CEOs Are Finally Warming Up to Social Media | Mashable

CEO’s are finally embracing social media’s role in engaging business and customers, according to a recent IBM Global CEO Study.

For businesses, social media is currently the least-utilized method for connecting with their audiences. The hierarchy of connecting is as follows: face-to-face interactions, websites, channel partners, call centers, traditional media, advisory groups, and then, finally, social media.

However, social media is expected to jump to the number two spot within three to five years — and traditional media will plummet to the bottom of the list — according to IBM’s report of their findings.

Out of the 1,709 CEOs interviewed for the study — hailing from 64 countries and 18 industries — only 16% currently participate in social media. However, that percentage is expected to grow to 57% within the next five years, according to the IBM analysis.

As Mashable previously reported, these numbers coincide with the “conservative optimism” regarding social media engagement for businesses. More than half of business owners (64%) believe in social media as a useful tactic for marketing — they just aren’t willing to jump into it full-force yet.

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Could Twitter Help Us Create Smarter Transit Routes? “Traditional city maps visualize just one aspect of urban design—the city’s intended structure, full stop. But add in a layer that visualizes how people actually use the city, and then the map becomes much more interesting. Eric Fischer did exactly that when he used Twitter’s API to collect tens of thousands of geotagged tweets and map them onto the streets of New York, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area. The maps amount to something close to adesire path on a macro scale: The maps show where our buses and subways should be, if they conformed to the way we actually move and live.” via studio630:

Could Twitter Help Us Create Smarter Transit Routes?

“Traditional city maps visualize just one aspect of urban design—the city’s intended structure, full stop. But add in a layer that visualizes how people actually use the city, and then the map becomes much more interesting. Eric Fischer did exactly that when he used Twitter’s API to collect tens of thousands of geotagged tweets and map them onto the streets of New York, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area. The maps amount to something close to adesire path on a macro scale: The maps show where our buses and subways should be, if they conformed to the way we actually move and live.”

via studio630:

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That map you see above isn’t a picture of the earth, seen from space. Rather, it’s a map of the locations attached to every tweet and Flickr photo. What results is a remarkable picture of how each service has spread across the globe.  Infographic Of The Day: Using Twitter And Flickr Geotags To Map The World | Co.Design

That map you see above isn’t a picture of the earth, seen from space. Rather, it’s a map of the locations attached to every tweet and Flickr photo. What results is a remarkable picture of how each service has spread across the globe. 

Infographic Of The Day: Using Twitter And Flickr Geotags To Map The World | Co.Design

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Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business | Fast Company IBM is moving itself and its clients well beyond social media into a new era of collaboration, insight sharing, and lead generation it calls social business. It takes extraordinary chutzpah to promote a vision before it can be fully realized by your audience let alone your company. IBM did just that in 1997 when it introduced the notion of e-business. Fourteen years later, it is doing it again with a concept they call socialbusiness. Given its prescience about e-business, a concept that radically transformed how companies buy and sell their products, it is hard to dismiss their latest idée fixe. That said, getting your arms around this grandiose idea is not easy. Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, spent the better part of an hour with me explaining the ins and outs while providing specific examples of how IBM is testing various social business approaches both internally and externally. In the end, I came away with these seven reasons why just about every company should be thinking about becoming a social business.

Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business | Fast Company

IBM is moving itself and its clients well beyond social media into a new era of collaboration, insight sharing, and lead generation it calls social business.

It takes extraordinary chutzpah to promote a vision before it can be fully realized by your audience let alone your company. IBM did just that in 1997 when it introduced the notion of e-business. Fourteen years later, it is doing it again with a concept they call socialbusiness. Given its prescience about e-business, a concept that radically transformed how companies buy and sell their products, it is hard to dismiss their latest idée fixe.

That said, getting your arms around this grandiose idea is not easy. Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy at IBM, spent the better part of an hour with me explaining the ins and outs while providing specific examples of how IBM is testing various social business approaches both internally and externally. In the end, I came away with these seven reasons why just about every company should be thinking about becoming a social business.

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IBM Connections - Android Market IBM® Connections is social software for business. It enables you to build a network of colleagues and subject matter experts, and then leverage that network to further your business goals. With its integrated suite of tools, you can share and discuss ideas, work collaboratively on presentations or proposals, plan and track project tasks, and much more. IBM Connections is a web application that is deployed on a company intranet to promote collaboration within the company. The IBM Connections mobile application extends access to company data to employees who are on the go.

IBM Connections - Android Market

IBM® Connections is social software for business. It enables you to build a network of colleagues and subject matter experts, and then leverage that network to further your business goals. With its integrated suite of tools, you can share and discuss ideas, work collaboratively on presentations or proposals, plan and track project tasks, and much more. IBM Connections is a web application that is deployed on a company intranet to promote collaboration within the company. The IBM Connections mobile application extends access to company data to employees who are on the go.

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How can a university best use social media for internal communications? | Guardian Professional Does your university really need a staff newsletter or a Facebook page? Tracy Playle explains why social media strategies need a clear objective to drive their purpose Increasingly, universities are beginning to explore the use of social media (or new media) for engaging with their internal constituents (sometimes known as “enterprise 2.0”). But how can a university make a success of using social media internally and not waste endless resource implementing tools that nobody will ever use? Clear objectives and an understanding of the university culture are key.

How can a university best use social media for internal communications? | Guardian Professional

Does your university really need a staff newsletter or a Facebook page? Tracy Playle explains why social media strategies need a clear objective to drive their purpose

Increasingly, universities are beginning to explore the use of social media (or new media) for engaging with their internal constituents (sometimes known as “enterprise 2.0”). But how can a university make a success of using social media internally and not waste endless resource implementing tools that nobody will ever use? Clear objectives and an understanding of the university culture are key.

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IBM’s Toronto Innovation Centre Workshops on Social Media, Collaboration and User Experience

As part of the centennial celebrations, IBM’s Toronto Innovation Centre invited local non-profit agencies to participate in learning and mentoring sessions. Open Doors was designed to educate senior level non-profit professionals in the use of online tools to drive community and volunteer engagement.

Watch the sessions on the IBM GBS Livestream Channel

In session 1, Richard Smallbone & Karen Maxwell discuss how to design an experience for users — including strategies, tools, and technologies that can help you communicate your message more effectively.

In session 2, Bernie Michalik reviews the tools and approaches that non-profit and other organizations are using, how the tools and approaches add value to those organizations, and the steps for applying social media tools and approaches in your organization.

In session 3, Jennifer Nolan discusses some of the free and low-cost on-line tools that are available to help you collaborate between your employees, partners investors, volunteers. Examples are provided on how IBM has developed custom applications for nonprofit organizations to support their goals through collaboration.

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Banks Mining Social Networks with Analytics Tools - Bank Systems & Technology

Frank Eliason thinks of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as customers’ living rooms. “You have to wait to be invited in,” says the SVP of social media at New York-based Citi. “You want to deliver content that’s important to your fans. As you follow what they’re sharing and commenting on, that tells you which content is working and which is not.”

Dan Marks, chief marketing officer at First Tennessee in Memphis, views social media as a big cocktail party. You want to go and listen, find out what people are saying, maybe jump in with a comment or a witty quip once in a while — but you don’t get to control the conversation or pitch products, he says. “It’s a great indicator of word of mouth.”

The point is, on social media sites, thousands of conversations are going on, and some of them are about your bank. (Actually, it’s often more of a random spewing of personal opinions, thoughts and article links to an audience that may or may not be listening.) Within this mass of communication lies a wealth of useful information for banks — insights into where they’re falling short in customer service; which products, websites and mobile apps customers love or hate; what their share of voice is compared to competitors (that is, how often they’re mentioned versus their competitors); and how their marketing messages are coming across.

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IBM Targets the Future of Social Media Analytics: Cloud Computing News IBM announced a new product dedicated to helping customers perform sentiment analysis of social media data on Thursday, as well as a new program with the Yale School of Management’s Center for Customer Insight to train students in advanced data analysis skills. With businesses increasingly getting hip to social media as a way of connecting with customers, and with an industry-wide need for analytics skills, both the product and project are well-timed. The new product, called Cognos Consumer Insight, is built upon IBM’s Cognos business intelligence technology along with Hadoop to process the piles of unstructured social media data. According to Deepak Advani, IBM’s VP of predictive analytics, there’s a lot of value in performing text analytics on data derived from Twitter, Facebook and other social forums to determine how companies or their products are faring among consumers. Cognos lets customers view sentiment levels over time to determine how efforts are working, he added, and skilled analysts can augment their Cognos Consumer Insight usage with IBM’s SPSS product to bring predictive analytics into the mix. The partnership with Yale is designed to address the current dearth of analytic skills among business leaders, Advani said. Although the program will involve training on analytics technologies, Advani explained that business people still need some grounding in analytic theory and thinking rather than just knowing how to use a particular piece of software. “I think the primary goal is for students to learn analytically,” he said, which will help know which technology to put to work on what data, and how. Source: GigaOM

IBM Targets the Future of Social Media Analytics: Cloud Computing News

IBM announced a new product dedicated to helping customers perform sentiment analysis of social media data on Thursday, as well as a new program with the Yale School of Management’s Center for Customer Insight to train students in advanced data analysis skills. With businesses increasingly getting hip to social media as a way of connecting with customers, and with an industry-wide need for analytics skills, both the product and project are well-timed.

The new product, called Cognos Consumer Insight, is built upon IBM’s Cognos business intelligence technology along with Hadoop to process the piles of unstructured social media data. According to Deepak Advani, IBM’s VP of predictive analytics, there’s a lot of value in performing text analytics on data derived from Twitter, Facebook and other social forums to determine how companies or their products are faring among consumers. Cognos lets customers view sentiment levels over time to determine how efforts are working, he added, and skilled analysts can augment their Cognos Consumer Insight usage with IBM’s SPSS product to bring predictive analytics into the mix.

The partnership with Yale is designed to address the current dearth of analytic skills among business leaders, Advani said. Although the program will involve training on analytics technologies, Advani explained that business people still need some grounding in analytic theory and thinking rather than just knowing how to use a particular piece of software. “I think the primary goal is for students to learn analytically,” he said, which will help know which technology to put to work on what data, and how.

Source: GigaOM

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IBM Intros Social Media Analytics -- Social Media Marketing

IBM is looking to help marketers gain insight from the treasure trove of data strewn across social networks with its release, on Thursday, of two cloud-based applications.

IBM Coremetrics Social is designed to aid companies in their analysis of the business impact of their social marketing initiatives. The software uses information that is publicly available on sites such as Facebook and Twitter to enable companies to determine the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns based on social media buzz, retweets, and other online chatter.

Also released on Thursday, IBM Unica Pivotal Veracity Email Optimization Suite analyzes email links that are shared across social media platforms, giving marketers the ability to leverage opportunities across multiple communications channels, according to IBM.

“IBM’s approach to social media analytics is based on the understanding that people interact with an organization’s brand in a number of ways — including email, social networking sites, and company websites — and the true measure of business impact demands a fully integrated view of the interaction with these resources,” said John Squire, chief strategy officer, IBM Coremetrics, in a statement. “The new social media analytics software unveiled [on Thursday] will help marketers develop more targeted, highly measurable, and effective social media marketing campaigns.”

…

Like its competitors, IBM is looking to dominate this emerging field, and recently formed a consulting practice to focus on “Smarter Commerce,” designed to help clients address today’s digital marketplace — which IBM estimates to be a $70-billion opportunity. The new practice offers cloud analytics software that lets businesses monitor their brand’s social media presence in real-time, and adapt marketing campaigns or create promotions based on consumers’ responses, IBM said.

Source: InformationWeek

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Technology empowers China’s rural workers: a social networking site is linking donors as far afield as London and California with farmers who seek micro-finance to develop small rural businesses. It has profiles of borrowers from Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, and profiles of contributors from 47 countries who select online which projects they want to support. In many ways, it is a Facebook for farmers.

Technology empowers China’s rural workers: a social networking site is linking donors as far afield as London and California with farmers who seek micro-finance to develop small rural businesses. It has profiles of borrowers from Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, and profiles of contributors from 47 countries who select online which projects they want to support. In many ways, it is a Facebook for farmers.

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