social business Archives | Page 2 of 3

This isn’t Margaritaville. You can lose the parrot head, my friend.

What’s the most common Employee Advocacy mistake brands make? Many brands have given their employees permission to use social media, published a social media policy, and offered training on the use of social venues. But that level of support leaves a lot of potential value on the table.

Many brands avoid empowering their employees in social media because they do not want to dis-intermediate the marketing team from customers, or they do not want employees creating brand assets that the brand does not own. Some brands fear that employees in social media could damage brand reputation or violate regulations and create liability for the brand. Some brands just do not know how to begin.

Regardless of how a brand feels about its employees in social media, nearly every brand today has employees who are active in social media and employees who talk about their brand in social media. Those employees engage in social media for a wide range of reasons. In many cases, employees get into social media because their partners and customers demand it.

While almost every brand today can find employees using social media to discuss their products, services, working conditions, and so on, the brands that achieve the most value deploy corporate resources and guidance to empower their employees in social media.

Simply asking employees to parrot brand-generated messages through their personal social media may help the brand to gain small amounts of reach or engagement, but it is not a sustainable strategy for engaging audiences and developing relationships online. It is easy to do, so a lot of brands do it; however, that approach fails to respect the relationships employees and their audiences, so it does nothing to help employees create a differentiated and effective presence online. Specifically, when people simply repeat brand-generated messages, they lose the ability to attract people like me, thereby diminishing their ability to build trust and advocacy online, or worse irritating their network and causing abandonment.

Here’s a hilarious example of the effect of parroting messaging featured by CONAN, to demonstrate the point:

See what I mean?

All joking aside, this kind of parroting can do huge damage to your brand. Not only is irritating your followers, it’s likely driving them away in droves.

A preliminary study that I’ve been working on, with my colleagues in IBM Research Watson Lab, has found that more than 50% of the 230,430 followers of a certain branded social account is also following more than one of the company’s branded or employees accounts. Given this, there is a risk of creating more spam than value for our constituents, if parroting messaging and distributing through multiple accounts continues. Resulting in the opposite of creating value.

My team has coined the phrase “Ecko Gecko” to describe the phenomenon. We’ve created guidance to help our employees understand what negative affects parroting messages has when they simply copy & paste the same message and share it across multiple accounts. There is significant risk in damaging brand reputation.

Leading brands monitor social media and use social media analytics to observe and evaluate the effectiveness of their employee’s who are engaged in social on behalf of their companies. It’s scary what you might find. Especially when it comes to the practice of copying & pasting the same message over and over then distributing via social accounts, both branded and employee accounts. Are you monitoring in this way?

There is an important opportunity here, a teaching moment. Don’t let it paralyze your efforts, use the insights to create new education and training to course correct. Share the findings from your analysis and provide clear, concrete incentives for behavior modification. If you share examples of what not to do, backed by quantifiable and substantiating evidence based on data which demonstrates the negative impact such actions have, such as:

driving “un-follows”
encouraging “opt-outs”
causing “removals from lists”, (just to name a few)

Who can argue or ignore that?

For more on how to “Help Your People Do Well”, read chapter 2 of The Most Powerful Brand on Earth.

Social Workforce Enablement System Components

What support do your employees and partners need to effectively engage in social to represent your brand?

I’m a passionate believer that sharing knowledge & expertise is a key driver of effective social engagement and it is imperative when establishing personal & brand reputation. Our CEO Ginni Rometty, recently said it like this: “In a social enterprise, your value is established not by how much knowledge you amass, but by how much knowledge you impart on others.”

Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring how IBM’s Expertise Enablement System compares to other leading brands that are vested in supporting a social workforce. This exploration led me to define a set of common components any company will require to drive successful engagement through social. I thought I would share these components here to inspire others who are working on developing such a system for their workforce. If you have additional ideas please share them with me!

Must have common componentry of an effective social business employee enablement program, include:

Organizational Alignment and Cultural Support from Senior Leadership: Executive commitment and open leadership is key to employee adoption. It is the leadership that sets the cultural tone for the organization. If the leaders embrace social and demonstrate that they practice it, not just talk about it, employees will adopt the company’s social business agenda and follow it’s organizing principles.
Training: Publicly-facing employees require training to ensure a consistent level of interaction quality.
Listening & Analytics: Social listening can enable activation, allowing employees to be responsive and even predictive with their actions. Deeper analytics provides employees and the company with an understanding of social engagement as compared to competitors and brand goals.
Content: Employees who create quality user-generated content stimulate interaction and discussion within their networks. Those who maintain a sustained commitment to such engagements are more likely to be recognized as an authority & become influential around their area of expertise.
Measurement & Reporting: Employee enablement KPI’s must be tied to business goals. Provided on regular basis, these analytics help employees understand their network engagement effectiveness and allow them to make informed decisions that improve future performance.
Platform: Curation and selection of appropriate social networks & venues ensures employees are engaged where their constituencies are likely to be participating & seeking expertise.
Governance: Ensures that each component of the Enablement system is on-point and in compliance with company standards & security requirements

What are the common components of social empowerment systems at your company? Please share them with me, so I can learn from you!

Effective Social Business Management

Social is not just another way to push content, it gives you the ability to connect human beings with one another and ignite conversations around topics of interest relevant to your social business initiative.

At IBM, the Social Business Manager collaborates closely with the Marketing Segment Manager to provide oversight for all aspects of a social business program including social listening research, planning, engagement and measurement.

Four requirements of an effective Social Business Manager include:

Information Gathering
Evaluating the data
Social Strategy & Content Plan
Measurement

“On a day-to-day basis, I mostly use HootSuite to monitor a few different social streams and what’s being said. I can retweet the content, or send it to one of our SMEs to share. I also like Sysmos. I use it on a weekly basis to track some of our numbers.” Kate Motzer, IBM Social Business Manager

Information gathering

Utilize social intelligence to understand the marketplace. There are a variety of ways to gather social intelligence. For the most reliable results, you’ll want to combine in-depth research with real-time listening. As a complex Social Media eco-system continues to emerge, any social media lead will rely on various tools to manage their social media programs.

“I’m using social dashboards to get information, or certain keywords or hashtags for conversations that are going around, and trying to be involved in that conversation, it also helps us identify communities and specific people who are influencers…” Cleveland Bonner, IBM Social Business Manager

Evaluating the data

Understand your audience; what is important to them and who is important to their conversation. Building your constituency — a group of people who would identify themselves as a group based on shared interests, beliefs, or behaviors — is a critical part of the success of any social business program. The more specific you are about your constituency, the easier it will be to create a digital plan that they will value and engage in.

“Are we driving conversations outside of the echo-chamber? Also, are people engaging with your blogs? Are they responding to your Tweets? Are they having conversations on Facebook or SlideShare?” Colleen Burns, IBM Social Business Manager

Social Strategy & Content Plan

Create a Social Strategy & Content Plan informed by your evaluation. Make connections between thought leaders. Determine who should be involved in this conversation, who can help the marketplace understand your company’s position and who can help your company leaders better understand the marketplace. Decide on the content type and content format that you should share and distribute in your social strategy.

Measuring Success (Metrics):

Monitoring and improving upon Reach, Engagement, Amplification & Conversion.

“I think what’s important is having a very clear and well-defined strategy and objectives, figuring out which groups you’re going to enable and how you’re going to enable them, and then making sure to provide them one spot that has all of the information they need in a manner that’s not overwhelming.” Kate Motzer, IBM Social Business Manager

An effective Social Business Manager understands and cares about the needs of their client and the community that their client serves. They learn the business culture as well as the political, economic and social context that influences their client’s industry. The Social Business Manager uses this intelligence to help the client achieve their business goals by identifying, connecting and communicating with influential decision makers. The goal is to create value for the client.

Do you have a dedicated team to drive effective social business management? Are you wondering what roles are required? Check out my book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, which includes a full chapter dedicated to the roles required to build a successful social team.

Trusted Experts engaged in social media are 135% more effective at generating leads

The Practice of Effective Social Business Program Management
Social gives you the ability to connect human beings with one another and ignite conversations around shared topics of interest relevant to your brands priorities. So if you’re thinking about social as just another channel to push content through, think again.

As you build your social program, identify insights and key learning’s from your listening research. Evaluate the ecosystem of people and connections. Think through how you can create a presence that will appeal to those you want to build relationships with and who would be best suited to be the focal point. Most likely, it’s not a marketer. Rather, focus on encouraging dialogue with your employees who have expertise to share. These leaders will not only have valuable knowledge, they also hold the promise to become the most trusted and credible within a relationship.

Like any other tactic or channel, social should not be approached independently but with an eye towards fulfilling your larger objectives. As you begin to think about your social plan ask yourself what role it will play in achieving your overall goals? Defining and identifying realistic ways to measure success are critical steps in creating the framework for a successful program.

Another crucial element in the early stages of developing a social program is performing listening research – this is how you get to know your audience and come to understand where they like to spend their time online and what kinds of content and tactical approaches they are most likely to respond to.

A change Agent – The emerging role of the Social Business Manager
Social business management is undertaken by people who create and engage in social digital experiences on behalf of your brand. At IBM, there’s a new role emerging, the Social Business Manager. This individual not only collaborates closely with the extended marketing management team to provide oversight for all aspects of a social business program including social listening research, planning, engagement and measurement. They also act as a change agent.

They’re driving cultural change and adoption of social through their commitment to:

Work with employees as a relationship manager and coach
Provide direction to employees on relevant influencers, external brand champions, partners and competitors within specific topic area. Help employees establish priorities which relationships to focus on.
Provide supporting assets, program guidance, training and critical feedback to those employees engaged in social outreach

Through some early pilot work I’ve been leading, we’re able to quantify that engagement with influential experts in social media is 135%* more effective at generating sales leads than traditional digital marketing tactics. Another way of saying this is, trusted SMEs who share their expertise online are 7x more likely to drive initiations with a call to action (offer) when compared to other digital marketing tactics in the same period.

This is a win-win for the brand and employees. The employees benefit from building their professional reputation and increasing their visibility in their field, while they drive the brand’s influence and support lead development in the market.

If you’re approach social as just another channel for marketers to manage and push content through, think again.

*IBM Select Social Eminence pilot 3Q2012

Building the IBM Brand in the Social Sphere

I’ve traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark to speak at the IBM Smarter Business Event.

This is my first time here and it’s an amazing vibrant city, full of old world charm and tourists from around the globe. I was lucky enough to have some time when I first arrived to tour a bit and take some snapshots to share with my family, friends and co-workers back in the US.

I’m excited to present work I’m leading, more specifically the IBM Select Social Eminence Program. This initiative empowers employees who are world-renowned for their expertise, experience, and reputation to more effectively share their knowledge across the social web. This is one of many social enterprise programs in IBM’s digital & social marketing strategy.

Skab verdens stærkeste brand, Susan Emerick, IBM US from IBM Danmark

Also presenting is my esteemed colleague Christian Carlsson @chris_carlsson, IBM Digital Leader of Denmark. He’ll be sharing Social Business Recipes from IBM’s Social Business transformation.

Favoritopskriften på Social Business, Christian Carlsson, IBM from IBM Danmark

While Christian and I have met virtually many times via collaborative communities and have shared ideas over the phone while web conferencing, there’s nothing like meeting in person face to face.

I’m also looking forward to is talking with our IBM Customers who are keen to understand what IBM’s doing to become a social business. It’s a journey, one that I’m passionate about and have been involved with shaping for a number of years.

After that, I’ll lead a discussion with MBA students about the importance of building & sustaining your personal brand online. Share tips on getting started, how to make connections with those who share your interest and provide some recommendations on what not to do.

For those attending the event, I look forward to meeting you! For those following the event, I’ll share my perspectives via Twitter #sbdk #socbiz @sfemerick

Performance Guru Advocates the Human Side of Social Business

Martin Packer describes himself as an “IBMer, Mainframe Performance Guy and zChampion, who gets to think about lots of other stuff.” And if you’d follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook or read his blog, you’d soon realize that characterization fits him to a T.

Martin’s involvement with social media began 25 years ago, when he first joined IBM and was introduced to its VM forums. Used by the technical community to talk internally about VM operating system issues, Martin quickly discovered two things. “Firstly, I could get discussions going on technical topics and, secondly and perhaps more importantly from a social perspective, I could find like-minded people in the company,” he says.

The forums provided Martin with a vehicle to grow professionally and gain stature as a mainframe performance specialist. They also gave him the impetus to establish his own voice within his community. “In 2005, I became aware of IBM’s internal blogging site called Blog Central. I guess I was a late adopter of blogging as a technique, but I took to this one quite readily and that really was where I got started with blogging and then with micro-blogging through Twitter and a lot of other social applications,” he says.

Today, Martin’s principal social applications are: IBM developerWorks, his Mainframe Performance Topics blog that’s open to IBM and non-IBM developers alike; he’s on Twitter @martinpacker, where he has close to 1,300 followers; LinkedIn where he continues to grow his professional network with those who share common a interest in mainframe performance topics and Facebook, where approximately 50 percent of his 300-plus friends are customers, IBM developers, consultants and other people in the field.

How does Martin make use of these different applications?

“Well, it’s horses for courses,” he explains. “I got heavily into Twitter because a lot of what I had to say was very brief. I didn’t want, for example, in a blog post to develop an argument over several column inches just to deliver a one-sentence payload. So, for me, Twitter works very well. It’s not as rich a medium as Facebook, so where the richness of medium is required, I think Facebook is better.

“But I’ve returned to blogging this year because I’ve realized there are some things I want to explain and discuss in much more detail and blogging is the right medium. … I think it’s a case of you use the tool depending on what you’re trying to do.”

On mixing personal and professional

Martin is not averse to mixing in non-technical discussions and comments. In fact, he sees it as a way of bringing his community closer together. “We get to find common ground,” he says. “For example, it might be taste in music or movies or books we’ve read, or maybe personal philosophy. So I have found that it’s really helped in getting to know customers and other IBMers and consultants in the industry much better and, hopefully, the same has worked the other way around.

“Other people have been able to get to know me better, to build common cause with me better, and that’s the way it seems to work.”

This eclectic approach of just being yourself is what Martin calls ‘authentic voice’ — “talk about stuff you want to talk about in ways you want to talk about it, using the media you want to talk about it in.” And it appears to have served him well in advancing his credibility and social eminence.

For example, when he speaks at conferences or visits with customers, “I’m seeing more and more people say to me I actually read your blog article on this very subject the other day,” he says.

Advice for beginners
Martin recommends that people find the medium that works best for them — “it’s probably several media” — and determine where the community they feel most at home with resides. Once people get started, he says, they’ll figure out how much time they want to devote. “I don’t really schedule time for social networking,” Martin says. “In fact, I regard it as interstitial. It’s stuff I do on and off throughout the day and maybe the night, as and when the mood takes me.”

Techie Uses IBM developerWorks to Build Social Eminence

Nigel Griffiths eats, drinks and sleeps Power Systems. Around 15 years ago, this IBM performance guru located in the United Kingdom authored a free utility he called nmon (short for Nigel’s Monitor), which can be used to monitor and analyze performance data on AIX and Linux systems.

While never officially supported by IBM, the tool captured the attention of performance specialists throughout the world to the point where today, Griffiths estimates, it has between 20,000 – 30,000 users. As nmon’s popularity grew, Griffiths was faced with a problem: how best to support this burgeoning community. “And so to communicate with them better, rather than e‑mailing them all,” he explains, “I started to get involved in developerWorks …” Thus marked the beginning of Griffiths’ journey into using developerWorks and its extensive social media capabilities.

A growing awareness of users’ needs

Griffiths first step was to create a wiki which he used to provide documentation and downloadable binaries for nmon. From there, he started a forum to answer questions from users directly and get answers to them fast. But he soon discovered that he was also fielding questions about Power Systems performance in general, and he noticed that many users were confused about how the machines work and how to get the best out of them, “Everyone wants their machine to go faster”.

And so Griffiths began blogging on developerWorks to allow others to benefit from his AIX and Linux expertise. He even made a few embedded videos. “I have the luxury that I work in advanced technical support, so I work on new things that are happening, new machines that we are bringing out with the latest technologies,” he says. His rule of thumb in deciding what to blog about: when he comes across content of interest to him, chances are that lots of others will be interested too.

The reader reaction and comments he’s generated from his blog entries have helped Griffiths escape what he calls “expert blindness”. He points to IBM clients just starting out and how they often struggle with things that he thinks are blatantly obvious. “That makes me rethink the way that we’re putting these things over and it reminds me that … there’s always some new guys that need a bit of help,” he says.

Griffiths has also found that customer tech people value interacting with IBM tech people and are impressed when contact is made, which helps increase brand awareness and purchase consideration among IT decision makers.

Griffiths is now using Twitter @mr_nmon to get the word out about his blog postings and to follow other leading performance experts. Currently, he follows 12 other techies inside and outside IBM whose knowledge he respects. “I usually find maybe one or two things a day that I think, oh, that’s useful, that would take me ages to work out. Or, I’ll file that one away, that could be useful in a project in the future,” he says. He also likes to re-tweet those items to the 400 or so people that are on his Twitter list, so they’re aware of the good stuff that others are doing.

Finding your own way

Griffiths’ advice to others considering social media: “Find out what approach to social media works for you.” For him, it’s about spending a few hours each week sharing expertise so people don’t have to find things out the hard way.

While leery about becoming too well known, Griffiths acknowledges that his reputation as a performance guru has grown considerably since he started blogging and tweeting. And his moderated use of social media shows that you don’t have to jump in with both feet to be really effective and make a contribution.

A quick look at developerWorks

Since 1999, IBM developerWorks has been the IT industry’s most comprehensive source of technical content for the developer community, focusing on IBM software products, as well as open-standards technologies such as Java, Linux, XML, Web development, and more. Four million IBM and non-IBM developers, IT professionals, and students in 195 countries use developerWorks each month to learn about advances in IT and open standards, develop and showcase their experience and skills, solve problems, and work collaboratively with experts and peers.

Today, the platform provides an extensive and well-managed set of social capabilities specially designed for business, which include wikis, blogs, forums, bookmarks, groups and profiles. Recently, developerWorks received the Forrester Groundswell Award and the AMI SMB Social Media Award in recognition of its effective use of social media.