Social Media in an enterprise

Implementing social media into an enterprise is that just plug and play?

2014-06-05T09:22:00.000-07:00

When enterprise companies decides that they want to invest in social media, a lot of these companies do not look into their own business structure to see if they are ready for going social and they forget to do the proper investigation of the company maturity is in before start using Social Media.

It is a fact that Social Media is a hit among consumers Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn is social platforms where consumers do everything from telling what they are doing right now to discussing brands and product performance. There is no doubt of the Social Media power, the collaboration among consumers can change the behavior of big enterprises and make them do things consumers demands. This is why the company has to do a proper homework before starting the collaboration within social media.

What is Social Media not about and what can it lead to!

Social media is not about starting a weekly or monthly blog from the CEO where there is no room for response or collaborative work, this is not social this is just changing media from one communicating platform to another. The proper way to embed social media into the enterprise company is about empowering the influencers and drive adoption of social networks and hereby secure the collaboration.

Social media is not just plug and play, social media can be disruptive to the established communication structure and even to the entire hierarchies of thinking in the enterprise company if the company haven´t taken the proper precautions before just implementing the social media. Social Media can even start challenge company policies, strategies and governance. An example of preventing disruptions to company policies and strategies is how IBM Denmark implemented social media in the general communication. As IBM have a set of policies called business conduct guidelines the social media implementation and strategy had to incorporate these policies and not disrupt this structure. A dialog was established with the employees where the critical subjects where discussed to secure a properly collaboration.

What is Social Media about!

How do an enterprise company get success with social media?

Task no.1 is to get employees to use the social media in a proper constructive collaborative way. This is not done by force or by telling employees that the company will save cost by using it. The success of social media adoption often requires senior management to lead by example.

Task no.2 is making social media fun and useful to every day activities of employees.

Task no.3 is to secure employees time to be social, and emphasizing employees by giving them credit for sharing on the social networks.

Task no.4 is certainly not to get rid of other communication forms it is to secure the way that every employee should work together.

Will Social Media lead to no physical workplaces?

There has been a lot of guessing about getting rid of the physical office and let people be distance workers as the digitization and the social media platforms will allow this - but as predictions of the paperless office has been proclaimed several times and not yet happened. Enterprises know for sure that they can not attract young and visionary people if these people do not have a community where they can test their visions. Social media will be an important part of getting the visionary delivered to numerous employees by collaborating.

The conclusion is that it is not just plug and play to implement social media, however the enterprise companies that doesn´t provide the social media tools to its employees will force the employees to use external services and hereby exposing the enterprises to even greater risk. It is not an option to modern enterprise companies whether to use social media or not. The issue is how the enterprises create the proper environment to appropriate the benefits and minimize the risk of using the new social media.

Why does US NSA watch our Social media activity – is the surveillance rely to prevent theorist attacks or do they have any other purpose with this snooping?

2014-03-01T02:30:00.000-08:00

During the first months of 2014, all Social Media users did feel exposed to privacy interruptions from NSA and the increasing security investigations they have forced upon companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and many others, to look into your conversations and the information you send and share with others.

Is this snooping into the social sharing a real act of preventing a theorist attack, or is it just an easy access to get knowledge of what new things are invented and could be a profitable sell to an American corporation in the future?

One thing is for sure, the US president do not score high points from the voters by jeopardising the privacy of the individual by forcing access into peoples Social media conversations.

What is the actual purpose, for organizations like NSA to look into millions of conversations from numerous providers of social traffic?

The official purpose is it to prevent theorist attacks – or is it pure spying on its own and other citizens?

Taking into consideration that NSA and the British GCHQ are working together on the surveillance of our social media traffic makes it even worse if the agencies actually are in for even political/personal reasons such as Mr Snowden suggest that our smartphones and social wear about can support agencies with personal data, location information and details such as political affiliation or sexual orientation. [1]

This entire discussion of who is getting access to data and social activities, gives us the reason to start a much bigger discussion about privacy on the internet and reasons to make guidelines for enterprise employees, of what they are discussing on the internet through Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and other social media platforms. This is to secure as little vital information to go out of the enterprise organisation and herby diminish the possibility of trade with company data from big public organisations such as NSA and GCHQ

[1] Source: Japanes Times, January 29, 2014

Social Selling is the 2014 challenge for the Enterprise Company

2014-01-01T00:45:00.001-08:00

Happy social selling in 2014
Among large companies top management, it is a common misconception that all involved in social media and selling is either placed in marketing and or sales department. It is extremely important that top management is fully committed to communicating with customers and helps to bring value and Content into the dialogue with customers. The first step in this process is to have a social strategy, where working with social strategies are clearly defined and formulated so everyone knows what to do to ensure a successful social media/selling engagement.

The traditional sales cycle process changes due to a number of factors.

· First the decission makers in the B2B market changes, where it was the It-manager taking the decission when IT had to be purchased it is now the CFO who take the decission on recomandation of the It-manager.

· When it in the past was mainly price and features which was the overall decission factors it is now the value creation towards the purchasing company which is top of the decission line.

· When it was the marketing messages and the product catalougees that decided what the company should purchase it is now the experience of other customers and their rating of the selling company value creation model which makes the customer take a purchase decission.

Enterprise Companies must fundamentally alter their marketing strategies and quickly adapt to the social selling ecosystem. To be able to take advantage of the new social dynamic environment the enterprise management must start to:

· Gain real time knowledge of the customer decision behavior.

· Understand the customer’s individual needs and engage in relevant communities creating valuable useful information.

Social Media has reached a new level

Social Media has reached a level where all the target-buying groups (prospects and customers) are freely offering information about themselves, their buying behavior and their communication with other potential customers. The customers are giving free feedback on their opinion of the products and services they want to buy or just have bought from any enterprise company in the same target group as your company are working in. It is time for the enterprise company to be able to collect all the data being produced every minute of the day (Big Data) and process the data so it can be used to support the social selling.

Social selling has created a world where even B2B buying decisions start , progress and reach the closing point with little or non face-to-face collaboration. The Pre-Social Media selling where the B2B buying was governed by the face-to-face sale, the product catalough and the marketing communication sent out from the enterprise company is now beeing deminished and is under presiour from the social communication going on among customers.

The B2B sales force are feeling the presiour and know if they should keep their specialist position they need to participate in the conversation going on in the Social Media univers. The sales departments are seeing that a real shift in communication is taking place, and therefore they must urge their B2B sales people to take advantage of the power that social media content offer as a sales tool to create new prospects and keep into the collaboration with their customers.

This is where 2014 will force enterprise companies to adopt social selling in greater numbers.

Happy social New Year

Social Media trends for 2014 – What should enterprises expect?

2013-12-06T05:42:00.001-08:00

Social media as a communication form has changed completely the interaction between people and organizations. Social media has lifted the communication from the few –to- many over to the many-to-many. The communication has moved from “we tell you” to “Tell each other” and we as enterprise will listen to your conversation. Enterprises will collect the Big data to “paint” a picture of your purchase behaviour and your “Likes” in your conversation to be able to sell you what you need. Having a social media strategy has suddenly become a necessity if the enterprise wants to succeed.

But being social continues to mature and the various buying segments will change and mature – you will properly see that target groups will be younger and demand more from you as an enterprise both in terms of price and performance and ethics.

“A picture says more than thousand words”

The famous phrase “One picture is worth a thousand words” is quit actual as the younger generation are requesting a more visual experience on the Social Media. The Social Media App Instagram.com is a brilliant example of how you use pictures to show your world of food, clothing and travel among other things. You can choose to follow a magazine a designer who will show his or her world in a visual stile using pictures when it is on Instagram.com. Another possibility is, you can ad your own video on YouTube and upload your own mobile phone video production in a few minutes. This visual way of expressing one self is true of younger generations who are the future customers, which put a pressure on enterprise organizations to change their practices and embrace the visual experience. According to Apu Gupta the co-founder of Curalate.com; Enterprises need to find tools, which can measure and understand imagery and visual cues are most likely to be successful in leveraging Social.

“You need to be quick in responding to your customers and witty as well”

Social is often a live interaction between customers and enterprises, where the enterprise company need to be quick in responding to comments on their products and actions with knowledge and witty, using Twitter to do it short and precise. It is a must but can be a challenge for an enterprise company to respond to costumers and events in real time and herby use this concept to their competitive advantage. Brands known for using this strategy is Old Spice with the witty and Caricature Old Spice man. This brand story went into a communication between the actor and brand been asked by costumers everything from wedding to when the next video will appear. The case of Old Spice tells us that enterprises need to be constantly monitoring social channels to respond to any customer or make the most out of a given situation.

“Quality over quantity and an ethic touch”

It is important in all communication to have a high quality instead of a big quantity – WHY!! – obvious you need to send a clear and simple message to costumers which spot on in a collaborative way state the message in a clear context and content. Look at the most successful enterprises in modern time all with out any doubt have had a clear and relevant message to their costumers. Relevant messages addressed to me with a clear content and context will have my doled attention, and a higher possible rate of purchase. The social web needs to be a platform for sharing quality content and context to engage interested users. And then you can not as an enterprise start cheating with your quality to increase your quantity. On top of your quality you need to be able to appear as an ethical correct thinking and acting enterprise company - this is an expectation from costumers.

Collaboration is everything

Collaboration is everything when we are talking Social Media. Collaboration is both the nightmare for the enterprise and a Hugh advantage. The nightmare appears when and if the conversations among costumers turn into a negative dialog where the offering from the enterprise is scowled instead of being praised for the value created to costumers. The Hugh advantage for the enterprise comes when social collaboration turns into the praising and positive conversation among costumers and their friends and herby is marketing and driving sales for the enterprise. There is a trend in social collaboration where costumers are interested in asking trusted “friends” for advice about products and services before purchasing anything. The strategy for the enterprise is to create value into the collaboration to secure a praising of the enterprise products and services among costumers “trusted friends”.

User generated content is the soul of Social media

Social Media has the ability to bring different people together often because a user has generated content, which appears to have the interest of another person. User generated content is the soul of Social Media, and enterprise should embrace it and provide customers with the space to interact with each other. For the enterprise company it is about listening to your customers and make sure that you will host the forum where the conversation takes place. It is a matter of grapping the conversation and be able to apply the knowledge of the conversation into the brand of the enterprise. This will give you as an enterprise a competitive advantage. An example where an enterprise company could use their costumers input and conversation is the chocolate producer Tom´s. In December they produce a Christmas chocolate calendar for children. Apparently a lot of parents have experience that when the children opened December 4^th there was no chocolate inside the box – some parents was very angry in their social media communication towards Tom´s chocolate due to sad children who did not have their expectations fulfilled. The Marketing director from Tom´s had to answer the angry parents. He had the possibility to send the costumers some chocolate and whish them a merry Christmas and herby show how Tom´s protect their brand towards mistakes in production. Tom´s are living of having happy costumers. User generated content suddenly have a power addressing several other of the enterprise costumers. Enterprises have to react and respond and use the content to secure future mistakes.

The conclusion of the above trends for 2014 keep the pressure for the enterprise organizations to continually addressing the issue of Social care and expand the delivery of customer service over the social channels. Customers expect enterprise companies to use the social media as an extension of service delivery.

Merry Christmas and happy Social Media year

Will the use of Social media be jeopardized by NSA surveillance?

2013-12-01T02:43:00.000-08:00

During the latest month NSA has been exposed in systematic surveillance of conversation on Social Media and other cloud based forums. A former NSA analytic Mr Snowden has exposed this systematic surveillance. This exposure has given Enterprises a wake up-call that US surveillance is not about national security for the United States, but in general of industrial espionage on enterprise companies outside USA.
The most embarrassing case is without any doubt the interception of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone. But significant companies with an interest in the U.S. domestic market has undoubtedly not been listed in the systematic monitoring by the NSA. How do we as nations, individuals and companies relate us to systematically monitoring of our social media footprint. Or, are there, far more important issues that we as individuals need still in this new monitoring reality to take care of? The relevant questions to ask here is perhaps:
Are we creating an information society, in which every Social Media conversation, cell phone photograph or other record of personal behaviour is transmitted not to police but to the world at large?
Do we want to jepodize our democraticaly right to speak and express our opinion with-out beeing afraid of some organizations will monitorize us ?

Do we want to chill behavior and spech with the fear that an unpopular comment or embarassing slip will call forth vituperative criticism and perhaps even adversely affect careers or reputations?

Do we need to constantly monitor what we say or do in restaurants, at sporting events, on public sidewalks or even private parties ?

This is worth to have a national and global debate about to secure that our new social independence – the conversation many to many - will be able to continue freely. Everybody who are using the social media must start introducing a self-criticism, which does not create limitations in our use of social media but ensure that we become more worthwhile in the use of the medium. This debate of how we are using social media needs to be as much about our culture as of our law.

There are no doubt, that a constant surveillance will jeopardize how enterprise organizations will use Social Media in the future. The competitive advantage of beeing an american company,with an inteligence services, who are producing vital information which could be used by homeland industry, could develop the competitive advantage for the americans knowing what their European and Asian competitor are doing in the same field of work. As a privat person we must be aware of how we behave on the social media platform to secure our intrigity and independence to have the ability of free speech on the www.

From Social Media to Social profitability

2013-10-10T01:58:00.003-07:00

During my many blogs addressing the collaborative social media tool of communicating from many to many, and giving enterprises the possibility to enter new markets and having new information of their costumers, it should be quite obvious that using social media is all about creating profitability in the enterprise.

Marketing has owned Social Media.

Social Media has been owned by the marketing department, who has used it to justify their increased value on revenue generating in the enterprise. In fact Social Media is not a tool to justify the marketing department’s value towards the enterprise organization, social media is all about driving revenue, EBITDA, earnings per share and competitive advantage – it is a strategic element which should have the CEO´s and the top management’s top priority.

CEO should take charge of Social profitability

The CEO´s has to take charge of the social media / social profitability to be able to control the profit of the enterprise company. The strategic value of social media/Social profitability is to gain increased revenue, competitive advantage and profit, all key performance indicators which should be in the top management’s highest priority. Another advantage of a social profitability strategy is a change in the information flow between departments in the enterprise company. Social profitability re-defines the flows of information and decision making between departments in the enterprise company. Changing focus from Social Media to social profitability you will have the entire enterprise organization from HR, Marketing, and Finance to production in the group as stakeholders. The CEO as the main stakeholder in the Social profitability should start asking the questions such as:

How can social profitability affect the enterprise competitive advantage?
What is the role of Social profitability within the enterprise branded business system, both internally and externally?
What are the associated resource and capability implications?
How are we applying social profitability outside of the marketing department?

When the CEO takes charge of social profitability – the marketing department can operate again.

With the CEO as the main lead of social profitability, the CEO will relief the Marketing Department from the burden of seeing the cross-enterprise potential of Social profitability and not having the authority to make it happen on their own. Functionally speaking, Marketing could very well continue to press the buttons on social profitability, with the difference that it now will be fully supported with the authority of the CEO.

The outcome of this change in lead and responsibility of your social profitability strategy will be embedded throughout the enterprise organization. The advantage for the Marketing Department is that the social profitability strategy is not seen as a marketing tool but instead as a means of driving profitability throughout the entire value chain.

Can social software help reducing youth unemployment in Europe?

2013-10-02T12:23:00.001-07:00

There is no doubt that Europe faces three major challenges;

The growing unemployment among European youth
The increase of old people getting older
The structural and economic difference between north, south and east, west Europe

We have to face these challenges and find solutions in order to save our democracy, or we could have the same situation with social unrest they have in North Africa and Middle East. We in Western Europe have used a lot of means to save banks from collapsing – this has been wise to a certain point – now we need to solve the underlying problems. In the following I will try to look into how the new social culture and use of social media can help the European youth.

The growing unemployment among European youth!

One of these problems is youth unemployment, which is a derivative of the banks' lack of lending to businesses who want to increase their business, compare also to potential entrepreneurs. Banks' reluctance has caused problems for society's growth and thus indirectly contributes to increasing youth unemployment. When a country as Spain reaches an unemployment rate among youth on

56, 1 %[1] we are starting to loose a generation.

Europe needs to have some quick solutions and start to think out of the box to be able to recover from such a crisis situation of loosing a generation. The south European countries – Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal are in a massive danger zone where unrest and instability are causing trouble for democracy and creating possibility for extremist political fractions.

How can Social Media help to create new jobs?

Social Media and the social software used by the enterprises generate new opportunities of where a person should be situated and make it possible to have young people working in teams on a virtual basis. The Social Software market generally supports people working in teams, communities or networks which is ideal for cross boarder working and even with different cultures. The Social Software is not product or market specific, it is used to support a variety of collaborative activities within the enterprises, used by their employees and also by external costumers and suppliers and partners to create value for the enterprise.

With the collaborative social software it is possible to have employees present in various regions as the software is designed to be shared among teams and groups who are not forced to be situated in the same office or even region. The purpose of this virtual environment is to engage participants across the whole organization to create, organize and share information, as well as find, connect and interact with each other. This will in the long term secure that enterprises will be able to engage employees where the costumers are without creating expenses that can not be covered by the revenue that the social software creates. Social software includes both applications, which deliver specific functionality out of the box (functionality such as shared workspaces or communities) or platforms, with capabilities that can be used as a basis for contextual collaborative applications. Where it is most interesting for the enterprise companies is when the social software are used in communication and information sharing and project coordination within small teams or homogeneous groups. The social software gives the enterprise companies the possibility to the sharing of best practices within a business unit as well as the encouragement of communication, networking and information exchange among employees across the whole organization or with external participants in other organizations. These possibilities make it possible to engage people in other time zones and abolish physical borders which can prevent youth from getting a job in an enterprise company in another country. The social software gives the enterprise the freedom to engage people where the market is or where the most qualified people are. This new social world creates possibilities for creative enterprises to secure a highly qualified workforce without having any boundaries and helps in general the enterprise and their users to:

Mine their networks of contacts and acquaintances for advice, references and referrals.
Form teams, communities or informal groups and invite external participants from other organizations.
Work together on the same work objects – could be engineers working on an new construction – time zone and borders would not have any importance
Discuss and comment, sharing their work.
Organize work from their perspective
Identify relevant work – this will be of Hugh importance for the many unemployed in southern Europe.
Discover other people with common interests.
Alert users to information or events that might be relevant to them and can help them in getting their next assignment
And last but not least be able to learn from other expertise which can help in the specific region

It is important that we start getting this new social software in use to prevent a whole generation from getting a work and be part of the society both in own country but also abroad. We need this to happen fast to stop this evil circle of youth unemployment.

[1] The Guardian
September 2, 2013

How to run Social Blogs with your enterprise costumers

2013-08-25T02:18:00.000-07:00

One of the most important things to do for an enterprise organization or an interest association is to facilitate the dialog with their costumers and make them interact on their behalf and be the facilitator for the dialog. What is important for an organization or an association is to make the communication interactive among their costumers or members to make them share information and create many-to-many conversations. These conversations can be applied in the enterprise organizations production or in the interest association member creation structure, generating mutual ideas creating new products or services with a new revenue for the organizations.

How you should NOT communicate with your members or customers

An example of what you should not do when you want to create a many-to-many conversation among your members/costumers is what the Danish Diabetes Association did to a member with a good idea.

A member of the association has created a blog: http://newwithdiabetes.blogspot.com/ for new members with diabetes.

The blog is a virtual tool box for new discovered diabetes type 1 members, who need to be properly regulated in their blood glucose level. The interest for this topic creates a lot of frustrations and anxiety for the ones who need to be properly regulated. This makes the blog a super tool of content which should be distributed to newly discovered members of diabetes 1 by the Diabetes Association.

What is in it for the association/enterprise?

The Diabetes Association has an interest in helping their members in this topic and generating more members in this category of members to expand the association. Apparently the Danish Diabetes Association’s communication department did not grab the dialog and did not want to facilitate this dialog. The Danish Diabetes Association used the first escape road – “we don’t refer to blogs but we do find your content interesting”. This escape will over time be costly and less rewarding to the Danish Diabetes Association. The value creation from the Diabetes Association is to secure that members of the association will continue to get information and discuss this information among the members to have the conversation. The problem for the association is that they will not create a dialog among their members and herby loose the grip of the members interest over time. In our Social world discussions many-to-many generates advantages and also disadvantages for enterprise companies and interest associations.

Advantages and disadvantages of social dialog

An advantage is that the associations and enterprises can generate new ideas and concepts by just listening and facilitating the dialog and herby benefit from the outcome. Most of the content developers will be proud and happy to create this content which can be used to help others and will not notice that an enterprise or an association can benefit economically on their idea.

The disadvantage for the enterprise or the association is if they reject the content from the costumer or member and then force them to create their own communication strategy towards the members or costumers the association or enterprise will not know what their members or costumers discusses and that could be fatal. When an association denies their members to have a dialog between each other by using a social blog, the association has created a negative dialog with their own members who will spoil the confidence in the association or enterprise product or cause. The outcome from such a decision can have fatal consequences for the association. One consequence could be lack of interest from the members in the associations dialog and events; another could be simple member getaway as the member community will be watched by the association rather than being facilitated. The importance of the many-to-many communication has to be recognized by enterprise and associations to get a sustainable success ahead.

Getting more sales out of your social media investment

2013-07-31T00:34:00.000-07:00

As the economic situation in the northern part of Europe seems to lighten up, with the effect of investments from enterprises and a greater willingness of spending money from the consumers, the company sales forces need to be more efficient and be able to identify the right opportunities at the right time and determine the right people to contact?

How does this unique approach enable sales and marketing collaboration to drive productivity?

And, most importantly, how does it help you close more deals in this increasingly more connected world?

These questions is the summer of 2013 most interesting questions to solve as it will be a competitive advantage to have your sales force aligned and trained in solving these questions.

One of the vital tools that every sales force should use to enter their prospecting in is the CRM (Costumer Relationship Management) system. The objective for every sales person is to identifying companies where they will have a high likelihood of sales success, getting to know their business – and doing all of this quickly so they will spend less time researching and more time selling.

Thanks to new technology, enterprises have access to real-time insights from thousands of content sources, including Thomson Reuters, Capital IQ, Jigsaw, and the Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, delivered right into your CRM application. The intelligence delivered within CRM mash-ups can save some serious research and prospecting time. Focusing only on timely, relevant information also helps sales and marketing build high-quality targeted prospect lists. Now you have the information from your social media and the CRM tool to mash-up the intelligence then you have to be in proper time at your costumers. Timing is crucial! Once you identify the right companies and the right contacts within those companies, the next step is determining the right time to contact them. Timely actions on key trigger events – i.e. changes within or outside your target company that can create the perfect opening for your products or services – can help you get in the door and close the deal. The 3 most important factors for success with your social media used for creating more sales are:

The Social Media information should be run through you analytics and delivered into your CRM system for sales use
Focus only on timely relevant information
It is important to approach the costumer on key trigger events

Bearing this in mind you will as a sales organization have more use of your social media information and be able to create competitive advantage by using your information in due time – it is not about who has the most information about the costumers it is about who has the best relevant social media information which can create more sales.

Social Media in a virtualized world

2013-06-23T03:25:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that it is difficult to develop Social Network Services that contains large amounts of Social Media by using traditional techniques with related to processing and transmitting it in large and Data Base systems for storing it. The rise of mobile and cloud applications where Social Media are used on is subverting existing IT management paradigms. The ability to handle large amount of Data – BIG DATA – (Social Media among other) on a single management console is moving from a nice-to-have solution to a must-have solution. The demand for collaboration where ever you are from what ever device you use forces products from complete solutions to point products having the same availability at a lower cost. One of the issues of working with social media in a virtualized environment is to have an increased ROI on client virtualization which must be achievable and measurable. Of course an enterprise company should not approach client virtualization only due to ROI. Client virtualization makes it much more beneficial to work a collaborative environment in an operational sense. Enterprise companies culture become increasingly driven by younger, more connected, collaborative, and mobile workers. Enterprises which do not build the foundation to support flexible and collaborative computing will find employees much harder to manage and to an extent, harder to retain in the enterprise. There are 3 main reasons why Social Media has to be worked in a virtualized world;

· The increasing amount of Data which is used to make Social Media collaboration.

· The reduced IT-budgets drives IT cost by enabling IT to work more efficiently, and ensuring increased collaboration. This means driving the endpoint hardware by extending the life span of the equipment or repurposing them as virtual machines endpoints.

· The Social Media collaboration demands a more flexible computing to ensure that younger employees will retain in the enterprise.

Virtualization on various devices can allow users ubiquitous access to their virtual devices which can improve overall user satisfaction and increase the Social Media collaboration. But it is a fact that client virtualization is still in the early phases so if the enterprises start investing in solutions that can better manage users demand for faster and easier collaboration, regardless of where they are or what device they are using in their Social and other communication. Enterprises failing to participate in the development of a virtualized communication platform will risk losing their competitive advantage in the long term and in the short term damage their overall business according to the 3 reasons why Social Media has to be worked in a virtualized world.

How to get your Social Media data operational in your strategy plan!

2013-05-12T00:35:00.000-07:00

To get the proper use of your Social Media Data (SMD) in the enterprise structure, it is vital how good you are to crunch the unstructured SMD and make them operational.

This is not an easy task to make SMD operational as you as an enterprise have several parameters which you have to take into consideration;

1. You have to match your SMD investments priorities with your business strategy- this is part of doing a strategy plan for your SMD.

2. It is important to balance the speed, cost and acceptance in the enterprise organization to get success with implementing your SMD and get benefit from them.

3. To secure focus and engagement from operation and at the same time have the proper capabilities you must have a plan to train the staff.

You have to match your SMD investments priorities with your business strategy- this is part of doing a strategy plan for your SMD

Integrating SMD with your business strategy calls for choices. Integrating of data and information can provide powerful insight but the cost of new data architecture and use and development of models and tools can be immense. In our world of scarce resources it is vital to prioritize our investments in SMD models and tools and make sure that we will get the best business strategy to work.
On very common problem working with your SMD is when the marketing function works in a siloed approach and have not been able to get the communication out to the individual business units in the enterprise. It is important for the enterprise that it works with one common approach. What is often seen is individual business units do send multiple offers across the enterprises entire base of customers, regardless of their profile or preferences.
Therefore top management must act towards the individual approach and decided that solving the problem would require pooling SMD in a cross-enterprise warehouse with data on income levels, product histories, risk profiles, and more. This central SMD database allows the enterprise company to optimize its marketing campaigns by targeting individuals with products and services they are more likely to want, thus raising the hit rate and profitability of the campaigns. A robust planning process often is needed to highlight investment opportunities like these and to stimulate the top-management engagement they deserve given their magnitude.

It is important to balance the speed, cost and acceptance in the enterprise organization to get success with implementing your SMD and get benefit from them.

A natural impulse for executives who “own” enterprises SMD and analytics strategy is to shift rapidly into action mode. Once some investment priorities are established, it’s not hard to find software and analytics vendors who have developed applications and algorithmic models to address them. These packages (covering pricing, inventory management, labor scheduling, and more) can be cost-effective and easier and faster to install than internally built, tailored models. But they often lack the qualities of a killer app—one that’s built on real business cases and can energize managers. Sector- and company-specific business factors are powerful enablers (or enemies) of successful SMD efforts. That’s why it’s crucial to give planning a second dimension, which seeks to balance the need for affordability and speed with business realities (including easy-to-miss risks and organizational sensitivities).
Finally, some planning efforts require balancing the desire to keep costs down (through uniformity) with the need for a mix of data and modeling approaches that reflect business realities. But to develop a more sophisticated model to predict regional and seasonal buying patterns and optimize supply-chain operations, the enterprise has to gather unstructured consumer data from its SMD, to choose among internal-operations data, and to customize prediction algorithms by product and market approach. A balanced big-data plan embraces the need for such mixed approaches.

To secure focus and engagement from operation and at the same time have the proper capabilities you must have a plan to train the staff.

When enterprises start investing in new tools for working better and more efficient with their SMD they often find that the productivity of its revenue management analysts is below expectations. This problem arises when enterprises neglect a third element of Social Media big-Data planning – engaging the frontline managers in the enterprise organization. But planning for the creation of such worker-friendly tools is just the beginning. It’s also important to focus on the new organizational skills needed for effective implementation. Far too many companies believe that 95 percent of their data and analytics investments should be in data and modeling. But unless they develop the skills and training of frontline managers, many of whom don’t have strong analytics backgrounds, those investments won’t deliver. A good rule of thumb for planning purposes is a 50–50 ratio of data and modeling to training.

The success with your Social Media big data depends on how good you are to make a strategy plan.

When a plan is in place, execution becomes easier: integrating data, initiating pilot projects, and creating new tools and training efforts occur in the context of a clear vision for driving business value—a vision that’s unlikely to run into funding problems or organizational opposition. Over time, of course, the initial plan will get adjusted. Indeed, one key benefit of SMD big data and analytics is that you can learn things about your business that you simply could not see before. The sooner executives change that, the more likely they are to make data a real source of competitive advantage for their organizations.

To get the most out of your Social Media data you need a strategy plan!

2013-03-26T05:21:00.000-07:00

There is nothing new about creating a strategic plan for how you as an enterprise want to act in any given situation in your business. A strategic plan for your use of your Social Media data is simply to highlight critical decisions or trade offs from the collected huge amount of data.

Social Media data is considered to be critical data. Social Media data complicating matters in a new twist: critical information often resides outside companies, in unstructured forms such as social-network conversations. To be able to create value for your enterprise it is important to create a social media strategic plan at CEO/CMO level to establish investment priorities – balance speed, cost and acceptance and to create the conditions for frontline engagement.

Have you created a Social Media data strategic plan?

This seams simple and obvious to develop a Social Media data plan, but in many company cases the missing step to create a simple plan for how data, analytics, tools and people can interact to create business value is not as obvious as it seams. On the other side the power which such a plan creates in making a common language for management to discuss where the greatest returns will come from and, more important to select the two or three places to get started makes a huge difference for any enterprise. The essence of a good strategic plan – weather it is for Social Media data use or for another purpose - is that it highlights the critical decisions or trade-offs an enterprise must make and defines the initiatives it must prioritize.

What will make management, to workout a Social Media strategic plan is if there is a compelling reason to act; One such reason is when business has to consider which part of the businesses will get the most capital, whether to emphasize higher margins or faster growth and which capabilities are needed to ensure strong performance in your social media plan. To make such a plan there are 3 elements the enterprise has to have in place;

Data
Analytical models
Tools

Speaking of Data, it is important to have a game plan for assembling integrating and make an output of data which could create greater value for the entire business – this is essentials for the business. The next data question is do we as an enterprise have the right processing and storage capacity to create a format of data that could be used in sales and production.

But being able to integrate data is just not enough to create value. Advanced analytic models are needed to enable data-driven optimization (for example, of employee schedules or shipping networks) or predictions (for instance, about flight delays or what customers will want or do given their buying histories or Web-site behavior take the case of Sainsbury they have to collect their costumers buying behavior and even conversations and analyze the outcome. IBM Pure Data System for Analytics is a software and Hardware solution for working with advanced analytic models. The system which is based on Netezza technology[1] is a simple tool for data-intensive analysis. It simplifies and optimizes the performance of data services for analytical applications, making it possible to run very complex algorithms in minutes instead of days, which is important if you want to get value out of your social analytics.

Once you have taken the data in and analyzed it you want to have the proper tools to get your information out to management and frontline people in your enterprise and make them use the information to start getting the value out of the information. What’s needed are intuitive tools that integrate data into day-to-day processes and translate modeling outputs into tangible business actions: for instance, a clear interface for scheduling employees, fine-grained cross-selling suggestions for call-center agents and sellers, or a way for marketing managers to make real-time decisions on discounts. Many enterprise companies fail to complete this step in their thinking and planning—only to find that managers and operational employees do not use the new models, whose effectiveness predictably falls. If employees do not use the new models the social media investment will not be worth the time and effort – so it is very important that every single person in management and frontline takes the Social Media models seriously again to have a return on your enterprise investment.
It is important to combine the 3 elements to create the foundation which the enterprises can formulate an integrated a Social Media data plan. There are no doubt that there are variations from enterprise to enterprise and different sources of business value creations, but you have to have a plan and this plan should be a part of your strategy to create the most value out of your social media data and help grow your business. The next we will have to look into is the three key planning challenges – they will follow in the next blog.

[1] Netezza (pronounced Ne-Tease-Ah) designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for uses including enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning.

Are Social Media and Big Data connected to each other?

2013-03-10T05:18:00.000-07:00

With the raising popularity of Social Media corporations need to be able to handle a substantial larger amount of data. Until now the ones who decided how and what to buy of IT equipment was the CFO and the IT manager. Due to big data we have seen a shift in who are taking the decision – the new rising star is the CMO – the Chief Marketing Officer. Marketing are the new collector of data – and in huge amounts due to Social Media data collection the large amounts of data to be processed, used in sales to generate additional earnings. Social Media is communication from many to many the amount of data which should be analyzed by the product and marketing people are huge.

An organization like Sainsbury – a grocery company – has a huge potential of Many – to many communication through their costumer card and membership association. Big data or the ability to analyze and work with Big Data creates the possibility for Sainsbury to communicate directly and spot on with their costumers.

How can the enterprise use the Social Media data?

An example how Big Data and Social Media go hand-in-hand is the online shopping module above. Sainsbury has a number of costumers who has an access code and a username for the Sainsbury membership association. Each time a costumer uses the on-line shopping or attends a Sainsbury shop the costumer leaves a Social Media footprint. The costumer footprint describes the need and wants of the costumer and is stored in Sainsbury’s IT-systems and can eventually be used to see the purchase pattern of each costumer. Consumer surveys indicate that consumers are quite conservative in their purchase pattern of fast moving consumer goods. The enterprise advantage use of the Social Media data is;

The Social Media footprint each costumer leave at Sainsbury web-shop or by registration of their costumer card in a Sainsbury store is a possibility to react towards the costumer. These costumer activities, gives Sainsbury the possibility to communicate directly with their costumer and direct special offers to the costumer due to the costumers purchase pattern.
Another advantage is that Sainsbury can control its stock and herby get a better rotation on products, and purchase products. The demand of being able to analyze and use the data proactively requires the ability to use Big Data.
The third advantage is that marketing can provide special offers to the costumer via Social Media on behalf of the Data collected from the costumers purchase pattern.

Sainsbury has the costumer purchase pattern – they know when, where and what their costumers are buying. Sainsbury can send their costumers special offers and recommend them to giver their opinion about the offers and share their experiences with Sainsbury and other costumers. To handle all that Social Media data and analyze the data against internal sales and stock data collection you as an enterprise need a lot of computer power to get usable data out of your Big Data.

The demand for using Social Media in the communication and sales towards the costumers are developing rapidly. The ability for the enterprise to be able to “listen” to the conversation between the costumers “Tell each other” is only possible if you as an enterprise can collect and analyze the huge amount of data (Big Data) that are produced by using Social Media. The ability to use Social Media demands handling of huge amounts of data that is why Social Media and Big Data goes hand in hand.

Social Media trends of 2013 – is it all positive!

2013-02-10T00:37:00.000-08:00

During 2012 the corporate world, has taken Social Media into the communication strategy and have started to collaborate with their costumers, surveys indicates[1] that 72% of top management, will work much more with collaboration and social media in 2013. Is this just a statement that corporate companies want to express or can the consumer expect a much stronger engagement from the top management?

In 2013 we must expect to handle Social Media on two levels – the Strategic corporate level and the Personal level, this will be the trends. Starting with the Strategic corporate level the most spoken subjects is;

· Mobile social media usage.

· Social Media grows as a marketing tool.

· Big Data gets a lot more manageable

Turning to the Personal Level we must expect to see some more critical voices telling us that Social Media can have a flipside which is not all that beautiful. The backside of Social Media is described as:

· Social Media could harm your self-esteem

· Social Media is bad for your blood pressure

· Online is not a substitute for offline

Social Media at the Strategic level

As mentioned above there are 3 most spoken subjects that corporate has to take into consideration in 2013, as they will affect their strategic decisions.

The first mentioned is Mobil social media usage, the first prediction is that mobile internet users will overtake the wired internet users in USA by 2015 and this shift is expected to go much faster on social platforms. This will give an advantage to networks engaging on “The go easy and visual platforms” like Instagram. This will again force the traditional networks to be able to better differentiate their desktop and mobile experiences. In other words providers of mobile interfaces must have more streamlined and fast-loading interfaces, while also being able to take fully advantage of GPS and exchanging information by touching smart phones. Then we have the field of gaining revenue from using the mobile devices as advertising options. The Achilles heel is to squeeze ads into the small Mobile screens and make costumers read these without deleting them before they are read.

Secondly we will see a further increase of using social media as a marketing tool.

To solve the above mentioned mobile revenue puzzle, social networks will strive to implement new social ad models. Today we have the banner and interruption ads which is something costumers dislike and therefore eventually will decline. Costumers want a proper content and they want to have “user generated content “and therefore a new innovative style of offerings will appear such as Promoted Tweets and Sponsored Stories. This is what marketing people refer to as native advertising. A definition of Native advertising is an ad strategy that allows brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non interruptive, integrated way. Some costumers will resent this kind of intrusion into their home streams, but native ads enables brands and companies to interact with their costumers on their own turf and on their own conditions. This is an idea that ads and content can be interchangeable and therefore will be able to start collaboration among companies and costumers on their home field. The concept of native ads is used by companies in sending Tweets to followers from the company social media channels. Another tool is the available social - analytical software which can identify which are the most read tweets the company are sending out. This gives the company the possibility to selectively amplify the best of the bunch of Tweets and then turning the best tweets into Promoted Tweets. The strategy is simple turning content into ads and herby reaching an even larger audience.

The third strategic objective is the use of Big Data. Big Data appears in the media world still as a buzzword but as it gets more manageable, Big Data will be an advantage for companies. Social Media has provided companies both access and volumes of information and data about costumers buying behavior on an aggregated level. The challenge with these huge amounts of Data is how companies can turn the information into a manageable strategy towards the costumers so the companies can take advantage of the data. A survey made by Oracle states that 93% of the CEO in North America believes that they are losing revenue by not leveraging the Data available to them properly. What is needed is better social media analyzing tools and software that are capable to processing the huge amounts of data flowing in from social media and link it to other touch points consumers have with the company and brand. Big Data will in the future, give us the ability to track multiple social statistics in real time from tweets, Likes and even Instagrams to customer sentiment. This will lead to improved customer service and predict future buying patterns and collaboration can be increased between company and customer.

Social Media at the personal level

The strategic level of Social Media trends 2013 could be seen as some what predictable. We the customers, consumers are living in a technological driven world where devices are produced to increase our productivity and some even say our life quality. But who are looking into the more personal level of Social Media and how it affects our personal well being. Most companies will not accept that the there are consequences in working in a social driven world and environment. Most companies will not accept that they have a responsibility for their employee’s personal level of interacting and collaborating on the Social Media.

Who will take into consideration that social media could harm your self-esteem?

While evidence for Social Media Anxiety Disorder is not proven and largely anecdotal an UK study[2] from fall 2012, found that 50% of Social Media users have found that their participation on social networks has had an overall negative effect on their lives. Some of the participants have even mentioned that the more time they spent online the bigger possibility is there for harming their self-esteem. The reason for poor self-esteem may be due to the increasing numbers of false portrayed images people are putting on the net to exaggerate their profiles and be more valuable towards employers among others. This comparison of profiles is one of the biggest blows to people’s self-esteem. The funny stuff is that Facebook has estimated that there are approximately 42 million profiles which are faked, where people have exaggerated or are lying about themselves in their profile.

So before you start feeling a less valuable person continue to be honest on your profile and secure that you update with facts not fiction – the last one will be discovered in an interview.

The second personal level indication is that social media is bad for your blood pressure. Social Media is by some described as a hotbed of bad behavior in the way of using the language and grammar and the way that users are bragging and faking to appear more likable towards the world. If you find yourself getting unduly irritated by all this exaggerating and lying then turn to other places on the Social network which appears more trust worthy. It is not worse to exaggerate your blood pressure.

The third personal level indication is Online is not a substitute of Offline. When participants in surveys are asked if they have missed any important life moments by being captured in their quest of being social, 25% of the survey respondents say they have missed important life moments. Some will even mention that with the ubiquity of communications technology in our daily lives it can be easy to convince one self that “online life” directly correlates to your “offline life” and that having a face to face dialog with a good friend can be replaced by an online chat you will be wrong. Just remember you can not make the online attempts to get a job you have to secure that you work offline as well otherwise you will miss opportunities.

Reflection

Can we expect the above mentioned of 2013 Social Media! We are working in a world in crisis, where it should be possible to gain a closer collaboration with the costumers- some says that the social technologies will revolutionize the social media collaboration in 2013. What is most important for me both looking on the strategy and the personal level you as an individual has to take into consideration, as in all other aspects of life, make a full stop and think what good can the social media do to you and what is the disadvantages of the communication form. There is nothing which are just black and white and you should not say that you have to start to direct your energy elsewhere just because there is obstacles in using and communicating on Social Media.

[1] IBM CEO study 2012 Social Media collaboration

[2] Forbes article ”3 reasons to quit Social media in 2013”

Does Social Media affect the private consumers purchase behavior?

2013-01-02T01:10:00.000-08:00

Happy Social Media New Year.During 2012 we have seen a growing regulation of behavior which on one hand is a part of the many to many communication among consumers which Social Media is a strong influencer. On the other hand Social Media is also in use from governments (particular from the western world) who want to affect the public opinion on various subjects. We have seen that the environmental subject, are a hot topic, animal welfare is another and corporate taxation is the last one in Denmark where Social Media plays a role.

The sustainability of the corporation depends on the choice and behavior of the consumers.

The consumers can affect the corporations through their social network and social media and general information to be able to affect the behavior of the corporations. The environmental issue is one area where corporations start to communicate the message that their production is environmental sustainable. This information is often written on their homepages and if they are active bloggers they will send the message to their costumers. Corporations know from surveys that consumer purchase behavior is very much affected from how sustainable the corporation is in animal welfare and how they interact in third world countries concerning production and how they treat their employees. The use situation is structuring purchase, form the assessment framework for the choice of shopping location. This is where social media and Social Network will start forming attitudes and creates behavior of the individual consumer that will influence how the corporation should act if they want to keep costumers purchasing their goods and services.

How does social affect the general consumer that a corporation does not pay any corporate tax in the country they are situated in?

The Danish socialist government has chosen to publicize in an easy to read manner who and how much big corporations pay tax in Denmark. This act has one specific purpose; to create a public demand among the Danish citizens that if the citizens should purchase, anything from one of the listed corporations they should have a good explanation for not paying tax in Denmark. The fact is that Danish citizens are one of the most heavily taxed people on the planet earth – so if people has to pay high personal taxes the corporations has to pay their part as well. The Socialist government has now made it up to the individual citizen to demand tax payment from the corporation – the citizen could start boycotting products and services from the corporations who have chosen to send their turnover home to their mother countries. The next step from the Danish government could be to demand that each time the public sector should make a purchase it is a demand that the corporate company must be able to show that it has paid Corporate Tax in Denmark during the last 5 years. This is how you as a government through the public opinion and with the use of social media create a demand for corporate sustainable taxations.

There are no doubt that social media used as described above has a behavioral regulation effect on how corporations in the future will communicate everything from their accounts and in general how they want to appear to their customers in ethical issues. This could have a huge impact on their turnover and their position in the country they are operating in. The corporate companies will on the other hand have to use Social media as an important communication channel towards their costumers to secure that they are satisfied with the corporate company's transactions. The power has definitely changed from the corporations to the consumer.

Will Social Media continue to be a powerful communication channel in 2013?

2012-12-23T03:32:00.002-08:00

During 2012 corporations and individuals, who have been in the social media market have discussed;

To find the tools to get the measurement right, so the accounting people can see the investment in Social Media pays off.
On the other side the communications people have been discussing context and content.
And least but not last a lot of private people has started a “battle” to keep their integrity intact and secure that their information belongs to them instead as they claim to the corporations.

Ad1. From a corporate perspective there will still be a battle in 2013 to find the right measurement tools or more correct the best measurement tool available for the specific social media task you as a corporation want to present to the market.

Ad2. In 2013 Marketing and communication people will continue the discussion of content and context. This discussion purpose is to be able to reach the consumers in a better and more direct way to create a dialog with them to make them purchase more products or services in the future

Ad3. In 2013 the integrity battle will continue and maybe even grow among consumers and corporations. The interest in this subject from a corporate perspective is to secure that possible costumers do not lose their trust with a service; they will go find a different one.

To help consumers to have more faith and trust in what is going on at the social media at least two important actions must be implemented:

We need to have a better privacy setting and an ethical default sharing options.
Search engines, social networks and other data storing Medias need to provide ways for users to easily remove hide or at least curate their personal data that has been cached or stored permanently.

The social media presence in 2013 will have the dimension to keep the consumer more secure and faithful of being part of the social media. Consumers must not feel that the power of their social media presence is controlled by search companies and the social media it self.

I want to whish all people reading my blocks a happy and prosperous social media new year 2013.

Social Media sustainability in an enterprise is part of the value creation!

2012-11-04T15:45:00.000-08:00

An increasing part of the enterprise value creation model is how sustainable the social media are. Both enterprise management and other stakeholders have numerous opportunities and challenges with the value creation and herby sustainability. The enterprise organization has a challenging job in creating a safe and controlled environment for the sharing of ideas and collaboration among its stakeholders. The whole idea is to improve the social and financial performance of the enterprise and creating more value to the organization.

To create a social media sustainable environment for the stakeholders, the enterprise will need to act and behave in a certain way to convince both internal and external stakeholders that the social media effort is real, honest, open minded and not guided and controlled in a specific way to enforce the enterprise values directly on the stakeholders.

When an enterprise want to create value using Social media it has to consider how it approaches all their stakeholders. Stephan Burckhardt wrote (Social Media and sustainability: Seven key lessons, May 8 2012) that there are 7 key lessons for social media value creation:

1. Listen, Listen, Listen

To create sustainable value with your Social Media is less about managing downside risk and more about listening to your key stakeholders. Your stakeholders will bring emergent thought to the surface and tell you their truth if they experience reel collaboration. Listening to your stakeholders will create sustainable value to the enterprise business and make you stay ahead of the market.

2. Be authentic

In the emerging social ecosystem authenticity is the key for making reel collaboration. Feeding the enterprise line either falls flat, or worse backfires. Let the content and the context speak for itself, and create an open and honest collaborative environment. Being authentic will also engage your stakeholders to give you the understanding of what questions to answer. (Source: Editor Matthew McDermott – Treehugger; Business, Politics & Energy)

3. Be humble, self critical and willing to adapt

One thing an enterprise should not do is making self promotion which will be taken by the stakeholders as a social death-knell. What the enterprise should do is to show its humble attitude towards the stakeholders, this is when the social media model with the push/push effect is in use, that is collaboration and that is when you have the dialog with the stakeholders. The stakeholder can go all the way from awareness to interest to desire to action all in the same medium at the same time. The popular way of expressing this new communication style is mentioned in the figure below.

This is when you as an enterprise should be willing to adapt and be self critical to get the best out of collaboration.

4. Be a real person

What is real important when the enterprise want to be social, is when it has to have a real person to do the collaboration. Anonymous corporate voice with lingo and the occasional enterprise CEO quote do not get any hits nor engagement with the stakeholders. Stakeholders want real people to collaborate with, they want “to feel and have the picture and name of whom you are going to collaborate with.” Stakeholders want to know the personality they are collaborating with.

5. Engage over time and on multiple platforms

It is important for any enterprise to engage social media on multiple platforms, as all platforms seems to serve stakeholders engagement in their own unique way. Some enterprises use Twitter for quick internal ping-backs and dialog uses YouTube and a wiki for prospective employees. An others uses Linked In and even Face book for checking on prospective employees.

6. Be relevant

Stakeholders want value, especially in the B2B market. As an enterprise you need to be able to deliver a valuable content in an engaged context. What that means is that stakeholders seek expertise and want their problems and suggestions taken seriously. On the other hand the enterprise managers want to be addressed by specialists who know what they are talking about and can help solve their specific problems. What is important when enterprises are working the Social Media they have to remember that they are “telling each other” which mean the enterprises have a dialog with their stakeholders and they have to find out how they can relieve their pain. You have to be able to take your own and your stakeholders pain seriously and are able to use both suggestions and problems to solve the pain to the mutual benefit for both parties – then you can grow into an industry leader.

7. Be fearless

It is important for the enterprise to dare do collaborate with its stakeholders. In the “old days” when the enterprise used the model of “Tell us what you think of what we tell you” approach does not make you fearless as an enterprise. With this approach you stay in your comfort zone and do not dare to engage with your stakeholders. We all know that it is risky business to start a dialog where you can get some critic from your stakeholders even some dislike which can make the enterprise internal shiver. It is easy to say that we should collaborate with our stakeholders but it is hard to convince the internal powers that be. But those enterprises who dare will suddenly feel rewarded with increasing reach, and value creation more leads and attention all the way up the credibility chain. As social media are not a direct sales tool you as an enterprise will indirectly see the value creation in the sales funnel.

Following these basic guidelines developed in the trenches will get you on the right social path to credibility and relevance in fulfilling the enterprise social and environmental responsibilities, and create sustainable value to your enterprise.

Social Media demands leadership to create real value!

2012-10-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

In my recent post “How valuable is Social Media for the corporate business” I described that getting real social the corporate company needed a cultural change. The cultural change which is demanded depends on having an environment of openness, information sharing and trust. This sort of culture is acquired to create value out of the social media investment. To create such a culture you need to have top management in the leading position of being social acting social and communicating social.

How does CEO participate in Social Media?

In IBM latest CEO study, 1709 CEO around the world was asked if they were participating in Social Media. The answer to this question was from my point of view quite embarrassing for the CEO´s - only 16% (274 of the CEO) was participating in Social Media. This number will eventually grow to 57% with in a 5 year period. This question in the IBM CEO study actually pinpoints clearly that Social engagement is not seen as an important value creator for top management at the moment. Further more, if it should take 5 years to have a new leadership in place in the corporate companies to start participating in the social collaboration, I doubt that these corporate companies will be present in their size and shape we know them today. There is no doubt that the success of Social engagement demands active top management participation, this participation will have a significant impact on the culture of the corporate social collaboration.

How can we quickly change the CEO social participating?

It is obvious from the IBM CEO study that the CEO do not recognize Social Media and the collaboration as an important value creator for the company. How can this be changed?

First thing which always counts for companies is the impact on bottom line figures – so if you want the CEO getting social quickly he/she has to be measured on the social collaboration engagement he/she does?

Second thing to do, are getting Social collaboration as a part of the annual report, just like environment responsibility and other societal values. When you are making social collaboration visible towards the shareholders and the board, the CEO will be accounted for this parameter as well.

Third thing you aught to do is to have a direct access from costumers to the CEO – collaboration is needed directly from the top. A good example of social collaboration on top level is the former prime minister of Denmark Anders Fog Rasmussen who used face book to communicate whit his voters.

Will these steps work to get the CEO participating in Social collaboration?

You can not guaranty anything but first secure measurement of Social Collaboration, secondly have social collaboration as a part of the annual report, this will give some kind of pressure on the CEO to start acting on social collaboration.

If non of these will get the CEO in action on Social collaboration he will be one of the ones who will wait for 5 years to interact in being social and use social media to communicate with the company costumers, and properly out of his business.

How valuable is Social Media for corporate business in 2012 and ahead?

2012-09-02T10:59:00.001-07:00

During the last seven years the internet has changed from an interactive information tool where you as a costumer could tell the corporation about what they have told you. This was a one–to-many communication. The change which made all social and made the social media, was when the communication changed to many-to-many and went out as collaboration between costumer and corporation.

Corporate value creation from Social technologies

Corporate business is still not using the fully potential of the social technologies. An estimated 1.5 billion[1] people around the globe have a social network account. Corporations are not using this potential fully to collaborate with this huge amount of potential costumers. The reason for most corporations not fully using social media and networks is the lack of control towards the costumer – this is not only a one- way communication where the corporation informs the user of their products it is a new arena where you as a corporate business will get immediate feed-back on your product, and performance a collaboration will occur between corporation and costumer. It is here the value creation appears from social media and technologies – you get a feedback, which can generate new opportunities for your business.

Costumers part of the value creation due to social technologies

The costumers has created a new and more powerful role in the entire world of sale and marketing – today you must not expect that costumers just buy your product, information. Costumers starts putting questions about your product and services; they even create news and make regimes fall (the Egyptian spring 2011). The important question for a corporate business is how will social media create value for the corporation?

Thousand of corporate business has found that social media and communication can generate rich new forms of costumer insights – at a lower cost and faster than conventional methods. Products as perfume and services are being re-launched to costumers on YouTube and in blogs to cut cost and trying (with success) to engage costumers directly on the social platforms. The value created is unfiltered feedback and behavioral data – do people like your tweet your YouTube video or even your brand. Corporate business are beginning to discover that social technology platforms, provides a much more efficient way of communication and collaborating. A further benefit is that on social platforms, communications become content – forming a searchable archive that can be continually enriched with comments from costumers, experts and other stakeholders. The latest example I have heard on this is by open up service platforms, where costumers are able to check service status on their own equipment on a social platform. This creates a much more efficiently and effectively use of the data opening up for the costumers to use the corporate business collected data. Further more opening up for data is creating value to both the costumer (Easy to access data) and time consuming for the corporate business not sending abstracts on email to costumers on data they can get by themselves.

Corporate value creation on social media demands openness.

Participation on social media using the technologies, in turn, depends on having an environment of openness, information sharing and trust. This sort of culture, that is acquired to create value out of the social media investment, is not established fully in many corporate organizations. This change of mindset in behaviors and in corporate cultures to get the value out of social media and technologies demands an openness and sharing which is a challenge to corporate organizations.

The award for the ones who really creates the conditions of openness and trust in the corporate organization and are able to let this openness and sharing reach the costumers in real collaboration, will find that the value and benefits from using social technologies and media, will make the corporation more adaptable to changes and crisis in their business and in the society. The ability to absorbing and acting on new ideas and possibilities and even threats is another value of this transforming from an information corporation to a collaboration corporation.

[1] According to Mckinsey latest research 2012

Social Media in big events – how should corporate react?

2012-08-07T06:45:00.002-07:00

It is quite obvious that Corporate has an opinion on how and when members of an organization react during a big event. During the London 2012 Olympic Games Twitter, Face book personal blogs and other Social Media, are becoming a more important part of the promotion of the individual sport performer. The International Olympic Comities are trying to form rules of engagement for the individual performer to make sure that corporate (The Olympic concept) will be respected.

But can you make rules from Top management (IOC) and is it the proper way to control or try to control social media?

"The International Olympic Comity (IOC) objective is to secure that each of the athletes treat each other respectfully and live up to the Olympic ideals perceived as restrictive."

In my opinion there is no problem in advising your employees or Athletes in how corporate want to be presented in the public room. If you are part of a corporation or an athlete in the Olympic Games you have to apply to the rules as long as these rules do not limit the individual’s freedom of speech and expression. The rules made by IOC do not in my opinion limit the athlete’s right to express them self. All athletes are encouraged to use Social Media to tell their fanes about themselves and how they progress in the games. The rules/objective made by IOC; is do not use Social Media to express your feelings about other athletes and do not report directly from the competitions.

These simple rules will not destroy the power of Social Media but just prevent the media to be abused in the way to create hate towards officials and competitors. The idea with Social media is not to use it as a smearing media not in the Olympics nor in corporate context. When a corporation or and individual uses social media it is important to take into consideration that you have the proper content in the right context. Social Media is about creating communication and interaction among the creator of an activity and the fans you have as an athlete. So every initiative you as an athlete or an employee create should, at a minimum, track three key social metrics:

Activity is the amount of outbound activity you as an athlete or your company brand share, publish and communicate with online users.
Reach serves as the measure of how large a community you as an athlete or an employee are reaching through your social media activity
Engagement represents the overall interactions you as an athlete or an employee are experiencing in social channels.

If the athletes in the 2012 London Olympic Games look upon the IOC Social Media engagement rules it should be easy to aligned their own Social initiatives with the IOC objectives - that each of the athletes treat each other respectfully and live up to the Olympic ideals perceived – and herby secure that the athletes do not have any limitations in their ability to express themselves freely.

Will Social Media have any positive impact when acting in a financial crisis?

2012-07-02T04:31:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that the world is in a crisis, in Europe we have the Euro crisis, in US they have a debt crisis and even growth markets as china and India are declining in growth. Companies all over the world have to fight harder to get the attention of their costumers and make them want to purchase their products and services.

The question is; will Social Media have any impact on company’s ability to turn revenue and profit into positive figures?

Social Media has gained a new purpose at the same time as technology has become available to everybody, everywhere at anytime. This has shown in;

The ability to reach new target groups
The ability to use mobile devices

Reaching new target groups

As the technology has become cheaper the target groups for consumers has changed to even getting in contact with younger people. Further more you can now get in contact with people in rural areas which have not been an option in the past. Mobility has been a key word – the increasing number of smart phones and tablet computers has increased the availability and contact possibility to people all over the globe. The increasing use of medias as Face Book, Twitter, Google + , LinkedIn and Orkut has changed the way companies do communicate with their costumers and even move marketing budget from traditional communication to Social Media communication.

Using mobile devices

The availability of mobile devices in rural areas and among people with minimum incomes has increased the use of Social Media. Another target group is the young people who use the social media on their mobile devices as more mature people uses the internet for mails and communication of messages. Companies can now reach new target groups in a much more direct way and either get credit for their social engagement or get punished if the product services do not get accepted the way it is communicated. In other words the receiver of the social engagement decides if he/she like or dislike the engagement from the company – the power is at the consumer.

In my mind it is obvious that in a crisis the social media will be a very good tool to get your message out to a much broader target group. But one thing you as an enterprise must remember it is not possible just to go out there and save money on your marketing expenses if you can not provide a proper content in the right context. On the other hand can you provide the consumer/costumer with a proper content in the right context, Social Media is a very powerful and direct tool which can give you direct contact to new and interesting costumers/consumers in a crisis situation.

Making sense of and understand Social Media better!

2012-06-02T00:51:00.000-07:00

Communication on different levels are difficult and time consuming but a necessity for any enterprise company to send the proper messages to their costumers and partners who are the foundation of their business. Among the communication tools you as an enterprise can use is the Social Media platform. The Social Media platform gives you as an enterprise the opportunity to listen to the Word of Mouth from your costumers. The costumers will, if you are communicating the proper way – the collaborative/many-to-many communication – make you as an enterprise, create a forum which could give you numerous information of how your product and services affects your costumers and hear how costumers marketer and discuss your products among each other.

The above model show how the interaction among costumers/consumers (red arrows) is leap forging the enterprise. This is why the enterprise should create a social room to be able to monitor the discussion, be able to respond to the discussion, be able to amplify the discussion and last lead the discussion by launching products which uses the discussion from the social media forum. (Source: Mikael Thorsen 2012)

What are the enterprises Social Challenges?

What an enterprise must learn is that the costumer has taken the control of the dialog! Costumers are learning from each other, getting to know the brand and its product and services and they are discussing it among each other, exchanging experiences – now the discussion is out of reach for the enterprise company. It is actually now the enterprise has the ability to show their costumers how passionate they are about their product and services. The opportunity and the social challenge for the enterprise are to interact in the word-of- mouth discussion NOT interfere the discussion. A starter is to have created the good story about your product and service – Nike has done that with the “running chip in the shoes” – another company who have created or reinvented their product is - Old Spice, they have created an universe of what men’s hygiene (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE) purely made for Social Media.

How can the enterprise get into the opportunities?

If the enterprise management should benefit from the Social Media trend, it is important for them not just use the entire marketing budget on Social Media ad once. It is important to make a simple approach to Social Media starting creating a social discussion forum where employees also can participate and developed this start into having blogs, tweets and links on

Face book and linked-in.

Executives from enterprise companies understand that Social Media is important. But how do they realize the potential of Social Media, hand-to-measure, the costumer-controlled media and how to drive sales and strengthen brands?

Now getting the full advantage of the costumer discussion the enterprise must start going into action using the following means of getting knowledge and take part in the discussion. Enterprises must be able to react 24/7/365 on any kind of discussion good or bad with all the risks it includes.

The enterprise must monitor the discussion.
The enterprise must respond to the discussion.
The enterprise must amplify the discussion with relevant information.
The enterprise must lead the discussion by launching products that have taken inspiration from the discussion.

This is not an easy task but the key word for the enterprise and the entire staff of employees is KISU – Keep It Simple Understandable for the employees and even more important for the costumers. Then the enterprise management will be able to experience how they can benefit from Social Media and understand the importance of the collaboration model it self.

Should enterprises encourage their employees to be available on company Social Media 24/7 on their smart devices?

2012-05-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that everybody with social media and new smart devices have gained a completely new world with a numerous possibilities for getting information and communication with who ever they want to get in contact with on any time in any geography. When you suddenly reach a level where you live and work 24/7 on your smart device getting tons of information and communication, from the Social Media private as well as business, will that give you as an individual a better work life balance,

and will you be more productive in your work?

Research has been published arguing that people who “take time off” from the social media and leave their smart devices disconnected at night feel more satisfied with their job, compared to people who stays on 24/7. A natural thing which happens when you are on 24/7 is that you believe that you should be able to answer all incoming “questions” private as well as business wise immediately. This creates a stress factor giving the individual the impression that he/she can not fulfill his/her duties private and business wise without always being connected. This feeling can lead to a decrease in working moral. Your costumers do not understand that you can not fulfill their demands and privately you will continue to not being able to absorb the information which you reach every day from your friends and the one you follow on the social media - a stress- full situation can occur. The new Social World and the smart devices have managed to blur the boundaries between work and private life to make their work life balance out of balance.

Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow´s research in the phenomena of “how to break the 24/7 habit and change the way you work[1]”. Her conclusion is that enterprises need to help their employees to unplug. She gets to the point that employees have to work smarter not blindly faster. I am sure that Leslie Perlow are right in the way that we need to get time off from our work to be more productive, but the problem is that our working and private life are melting together due to the fact that we work and communicate privately with the same smart device 24/7. We have reached a situation where we as private and on work are living in the “fast lane” and since everyone is doing it, it’s considered acceptable we need to change the way we work and the way we act on the social media privately. As a trial talk to your family and agree to shutdown all your smart devices tonight – you may feel the benefits in the morning both on your work but also on the private front!

[1] Sleeping with your Smartphone : How to break the 24/7 habit and change the way you work, publication date May 29, 2012

“We shape our Social Media; thereafter Social Media shape us”

2012-04-04T01:03:00.000-07:00

The above headline is first time said by Winston Churchill in his wording concerning buildings, but the truth is the same analogy can be used on Social Media. If we discuss the rising mobile area and look at the development in Social Media on these devices the situation is as described. The users have shaped the Social Media and thereafter the devices which we use them on have shaped Social Media to fit these platforms. This also means digital content strategies for mobile social media will need to be reconstructed based on how content is consumed on these platforms. Unlike the PC/notebook era, mobile devices come in a dizzying array of screen sizes, platforms and user interfaces. Add to that the context in which the user is accessing the content. Context could be a mash up of any or all of the following:

Device: Smartphone or tablet. (Size of screen etc.)

Location: Where is the content being consumed...at home, while commuting, in an outdoor environment, in a noisy indoor area like a restaurant or a mall?

Time: When is the content being consumed and what would be the most relevant information at that time?

Social Relevance: What is their network consuming probably at that time and location? Also what are other people in their vicinity consuming?

Personalization: To what degree can the content be tailored to an individual? One way of doing this would be through data analytics of user and group behavior to serve up increasingly relevant content. It is going to be a tough game for corporations to get into the loop and create the proper platform to the user and with both right content and context we will need another shaping of how to present the content message to the user without making him or her out of focus and board. The reality is that:

· You as a provider of content has less than tree paragraphs of text

· You as a provider of content has less than 30 seconds of audio

· You as a provider of content has less than one minute of video

Mobile social media has to be reshaped by enterprises to make sure that the consumer will embrace the content. The content has to be shaped to the device and give the consumer a compelling reason to act positively to get their message out to the proper users. An example could be restaurants giving consumers details of its breakfast or lunch menus depending on the time the data was accessed. This could be followed by a discount coupon valid for a couple of hours and directions to the nearest restaurant. Today you do not see any restaurants trying to shape their costumers eating behavior to be on a specific time and location with a personalized touch to the individual and with a good social relevance. We can all look forward to be shaped by social Media due to the devices used to bring us content in the right context.

(Smartphone user survey 2012)

Is Social Media blinded by few communication platforms?

2012-03-18T02:49:00.000-07:00

Is the Social Media “revolution” limited to be placed on platforms like Twitter, Face Book, and LinkedIn and operated from Smart phones and tablets? If this is the issue, a lot of enterprise owners have been blinded and assured that only the new and fast moving platforms is only Social Media durable. The purpose of Social Media for an enterprise is not about which platform or device it is run on – it is a matter of how to get a proper content delivered to your target group. To state it more clear – The principal goal of social media is not to make friends but to tell other people what to do!

Which target groups do the enterprises have to turn to?

Most enterprises have to realize that the social era has changed the world and how we create value to our consumers. The 21^st century consumer searches the internet to gather information of what to buy and get knowledge of the new trends. The consumer’s uses, the fast growing platforms like twitter and Face Book to speak to their friends and get recommendations from them on products and knowledge of trends but other means of information gathering are used heavily. Consumer groups are still heavy users of on-line forums such as blogs and other sights where they could be told what to do and where to go with out being directly influenced by the commercial from enterprises.

What should the enterprises do to participate in the dialog and at the same time tell people what to do?

The recopy is simple for the enterprise, it isn’t the social media per se, that they should be attending to; it’s the media used by the target group of the enterprise that care most about what they do and what the could help to solve. The recipe is simple but the way to get there will demand changes in how the enterprise, want to communicate and how open it can and will be of its products and services. There is no doubt that you as an enterprise can learn what people think of their company on Facebook. And the enterprise can get followers on twitter. But do not make the potentially mistake of thinking that you have covered your social platform with these few medias. There have been stakeholder media before twitter, facebook and LinkedIn and they have been worked on other devices than smart phones, tablets and other fast moving devices. Be aware that the stakeholders are still expanding in reach and resources and you as an enterprise have to consider how to work together with these stakeholders to be able to create the value you want to sell to the market.