass, Trucking and Waste Management. Many of these make sense but I am surprised with real estate as it an industry heavy into blogging.

The research also found that Twitter is by far the tool of choice with 73% having corporate twitter accounts and at least one company from every one of the 71 industries on the list tweeting. This is an increase of 11% from 2011. The team found that all of the top 10 companies (Exxon, Wal-Mart, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, General Motors, General Electric, Berkshire Hathaway, Fannie Mae, Ford Motors and Hewlett-Packard) consistently post on their Twitter accounts.  Here the leading industry is Food Consumer Products with 93% participation. Google has the highest number of followers on Twitter (4,795,987), followed by Whole Foods Market (2,666,439), Starbucks (2,546,244), and Southwest Airlines (1,305,938).  Walt Disney had the largest increase in a year with 206,843 Twitter followers in 2011 to 1,289,222 followers in 2012 (84%).

 

In addition, 66% of the 2012 Fortune 500 have a corporate Facebook page. This is an increase of 8% from 2011. Next, in the usage line is YouTube with 62% (309) of the 2012 Fortune 500 while only. 2% (11) are using Pinterest. I do not use it either.  Within the 2012 Fortune 500, 23% (115) have neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook page.  This is down from 2011 when 31% had neither.

There is much more in the free report and I would urge you to take a look. I greatly appreciate the effort by Nora Ganim Barnes and her team in documenting social media use over time. 

Schema.org: Standardizing Tags for Web Content Managers

My friend, Geoff Bock, recently posted a very useful article, Schema.org site aims to standardize tags for Web content managers. As Geoff notes, federal agencies have charged with administering "discrete pieces of open data and content which can be tagged, shared, secured, mashed up and presented in the way that is most useful for the consumer of that information."  The concept is to eliminate silos between agency content and to make it more accessible to other agencies and citizens. This is a good thing.

In addition, government agencies are adding semantics and structure to the content they publish that will make the information more useful to everyone. Geoff describes a new group called Schema.org that is working toward HTML standards for tags to support this effort. As their site syas, Schema.org “provides a collection of schemas (i.e., html tags) that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers.” This initiative can take advantage of the fact that “open standards for marking up information and for parsing all types of content have matured to deliver smart results.” This takes a step further toward the original vision of the Internet as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."

The Schema.org website, started in 2011, includes a core set of almost 300 different item types, including familiar entities such as "event," "organization," "person" and "place," in an extensible hierarchy of related terms. These item types are continuing to grow. Geoff writes that Schema.org's open markup vocabulary is rapidly gaining popularity as the “underlying technical standard for enriching content with the descriptive tags that embed semantics within information streams.”

All of this is good news for people who want to be able to easily access content on the Web. Standards are one of the keys to taking advantage of what the Web and its younger cousin, social business, offer (see for example, Open Social Provides Standards to Help Put Social Software to Work). Geoff also provides advice for Web Content Managers outside the government on how to best take advantage of this effort and I recommend taking a look at his work. 

State of Social Media Marketing 2012

Social Media continues to grow. The recent McKinsey report, “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies,” reports that there are 1.5 billion members of social communities globally and 80% interact regularly with social networks. The found that one in five hours spent online is now spent on social networks, increasingly on mobile devices. McKinsey also projects huge opportunities for wealth creation through social media, many of them are marketing oriented.  However, they also note that companies are just beginning to tap its potential.

Awareness recently released a report, The State Of Social Marketing Report: 7 Major Findings & In-Depth Analysis. To complete this effort they surveyed 469 marketers from wide varieties of industries, company sizes and levels of social marketing expertise. These respondents included a cross-section of executives, managers and those who support the social marketing functions within their organizations.

The seven major findings are as follows:

• Misalignment between business objectives, measurement methodologies and social marketing investment
• Tighter integration between social and rest of marketing and business overall
• Social marketers are starting to measure what matters
• Marketers are yet to tap into the true potential of social
• Social marketing budgets and resources insufficient to drive value
• The big 3 social platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, still dominate
• Limited outsourcing

You might say this represents the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media marketing. The ugly is certainly the first one. As I mentioned in another Awareness report, How to Kick-Start Your Content Marketing - A Seven-Step Approach to Delivering Success, - You need to start with defining your business objectives and build your program and metrics around those goals. If you are not measuring against business goals, the whole effort is meaningless.”

Coming in the bad category are insufficient budgets and the inability to tap into social’s true potential – which I would add is the product of the tow prior findings. The good results include the tighter integration between social media marketing and the rest of the business and the measurement of what matters. Although I am not sure how they know what matters if companies do not create between business objectives, measurement methodologies and social marketing investment.

The top business objectives for social media include: Better customer engagement tops the business objective charts (78%), revenue generation i(51%), better customer experience follows (47%), and increased thought leadership (41%). Unfortunately, only 47% measure success today but 38% more plan to measure by the end of the year. At the same time ROI is listed as the top challenge with 57% indicating this is an issue.

On the plus side, an increased presence across all social media platforms was reported by 66%. Increased frequency of content publishing was reported by 56% and better social marketing integration with other marketing initiatives was reported by 50%. This is all heading in the right direction.

The report goes into good detail on each of the findings with many more quantified results. They conclude that companies are continuing to piece together paid and free tools to measure their impact. This results in a lack of integration that likely affects their ability to measure ROI. They expect an increase in social CRM adoption to tie social metrics with traditional ones to drive business value. I am not sure that social CRM is the only answer but I do see a need to better align social metrics with traditional business ones. I recommend looking at the free report to see more quantified results in a fast growing field where, for some, it is ready fire, aim. 

Spigit Provides ICON as a Free Crowdsourcing Platform

I have covered Spigit before (see Spigit Provides Version S3 as Market Matures for Idea and Innovation Management and Spigit – Enabling Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Through Market Games). I recently spoke with Shail Khiyara, Chief Marketing Officer, and Hutch Carpenter, VP of Product about the free ICON offering. Spigit’s overall company goal is to drive business growth and customer and employee engagement.  Spigit brings your community - employees, customers, vendors - together on a comprehensive social innovation platform, and connects people who have questions with people who have answers.

It is designed to make full use of the good ideas across an enterprise and help companies then implement those ideas by using traditional workflow to connect the right ideas to the right person at the right time. To do this it provides business context and relevance to the crowdsourcing concept.

This is an important concept as the value of companies is increasingly found in the good ideas of their employees. For example, in 1982 38% of the market value of S&P companies was within their intangible assets, the ideas of their people. By 1999 that number had grown to 84% and I am sure it is still growing. The key to creating wealth in today’s economy is tapping the expertise within enterprise, as well as getting ideas from partners and customers. This is the task that Spigit addresses and I have been a fan for several years.

Spigit allows companies to solve specific problems by tapping into the expertise of relevant groups in a focused manner. As Shail said, up to 70% of the cost of an organization is now its people. Organizations could maximize this investment and drive higher rates of engagement which would lead to business growth. At the same time much work needs to be done here as he also pointed out that up to 67% of employees are disengaged from their work. Engaging them in meaningful ways to contribute and become a part of the solution is an excellent way to improve engagement.  What once took managers and corporate hierarchy can now be done in the context of a community.

Spigit has launched ICON as a free service to promote the use of mass crowdsourcing with the purpose of innovation and growth. It combines best practices and knowledge gained from delivering Spigit’s solutions to the market. It lets employees connect with their entire organization by posing questions and challenges and getting immediate feedback from coworkers. They showed me a demo. Here is the home page.

Across the top of the screen is a serious of questions or challenges. You can decide which ones to take on. Contrary to typical voting mechanisms every idea in ICON gets equal assessment as coworkers and employees engage in a pair-wise comparison game of selecting this one or that one. The solutions the crowd finds valuable then bubble to the top of the leaderboard. There is room for comments and the forced choice method allows for more precise comparisons. Once you decide between one pair, a new one comes up to further refine your perspective. Over time you get a rank order of answers for an individual and for a group. Here is the question page.

There is also a gamification aspect as users can earn points and top leaderboard status by posting challenges, voting, commenting and “gifting.”  The screen also shows the top answers, the top experts (people most active), and the question activity. The latter is an activity stream for a question so you can track what is happening. The system is dynamic and is constantly being updated based on new input. As an idea moves to the top, an alert is sent to the activity stream. You can also see who is voting and when this occurs.

They have also announced a Yammer integration. For Yammer users looking to take advantage of ICON, Spigit utilized Yammer’s open APIs to build this integration, which publishes activity stories such as new ideas, challenges, votes and comments in Yammer’s Ticker in real-time. Yammer users can also log into ICON via the Yammer Connect button, using their Yammer credentials to bring their Yammer identity, profile information and corporate social graph with them. If a user has not yet created a Yammer account, it will prompt them to do so.

I think this is great idea to make crowdsourcing more accessible at a time when it is much needed. For now the free version is seen as a possible lead generator to their more comprehensive commercial offerings. They may add a premium version of ICON in the future. 

 

The Disconnect Between Management and Employees Runs Deep

Happy Labor Day. Here is a relevant message. I recently read an article, Are You Using Social Media as a Management Crutch?,  that focused on the different perceptions of Management and employees on how effective social media is. According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, 41% of the executives participating in the study believe social networking helps build and maintain workplace culture while only 21% of their employees agree.

It quoted Punit Renjen, Chairman of the Board of Deloitte. "Social media is a useful tool, but not when it's used as a crutch that allows leaders to appear to be accessible... when really, they are not." The survey goes on to report that 45% of executives feel social has a positive effect but only 27% of employees feel the same way. In addition, 38% of executives feel social media allows for increased management transparency; only 17% of employees agree. Some employees feel that face time is most important and some social media efforts by managers take away from this face time.

However, it you look further at the results you see some confounding trends. It adds that executives rank tangibles like competitive compensation (62%) and financial performance (65%) as the top factors that influence culture. While employees have a different view say intangibles such as regular and candid conversations (50%) and access to management (47%) rank higher than compensation (33%) and financial performance (24%).

So the firms surveyed have a basic and fundamental disconnect between managers and employees that may influence the social media results. If the employees already have a disconnect of such traditional issues as what supports a strong company culture and makes employees happy, then they are likely to see social media as just another way to distract they and paper over their discontent. I would not blame social media for this but the rotten preexisting culture of the companies surveyed.