Monitoring Social Media

As more organizations are getting into social media, they are learning the best techniques to make best use of those media. One of the techniques is establishing a good system for monitoring what is being said about the company and who is saying it. Sometimes particular issues can go viral on the net, leaving the company with a tarnished reputation.

Particular techniques include identifying customers by segment, hosting one or more branded customer communities, engaging customers in conversation and integrating the social media channels with other channels of customer communication.

Social media use is quite new for business, but nevertheless the use of it must be guided by business priorities, efficiency and ultimately, profitability.

This article provides an interesting summary of an approach to social media.

The New IT Platform

It's no secret that the world of IT is increasingly dominated by cloud computing, mobile computing and social networks. What is less widely acknowledged is that these phenomena may actually replace the current IT platforms, at least that is what a new IDC report, "IDC Predictions: Welcome to the new mainstream" says.

The new IDC report was released last week and is more than a trendy muse.

Companies are already moving into social media, including blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But that doesn't mean in this new world that personnel will be tweeting and sending Facebook status reports that they are going to take their coffee break now. Not at all. Social media is revealing itself as a valuable tool for interacting with stakeholders in the business - employees, customers, suppliers, competitors, and others. The work that people do in the new world will be very serious work, directed to greater profitability and efficiency through the use of the cloud, mobiles and social media.

The IDC report, downloadable here, says that during 2011, these things will become mainstream. It's moving faster than we thought.

Social Media - An Important Management Tool

IBM has sponsored a new eBook, entitled "Empowering People, Removing the Barriers to Social Business Adoption," that explores the ways in which social media can be used to manage a company, support collaboration and monitor and manage the activities of teams within the organization.

For some time now, companies have been using social media as a resource in researching new personnel being considered for hiring, and for corporate wide discussions and announcements. The new paradigm suggested by IBM, already adopted by some progressive companies, goes much further than that, making social media an important and central part of the fabric of the company.

The paper offers some concrete solutions to the problems of work silos and uncooperative teams, all within a context of peer respect and transparency. You can download a free copy of the eBook from this site.

Television in Transition

That medium most central to news and entertainment life during the latter half of the 20th century is rapidly changing before our eyes. The internet has changed and continues to change everything else - books, magazines, newspapers, travel, banking, you name it - but television has been the longest holdout, particularly cable TV.

That cable still survives these days is particularly remarkable when you consider that a lot of the content that people like to view is available for free on the internet, while the cable companies charge an arm and a leg for it.

Many people realize this, and surveys are reporting hundreds of thousands of people discontinuing their cable service. And many more planning to do so during the coming year.

People are discovering the entertainment value of sites like Youtube, which offers its content for free. Also, movie services like Netflix are catching on and many of the news services offer their programs and news programs on archive and sometimes on a live streaming basis. Quality of internet content on the big screen is getting better too, and in many cases as good as regular TV.

The most interesting aspect of this changing part of the world from a business point of view is that there must be a way for the providers of the content to get paid for their product, whether it be music, movies or news features. Right from the people/actors doing their part to the companies providing the equipment and marketing expertise to get their work to the public. So "for free" may be appealing to the audience, and especially to the young who often feel that everything should be free, but free is just not sustainable.

This means that the companies in the TV business need to find new business models. that may not be as hard as it first seems. They already have strong support of advertisers - the most likely source of revenue. All they need to do is to convince the advertisers that it is worth their while to spend big bucks on advertising on the internet. As the audience shifts over, this will be an easier task.

The established players also need to find ways to compete with new players like Google TV and Apple TV.

Musicians have adapted quite well. Justin Beiber is a good example, who got his start through his parents putting his videos on YouTube. They of course went viral and the rest is now history. We can expect more YouTube stars in various fields - not just music.

The end result will not be the end of TV. It will mark the end of cable TV as we know it. And it will result in new business models for everyone in the supply chain and will mark a wonderful new era in TV content for the audience.

For a good article on this topic, check out this link.

Top 5 IT Business Videos for 2009

ITBusiness.ca has released a list of the top five videos for 2009, including the links that can be used to watch them. Worth some time! Many of the links involve the use of mobile units and social media - two of the forces currently shaping e-Business. For the list and the links, click this link.

Managing the Move to the Cloud

Gartner predicts that spending on the cloud will increase in the next year by 16%, more than three times the rate of increase expected in IT spending generally. That would indicate that many companies will need to pay attention to the management of the transition to the cloud.

One point is immediately clear - many of the same issues are going to arise as in any IT migration - the need to test before cut-over and the need to manage process change being two examples. Other issues may not be quite as obvious.

Companies need not and in many cases should not use a single supplier. In the cloud, this can be a challenge, and there is a new breed of service providers who act as cloud brokers, to guide people through the labyrinth of issues.

Also, and this is better known, it is important to pay attention to where your data is going to reside. Different jurisdictions have legislation that covers the management of data that resides in their jurisdiction. For example, the EU Privacy Act limits the transfer of private data outside the EU. And the US Patriot Act makes the data available to certain government and regulatory bodies. As a minimum, the company needs to know the location of its data and have a grasp of the governing legislation and how it fits with home legislation and relevant contracts.

For an excellent article, which provided much of the source of this article, check this link.

Mobiles in the Cloud

Mobile devices have been famously proliferating in the world of data transfer, through texting, email and many new apps that can do anything from playing Bookworm to showing movies to operating complete GPS systems. These are impressive accomplishments for such tiny devices, but yet they are limited as computing devices. They don't have much space for storing apps or the related data. Also their computing power, while impressive, pales against conventional computing devices like laptops and of course other bigger computers.

The cloud offers up the logical answer. Cloud apps run on remote servers and can run pretty well any application you can think of. The challenge for mobiles is to get the input-output interfaces working so the results of such powerful apps can be run from the limited mobile interfaces. it's a challenge but not impossible for a wide range of apps. Such apps are starting to come out in commercially viable scale and content, primarily at this point in the form of games. But then a lot of modern computing originated with games.

We'll soon see a large growth in the capabilities of mobile units. A person cruising in a boat on a lazy summer day out in the country will be able to run an app that utilizes the advanced analytical capabilities of a sophisticated ERP system and display the reports on the tiny screen of the mobile. It will open a whole range of services for the devices. And will cement their role as a focal point of the new computing environment. An article in Technology Review explains some of the new games coming on stream.

I Want it and I Want it Now

Such is the consumer of data in the modern age. They want their data anytime, anywhere. Sounding like a spoiled child, they are backed up by masses of people and by technology. And by three megatrends - the proliferation of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration. It is possible for them to get what they want.

Companies who use the web for disclosing their information to their stakeholders, or to their partners and collaborators, need to respond fully to these trends. Lets take a quick look at what this means.

Mobile devices are evolving so quickly it makes it difffcult to plot strategy. However, we do know that smart phones are likely to be around for a while and that they are likely to have small screens but big capabilities. Information needs to be made available so it can be consumed on these devices as well as on more conventional devices. That part is not too difficult.

However, we also know that the consumers of data want to be able to work with the data themselves, rather than just receive a bunch of prescribed reports. That means they need to get the data into applications that are powerful enough to do good analyses. That's a challenge for the small devices, even though they are powerful. Also, people using any computers are increasingly using cloud apps for various purposes. The companies therefore need to provide the analytical ability and the logical way to do this is on a SaaS basis - in the cloud - so that the users don't need to worry about finding good analytical tools every time they want to consume some data.

Third, users are accustomed to social networks, and becoming more so. Collaboration is the key and understanding data is a natural for collaboration - between the organization providing the data and the consumers as well as between the consumers themselves. This is the way people work online, and the way companies need to provide their information.

So Mobiles, Cloud computing and social networking (see this related article) - all are key to the disclosure of information in the new and developing information environment.
 

Dell Keeps on Innovating

Way back when the Web was new, and companies were just starting to use it, Michael Dell started up a new venture to sell computers to people on demand. What set his new business apart from others that preceded it was that it didn't carry inventory, it didn't build the computers until they had been sold. This simple (conceptually anyway) innovation revolutionized the field of supply chain management, and set the stage for countless new companies in the information age.

Now, Dell is still innovating, this time in tune with the major trends of the time - SaaS, the Cloud and virtualization. The company is moving beyond hardware into service, something that all big companies (e.g. IBM) must eventually do. For an interesting article on Dell's current initiatives, check out this link.

Facebook CRM

Social media are increasingly being used for contact management. Traditional contact vehicles, like email, don't really provide useful contact manegement capabilities. Social media, like Facebook and LinkedIn do offer not only information about contacts, continually updated by the contacts themselves, but also have been growing their messaging and chat functionality, making them more viable as contact management tools.

Social media have been used for some time now by companies trying to get their message out and trying to collaborate with their stakehoilders. The enhancements in contact management and messaging capabilities will serve to make them more valuable and more widely used for CRM. For an interesting take on this theme, see this link.

The End of Top Down Management?
by Gerald Trites

Management gurus have been predicting the end of top-down management for years. It might have started with some of the early writings of Peter Drucker, but I haven't gone back and checked the references. Certainly, after the beginnings of the information age, the predictions abounded. The workforce is different, the thinking went. It is more educated and (gulp) talented. The power will lie with those who have the skills. The bosses won't even understand what their people are doing and will be relegated to the role of coordinators. The real decisions will be made by the workers.

Somehow, it hasn't worked out quite that way. The bosses still call the shots - the real shots. The masses still have to toe the line, certainly in the big companies. Yes, there are exceptions, Google is often touted as one, but then one could argue that it gets a lot of press on this point because it is an exception.

The move to collaborative or participative management has evolved into something of a charade, where there are periodic meetings and discussion groups when important things are happening, but which often involve explanations of why management has chosen a particular path, under the guise of seeking employee input.

So that's where we are at this time, after some twenty or thirty years (depending on where you start counting) of the information revolution.

Enter social media. A rising tide of commentary has been suggesting that social media will transform the internal workings of organizations, that the people within the organization will all have a voice and that decisions will be made with ongoing and decisive employee input.

A recent book, "Social Nation" by Barry Libert, (reviewed at this site) argues just this point - that social networking is transforming the attitudes of everyone in or connected to an organization, and that management therefore has to change its ways and become much more inclusive and consultative.

The fact is though, in a modern corporation, employees can participate publically in discussion of corporate issues on social media, but they cannot speak their minds. If they speak against the corporate line of thinking, the current culture or, especially, the actions or pronouncements of particular managers, their tenure with the organization is bound to be short. They know that, and many people on Facebook, for example, keep two accounts - one for work related acquaintances and one for family and friends (real friends).

So is social networking transforming management? I'm from Missouri on this point.

The fact is, there are many factors working to transform management that have nothing to do with social networking. One of these is the tremendous increase in the participation of women in the workforce and their growth in numbers in management - a trend that has developed over the past twenty years or so. Women have always been more eager to communicate than men, and more eager to talk things out with others who are affected. Men and women working together, throughout history have always been able to work effectively to the common good. It was only with the advent of large organizations, with their need for men to go away from the home to work that the worklives of men and women became so separated. Before that, they worked together on the farms and in family owned businesses for centuries. Men and women working together avoids the extremities of masculinity and feminity and brings to bear a much more balanced and inclusive approach to management and to worklife generally. It is that which is leading to major changes in the way organizations are managed, not social networking, although hopefully it will improve the way in which social networking is used in corporate cultures.

Distributed Co-Creation et al

The growth of social networks and the concomitant growth in online collaboration has led to the coining of a phrase that captures the business technique that has evolved. It's called distributed co-creation and it represents the approach of gathering a group of users on the web together to collectively solve business issues.

McKinsey defines and places it thus “…[T]he ability to organize communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream,”

Those who are gathered may be customers, suppliers, technical experts or any group with the capacity to bring some critical expertise or knowledge or experience to bear on solving problems.

Online collaboration is no longer new, but this term is, as is the focus on the legitimacy of including in business processes, particularly those involving creative functions, such collaborative activities.

McKinsey has released a list of 10 IT trends most affecting business, and distributed co-creation is top of the list. Other collaborative activities are also on the list. All of which points to the new world of widespread collaboration on the web for business purposes.

When Credit Card Fraud Strikes a Company

"A credit card data security breach was not a positive event in the history of Hannants, but the way the company handled it mitigated the problem and made customers feel like they were included in the solution -- more like partners than like victims. Hannants trusted its customers and their reaction to the news, and the company was rewarded with a largely positive response from its customers in social media."

Credit card fraud can be disastrous for a company, but the Hannants case illustrates a number of important lessons about good CRM. Communicate with the customers. Be open and honest. Don't be defensive. Don't lay blame. Just work to fix the problem and tell the customers what is being done to safeguard their interests. Have good relationships to begin with. That may be one of the most important points. Good CRM, with established channels of communication and a legacy of trust will pay off in bad times.

For a write-up on the Hannants case, see this article.

Gartner's Top Ten Technologies for 2011

Gartner has released its list of top technologies for this year. Cloud computing tops the list, as might have been expected. Also Mobile apps comes second - again not a big surprise, which means that it is a reasonable list.  The top ten are:

1: Cloud computing

2: Mobile apps and media tablets

3: Next-gen analytics

4: Social analytics

5: Social communication and collaboration

6: Video

7: Context-aware computing

8: Ubiquitous computing

9: Storage class memory

10: Fabric based infrastructure and computers

For more detail on these items, please click here.

Saas, IaaS and PaaS

We hear a lot about Software as a Service (SaaS) and its role in enabling applications to be provided in the cloud. Lately we have been hearing more about Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. IaaS essentially involves the provision of raw computer power and storage. PaaS, on the other hand, offers up not only the infrastructure but an operating system and an applications platform which customers can use to develop/configure their own applications. PaaS gives the customers more flexibility with the applications they use on the cloud than does SaaS, which is generally a bit restictive because the same apps need to be used by a variety of customers and the provider could not possibly support the apps if there were 100 variations on them being run.

IaaS and PaaS not only involve different customer experiences, they involve different strategies by the providers. So far, Amazon, as one of the major cloud providers, has stressed an IaaS service. Recently, on the other hand, Microsoft has been going into the PaaS route. The two rivals will therefore be attracting customers with different needs and desires, but also will be selling their wares on the basis of the differences they offer to the customers. The outcome will be instructive in gauging the future direction of cloud services. For an excellent article on the Microsoft initiative, check out this article.

 

What is Social CRM?

CRM has been changing drastically over the past couple of years, and the centerpeice of this change is Social CRM.. Involving the use of Social Networking to strengthen CRM, Social CRM provides a way to involve the customers as never before. Facebook is widely used by companies for this purpose, although some of the other social media, like Myspace, LinkedIn and Youtube (although this is a different kind of social media) are used as well.

Companies that implement social media generally set up a few pages on Facebook, and then install social media software, which is available from most major CRM vendors now, and which gathers the Facebook information and provides an interface for managers to analyze the information. This might include who likes and dislikes a particular entry. Who has become a fan and who hasn't. And what comments are being made on the company's wall. Of course, the Facebook site also provides a vehicle for providing answers and commentary, but companies who successfully implement social CRM recognize that it's more about listening than about talking. For an intro to Social CRM, check out this site.

Using Social Media in a Small Business

Social media are being used more by companies for CRM purposes. For smaller business, social media can also be useful for interacting with customers and others. The key is interacting. many smaller businesses, and some larger ones, see social media as just another tool for getting their message out. Another tool for broadcasting.

But the key to social media is the fact that it is social. That means interacting with people at a personal level. Listening as well as speaking. This is a novel idea for many people. Not that they have never used social media before, but they often have not made the connection between business promotion and social media. It's very different from traditional advertising. But it is quite similar to the idea of socializing with clients and potential clients. Going to cocktail parties with them or playing golf with them. This is the kind of interaction you want when using social media.

For an interesting article on this subject, check out this link.

Cloud Confusion

Yet another study indicates that people are confused about cloud computing and whether it has any benefits for their organization. This article has some pointers about how to address this confusion. Do your research, Try it out on some non-critical apps. Evaluate the experience. Treat it as a strategic decision, with all the implications that carries with it.

Frenemies

A new form of collaboration on the web is that of working with competitors. While this has been touted as a likely outcome of web usage since the web began to be used for business purposes, the idea has been gaining some traction lately, with the collaborating competitors being referred to as frenemies.

One important form of it is having customers browsing for certain products directed to a local physical location where they can obtain what they seem to be looking for. The chances are that if a customer is just looking and does not place an online order, they will go to a location within a reasonable distance from them in any event. So the idea is that they are referred to a local place, even that of a competitor. Of course, this works both ways, with competitors referring to their competitors as well, so over time, the business brought in from referrals should hopefully be more than any business lost to competitors.

For an article describing the arrangements made along these lines by a particular company, please see this link.

Social CRM

CRM is a natural tool for enhancing and perhaps even establishing a strong CRM System. Social Media can be used to engage customers, gain feedback and vet new ideas and initiatives.

But the issue has been how best to use social media. Just setting up a Facebook page or Twitter Account won't accomplish much.

One of the approaches to consider is to identify which types of customer are most likely to use social media and become engaged in it. There are several possibilities, but Chris Bucholtz, a blogger at Forecasting Clouds, has made three good suggestions. First is sports fans. Often they are young and enthusiastic users of social media. Another is clients of government agencies. The agencies themselves are usually eager to hear from the publics they serve and often the publics they serve are eager to provide feedback. Finally, certain Hobby enthusiasts may provide a successful group of social media users.