IBM Ranked as Leader in the 2015 Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Social Software

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And the great news keep piling up as we get ready for another major IBM Connections release. I'm just back from IBM Insight 2015 and will share some content soon about that but wanted to get this out soon!

The latest to hit the wire is that IBM Connections has been ranked as a Leader for the third year in a row in the third Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Social Software. This is in addition to the Gartner report where IBM came out as a leader in the Enterprise Social Software MQ (more on that soon)!

According to Aragon's announcement, the report evaluates 22 social collaboration vendors against 3 dimensions: Strategy, Performance, and Reach. Based on the evaluation of each vendor, each vendor is placed in 1 of 4 spheres: Leader, Innovator, Specialist or Contender. Again, IBM was ranked as a Leader.

“When it comes to Social Software and Communities, the biggest challenge for the enterprise has been connecting people with critical content and knowledge,”said Jim Lundy, CEO and Lead Analyst at Aragon Research. “Our new Aragon Research Globe for Social Software will help buyers understand the current state of the market and why the market has shifted from feature comparisons to use cases, and how ESNs are helping the enterprise get to faster outcomes.”

Aragon called out the growing number of apps available for IBM Connections: With its growing set of partner apps, IBM Connections can be configured to meet multiple business user needs.

A great example of a customer reaping the benefits of becoming a social business with IBM Connections is Verisure. Check out this video where they share the benefits that they've seen:

Update 19/Nov/2015: To download and read the report, click here. To start a free trial of IBM Connections in cloud, go here.

Brand Image and Security Concerns – All the More Reason to Become a Social Business

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To get the full benefit of social business, you must inject it into your key business processes for stronger customer engagement and workforce collaboration. But many enterprises are afraid to fully embrace social business, with 30 percent of them citing security concerns and perceived risk as major adoption barriers, according to IBM's 2014 Business Tech Trends report.

But these fearful enterprises need to realize the true nature of social business. At its core, social business is a grassroots movement. Your customers have already embraced social. They’re online, on multiple channels, multiple platforms, talking about your business and reviewing your products and solutions. In other words, there’s no such thing as ‘opting out’ of social business.

In fact, the real risks of security and brand perception are increased when you don’t engage in social business. If you're struggling to integrate social into the core of your business internally and externally, IBM can help.

For example, IBM Connections can help you reorganize, restructure and transform your enterprise into an effective social business with social guidelines and policies set into place to optimize both customer engagement and your internal workforce communication.

When social business is done right, the possibilities are endless. In fact, Pacesetters engaging in social business have reported an 87 percent stronger competitive advantage in their respective markets.

To read the full IBM 2014 Business Tech Trends report, click here.

To watch the webcast replay of the Business Tech Trends announcement, click here.

After you’ve read the report, join us for a Bluemix app JAM! Simply download the report's data in an IBM Bluemix app and start discovering new insights! Share with us and IBM will highlight our favorites!

IBM Ranked as Leader in the 2014 Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Social Software

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And the great news keep piling up on the heels of the IBM Connections 5.0 rollout.

The latest to hit the wire is that IBM Connections has been ranked as a Leader in the Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Social Software.  This is in addition to the Forrester Wave report where IBM came out as a leader in the Enterprise Social Software Wave a couple of weeks back and the news that IBM Connections continues to be the market leader in enterprise social software !

According to their announcement, the report evaluates 20 social collaboration vendors against 3 dimensions: Strategy, Performance, and Reach. Based on the evaluation of each vendor, each vendor is placed in 1 of 4 spheres: Leader, Innovator, Specialist or Contender. Again, IBM was ranked as a Leader.

Aragon called out the purposeful use of social as one of the differentiators of the IBM Connections platform:

IBM is leveraging Connections across its software portfolio, including its social HCM (Kenexa) product line

Aragon delivers high impact research and advisory services to provide enterprises the insight they need to help them make better technology and strategy decisions.

A great example of a customer reaping the benefits of becoming a social business with IBM Connections is CEMEX who has actually measured the ROI of their Social Business journey with IBM Connections.  They shared an update of their recent success stories a few weeks back:



If you want to read the report, you can get it from Aragon here.

IBM Cited as Leader in the Enterprise Social Platform Wave Report

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As we continue our march towards the release of IBM Connections Next, there are some amazing news I would like to share according to the most recent blog entry from one of my peers in product management, Suzanne Livingston.

There you'll see IBM was compared against 13 other vendors.  Suzanne and I worked very closely with Forrester throughout this process and needless to say, we are extremely excited with the results.

Update 13/Jun/2014: Download the Q2 2014 Forrester Wave for Enterprise Social Platforms from here.

This is another perfect case where timing couldn't have been better as the release of IBM Connections Next is imminent. I hope by now, you have seen some hints of what's coming.  If you missed our webcast on May 21st, or the Live Q&A on May 22, or the follow on webcast on May 28th, then definitely go catch those replays (note: the Live Q&A was through a Forum discussion so you can catch up all the conversations there).

Another opportunity for a sneak peek is this blog entry by Albert Nichols, another peer of mine in product management team.  There, he expands on some of the demo that we did on the May 21st webcast. Get ready, we are almost there! Get ready to put people back in the center of your business:

Tell Me: How Do You Use Online Files Today ?

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One of the best parts of my job is to work directly with end users to understand how they use our products (or in some cases, those of our competitors).  Sometimes, however, this just doesn't scale and in order to understand usage patterns we conduct surveys to reach a wider audience. And since I know a lot of you love to give us feedback, this is your opportunity!  

As you may know, I'm currently the Product Manager for Files within IBM Connections, IBM's social collaboration platform. With the help of the the IBM Docs design team, we are working on improving the Connections file editing experience and would like to extend a special feedback opportunity to those interested. 

The team is seeking to gain a thorough understanding of features involved in editing files on Connections (or other products). For example, do you find the ability to insert an image to be a basic, intermediate or advanced feature? How often do you use that specific feature and is it useful on your phone and/or tablet? 

Just like the upcoming May 21st event to introduce IBM Connections Next, please share this with everyone you know:  your customers, your partners, your own end users, family, friends, etc.  

Available surveys (please go through as much as you can)

General File Editing (A): Estimated time: 10 mins.  https://www-950.ibm.com/survey/oid/wsb.dll/s/ag57d 

General File Editing (B):  Estimated time: 15 mins.  https://www-950.ibm.com/survey/oid/wsb.dll/s/ag57e 

Document Editing:  Estimated time: 5 mins. https://www-950.ibm.com/survey/oid/wsb.dll/s/ag57f 

Spreadsheet Editing:  Estimated time: 15 mins.  https://www-950.ibm.com/survey/oid/wsb.dll/s/ag580 

Presentation Editing:  Estimated time: 15 mins.  https://www-950.ibm.com/survey/oid/wsb.dll/s/ag581

Thanks!

IBM Study on Big Data and Social Reveals Less Than Half of Organizations Monitor Social Media

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Today, IBM has released a new study on Big Data and Social. The study was done in conjunction with Oxford University and looks at organizations are leveraging (or planning to leverage) big data. The reports is based on a global survey of 1,144 business and IT professionals from 95 countries and 26 industries. It provides a global snapshot of how organizations today view big data, how they are building essential capabilities to tackle big data and to what extent they are currently engaged in using big data to benefit their business.

Reading the report, several things stood out for me:

• Organizations across every industry – from retail and banking to healthcare and government – are trying to tackle big data to drive better business outcomes. And the research shows that the early adopters are gaining a competitive advantage.
• Most big data efforts are focused on improving the customer experience but less than half of the organizations currently analyze data from social media sites. This means that companies are missing out on HUGE insights into their customers
• A reason why social data is underutilized is because of a skills gap. For example, less than 25 percent of the survey respondents say they have the required capabilities to analyze highly unstructured data – a major inhibitor to getting the most value from big data

I definitely recommend reading this report to those involved in the analytics and social world.

To access the full report, visit: http://www.ibm.com/2012bigdatastudy. To learn more about what IBM is doing in Big Data, make sure you follow the Information On Demand conference next week.

IBM positioned as a Leader in the 2012 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace

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Today is my 2nd year anniversary as one of the Product Managers in IBM's Social Software team and have some great news to share. Analysts at Gartner have positioned IBM in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2012 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. IBM’s placement is based on its ability to execute and completeness of vision. Just a few weeks ago, IBM released IBM Connections 4.0 the core of the IBM Social Business Platform.

This new report adds to the recent analyst reports from Forrester and Aragon Research which also list IBM as a Leader in their respective research reports. IBM Connections has also been listed as the worldwide market share leader by IDC.

I'm extremely proud to be part of the IBM Connections team! If you want to learn more about IBM Connections, check out this quick 3 minute video created by my colleagueSuzanne Livingston:

Check out the other 9 videos that Suzanne has created. These are great "shorts" you can easily share with your colleagues and even embed directly in Connections to show users what's new in IBM Connections 4.0 and they cover the different components of Connections including Mobile.

The Value of the Social Media Economy is $1.3 Trillion

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The McKinsey Global Institute recently released a report titled: The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. I stumbled upon this report on Friday and spent some time at nights reading it over the weekend.

What's impressive is how McKinsey has been able to quantify the value of what social technologies can add into the economy. The total? A massive $1.3 Trillion ! Yes, Trillion! 70% of organizations are already using social technologies and 90% of those report some benefit. And most companies see a 20-25% increase in knowledge worker productivity. I for one have shared how social tools make me productive. This report also reminded me how IBM and MIT scientifically proved the value of social networks at work.

In the McKinsey report, a familiar use case, among many others, was included: TD Bank who leverages IBM Connections as its social business platform. (coincidentally, IBM Connections 4.0 was announced today)

One of the things I liked about the report is that it includes a lot of examples from companies in a wide variety of industries: Financial Services, Consumer Packaged Goods, Professional Services, Manufacturing, and more. Therefore, irrespective of the industry you work on, you are likely to find a success example in the report.

Over the weekend, I also stumbled upon this quick video that (while an ad for another company) has some nice visuals to explain the power of social media for your business

Are you still considering becoming a social business? Or do you want to learn tips on how to become a social business ? Want to learn how other companies are getting value from becoming a social business? If so, then you *must* attend the following webcast next week:

Register today!!

To download the 184-page McKinsey report (for free) or even get a free eBook copy for your iPad, go here. I also recommend that you listen to the 10 minute audiocast embedded on that page with lead researcher Michael Chui.

IBM Ranked as Leader in the Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Social Software, 2012

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And the great news keep piling up. On Tuesday, IBM was cited as a Leader in Forrester's Wave: Cloud Strategies of Online Collaboration Software Vendors.

Today, I've learned that IBM Connections has been ranked as Leader in the Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Social Software, 2012. IBM Connections continues to be the market leader in enterprise social software !

According to their announcement, the report evaluates 22 social collaboration vendors against 3 dimensions: Strategy, Performance, and Reach. Based on the evaluation of each vendor, each vendor is placed in 1 of 4 spheres: Leader, Innovator, Specialist or Contender. Again, IBM was ranked as a Leader.

Aragon Research is the newest technology research and advisory firm. Aragon delivers high impact research and advisory services to provide enterprises the insight they need to help them make better technology and strategy decisions.

A great example of a customer reaping the benefits of becoming a social business with IBM Connections is Lowe's Home Improvement. Earlier in the year they shared this story:

Needless to say, I'm extremely excited to continue to see IBM Connections being validated by independent research firms as a leader. Exciting times ahead indeed!

If you want to read the report, you can get it from Aragon here.

IBM SmartCloud Cited as a Leader in Cloud Strategies of Online Collaboration Vendors

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Amazing news to share today! As you may have seen in Bethann Cregg's blog entry from today, IBM was among the vendors Forrester Research invited to participate in their latest Forrester Wave™: Cloud Strategies of Online Collaboration Software Vendors, 3Q 2012. In this report, IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, built on IBM Connections, was cited as a leader. W00t !

IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is IBM's premier cloud-based online collaboration platform. Several weeks back I worked with my peers as we prepared our documentation to send it over to Forrester. Needless to say, I'm extremely excited that Forrester considers IBM a leader in this Forrester Wave report!

The BrainYard earlier this week published an article that highlights the vendors that Forrester recognized as leaders. In it, you can see my colleague Ramsey,  who I worked with to get this done, quoted in the article.

More and more companies are looking at leveraging cloud-based collaboration solutions. A recent example is Ricoh who chose the IBM Connections platform on the cloud to better collaborate with its global employees. Check out the video that was recently shared by them:


Other media outlets have picked this up too:

• CMSWire: Forrester Wave: IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce Build Online Collaboration Lead
• SMBNation: 5 Cloud Services Already Replacing Small Business File Servers
• ZDNet: Are Online Collaboration Tools Ready for your Business?

Congrats to the entire team who worked on this. [Updated 30/Aug/2012] - to view the report now go here.

Exciting Times Ahead: The Case for How Social Media Can Boost Employee Productivity

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With the upcoming launch of IBM's newest Connections release, I can't help but get excited as to what's about to happen. And of course, when I see the product that I work on as the Cover Story of the USA Today, that gets me even more excited! As you probably saw in Ed Brill's blog yesterday, the USA Today ran a piece on how companies are seeing employee productivity increase with the use of social collaboration tools, such as IBM Connections. The article highlights Newly Weds Foods which uses IBM Connnections for its 2,700 employees to help them share sauces, batters, breadings, and more. To see a video of Newly Weds Foods testimonial, check this out. Also, check out the picture I took of the paper's cover story:

A picture of yesterday's Cover Story in the @usatoday, the paper with largest circulation in the US #ibmcnx twitter.com/lbenitez/statu…

— Luis Benitez (@lbenitez) August 14, 2012

So the next question is, how big is the opportunity for social collaboration tools ? Well, another interesting piece that I ran into yesterday was the 2012 Digital Workplace Trends Report. In it, only 8% of enterprises surveyed claim to have a social business platform rolled out enterprise wide. The number at first seemed very small to me, but when you compare that with 33% of organizations that say they have sporadic deployments, it makes sense. However, it concerns me that companies are still taking a silo'ed approach instead of taking an approach where silos are destroyed.

What's very encouraging, and validates IDC prediction that spending will continue to increase in this area, is that the report found that 47% of organizations are planning to increase their investment in social collaboration tools.

Exciting times ahead!

Everything You Need to Know About IBM's Global CEO Study 2012

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Last week, IBM published the results of their 2012 Global CEO Study. Below you will find some of the relevant assets related to this story: infographics, videos, results, and more. It was put together as Storify by IBMer Karl Roche.

Those of you involved in social media and social business will find the results of this study extremely interesting. The study has already received some good coverage in the press and blogs.

For example, Social Media Today highlighted the results of the study in their Why B2B Social Media Will Be "Kind of a Big Deal" article. In it, a interesting trend is highlighted: CEOs are now willing to shed command-and-control and opting for openness, transparency, and employee empowerment. Why? Because companies that do so tend to outperform others in their industry!

I strongly recommend that you go through and read through the study of 1700+ Global CEOs. Everyone in the social business industry will get value out of it.

Enjoy!

How Social Business Can Increase Sales [WEBCAST]

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Still on the fence on whether or not you should embrace Social Business? Well, here's a webcast you can't miss!

LIVE FROM SUGARCON! How Can Social Business Increase Your Sales?

Date: Apr 24, 2012

Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (Eastern Time)

Social Business is real and it's about to change the world of sales as you know it. According to a new Nucleus Research report based on interviews with more than 220 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) decision makers, adding social features and mobile access to CRM applications boosted the productivity of sales people by 26.4 percent. In this webcast, Larry Bowden, VP of Web Experience Software with IBM, and Chuck Coulson, VP of Business Development at SugarCRM will provide an exclusive introduction live from SugarCon!

Then Chris Lamb, Program Director for Social CRM Software at IBM will show you a day in the life of a sales person in a social business -- what it could look like and how it changes their performance. Then he will walk you through the financial analysis and impact of optimizing your sales team The analysis will help you understand what a team of top performers could mean to your bottom line.

What You'll learn:

- How sentiment analysis will help you understand your customers better than the competition

- How you can take the guess work out of decision-making with predictive analytics

- How you can make your sales teams smarter and close business faster

To register, click here . And if you would like to follow the IBM Collaboration Solutions community, check them out here.

Recap of Day 2 at SXSWi

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Saturday, March 10 … Day 2 at SXSW Interactive (SXSWi). It was loooooong day and the rain kept coming down hard.

The first session that I went to was Top Chef: How Transmedia is Changing TV . This session was tremendous and I liked it a lot. It was moderated by Andy Cohen, host of Watch What Happens Live and one of the panelists was Tom Collichio, a judge in Top Chef. Others in the panel included various senior executives from Bravo. They talked a lot about Social TV and the transformation that we are seeing and how Bravo has embraced media to drive ratings to their shows. While I don't watch any of these programs, it was still a very interesting panel. Andy also did a very good job of moderating and was taking questions live via Twitter. Sometimes questions came in and within a minute Andy was already pitching it to the panelists. The session was tweeted under various hashtags such as #bybravo and #sxswbybravo. My biggest takeaway from this session is that the future of social TV is content co-creation with the fans. Here are some notable tweets from that session:

After that, I headed over to Why Small is the New Big and Big is the New Small. The session was tweeted using #eggcellent as the hashtag. Kathy Mandelstein and Jason Stoddard did an interesting panel. Kathy comes from a big company called IBM and Jason typically works with very small companies. The panel covered what big companies are doing to be able to compete with the smaller ones and what the smaller ones can do to compete with the bigger ones. My biggest takeaway from this session was that social media/marketing sets a level field. Here are some notable tweets from that session:

After that session, I headed over to lunch and then over to the Omni Hotel to get ready to present for the first time to the SXSW audience. I have to say that I'm humbled by the experience. The room was packed for a 5pm session and the feedback from the session was extremely positive. Thank you all for coming and interacting with us. Hopefully we can continue the conversation on Twitter (or whatever your preferred channel is).

As promised, here are the slides from my presentation with Heidi Ambler. The session was recorded and will be available as a podcast. If I find that podcast somewhere, I'll share that here as well for those that couldn't attend SXSW.

Enterprise Social Media: 5 Emerging Trends

View more presentations from Luis Benitez

The twitter stream for my session is #socbiz5 in case you want to see what people were saying.

Enjoy!

Bunchball Introduces Gamification for IBM Connections with Level Up

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Bunchball, who shipped the first gamification solution 5 years ago has recently added support for IBM Connections. Leveraging Connections' extensibility points via widgets, Bunchball plugs into IBM Connections to promote end-user adoption and engagement. So far, Bunchball's platform, called Nitro, has handled 125 million users and tracked over 15 billion actions !

Gamification is certainly a topic that comes up often when discussing how to drive adoption of various systems. In fact, you may remember that it came up during the Birds-of-Feather that Mac Guidera and I hosted back at Lotusphere 2012 #ls12.

Gamification can used in various ways to help drive usage of a new system. For example, you can offer rewards or badges once a user completes his profile, creates a wiki, uploads and shares files, etc. The tricky part, of course, is to not only use gamification just during the initial adoption phase, but to keep users consistently engaged.

This is possible with Nitro's admin console where customers can very easily create an infinite number of missions, determine point economies, and establish rewards (or whatever works best to keep users engaged).

To go along with the launch, Bunchball is also offering a free Whitepaper on Enterprise Gamification (registration required).

Here's a screenshot that shows Nitro for IBM Connections in action:

One of the cool features that Level Up adds to IBM Connections is real-time feedback on awards and missions completed. To see this integration in action, check out this quick 5 minute demo of gamification with IBM Connections with Bunchball.:

To learn more about Nitro for IBM Connections, check out: http://www.bunchball.com/products/nitro-ibm-connections

Enterprise Social Media Trends: What's Your Take? #SXsocbiz5

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I'm currently working on my presentation for SXSW 2012. I can't believe that I'm going to go to my first SXSW in just 5 weeks. I'm so excited.

As we get ready for our presentation, I was curious and wanted to see what most people are seeing in terms of trends. How are you seeing social media being used by enterprises and what are some of your most favorite examples ? Let us know in the comments section below!

And by the way, if you are going to SXSW 2012, I hope to see you there. Here's the details:

Enterprise Social Media: 5 Emerging Trends
When: Sat March 10th @ 5pm
Where: Longhorn Ballrom @ Omni Downtown

We'll be monitoring the hashtag so sends us your comments/questions. We would love to hear from you! The hashtag for our session is #SXsocbiz5

Hope to see you there and hear from you!

Yay, I'm going to SXSW 2012 !

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Earlier this year, I asked that you go out and vote for the various sessions we had submitted. Yesterday, more sessions were announced for SXSW 2012 and I was happy to see that the proposal Suzanne Livingston and I submitted was accepted.

Our session is titled Enterprise Social Media Trends: Are We There Yet? . Here's the abstract we submitted:

Social media has gone mainstream! But it's not everywhere yet. In this session, we'll explore case studies that showcase the trends and best practices of using social media today, the ROI, and the impact on your customers, employees, and entire supply chain. We'll dive into the core capabilities of a social business and review how organizations are leveraging new capabilities to deliver bottom-line results. This session will provide a look into how businesses are utilizing social technologies to respond faster to opportunities, generate new ideas, accelerate innovation, and beat their competitors. We'll look into the technologies that enable this growing form of enterprise collaboration that is built on the new generation of information sharing. We'll close this out with five top trends and thoughts about where this is heading.

So once Lotusphere 2012 #ls12 is done, I'll come back home for a few weeks and then off to Austin.

I've been to Austin a couple of times to visit customers and the IBM offices and it's a great city. However, I've never had the opportunity to go to SXSW. Based on what I've read and heard, it's an awesome conference and I feel lucky to have the opportunity to go there and not only present, but also go to sessions put together by leaders of the mobile & social media industry.

For example, in the newly accepted sessions, I see speakers from companies like Twitter, Foursquare, Paypal, Pageonce, Popular Mechanics, etc.

If you are going to SXSW 2012, I hope to see you there!

Nielsen Releases the Latest Social Media Report [INFOGRAPHIC]

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This morning I was made aware of the following report titled: State of the Media: The Social Media Report Q3 2011

Nielsen has put together a fantastic set of info graphics where they share the latest statistics on social media. Here you will find things like:

• How Americans spend their time while connected to the Internet
• The demographics for the most active social networkers
• Mobile social media use
• Top App categories used by smartphone owners
• The demographics of who is engaged more by online video
• Correlations of active online users and the impact on their lives offline

I've re-shared the info graphics below:

The original link is here if you want to see a higher resolution version: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/social/

IBM Once Again Leader In Social Software Platforms

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IDC, for the second year in a row, has named IBM the world wide leader in social software platforms based on market share. IBM was also the world wide leader in social software platforms in IDC's 2010 report.

The release of the report is very timely as the Enterprise 2.0 Boston Conference kicks off today. In this year's report, IDC looks at the social software market for the 2008-2010 period. In the report, you'll find revenue and market share for each of the vendors listed.

IDC reports that the worldwide revenue for social software platforms was more than $500 million in 2010. This represents an almost 32% growth from last year. IDC also mentions that they expect the market to grow to $2 billion worldwide by 2014.

It's also worth noting that Microsoft is not included in this year's list. Microsoft wasn't included in last year's list. This further validates that SharePoint is not an Enterprise 2.0 platform (unless of course you can find the budget to spend $6-$9 on services/customization for each $1 you spend on a SharePoint license).

You can learn more about what IBM is doing at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston here. The keynotes will also be broadcasted live today and tomorrow here.

Article first published as IDC Names IBM Worldwide Marketshare Leader in Social Software Platforms on Technorati.

Recap of IBM's Social Business Jam

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As mentioned in a previous post, the IBM Social Business Jam results have been posted (no registration required).

Others have already beat me to the punch to highlight some of the results from our Social Business Jam which was held the week after Lotusphere 2011 #ls11. For example, Peter Kim from the Dachis Group offers his take here and my colleague Rawn Shah has his take over here.

The 72-hour jam brought together 2,700 participants from 80 countries (with a high profile list of special guests). According to the report, in those 72 hours, there were 2600 posts and 600+ tweets (this # seems low to me though).

Throughout the Jam there were several quick polls aimed at getting a quick pulse from the participants. One of the polls that caught my eye was: "What is most likely to encourage you to use social software more in your job?". Top answer? Social software must be embedded in the applications I use to do my job!

And that's something that I've been promoting a lot. Every customer I go to, I tell them the importance of integration, integration, and integration. Just like real estate is all about location, location, location. This poll also validates IBM's Social Everywhere strategy which was announced at Lotusphere 2010.

The jam also addressed the elusive social media ROI (retun on investment). The participants believe that social media ROI is measurable but there's a need for a new set of metrics, for example:

1. Brand mentions
2. Customer engagement (comments / re-sharing)
3. # of active advocates (outside of the brand)
4. Customer satisfaction increase
5. Increased web traffic
6. etc

I thought #3 was an interesting one. I hadn't really thought about that one and that's a good one to try and measure.
Another section of the report that caught my attention was that "the role of middle managers is changing -- or perhaps disappearing altogether". This is something that I fear prevents adoption at some organizations as some levels of management see this as a threat to their jobs. It reminded me of a blog post I read recently: Why middle management must feat social media. To address this, I often mention how middle management is going to become even more effective and productive at their work because they'll have more transparency. At the same time, they remove themselves as the bottlenecks and can focus on business decisions that require their attention instead of just being a connector.
A key point that was brought up by the participants was the role of IT in a social business. In a previous blog post, I highlighted the importance of not falling victim of the "If you build it, they will come approach". The jam participants validated this by stressing the importance of making IT a partner in this process. If IT is not nimble enough to adjust quickly to the needs of the employees, the company faces a bigger challenge: the adoption of consumer tools for internal social collaboration.   

You can download and read the full report here and read it on your way home on your iPad or favorite eBook reader.