Personal Tech COVERAGE FROM AROUND THE WEB
Brian S Hall writes about the "Smart Social Mobile Web" and how it is rapidly re-constructing markets, industries, business models and relationships around the world. His fiction works are available at Amazon.com. His personal site on the "Smartphone Wars" is at www.brianshall.com.But the rumored announcement of a Facebook Phone isn't just a repudiation of that plan, it's also another step on Zuckerberg's slow journey torward accepting the superiority of so-called "native apps" over the Mobile Web running on HTML5. For years, Zuckerberg has championed the Mobile Web's ability to deliver a consistent user experience across multiple devices with a single development effort. But last summer Zuckerberg admitted defeat and publicly changed course on HTML5. As ReadWrite noted at the time:Facebook released a completely rebuilt version of its iOS app for iPhone and iPad today, changing a fundamental aspect of the company's mobile strategy. Gone is the Web-centric, HTML5 approach. In its place, Facebook has rebuilt the iOS app using Apple’s native framework. The result? A more streamlined, faster app for the iPhone and iPad.And, in fact, the iOS native Facebook app has proven faster, smoother and quicker to load versus its Mobile Web counterpart.Facebook seems to have learned its lesson, but what about the rest of the mobile industry? A new survey by Compuware APM confirms that users greatly prefer native apps to the mobile web. For example, the survey's key takeaway:
Many of us find ourselves with a bit of a problem. We have plenty of followers on our Twitter accounts, and yet we are getting next to no retweets, mentions or overall benefits from those followers.Because of that, many people think that the whole Twitter marketing thing is all hype. After all, they seem to be doing everything right but they have nothing to show for it except for a lot of wasted time, and more aggravation than it was worth.Of course, interaction is not easy to build. Many people give up earlier than achieving it. One of the first steps to take: Learn more about your followers.For those who are experiencing the same problem as I described above, below are some great apps that will let you get the proper stats to start engaging your followers in a real and dynamic way.This is a full marketing service aimed at professionals who need something a little more extensive than the average analytics app. It has a full social listening feature that will help to break down your overall Twitter follower use, as well as all data coming from your profiles.Find out the conversation going on surrounding your brand, then find context within those conversations for better targeting of your marketing campaign. Additionally, SalesForce Marketing Cloud also has social content, engagement, social ads, workflow and automation, measurement, and packages for basic, professional, corporate and enterprise use.
“Hi Mudasir,
Thank you:) It is important for me too. I am always doing my...”
“Thanks Herby appreciate it dude. Hope you'll keep listening!...”
“Thank you for sharing one more social media update news, Cendrine! :)...”
Valentine Belonwu is the Founder of JustRetweet.com, a tweet submission site that enables any small business owner, entrepreneur or blogger to have Twitter users share …
Google Plus for business continues to gain momentum in the social media universe and it’s important to know how to create the best possible profile. This is especially true if you’re promoting your business.Below are four steps to improve your Google Plus profile visibility in search engines and make your online profile stand out from the others.Taglines need to be strong, yet brief. Remember, the tagline might be the only thing people see, so create one that’s interesting and alluring and gets to the point quickly. Readers scanning websites online won’t likely take the time to read a long, drawn out tagline.For example, a heating and air conditioning contractor might select a tagline such as, “Offering [your city] the best service and lowest prices. Period.” A restaurant tagline might read, “Best Buffalo wings south of Buffalo.”The point is, to get to the point quickly and make it easy for readers to grasp what you’re about in an instant.A grainy, out of focus or unprofessional looking photo is an instant turnoff. The photo is your one shot to grab and hook the casual reader who’s scanning for information. It’s best to invest in a professional photographer to get a clean, good-looking shot.
A New York Times social media editor says they don’t attract an audience and “are aesthetically damaging.”The noble hashtag is cursed by a problem Yogi Berra could appreciate: Too many people use it, so no one goes there. Presumably, most Twitter users use hashtags intending to add their tweet to a river of similar information and to expose their own thoughts to a wider, interested audience. Twitter itself markets the hashtag to those ends. But does that actually happen? It’s unlikely, especially for the most popular hashtags. There are many useful exceptions, but hashtags for big news stories are particularly vulnerable to mathematical futility.According to Twitter, #SuperBowl was used 3 million times over about five hours on Super Bowl Sunday this year. Look at all those people who might be interested in our jokes about Beyonce! And yet getting any single person’s attention is just short of impossible, like a single Niagara droplet screaming for notice as it shoots down the falls.Though there were peaks and valleys, 3 million tweets over five hours comes out to an average of 167 tweets per second. To say that someone would have to search for “#SuperBowl” in the split-second you sent it would actually be a little generous; assuming they’ll notice your tweet if it’s in the most recent 10 tweets, users would have a window of 1/17 of a second to find you.
Before joining ReadWrite, Taylor was the Senior Editor of Tecca. She has a deep interest in the spaces where technology, culture and big ideas overlap. Taylor's work appears regularly on Yahoo! News and has been featured on Mashable, MSNBC, Today.com and in the print edition of USA Today, among others. Taylor graduated from New York University and now lives in Portland, Oregon. When not writing about tech, she samples well-hopped local beers, thinks about science and advocates for social justice in the LGBT community. The Twitter client end times are nigh. Well, to be fair, they've been nigh for a while now - so I guess now the end times are here.In a blog post today, Twitter announced that it would formally discontinue support for TweetDeck's trio of non-web apps, TweetDeck for iPhone, Android and AIR. The clients will be pulled from their app stores in early May, so you can expect considerable wonkiness thereafter.The death of the TweetDeck trifecta marks a formal end to the heyday of third-party Twitter clients. Last year, as Twitter began to tighten its guidelines, the company effectively wrestled developers into a choke-hold. Along the way, many great clients and apps folded, deeming it too risky to pour themselves into projects that could be killed by Twitter at a moment's notice. The three clients that Twitter will no longer support are all powered by its old API v1, which the company already announced plans to retire.
Early last year, soon after Facebook instituted a feature that let people subscribe to others’ feeds without being friends, I quickly amassed a healthy ”subscriber” list of about 25,000 people.Every Sunday morning, I started sharing my weekly column with this newfound entourage. Those garnered a good response. For example, a column about my 2012 New Year’s resolution to take a break from electronics gathered 535 “likes” and 53 “reshares.” Another, about Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owing me $50 after the company’s public offering, quickly drew 323 likes and 88 reshares.Since then, my subscribers have grown to number 400,000. Yet now, when I share my column, something different happens. Guess how many people like and reshare the links I post?From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch, and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop in interaction has occurred.What changed? I recently tried a little experiment. I gave Facebook $7 to promote my column to my friends using the company’s sponsored advertising tool.
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Home » Featured, Marketing, Social Media/Marketing » Social Commerce and the Measurable Impact of Social Media
on Feb 25, 13 •
by Ted Rubin •
with No CommentsTed Rubin and Jason Keath debate the impact of social media on business in this new era of social commerce. Hear them discuss how CMOs can instrument their marketing to target clients more effectively and the value digital relationships have to a business. Moderated by CMO Club founderPete Krainik.Ted Rubin is the Chief Social Marketing Officer of Collective Bias, a Social Shopper Media Company. He is a leading social marketing strategist and in March 2009 started using and evangelizing the term ROR, Return on Relationship. Ted is the most followed CMO on Twitter according to Social Media Marketing Magazine. ROR is the basis of his philosophy…It’s All About Relationships! His book, Return on Relationship, is now available.Jason Keath is Founder and CEO of Social Fresh, the social media education company. Jason spends his time writing for and curating the Social Fresh blog, managing Social Fresh conferences, and organizing quality online social media training specifically for businesses. Jason also works as a social media speaker, consultant and analyst. He lives in New York City with his beautiful girlfriend Nicole D’Alonzo. You can find him blogging from your local coffee shop or roaming the streets of New York City as a full time tourist.
There is a long time (about three years) I haven’t published this type of article on this blog about dos and don’ts and social business. But when Gartner released a prediction that through 2015, a whopping 80% of social business efforts will fail to achieve their intended benefits, hampered by « inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology », back to basics is may be not a bad idea. So here is a commented list of dos and don’ts.Nothing new under the sun, but when you see the number of failure, and companies which are sure to know how to manage by themselves that type of project, a quick reminder is never excess.
[Editor’s note: Joachim Kempin is a former top Microsoft executive and author of a new memoir, Resolve and Fortitude: Microsoft’s `Secret Power Broker’ Breaks His Silence. It’s a fantastic book, and I’ve asked Kempin to write a few columns for us sharing his perspective on Microsoft. In this, his second column for us, Kempin argues Microsoft should take over the social networking space, and get out of the hardware business. –Dan Lyons]Last week I gave you a historical perspective about Microsoft and pinpointed several areas for improvements. Today I will continue that discussion with more food for thought:Microsoft could create lots of magic by developing advanced social media software, which would be so user-friendly that even a dog could use it with ease. The leading product, Facebook, lacks a good user interface; while it connects you, it basically sucks. Its value lies in its huge user base, the vast computer network it needs to function, and the ease with which it attracts immense amounts of advertising dollars.As with any social media network, the vast user information it contains is its most valuable asset. This is the main reason why Google is making a serious effort in that product category. By properly analyzing and evaluating this info with modern data-mining techniques, Facebook can create unprecedented consumer market knowledge and deliver well-targeted advertising. Microsoft has only a very small share in this business.
Brand newsrooms are a hot new trend in marketing. To believe the hype, every brand should be staffing up with journalists and going 24/7. In reality, the model’s not right for the majority of brands.In the age of social media, overnight viral sensations and the constant flow of information and multimedia experiences, it’s not surprising that brands find the newsroom idea enticing. In order to keep up with the times and current media-consumption behaviors, brands are starting to shift towards higher-metabolism marketing that responds quickly to culture, much like how journalists in newsrooms act quickly in response to important events.“Newsrooms, in some ways, are simply a natural evolution of social media,” said Carmen D’Ascendis, director of global marketing at Jack Daniel’s.But that’s when reality sets in. Any publisher will tell you that operating a newsroom is an expensive, arduous task. It’s also incredibly difficult to do well, especially if it’s not your business. Add in the many constituencies at a brand, and you could have an expensive nightmare on your hands at worst or a yet another fancy buzzword at best.That could leave brands back where they started: relying on their agencies. Deep Focus recently created its Moment Studio, which specifically focuses on helping brands with real-time marketing. Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer is a strong supporter of the newsroom content model for brands and sees it as agencies’ role to make it happen.
The headline wasn't exactly subtle: "Even if It Enrages Your Boss, Social Net Speech Is Protected." This New York Times article, which ran a few weeks ago, outlined a series of recent National Labor Relations Board rulings that analyzed employee firings in the wake of potentially-damaging Facebook posts. Centered around a case involving the nonprofit organization Hispanics United of Buffalo, the Board ruled that the group was unlawful in terminating five workers after another employee alleged harassment. Not exactly. You can enrage your boss via social media and be fired legally. In fact, the Times article contains two examples of people — "lone wolves" — who were fairly terminated for statements they made on Facebook."The Board has issued a bunch of the decisions — and in a lot of cases the employer won," Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard Law professor and faculty co-director of the school's Labor and Worklife Program, reiterated to me. "It's not the case that you can just go on social media and scream about whatever you want to." Organizing. And we're not necessarily talking about rallying your colleagues for a walkout, or overthrowing a regime. We're talking about the much more subtle distinction, per Article 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (1935), which stipulates, in full:
In a conversation yesterday, my friend and colleague Marcia Conner lamented that “there just aren’t enough public, shared examples of companies using social to do real work.”It’s too easy for enterprise social software deployments to degenerate into places where people simply publish—or worse yet, merely talk about–work they’ve done elsewhere.But there plenty of examples of companies that are really transforming their business processes through social.Different industries, different functions. But they have several things in common. They did the heavy strategic lifting to rethink their business processes in the age of social. They’ve achieved near-universal adoption within their target populations. Most important, they have hard ROI numbers that tie directly back to the numbers they use to run their business.So if you’re struggling to see what the “big deal” is about social, ask yourself this: Have you re-conceived your business process for a collaborative workflow, or have you simply pinned a social tail on the same old donkey?On this blog, Socialtext staffers and customers explore how companies can gain the most business value from their use of enterprise social software, including microblogging, social networking, filtered activity streams, widget-based dashboards, blogs and wikis. Discover how easy it is to share expertise, ideas and data with colleagues in a secure, internal environment.
Can you feel it? It's the subtle loosening of gravity’s pull as we pause at the peak of the hype apex before we thunder down into the trough of disillusionment (with apologies to Gartner). Social collaboration isn't working very well, but must we go gently into that good night?Some of the reasons we’re hitting the near edge of this “chasm” we've known and predicted from the beginning.This is a paradigm shift as fundamental as any the modern workforce or capitalism has ever seen. More significant than the PC, the internet and the IT department combined. More significant than globalization. It's about retreating from command and control practices designed to make the ENGINE of capitalism (and government and war) purr, to a collaborative one which activates the full capabilities of the participants and networks them in a way that amplifies and accelerates action.It's about changing from a daily grind of covering our individual and collective heinies to one where we are joined in the intellectual, emotional and emergent pursuit of “better.” Of mission and service.Ok — so that’s pretty hard, we have established but few ground rules, and it looks like we’ll wander another 10 or 20 years or so in the desert till it's really as true as we’d like to to be, but it does seem inevitable, and so it is. But we could speed it along with more rigorous research and learning. We need to stop trying to ferret out bits of good news and start ferreting out learning.
To take full advantage of Flickr, you should use a JavaScript-enabled browser and install the latest version of the Macromedia Flash Player.In general, we can break down the processes of a social business into
four broad categories: The first category is the totality of an
organization’s human activities including any conversations that involve it or are relevant, both
inside and outside of the business. These include the day-to-day
business processes that keep the organization running, the ad hoc and
informal processes of knowledge workers involved in creating new
information or dealing with exceptions and edge cases of operations,
as well the main digital engagement cycle of the business itself as it interacts with itself and all of its
many and varied stakeholders. This includes customers, the general
marketplace, suppliers, and business partners. Note that each and
every type of business activity is reflected in social and non-social
media both, to varying degrees. Some processes will principally
involve systems of engagement, others will only involve systems of record. A large and growing
number of them will involve both.The second major category are key support functions. These in general are a requirement for social business to operate
successfully and include community management, social business transformation (which is almost ways is a series of loosely integrated and disparate
efforts of varying size over time within the organization), as well as
the definition, management, and enforcement of corporate policies related to digital engagement, especially including social media. Of all of these, social business
transformation is the most fraught with unpredictability and requires
a healthy dose of culture change in order to “take” within the business.
Last week, we examined how social business optimization (SBO) can help your company shape the long tail of your online brand by leveraging the employee-owned websites that position and reposition your corporate identity on daily basis. For medium to large size organizations, this could be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of sites.The key ingredient in achieving this kind of success at scale, of course, is ensuring your employees understand and align their online presence to their real world business goals. In order to do that, your company needs to address their inevitable question, “What’s in it for me?” Employees need to believe that adoption means that they are going to reach their goals more easily and do their jobs more efficiently, regardless of their role in your organization.In an article for the Harvard Business Review blog last week, Jacques Bughin provided insights that indicate not many organizations are answering the “What’s in it for me?” question when it comes to social business. Bughin, a director at McKinsey & Company and one of the authors of the recent McKinsey Global Institute study, “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies,” offered these stats from the survey:What is even more telling comes from two takeaways found deeper in the report about employee adoption. More often than not, employee usage of social software experiences an initial spike when introduced, followed by a downturn when excitement fades. And, if social technology is not made to be part of the workflow, employees won’t participate for long once pressures and deadlines from their “real jobs” materialize.
A student recently asked the following question: “I want to ask you about incorporating personal branding with social media. I have ALWAYS used social media to vent… but if that makes you less favorable in the eyes of employers, it seems there is no longer a medium in which we can post semi-inappropriate statuses, or share our actual thoughts in the moment. What I’m really asking for is advice on finding that balance. How do you do it?”While it can be hard to figure out how to balance your personal and professional self on social media, the process is actually easier than you think. The key is to be intentional and thoughtful about why you have social media and the results you desire from your posts.For example, ask yourself: is social media a way for you to A) connect with professionals, network, and find jobs, B) connect with friends, or C) both? A) Professionals: If you primarily desire for your social media to be professional, think of all your channels as a LinkedIn, and focus on adding value in your field and remaining positive and helpful. Notice the social media channels of the top professionals in your field and use them as role models. B) Friends: If social media is a way for you to vent and be your uninhibited self, you’ll want to be very intentional about your privacy settings and who you allow to be your friend on Facebook or who you let follow you on Twitter. C) Both: For me, social media is both an important part of my job (I get most of my clients from it), and a vital part of my social life (I love my Facebook friends and Twitter peeps). Since that is the decision I’ve made, I’m very intentional about remaining positive, fun, and helpful. If I have a horrid day or need to vent, I do that with my close friends, in-person or in a direct message. You can also consider having two separate profiles, a private one just for friends and a public one for networking.
Recently I’ve found myself reading a number of articles and blog posts decrying the untimely demise of the social business movement. So what do you think, has social for business run its course and now we should just move on, because there’s “nothing to see here”? Have businesses given it a good go and, finding no value, are they abandoning their efforts? Okay, right up front here, let me say clearly, social for business is not only not dead, it’s thriving and delivering lots of value to businesses! In fact, I believe that the changes associated with social business are absolutely critical for businesses in the information age if they want to attract and retain the best employees and partners and if they want to meet the expectations of their customers. In our last social business survey conducted Summer 2012, we found that 67% of North American businesses were already using some social tools for business, up from 42% the prior year. So if that’s true, why all the doom and gloom predictions?I think that there’s still a general lack of understanding around what social business is and isn’t. If you think it’s just about implementing / using new technology your wrong, social business isn’t a new marketing campaign on facebook, integrating your customer support system to Twitter or using an activity stream product instead of email. Technology underpins social business, no doubt, but changing a business to operate in a way that is optimized for the information age and moving away from the old industrial age model is about people, organization, process and culture first. It’s about changing the way companies get work done and the way they interact with and service customers. There’s technology in there, and for sure we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all if the Internet didn’t exist, but the fundamental change that business is facing is a lot bigger than just implementing some new technology.
oren Dayton and Rob Bluey — two conservative tech geniuses — talked me into joining Twitter during a lunch Ed Morrissey organized at an Iraqi restaurant in Minneapolis during the 2008 Republican convention. Life hasn't been the same since.Of course, I can hardly claim to be an early adopter. But by virtue of signing up in 2008 (my original handle was @MattLewis01), I was at least well ahead of the curve. And soon enough, I became not only a proponent of Twitter, but also a sort of evangelist.It's hard to even fathom now, but at the time, few journalists were really using Twitter. I was working at Townhall.com, and I can still remember some of my colleagues mocking me for "tweeting about what sandwich I was going to have for lunch that day." (Within a year, they would all succumb to the sweet temptations of Twitter.)My next writing gig was with the now-defunct Politics Daily, and Twitter was very important to my job security. Our staff consisted of mostly seasoned and accomplished mainstream journalists who had worked at places like The New York Times and The Washington Post. And then there was me.How did I compete with these highly accomplished journalists? My unique selling proposition was that a) I was a conservative-leaning writer, and b) I used Twitter.
The analyst firm predicted by 2016, half of large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and 30 percent of these will be considered essential.
Of all Facebook’s data sets, it’s the social graph that’s truly unique. It’s spent nine years getting you to confirm who you know, and apparently it’s sick of handing over your friend list to competitors. This week it cut off both Twitter’s new photo app Vine and messaging app Voxer from Find Friends, Facebook’s API that lets you connect with Facebook friends on other apps. But this could backfire.Facebook knows who you are, what you’re interested in, where you go on the web, what apps you use, and more. However, other companies have bits and pieces of these data sets. LinkedIn knows your resume, Google knows your web searches, Twitter knows who you follow, Apple and Amazon have your credit card number, and your phone’s OS-maker knows what apps you’ve downloaded. Who your real-life friends are, though, is Facebook’s domain.Reconfirming your social graph manually on other apps is awkward at worst and annoying at best. Think about it. If your Facebook account was reset and you had to send friend requests to all your old friends, how many do you think would confirm? Even your best friends might be too lazy to, and people who were glad to friend you when you met years ago probably wouldn’t bother if they remember you.
Where to start? I suppose let’s track back to the source, a Cowen & Co. analyst named Peter Goldmacher had this to say recently about Salesforce.com in a research note:“Despite making a big splash around Social at its user conference in October, conversations with the CRM ecosystem around weak “Social” pipeline conversion, a lack of customer traction around Social Marketing and accelerating declines in sales productivity lead us to believe that Salesforce’s latest marketing gambit isn’t paying off.”Larry Dignan, editor in chief over at ZDnet, then writes a piece entitled “Is Salesforce pivoting from its social enterprise rap?” with the tagline summary of “The social enterprise movement may be running into a wall of culture, management and process. It’s not about software“. The article follows with ”Now what? Like most technologies, social is following a familiar path. First there’s the argument that the software will change everything. Then there’s the realization that the latest tech won’t magically cure your enterprise. Then there’s the blowback. Quietly—and just as everyone writes it off—something else comes along as an enabler. The social enterprise may follow a similar route, but for now it’s disillusionment time.”Never one to let the opportunity for drama pass by, Dennis Howlett decided to expand on Larry’s piece with one of his own entitled “Is it all over for social? Clues are everywhere“. He summarized Larry’s points and that of discussions over at Enterprise Irregulars as follows:
Summary: Facebook still has a massive lead, but Google+, with 343-million active users, is now the second most popular social network.Last year, many people dismissed Google's Google+ social network as a "virtual ghost town." That was then. This is now. According to GlobalWebIndex, Google+, with 343-million active users, has become the second largest social network globally. As Vic Gundotra, Google's senior VP of engineering, observed, "That is a lot of ghosts"Facebook is still the biggest of the social networks by a large margin. By GlobalWebIndex's count Facebook has almost 700-million active users. The research group defines active users as those who used or contributed to a site in the past monthAll three of the major global social networks, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter are growing by leaps and bounds. "Data collected in GWI.8 (Q4 2012) demonstrates the continued shift in usage from localized social platforms to global ones with huge growth for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. The fastest growing network in 2013 in terms of “Active Usage” was Twitter which grew 40% to 288m across our 31 markets (approximately 90% of global Internet population). 21% of the global Internet population now use Twitter actively on a monthly basis. This compares to 21% actively using YouTube, 25% actively using Google+ and a staggering 51% using Facebook on a monthly basis."
Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day. You may be familiar with my thoughts about this day of recognition. Those thoughts have not changed. I am excited the role of community manager and responsibilities of a community team are being recognized in organizations large and small. This day makes me feel uncomfortable. I have never been great at giving myself a pat on the back, so when an entire community does so, it feels incredibly odd. I do not conduct my job in a silo. While I have had great accomplishments in my career, they did not happen because of me working alone. My genius is a recluse, but cannot take all of the credit! I guess, this is why this celebration does not seem to be a recognition of the entire team, but individual egos. And a community manager cannot have an ego or the career path will be short and rocky.Today, I want to to give thanks to the talents who do not have a day of recognition, but who make my job and accomplishments possible. Thank you to the legal/compliance/privacy teams. I understand it is your responsibility to protect the organization and employees. We may not always see eye-to-eye, but you have taught me to respect policies and guidelines as a positive force and not an obstacle.
As more companies and more industries buy into the benefits of social media and community development, the number of job opportunities available for professionals with community-building skills also continue to grow.Companies are looking for professionals who can blend their skills to effectively deliver updates to a community, but also have the ability to tap into that community to collect feedback for a company to use for improving its product or delivering its message.While the job opportunities grow, so to do the number of professionals who include community skills on their resumes and profiles. On LinkedIn alone, the number of people who have added "Community Management" to their skills list is up 46% year-over-year.But being a quality community manager goes beyond having the knowledge and background to use social media networks. Here are 10 qualities a community manager should possess to improve the chances of success in the position, according to professionals who work within social media and community today.It's no surprise that the person who is acting as a representative of the brand should have strong people skills. Google DC Community Manager Corrie Davidson said that the community manager, in many ways, is the face of a brand, and this person must be able to effectively communicate the message to the audience. "Whether it be short form or long form, you have to be able to write," she noted. "Blog posts, guest articles, emails, proposals, social content — you have to be able to craft your ideas and messages to fit any medium."
You’ve been promised collective intelligence, but there’s more. Complexity is both the problem and -- if properly understood -- the solution.You’ve been promised collective intelligence, but there’s more. Complexity is both the problem and — if properly understood — the solution.So there are these two things going on. The first you’ve definitely heard of — it’s the great reawakening of the white-collar and consumer world as their value and participation and voice are released from the anonymity of the command and control corporate model thanks to nifty new social technologies.The second is about the exponentially increasing complexity of the world. Everything that touches anything sets off another thing and so on. Social is accelerating complexity and vice versa. The very best of us and even our technology are daunted by the challenge of understanding issues and taking action in such an environment.This is why the future has become ever more unpredictable, and engaging in planning is generally a highly optimistic pursuit. [There’s a third — all this reawakening stuff has nudged us to look hard at some things that had been left unexamined for too long, like leadership, collaboration and certain exploitative forms of capitalism, but that’s a different discussion.]
In one of my previous Huffington Post blogs, I listed the top 100 business, leadership and technology must-follow Twitter accounts. I was delighted to see the list shared by thousands across all of the major social networks. I was also pleased to hear from one particular social CIO, SAP's CIO Oliver Bussmann (Twitter: @SAPCIO), who astutely noted that the list of 100 did not include a single CIO. In a recent video interview with Byte (Twitter: @byte), Bussmann talks about the importance of mobility and social collaboration in business. Bussmann clearly stated the importance of collaboration in business and his active involvement with Twitter, with the purpose to connect with customers and other industry leaders. Based on Bussmann's comments, I decided that I needed to research and identify the most social CIOs on Twitter. A Wall Street Journal post written by Michael Krigsman (Twitter: @mkrigsman), titled "Social Media for the Innovative CIO," noted that "social media can enrich your personal and professional lives while providing value to users and your company." The post also noted that "participating in social media requires balancing time, politics and security against the unique value that engagement can bring." SAP's CIO Bussmann (Twitter: @SAPCIO) shared his four step approach to social collaboration and Ben Haines (Twitter: @bhaines0), CIO of Pabst Brewing Co. said the greatest value of social media was access to other thought leaders. Krigsman also published another CIO focused WSJ post where he emphasize the importance of promoting social business transformation based on interviews with social CIO business leaders like Kim Stevenson, CIO of Intel (Twitter: @KimsStevenson), and Stephen Lamb, CIO of the British Columbia Institute of Technology (Twitter: @SEE_EYE-OH).
A lot of companies congratulate themselves on having a "social media presence" — by which they mean a Twitter following and Facebook likes and a marketing plan that uses social networks. But some 70% of the extra profit to be made through social technologies has nothing to do with marketing. It's in areas of the company such as knowledge management, innovation, communication, and better integration with the supply chain.Examples of enterprise social-technology use are cropping up all the time: TD bank relies on a social network for employee communication, and at Unisys, social communities provide specialized expertise to resolve technical problems.The Dutch telecommunications company KPN implemented social media to strengthen employees' connections to others, but the technologies have taken on a life of their own, creating unexpected benefits in surprising places. One example: A team that was testing a new modem put out a call for help and got 170 volunteers to test the product and give the designers feedback. Another: During high-level internal discussions about worker salaries and pensions, the company's HR director, rather than put out the type of opaque statements that are typical in most companies, blogged about developments as they occurred, generating much positive sentiment among employees.
I have been astounded at the number of social media jobs brands large and small have created over the last year. With each month, more brands realize that Social media isn’t an afterthought; it’s something that takes time, strategy, attention and even aggression to keep ahead of the pack.With all of these new positions come a large number of employees who are making their first foray into the world of Social Media. They may have been promoted from within, from another department, or maybe they previously handled SEO or paid search ads within the marketing department.Many companies take a gamble that pays off on new-to-the-industry go-getters with not a lot of experience but tons of drive and passion.The reality here, in most cases, is that measuring the success of social media is much different than measuring the success of a paid advertising or SEO effort. There’s so much more to Social Media, and engagement is something I’ve talked about in previous articles.Measuring engagement is just as important as measuring revenue. Smart companies know that a social media strategy is about building a brand, and building brand advocates; so, when the need arises, they know exactly where to fulfill that need – their website.
Summary: There were many shifts in how businesses applied social media to how they worked last year. These were the most significant ones.Without a doubt, organizations of all sizes encountered social media in more of its various forms last year than ever before. Whether it was the marketing team or customer care looking to expand the reach of their traditional channels to encompass where their customers have moved or employees looking for better tools to find each other and share knowledge, social media seeped deeply into how companies worked in a major way in 2012.Anecdotally, with a growing complement of hard-won experience in the tools, technologies, and techniques of social business last year, companies are poised to have full contact with social media in 2013 like never before. From a statistical and trend perspective, the most recent data shows that we've now moved beyond the end of the beginning. Social media is no longer largely unknown and ignorable, but the exceedingly familiar and increasingly indispensable for many businesses.However, as organizations experimented with and widely deployed social media in their various functions, 2012 also became an breakthrough year for teasing out the more intractable issues of the medium that are likely to vex many enterprises in the coming years. As companies grappled with the cultural, organizational, technical, and process issues that the open and participative nature of social media brought to the fore, we began to see some of the way through the challenges as well.
Executive Summary:
Social Business Software vendors (Startups that offer social technology software for corporations to use to interact with employees, customers, and beyond) have raised on average $14m with the most common round being an A-Round at $5.2m. A few vendors have received large D-Rounds, however most are receiving $5-10m rounds from a series of investors. Brands must ask vendors at least 5 questions on who and how this money is and will be used, to understand the strategy before buying.Above: Figure 1 indicates that across these 55 startups, the total funding amount was $765. Please read method and scope below to understand this is not the full space.
Above: Figure 2 indicates that on average, Social Business Software vendors have raised $14m in funding.Market Findings:
After probing the data for hours, I found some interesting trends in the market worth notating.Five Questions Brands Must Ask Software VendorsBrands are making million dollar commitments to these software vendors, and often their careers, and quality of worklife will pin on choosing the right vendors. Beyond features and functions, buyers must pay attention to the root of funding as it shows financial stability, ability to grow, and credibility from third party investors who also believe in the company. As vendors pitch brands their software and services, it’s important to carefully pay attention to the slide on funding, as it helps to give an anchor point on where the firm has come from, and how fast they may grow in the future.
Despite the Obama administration's Digital Government Strategy, the use of digital platforms is "by no means standard across the government" with some federal employees still prohibited from accessing social media sites, according to a new report released Jan. 9 by the Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton.While government adoption and use of digital technologies remains uneven with some "pockets of excellence and innovation," the compelling value of social media to agencies is clear, the report says. One of the biggest and most significant drivers for agencies to embrace social media, according to the report, is that an entire generation of voters and taxpayers now expects to communicate and conduct transactions through digital platforms."Program managers who lag cannot expect that doing things the way they have always done them will continue to be effective in the new environment," chides the report. "They need to catch up with the nearly decade-old social media revolution, not only to benefit now, but also to be prepared for innovations to come."To help federal program managers, the report profiles seven digital agency projects that demonstrate creative ways they are using social media that might offer lessons that can be adopted and used by other agencies. In these case studies, successful federal program managers have engaged "communities of interest" by leveraging Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and smartphone apps, according to the report.
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