I want to highlight a few of last week’s articles that I find particularly engaging and thought provoking. An often overlooked aspect of social business is the immense amount of data that can be derived from social interactions. This data will not only improve our own productivity, but increase the effectiveness of tomorrow’s corporations. Related to that are how future organizations will embed social interactions into their processes in ...
I was thirteen years old when I first saw it on TV. An army of blue-gray drones march in lockstep through a long tunnel into an auditorium filled with more drones dressed in futuristic, grey drab. All eyes are transfixed on a big-blue image of a man speaking from a theatre-sized screen, extolling the virtues of its ‘Information Purification Directives.’ Suddenly, a woman in orange shorts and a tank top runs into view carrying a large sledgehammer. ...
The world’s largest gaming company is going through a remarkable transformation into a Social Business. Electronic Arts understands that today’s technologies, unlike those of the past decade, are no longer limited to the individual. They impact everyone. Impact that’s revolutionizing the way customers communicate. Impact that is forcing companies to listen, to learn, to adapt, to change its infrastructure and culture in order to stay competitive. ...
I typically like to provide context around discussions with industry thought leaders and Executives of the Fortune 500. Yet some discussions should simply be left untouched and published as-is. It’s not a short article, but the insights around IBM’s journey to becoming a Social Business is remarkable and a must read for those that are in charge of the Social Business program at their companies. Key Learnings: When IBM experiments ...
They were not incompetent or anything; they had simply broken more pumps in the last year than any previous year the engineers could remember. Not the inexpensive kind, but the large 200 horsepower, $22,000 pumps used in geothermal power plants; each blew up in a succession of preventable blunders. But then it got worse. They complained to management, suggested a solution, and management did nothing about it. Details of the gross negligence still ...
Want to know what it might feel like if an airline actually treated its customers like friends? Not a superficial, phony performance marked by fake smiles and fake actors (think the aviation version of the Truman Show). But an airline that runs its business by listening, supporting and doing what’s best for its customers. Instead, we’re subjected to dysfunctional relationships in a system that supports regular and repeated conflicts, which has led ...
Yammer thrives. The herd mentality around the enterprise activity stream is driving its competitors to emulate their every move. Jive’s done it. So has Salesforce.com, SocialText, Newsgator, Moxie Software and IBM Connections. From the Fortune 500 to the Fortuneless company of one, the activity stream is supplanting email for many forms of business communication. What’s going on here? There are several reasons for the ...
Social Business adoption is becoming a major issue in companies that are just starting to use social solutions from SharePoint, Jive, and Moxie. But it gets worse with social solutions. According to Forrester Research, only 8% of end users working in companies that have implemented enterprise social networks use those social software tools. Yet there are companies with successful deployments and high adoption of Social Business solutions. ...
There are a few sensations in life that manage to thrust us into action, or provoke us to work without a motive. Sensations so powerful that we fall victim to a form of altruistic amnesia. We’re driven by its hidden motivational forces and we forget the benefits are for someone else. In short, neither lack of advantage nor lack of compensation deter us. What sensation propels people to write a ten paragraph review on Amazon? What force is acting ...
There are executives who are social and there are executives who are anti-social. There are executives who do social well and executives that don’t. Some claim to be leading social organizations, and there are those that boast that they are not. There are executives who have thousands of followers, and there are executives that have none. There are social executives that say, “Trust me” or “Admire me,” that tweet, “Believe me” ...
