IBM Expands Social Business Services

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Paul

Seeking accelerate its pole position as a leader in the emerging concept of “social business,” IBM introduced new programs, services and partnerships to help organizations grasp the concept and make it work for their organizations. The company is rolling out a series of technical workshops and consulting services to help customers develop a culture that fosters open collaboration and sharing among employees, clients and partners. The announcements coincide with the annual Lotusphere conference being held in Orlando this week, which features a social business theme. Read more about the specifics here.

Sandy Carter, IBM

The initiatives are the second stage in an evolution of the social business theme that began with the introduction of the the IBM Connections platform last year. “These offerings are all about how to leverage the technology to drive business outcome,” said Sandy Carter (left), IBM’s Vice President of Social Business Evangelism. “It’s about what engagement strategies to user and how to turn social business into money.”

The offerings are also part of an IBM drive to sell its services at a higher level. The linchpin of the program is strategic consulting from IBM Global Business Services that focuses on how to restructure organizations about seamless collaboration and information discovering. This morning’s Lotusphere opening session repeatedly hammered on the theme of organizational transformation. “Five years from now, the people who win will be talking about a completely new way of doing business, one with new platforms, cultures, skills and insights,” said Alistair Rennie, IBM General Manager of Collaboration Solutions.

IBM is partnering with partners to deliver training and specialized consulting services. The partnerships are intended to speed delivery of services globally and also to build an ecosystem around the social business concept, IBM would clearly like to own. Dachis Group will provide a “social business adoption quickstart workshop” and Group Business Software will provide services to make Lotus Notes applications Web- and mobile-accessible.

The term “social business” has been gaining traction in the last year. Mentions of the term on the Internet grew from two million in 2010 to about 20 million in 2011, according to an informal Google search. Social business differs from social meda in that “Social media touches mainly on marketing and PR, whereas social business goes inside the organization to include the way you recruit and retain talent and how you work with your supply chain,” Carter said. “It’s not just about demand generation but incorporating social it into all aspects of your business.”

In a separate release, IBM said it is partnering with San Jose State University to “help students turn their social networking savvy into business ready skills to prepare for the jobs of the future.”

This is one in a series of posts sponsored by IBM Midsize Business that explore people and technologies that enable midsize companies to innovate. In some cases, the topics are requested by IBM; however, the words and opinions are entirely my own.

Live Blog: Lotusphere 2012 Opening Session

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Paul

Michael J. Fox kicks off as guest speaker, telling about his diagnosis with Parkinson’s Disease at the age of 29 and how it sparked his interest in the Internet. “I found out I was part of a community.” Web activism has enabled him to raise $270 million to battle Parkinson’s. Fox’s brief speech isn’t very relevant to social business, but the audience receives him well.

IBM’s Alistair Rennie kicks off the core session.There’s nothing new about social business, he says. It’s about sharing ideas and trust, having those actions persist so we can learn from them. We finally have a way to deliver those insights in a ways that they can be used at that moment.

IBM’s internal think tank, the Institute on Business Value, discovered that collective intelligence delivers three major benefits:

Discover new ideas
Leverage skills and distribute workload
Improve forecasting effectiveness

Alistair Rennie at Lotusphere 2012

There are many ways to apply these benefits, ranking from improved product design to global sales contests. “Ultimately, Social Business is a competitive differentiator.”

This is not new tools, it’s a complete reinvention of systems that form the core of how a business operates. Five years from now, the people who win will be talking about a completely new way of doing business, one with new platforms, cultures, skills and insights. “This is rethinking. It’s like Moneyball: analytics + baseball = new game.”

When you get serious about transformation, you stop thinking about tools and start thinking about platforms. It means a core platform for communications, botn internal and external, Rennie says. “I would shut off e-mail if I wasn’t running Lotus Notes.” Like many core technologies, e-mail has been abused.

The Social Business platform that IBM is building has these components:

Social networking
Content
Analytics

We need deep analytics around everything in the organization. This is what drives business change, Rennie says.

Together, these create a platform for action that transforms process and innovation.
“Social Business cannot be an IT project,” but IT must be closely involved. “If you understand the potential of social business, grab a Red Bull and a nearby nerd and get going.”

The Demos Begin

It’s impossible to describe all the screen stuff going on during the fast-paced demo portion of the program, but here are some highlights.

IBM’s Jeff Schick introduces a demo of the new Lotus social business platform, which borrows liberally from Facebook, Hootsuite and paper.li. The user interface is a Facebook/Google+-like internal social network. The news feed is the core experience with e-mail and calendar available through pop-up windows. Interesting evolution from traditional e-mail in-box. Lotus is effectively replacing the inbox with the social network.

Documents can be edited directly from browser. Workflow is overlaid to enable tasks to be assigned to others on a team from within the document. Those assignments go directly into a user’s activity stream.

Statistics are available about activity in any community you manage. “Do you ever wonder who are the most active members of your communities or what content is most popular? Now you have those statistics instantly.”

There’s also a cool, quick demo of a coming group video feature (technology provided via Polycom). Looks just like Google Hangouts.

The demo also shows integration with back-end content management systems so that community managers can share content such as PDFs and Word docs from within the Enterprise Content Manger directly with the community. Content can be organized by various views, including a paper.li-like custom news page and topical filtering. “This is the destination for all your work actions.”

The next demo shows IBM Docs. This is collaborative Web-based editing performed in the cloud or on premise. Social content management can unlock the content stored in every repository and enable new business processes. The new release of Notes Connections (available now) will make it easier to share content. Users can view a stream of user comments in a Twitter-like view. New Sametime integration intercepts messages and re-routes to the appropriate communication server,such as Apple messaging. Directory integration enables dial-back from a Sametime message for a voice/video call.

Business partners Polycom and Aruba Networks provided the platform integration for these features.

New mobile systems management features enable organizations to do a partial data wipe on a mobile device in order to maintain enterprise security without erasing user data.

Larry Bowden, VP, Web Experience Software, IBM shows the new IBM Customer Experience Suite. Noting that 30% of customers abandon Web pages within five seconds, he highlights the close-to-real-time analytics built on top of a scalable social network.

The IBM Customer Experience Suite is aimed at making it as easy as possible to reach mobile customers, deliver engaging experiences and apply analytics for informed decision-making. The beta of the suite is available now. This includes Portal & Community Pages, Web Content Manager and Web Experience Factory.

A demo show how a website manager can use a tablet to change a company website to deliver an optimized experience on any platform. The resulting site can resize and present content according to the capabilities of the device. This might be a click on a desktop or a swipe on a tablet. Integrated content management enables content elements such as text and video to be dragged, dropped and published. The content team can then be notified through an annotation feature that draws on the screen and shares those markups with others.

Surveys and user comments can be quickly added to content and made part of the published page. In-line analytics overlays visitor activity directly on the published page, making it simpler to identify trends. Survey/poll results can also be viewed instantly.

A social analytics demo shows data from SAP overlaid on sentiment analysis information from social monitoring tools (below). This helps a business to understand in near real-time how customers are reacting to news or a new product and how that’s reflected in sales from transaction systems.

User Presentations

Kurt De Ruwe, CIO Bayer MaterialScience

A division within the company wanted to take advantage of the knowledge and expertise distributed throughout the company’s worldwide operations. This division makes materials for the auto industry, where a 10% weight reduction yields a 5% energy consumption reduction. Bayer MaterialScience was looking for new lightweight materials.

IBM Connections was installed out of the box and made available without formal training. The first deployments were small but the software was so easy to use that it grew to several thousand users within 18 months. “By next month, over 125,000 internal users and business partners will have access to Connections.”

One of the most useful features is the tag-based user directory. Previously, employees had to find others within the organization by downloading and searching Excel spreadsheets. With the tagging function so, people can be found by expertise, location, title, division, etc. Bayer now has 54,000 profile tags in Connections, and the rapid and always-current directories is transforming the way people work together.

Collaboration in Medicine

The session features presentations from two users in medicine.

Denise Hatzidakis, CTO of Premier Healthcare Alliance said, “At Premier, being exceptional means doing what we need to do so members can remain among the top hospitals in the country. We use the power of collaboration to lead transformation to high-quality, cost-effective health care.”

“Kids are the new normal. They think nothing about connecting with people and sharing actionable information. Health care information is easy to find, but useful data is hard to find. People are treated episodically by providers who only hlave access to a limited amount of information in a short exam.”

Getting health care providers to interact social is a big challenge. Data doesn’t flow easily. Premier has to find the trigger points that stimulates action. The requires collaboration across the industry.

The U.S. is plagued by 80 million health care mistakes a year, causing $800 billion in waste. The biggest fault point is in data handoff. In our business, operating socially improves outcomes and saves lives. Connected care is becoming the new normal, enabling providers to easily share knowledge. This addresses the biggest challenge health care providers face today: improving quality while reducing cost.

Premier is building a new platform that will allow it so measure, gain insight and imnprove the health of our populations. Data and social tools will be embedded in daily work. Patients will have greater certainty they’re getting the most effective treatment possible and the platform integrates expertise from the best health care providers in the nation.

The wrap-up speech was by Dr. Jeffery Burns, Chief of the Division of Cricital Care Medicine at Children’s Hospital in Boston

“I’m convinced medicine can’t move forward without collaboration with you,” he told the audience. Dr. Burns (left) told the story of working with a team of 20 doctors and nurses to save the life of a girl stricken with a bloodstream infection. “It was shutting down her vital functions: I was anxious about whether she could survive this,” he said. After multiple interventions and many tense moments, the girl was saved. “Last Hune I spoke to her mother and she told us how the girl had just finished sixth grade,” he said. “That is the greatest reward of my work.”

Dr. Burns was able to apply the lessons he learned to helping physicians in Guatemala City save a girl there who suffered from a similar condition. The physicians used telemedicine to consult between their locations. When the doctor later met that little girl he marveled, “My God, we did this over the Internet.”

Collaboration is instinctive to today’s young people. Dr. Burns’ 15-year-old son plays video games with people in faraway locations whom he has never met. “He was doing the same thing I was doing: working in teams, breaking down tasks, forming hypotheses and testing hypotheses. These are scientific skills but in a game format,” he said. The potential exists to revolutionize medicine through these techniques.

“Ten million children die every year of preventable diseases,” he said. “There aren’t enough doctors and nurses trained to take care of a critically ill child. We need a solution that works as well in resource-constrained environments as in resource-advantaged ones.”

Childrens ia building a solution in partnership with several other hospitals. It enables health care providers to access the information they need ot provide care to critically ill children from anywhere in the world. Underlying the collaboration platform is a social network that enables experts to share their wisdom with those who might need it. Participants can then interact through avatars to transfer knowledge and discuss. Expertise gleaned from one intervention is thus available to everyone on the network. The underlying platform is IBM Connections.

Best Gifts for Geeks: The Spiceworks List

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Paul

As part of my work with IBM Midsize Business, I monitor and contribute to an active IT community called Spiceworks. This collection of hard-core geeks (1.8 million as of this writing) loves to get down and dirty about the day-to-day issues of managing infrastructure at small and midsize businesses, but they also like to have fun. The Water Cooler group features an unending stream of discussion about everything from the Zombie apocalypse weapon of choice to clueless user stories. There’s a curious fascination with bacon.

Just for fun, I asked the members What’s the Perfect Geek Christmas Gift?, and they obliged with plenty of great ideas. Here are the highlights.

Superheroes

If you’re a fan of The Big Bang Theory, you know that techies love superheroes. UDReplicas sells full-blown costumes of most of the great characters (right). They’re gorgeous, but they aren’t cheap. Most cost more than $1,500 fully loaded. Still, for that special geek in your life, it’s an investment.

if you’re on a budget, consider satisfying the superhero within. Superherostuff.com sells wearable accessories for just about every superhero you can imagine. This includes pajamas and underwear for men and for women. Just please remember to do the laundry.

Just Geek Gifts

Save time hunting for geek gifts on Brookstone and Hammacher Schlemmer by heading directly to ThinkGeek.com. The people who put together this bountiful store clearly know their audience, because it was the most-mentioned e-commerce destination by the Spiceheads. Highlights include the Blade Runner-Style LED Umbrella ($19.99), the LED Binary Watch (which requires you to translate 10 LED lights into the time, $69.99), and the awesome Star Wars Jedi & Sith Bath Robes ($89.99).

Geeks are fascinated with time, as evidenced by several recommendations of clocks and timepieces. The Time Machine Ball Bearing Clock ($49.95) lifts a ball bearing onto “a durable concentric track at regular intervals. Here it moves with others on a slow downward course, both halted and propelled by ‘see-saws’ that tip when correctly weighted. Correct time can be read by observing the numerals that the balls are aligned with.” It sounds like a lot of effort to find out what time it is, but maybe not as much as reading the binary watch.

Burning down the house

In the category of Stuff That Has No Practical Value But Is Too Awesome Not to Own come products from WickedLasers.com. Many of this retailer’s products are simply super-bright flashlights, but a few might require FAA approval. In particular, the S3 Krypton Series and S3 Arctic Series ($299.95 each) both vie for the title of “brightest laser you can legally own.” Of the Krypton product, WickedLasers says, “Our Earth’s atmosphere ends at 62 miles, but the Krypton goes beyond as it breaks through our atmosphere, into outer space.” Who says the U.S. space program is dead?

The Arctic model is “currently being tested by Guinness World Records [as] the world’s most powerful handheld laser…The 1000 mW output power of the blue laser beam is able to burn through balloons, plastic, and much more.” If you don’t believe me, see the video below. Enjoy, but please stay away from my neighborhood.

Practical and Cool

Not everything on the geeks’ shopping list is pointless fun. There are Floppy Disk Sticky Notes ($9.99 for a pack of three) and my favorite: the Nest Learning Thermostat (available early next year for $249). This little marvel is a programmable thermostat with a brain. It learns from your behavior and over the course of a week or two automatically changes the temperature settings in your home to match your living pattern. “One-off temperature changes won’t confuse it, but change the temperature a couple of days in a row and Nest will catch on and adjust its schedule,” says the site. “Lower the temperature two Mondays in a row and Nest will remember for next week.” It has a lot of other bells and whistles, including a feature that tells you how much energy you’re saving. There are iPhone and Android apps, ‘natch.

Did I Mention Bacon?

Most geeks I’ve known drink sparingly, shun tobacco and avoid recreational drugs. But that doesn’t mean they’re complete health freaks. One major weakness: bacon. The Cooking with Spice group on Spiceworks has dozens of discussions on the topic, and breakfast meat came up several times on the holiday wish list. For $9.75 Geek Cantina will sell you a thick slice of pork to hang on your Christmas tree. The bad news: It’s out of stock. But my favorite is Tactical Canned Bacon. That’s right, it’s bacon in a can. A 9 oz. container provides 18 servings of porcine pleasure that lasts more than 10 years on your shelf. I can’t say it better than ThinkGeek.com:

The zombies have fought long and hard, but the tide is seeming to finally turn. We will survive this invasion…because we were smart enough to stock up on Tac Bac – Tactical Canned Bacon. That is why we are strong; that is why we’ll win.

Happy holidays.

Cool & Useful Sites for the Holidays

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Paul

The folks at the Webby Awards sent along a super-helpful list of Web resources to use over the holidays. They range from social shopping to gift recommendations to real-time TV and music sharing. While I was familiar with several of these sites, I hadn’t heard of gems like Yap.tv, Wantful and Trippy. Definitely bookmarkable. The descriptions below were provided by the Webby Awards.

1. Skype

Video chatting is now a standard activity for most Internet users – in fact, earlier this year, Skype reported that their users log 300 million minutes of video calls daily. Skype has recently added a new multi-party platform that allows up to 10 people to video chat with each other, which is a great way to get the family together, even if you’re all far away from each other.

2. Google+ Hangouts

Yet another way to connect groups of people over video chat – but Hangouts also enable the chat participants to share and enjoy digital content like YouTube videos in real time.

3. Crackle

Sony has brought together two of its popular platforms by creating virtual movie theaters on Playstation 3 that stream content from Crackle - and it’s planning to add more digital hangouts later this year.

4. Turntable.fm

Turntable.fm brings together the social experience of the Web and music. Users can create or join listening rooms for friends – or strangers – and DJ their favorite songs for each other.

5. YapTV

A great app that brings people together around their favorite TV shows – it shows every program on television at any moment and lets you socialize with other viewers. It pulls in tweets about the show and has a built-in chat functionality so you can talk while you watch. This is especially useful for every “Elf” re-run on TBS or if you’re sucked into another “A Christmas Story” 24-hour-marathon.

6. ShopWithYourFriends.com

Through sites like this, shopping online is no longer an isolated event. Shopping online is now social. These sites allow you converse with friends (through Skype and chat), compile lookbooks for your friends and family’s seal of approval, and most importantly, buy online.

7. SocialVest

SocialVest is an online retail platform that allows customers to buy and give at the same time. With SocialVest, you can make purchases at your favorite stores - like Target, Walmart, Bloomingdales, and more – and a percentage of all your purchases will go to a charity of your choice.

8. GiftaStranger.net

Make someone’s day brighter with this site that allows you to send a lucky person a gift of your choosing. All you need to submit is your first name, general location, and a picture of the gift you’re sending, and the site will generate a random address.

9. Wantful.com

The site suggests an array of thoughtful gifts based on information you provide about the recipient – everything from age and relationship status to how often the cook and their level of neatness.

10. HipMunk.com

With a well-designed, streamlined interface and smart use of filters, Hipmunk makes it easy to find the right flight or the best hotel. The site also has an app available for your phone or tablet device.

11. Trippy.com

It makes it easy for you to get recommendations and tips for what to do (whether you are heading home for the holidays or on a dream vacation) from your friends who already know you and your interests and needs, helping you travel better.

12. Amazon.com

Whether it’s a 6-hour flight home or over-the-river-and-through-the-woods, every trip is a little shorter with good book. Now, Amazon allows you to share your favorite books with your friends. Each loan lasts 14 days and are automatically returned to your library at the end.

The Wisdom of ‘We’

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Paul

My column in BtoB magazine this month. Original here.

The manager of the Mansion on Peachtree hotel in Atlanta has it pretty good these days. The Mansion is the top-rated hotel in the city on TripAdvisor.com, with 163 reviews, nearly all of them five stars. The endorsement has enabled the Mansion to hold its premium prices and cut its acquisition costs. It’s also got the staff hopping to maintain the coveted top position.

“Social media is vital to our business today,” said Micarl Hill, the Mansion’s managing director. “But it also keeps us on our toes. People can tell everybody about a bad stay with the push of a button. What they say isn’t always fair, but we take it seriously.”

Recommendation engines like TripAdvisor, TravelPod, Google Places and Yelp are transforming the hospitality industry, and they’re coming to your town.

Mark Snider, owner of the Winnetu Oceanside Resort in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., personally contacts every single customer who posts a complaint about his hotel on an online review site. Fortunately, it’s not a big job. Winnetu’s No. 1 rating on TripAdvisor drives so much business that Snider slashed his marketing budget this year.

If you think this trend is confined to consumer markets and small electronics, think again. Consider Spiceworks, a thriving community for IT professionals, where members have posted thousands of reviews of everything from computer servers to computer consultants. “When I’m looking at a vendor, I don’t Google it; I Spiceworks it,” wrote one forum member.

At Glassdoor.com, employees rate the companies they work for, review executive performances and swap salary information. How do you think the recruiting business will be changed by this?

And we’re still in the very early going. It’s only a matter of time before review sites pop up in every category of business, including B2B. Facebook and LinkedIn already make polling easy, and Quora is awash with questions about recommended vendors.

This is going to change the rules of marketing. People stopped listening to pitches some time ago, but they didn’t stop listening to each other. What you say about yourself now matters a lot less than what others say about you.

Marketers need to be tuned into these conversations 24/7, spot detractors and quickly try to turn them around. They also need to provide incentives for people to tell others about their positive experiences.

Start by discarding the “see no evil” mindset. Customers will share their opinions whether you want them to or not. You might as well be open about it. Southwest Airlines and Dell Computer encourage customers to lodge complaints on their company Facebook pages and address nearly every one. That’s called responsiveness, and it’s always been a good business practice. Today’s it’s life or death.

Facebook Tips for Midsize Businesses

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Paul

With Facebook presenting a tempting target of 800 million potential customers, small businesses are flocking to social network as a fast and easy way to generate business. But many SMB’s don’t take full advantage of the Facebook platform because they’re intimidated by the learning curve and the technical knowledge that Facebook applications demand.

Against the GrainThis is one in a series of posts that explore people and technologies that are enabling small companies to innovate. The series is underwritten by IBM Midsize Business, but the content is entirely my own.

That doesn’t have to be the case, says David Brody, Managing Partner at North Social, a software as a service company that specializes in serving small and medium businesses (SMBs) with a suite of Facebook apps that they can quickly integrate into their Facebook presence. I talked to Brody about tips for SMBs that want to optimize their Facebook presence.

It’s not about the likes. Research has shown that few people who “like” a Facebook page ever return to it. That means that getting a like is a means to an end, but not a goal.

“This is a test-measure-modify world,” Brody says. In other words, experiment with different offers and incentives to build fans and then measure those that deliver engagement and return visits. Remember, this isn’t direct mail, and your cost of trying something new is basically zero. On the flipside, simply getting someone to click a button is not enough. “‘Excite, Educate, Motivate’ has replaced ‘Awareness, Trial, Purchase,’” Brody says.

Match the offer to the business. Those ubiquitous iPad giveaways may not be doing much more than delivering business to Apple. Brody tells of one business owner in Atlanta whose offer of a flat-screen TV as contest prize yielded only 60 new likes. Maybe the problem was that the company is in the heating/ventilation/air conditioning business. An offer of offer of free or discounted air conditioning equipment might have played pretty well in Atlanta during the summer.

Capture and communicate. Facebook pages and apps offer easy ways to collect e-mail addresses. This creates a permission-based vehicle to continue a conversation. E-mail and news feeds can be used to deliver an ongoing stream of information that reminds people of who you are. Clif Bar asks first-time visitors to like its page in order to sign up for a newsletter, while Moosejaw Mountaineering touts giveaways, rewards points and tips..

This doesn’t mean e-mail is obsolete, but with inboxes mail clogged and people spending an hour a day on Facebook, the newsfeed has become an attractive alternative channel.

Use Facebook for sampling. Conventional wisdom holds that product samples need to be distributed on the street or unsolicited to the mail. It turns out Facebook can be an even better channel. One North Social customer that makes pretzels distributed 10,000 samples in less than 24 hours by sending them to people who liked its page. People who have opted in for a sample are more likely to be buyers than passersby in a supermarket. Audience quality more than compensates for the higher cost of distribution.

Be creative with promotions. You don’t have to incur manufacturing or mailing costs to distribute incentives with value. Think of a digital asset you can create that has zero marginal expense. Dentoola consulting gives away reports on how to apply social media in the dentistry profession. The Animal Print Shop gives away desktop wallpaper. You can exchange a like for a customized press release at Hunter PR.

Buy ads against pages of competitors or similar products. The great appeal of Facebook ads is their narrow targeting. Davids can ride on the backs of Goliaths by targeting ads to fans of much bigger brands. “If your product is candy, buy ads on the Skittles page,” Brody says. It’s the fastest way to find candy lovers online.

Keep the message simple and change it often. Don’t flatter yourself by thinking people will spend a minute on your page trying to figure out your message or offer. “Facebook is the equivalent of an out-of-home billboard,” Brody says. “You only have a few seconds to make an impression. Keep your message to a few words and make it compelling.” Remember the earlier point: You can always change the offer and test something new.

Get people involved. Brody is no fan of the automated tools that enable page owners to auto-post content across multiple social platforms. “No one wants to be friends with a robot,” he says. “Motivate your alpha evangelists.” Games, quizzes and giveaways work well, particularly if they challenge the audience to be creative.

One midsize business that Brody thinks does a lot of things well on Facebook is footwear maker Sanuk. From its provocative “like” message to its offbeat video to an online store that juxtaposes user comments with product shots, it provokes conversation at every turn. North Social’s examples page has plenty more.

Social Marketing Wisdom from the Insurance Industry – Really

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Paul

I was privileged to be on a panel with some outstanding social media practitioners from the insurance industry at the 2011 Social Media Conference for Financial Services put on by LOMA LIMRA this morning. Financial services firms – and insurance companies in general – are often seen as boring, but what these companies are doing within the confines of a heavily regulated business is anything but that. Farmers Insurance for example, hasn’t accumulated 2.3 million Facebook likes by boring people.

I actually think insurance is a fascinating business. It involves taking calculated risks about the unexpected. Insurance companies need to know a lot about the world around us, because their business deals with so many variables, from accidents to earthquakes to the chance of being hit by a meteor. This morning’s audience of about 100 social media practitioners truly believe in the value of new platforms to reach their customers, although they have understandable concerns about the many regulations that govern what they can say.

Here are some notes I took away from the three speakers on my panel.

Gregg Weiss (@greggweiss) of New York Life says the company’s social media content strategy is driven by constantly asking, “What can we do that isn’t about life insurance?” This was a theme that was borne out in every presentation: It’s not about the company but about what motivates customers.

A sampling of what New York Life has done:

Partnered with the NFL on a “protection index” of pro football teams;
Created the New York Life Game of Life in partnership with Hasbro. The goal was to get people talking about financial stability and have a chance to win the popular board game;
Hosted a Twitter chat about Halloween safety.

New York Life has carefully cultivated more than 100,000 likes on Facebook. “We believe 60% of our Facebook fans are prospects,” Weiss said.

His best story actually had nothing to do with insurance but everything to do with using social marketing to build loyalty and word-of-mouth awareness.

He told of buying a coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts: milk, no sugar. But when he got to the office, he found the beverage was loaded with sugar. “I couldn’t drink it.” He tweeted his dissatisfaction. Within two minutes he had a reply tweet from the head of corporate communications at Dunkin’. She asked for a phone call, during which she apologized and offered a gift card, which arrived in the mail two days later. “I tweeted about Dunkin’ Donuts’ great response,” he said. “It was a huge win for them. “

His advice to social media marketers: “Think big. Everyone in this room has the power to change things at your company. That’s incredibly empowering.”

Quotable: “The VP of Social Media at New York Life is the hundreds of thousands of people who have online relationships with us.”

And finally, “Seek a higher purpose. I hope someday to hear a story of a kid who got to go to college because a parent bought a life insurance policy from us.”

Kelly Thul (@kellythul), State Farm.

State Farm got started in social media when it set up a blog to find New Orleans-area employees and agents who couldn’t be located after Hurricane Katrina. “Within 24 hours, that blog was key to our locating ever agent and employee,” Thul said. Today, State Farm is all over Facebook, with pages for the corporation, careers, Latino customers, the Bayou Classic football event and an innovative youth-oriented forum called State Farm Nation (right), where people can “discuss life’s challenges and opportunities, connect with others facing life-shaping decisions [and] find helpful tips and information.” With 1.3 million likes, it’s doing pretty well.

The insurance company’s YouTube channel has had more than five million views, many for its TV commercials. The ads have spawned parodies, but Thul says the company is pretty sanguine about them. “If people care enough to have a bit of fun with you, that’s OK, as long as it isn’t brutal,” he said.

State Farm evaluates social media opportunities using four criteria:

Relevance to business strategy;
Role clarity: who is responsible for talking and responding;
Measurement criteria;
Activating platforms.

These four criteria provide a framework for making a rapid and relevant decision about new platforms and opportunities like Google Plus.

Words of wisdom: “People want to be heard. If they believe you’re listening to them, they’ll like you a little more.”

Theresa Kaskey (@TheresaKaskey), Director of Brand Management and Strategy at the John Hancock Financial Network, joined the company without any plans to get involved in social media. John Hancock had no social media strategy at time. Today, it’s 80% of what she does. There’s been a long education and adoption process, but company management is buying in, she said. John Hancock recently launched its first blog, Build4Success, and it’s posted nearly 40 videos on YouTube. Unlike the other two speakers on the panel, who speak primarily to consumers, John Hancock Financial Network’s audience is financial advisers.

YouTube has been one of its early successes. “We created more than 80% of our launch content in one day,” Kaskey said. “We had a meeting of our advisers and brought them into a room one by one to talk about how they delight their customers.” It’s been a low-cost, high-return recruiting success.

Words of widom: A key element of successful social media programs is “It’s not about us.”

What a Hotel Manager Taught Me About the Future of Business

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Paul

Scott Wright is the general manager of the Wyndham Wingate Hotel in Erlanger, KY, and in a 15-minute ride to the airport yesterday morning he taught me something about the future of business.

The fact that the manager of the hotel was driving me to the airport was unusual in the first place, but Wright makes it part of his routine. “I try to get out of the office at least a couple of times a week and connect with the customers,” he said. “I don’t ever want to be stuck in a back room shuffling papers.”

Wright’s attitude is one of the reasons the Wyndham Wingate has a 91% positive rating on TripAdvisor. He ticks of the two factors that most influence customer loyalty: “Cleanliness is number one by far. Customer service is number two. But you’d be surprised how forgiving people can be about customer service if the room is clean,” he says.

Scott Wright has no choice but to know what makes customers happy. Ratings on TripAdvisor and dozens of other evaluation sites have transformed the hospitality industry. The impact of open, online customer feedback on his business “is huge,” Wright says over his shoulder. The hotel’s policy is to contact online critics directly within 72 hours to address their complaints.

Many times those problems are more a matter of misunderstanding than mistake. One traveler recently posted a scathing review of the Wyndham because charges had appeared on her credit card despite the fact that she paid cash for her stay. Wright patiently explained that the practice was standard operating procedure for cash customers in the hospitality industry and that the charges were routinely reversed within a few hours. Another complained that the hotel wouldn’t let him cancel a reservation. Wright had to explain that the discount deal the customer had booked was clearly marked as nonrefundable.

These outreach sessions don’t fix the damage done by a negative rating. Few consumer feedback sites permit bad reviews to be reversed by anyone, so hotel managers are limited to posting responses, which Wright dutifully does. More importantly, though, the constant feedback cycle is driving he and others like him to become laser-focused on the customer experience. The terms of competition in that already brutally competitive industry have come down to one factor: quality.

Look at the ratings of these two Cincinnati hotels on TripAdvisor. Scan the excerpted customer comments. If you’re the owner of the Howard Johnson Inn, how do you solve this problem? Certainly not with advertising. No, there are three options the owner of the Howard Johnson Inn has:

Cut prices and compete for low-margin budget travelers;
Invest what it takes to fix the problem;
Hang out a sign that says, “Under new management.”

None is very appealing, but a customer-driven market doesn’t permit the luxury of spending your way out of trouble.

Conversely, the owner of the Best Western Premier Marlemont can cut the advertising and direct mail budget because customers are doing a better job of promoting the hotel than any marketing could do. The owner can also raise prices because business travelers are less sensitive to cost than they are to a pleasant place to stay.

Fifteen years ago, America’s most-admired brands were those with the biggest marketing budgets: GE, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Microsoft. Today, the brands everyone wants to emulate are Apple, BMW, Southwest Airlines and Harley-Davidson. There are two things these brands all have in common: Neither has dominant market share and all are fanatically devoted to delivering delightful customer experiences. In the future, every successful brand will have to operate the same way.

For Scott Wright and others like him, the rules have changed, but his industry isn’t alone. It’s just a leading indicator of forces that will sweep through nearly every market as customers learn to organize and apply the new powers of influence. These forces will affect B2B and B2C businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. Businesses will have to serve customers better because there will be no choice. All our managers will drive the shuttle to the airport.

I’ve been telling audiences about how customer ratings are reshaping the hospitality industry for more than a year, but no one made that impact more real to me than Scott Wright. As I stepped out of the shuttle, I reached into my wallet and handed him a few dollars.

“Oh, not necessary,” he said, waving his hand.

“Take it,” I said. “It’s a consulting fee.”

Awareness E-Book Raises the Bar on Social Measurement

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Paul

The question of how to measure social media performance, particularly in a marketing context, continues to be one of the industry’s hottest topics. Although many people are aware that traditional metrics like page views, visitors, followers and likes are poor indicators of success, the vast majority of marketers I speak to still focus on these overly simplistic criteria. These numbers may be of little value, but at least they’re understandable.

The more sophisticated practitioners are turning toward metrics that indicate engagement. Examples include comments, retweets, shares and subscriptions. Now Awareness Networks has contributed some important new thinking to this topic with a free e-book entitled “The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing.” (Full disclosure: I am quoted in the book but did not contribute meaningfully to the methodology and received no compensation.)

Awareness outlines five priorities that companies should define in becoming a best-in-class social marketer:

Measure and Grow Social Reach
Monitor Social Conversations
Manage Social Content
Practice SEO
Measure and Analyze Social Activity

Not surprisingly, the company has tools that help in many of these areas, but that’s one reason its research is so useful: The recommendations are based upon the experiences of more than 100 customers.

The most successful of those are reporting direct correlations between social media marketing and sales, and they have certain practices in common. Most use at least three major social media channels, compared to less than two for the average company. They also have multiple presences within each channel, such as product-specific pages on Facebook. And they measure like crazy.

Nearly 80% of the companies Awareness surveyed use social media channels to identify and respond to customer service issues and two-thirds use them for prospecting. Remarkably, only 18% said they have “formal tracking process in place to manage processes and better understand success criteria.” In other words, a lot of social media is still being done with seat-of-the-pants justification.

That’s going to change as more sophisticated metrics emerge, however, and here’s where this report has particular value. It describes four measures of content effectiveness that take into account multi-channel activity: Content-to-Contact Ratio, Comments-to-Content Ratio, Comments-to-Profile Ratio and Content-to-Share Ratio. I won’t describe these metrics in detail – you can find that in the e-book – but each speaks directly to the value of engagement.

As businesses spread their wings across increasing numbers of social communities, they need to get a better handle on what’s working and what isn’t. The cost of maintaining an effective presence is only going to go up as the market gets crowded, and it won’t be acceptable for only one in five companies to have meaningful measurements in place.

As I have noted elsewhere, our current obsession with counting fans and followers is an artifact of old media thinking. Online marketing provides much richer options for understanding how people interact with our content. Awareness’ e-book is an important attempt to try to nudge marketers toward realizing the potential of the information they gather.

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