Webinar: Addressing the Crisis in Employee Engagement

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Today, studies estimate that there's a $500 billion lost in productivity and higher attrition since only 37% of global workers are considered to be engaged in the workplace.

IBM's #NewWayToWork Futurists Insights share that 74% of respondents to a survey define a "social" business as one that uses social technology to foster collaboration among, customers, employees and partners yet, only 45% of companies are using social to identify internal talent or key contributors.

IBM Connections is a great way to mine talent and engage your workforce. Teams can self-organize and come together to get work done faster; with less barriers.

On top of IBM Connections there are various solutions that can help further drive usage and adoption to accelerate the returns on investment. For example, the team over at Badgeville has created a solution called MotivationMetrics. Badgeville quotes that companies who successfully use gamification programs have seen an ROI of over 260% with a payback of less than 1 month!

If you are interested in learning more, on Thursday March 17th, 2016, I'll be co-hosting a webinar with the team over at Badgeville at 12pm  ET. To sign up, go to: http://info.badgeville.com/addressing-employee-engagement-crisis-webinar

The Results Are In: IBM Connections Benefits $26.5 million over 3 years !

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A recent commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM titled The Total Economic Impact of IBM Connections analyzes the cost savings and business benefits of utilizing IBM Connections. The purpose of the study is to provide a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of implementing the IBM Connections social collaboration platform within their organizations to improve internal processes to engage, empower, and inspire both employees and customers and unlock new opportunities.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with an IBM Connections implementation, Forrester interviewed existing customers with multiple years of experience using both the IBM Connections cloud and on-premises collaboration platforms.

As one example, Forrester refers to a representative organization with about 35,000 employees and calculated benefits of about $26 million over a three year period. These come from increased productivity, reduced turnover, and reduced IT costs.

Here's an infographic with some of the highlights:

Here's a testimonial from one of our customers where Jacob Andersson, Corporate Systems Manager at Verisure, talks about his experience with IBM Connections.



You can download the study from here. To start a free trial of IBM Connections, go here: http://ibmcloud.com/social.

Rethinking Your Social Strategy to Act Like a Pacesetter

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Last week I told you about the amazing results that Pacesetters are seeing from deploying social business solutions, according to IBM's 2014 Business Tech Trends report. This week I'm going to tell you what your enterprise can do to catch up in social based on those Pacesetters’ key practices.

The Business Tech Trends report found that Pacesetters are using analytics as their fuel and integration as their breakaway move. So, what does this mean for social?

To compete like a Pacesetter, integrate social with:

• Mobile to reach more customers and segments and strengthen current customer relationships
• Analytics to mine all of the unstructured data and better understand your customers' needs
• Cloud to manage the large amount of data collected and to quickly and easily scale technology and initiatives 

Some of this might sound obvious to you, but the study found that Pacesetters are seven times more likely to use social business on the cloud and six times more likely to use social media analytics and mobile analytics than other enterprises! There is still a huge gap between the Pacesetters and everyone else. When it comes to social business, it's time to integrate and analyze.

 

Ibm connect 2013 sw 102 social analytics key to a social enterprise from Mark Heid

Read the 2014 Business Tech Trendsm report and then start analyzing it on IBM Bluemix at our Bluemix app JAM! Remember, share your insights and IBM will highlight our favorites!

Social Business More than Doubles Since 2012 - Pacesetters Are Seeing the Biggest Wins

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IBM's Center for Applied Insights has just released their 2014 Business Tech Trends report, which surveyed over 1,400 decision makers across 15 industries around the world to find out how businesses are deploying key technologies. The study found that social business is now being deployed by 70 percent of enterprises! That is more than double the number of enterprises (34 percent) that were deploying social business solutions in 2012.

Pacesetter enterprises, which regard big data and analytics, cloud, mobile and social technologies as critical to their success and adopt them ahead of their competitors, have seen amazing results from integrating social into their DNA:

• Pacesetters are achieving improved customer experience through social at six times the rate of other enterprises.
• Additionally, 72 percent of Pacesetters are seeing enhanced communication and collaboration across the organization and ecosystem through their social initiatives, which is also six times more than other enterprises!
• Furthermore, Pacesetters report that they are expanding into new markets and segments at three times the rate of other enterprises.

It's clearer now than ever that having a social business strategy is imperative. But with 70 percent of enterprises deploying social, how do you get results like the Pacesetters? Stay tuned – I'm working on a post now that will tell you how!

The following graph indicates the deployment gains since 2012:

If you missed the webcast in which Sandy Carter, General Manager of Ecosystem Development, IBM, made the exciting Business Tech Trends announcement, not to fear you can re-watch it here!

IBM Connections is Now Available in the IBM Cloud marketplace

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As just communicated in the press release a few minutes ago, IBM Connections is now available in the IBM Cloud marketplace.  Here's the direct link in case you want to check it out.

The press release sums up the latest release of IBM Connections which is now available for download (in case you want to run it on premises) or in the cloud.

One of the highlights that we want to call out is the continued growth that we see in our ecosystem. For example, using our latest APIs and SDK, ISVs (independent software vendors) such as HootSuite, Bunchball, TemboSocial, ISW, among many, many others have created social apps on the IBM Connections Platform.

A key aspect of this release is secure external collaboration, where you can bring in external users (your customers, partners, suppliers, etc) into your IBM Connections deployment behind the firewall and still keep the right security boundaries to keep information safe. Jeff Schick, our VP for Social Software at IBM, calls out the importance of this:

When a workforce is out of synch or out of touch, the whole organization suffers from lost productivity, efficiency and innovation. With the open nature of today's business environment, organizations are looking to build new systems of people-centric engagement. The ability to bring key internal and external stakeholders into the conversation can facilitate a more collaborative, responsive and authentic way to work and deepen engagement.

Additionally, Superior Group's CIO, Tom DeClerck shares how IBM Connections has made the organization more agile by putting people back at the center of their business.  Speaking of Superior Group, here's a quick video that talks about the Superior Group's success on becoming a social business and the ROI they are achieving by using IBM Connections:



For more information, check out the entire press release.

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.

The Agenda for the IBM Connections User Group Meeting Has Been Announced

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As I announced back in March, I'm going to Social Connections VI - the IBM Connections User Group.

Last week, the organizers announced the agenda and I'm extremely honored to be part of the keynote.  As you can see from the agenda, I want to deep dive on IBM Connections "Next" and not just what it is, but why we built it and why you need to get it now.

As I mentioned earlier this week, on May 21st we'll be hosting a 1 hour webcast to unveil IBM Connections "Next" and if you haven't registered yet, you can register here.

So what will I talk about in Prague? Well, I can't give you too much detail until IBM Connections Next has been announced.  I can give you, however, a 1 minute preview:



Now, don't let that hold you back from registering for Social Connections VI. The organizers have created a super awesome and packed 2 day agenda and the event is free so all you need to do is get yourself there and get some best practices, tips, tricks, ideas, and more from fellow IBM Connections users.

To start signing up for sessions and build your calendar, go here.  I've already taken a pass and there's so many good sessions, that I have tons of conflicts that I'll need to resolve once I'm there.

If you haven't registered for Social Connections VI yet, go ahead and do it now! 

Book Review: Doing Business with IBM Connections Suite

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Thanks to a long flight yesterday, I just finished going through Doings Business with IBM Connections: Opportunities for Improving Processes, Driving Results, and Achieving Great Outcomes with IBM Connections 4.5 written by Michael Sampson. You will notice that the title of this post mentions the IBM Connections Suite and I'll get to why soon. Michael Sampson is an independent consultant focused on helping organizations optimize collaboration.

After going through the book, I must say that this is going to be a recurring recommendation to all current and prospective customers. The book is intended for collaboration strategists, line of business managers and users of IBM Connections. I think the book hits the mark and is perfect for that intended audience.

At its core, the book focuses on how to best use IBM Connections to address various collaboration scenarios such as:

• Finding Expertise
• Co-authoring documents
• Capturing ideas for innovation
• Managing meetings
• Running a project
• Making decisions
• and more (a total of 10 scenarios are covered)

For each collaboration scenario, Michael follows a consistent flow. First, describe what the collaboration scenario is and how organizations typically tackle this (i.e. "the old way"). Next, a typical work scenario is laid out to highlight the challenges that users face today.

Next, the process is clearly laid out on how to use IBM Connections to solve this challenge (i.e. "the new, faster, better, optimized way"). The author does a tremendous job of not only giving you a set of steps to follow, but also explains why he is providing that recommendation.

Next, each scenario includes case studies from customers that have been successful using Connections for the particular collaboration scenario (and it even includes customers that I hadn't heard of before!! ). Finally, each scenario has a section for Advanced Concepts where the author provides additional best practices (e.g. when talking about ideation, he references how to avoid a repeat of the "suggestion box").

One of the most common use cases (or scenarios as Michael calls them) that I hear is running a project. Coincidentally, we published a video showcasing these capabilities last week:

Throughout the book, the author constantly emphasizes the IBM Connections Mobile apps, which I believe recognizes the increase demand of the mobile workforce and strategies for bring your own device (BYOD). Additionally, the book is not limited to just the core Connections product but includes real-time meetings, document libraries and more which are all capabilities of the IBM Connections Suite.

This book provides independent advice on how to drive business with IBM Connections, accelerate adoption, and reduce time to value.

To purchase a copy of the book and/or learn more, go here.

Disclosure: I wrote a quote for the front page of the book and received a copy of the book.

How to Compete in the Era of "Smart"

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Today, IBM Social Business was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal and it is front and center as part of IBM's Smarter Planet strategy.

In the essay published in the Wall Street Journal, we describe how for the past 5 years we've been working with companies to transform how they operate using key IBM technologies in mobile, social, analytics and cloud to achieve measurable business value and results.

At organizations, we've seen how employees have far more access to data, and better access to something else: each other. My favorite quote from the essay is:

In this knowledge economy, the exchange of ideas has become the new means of production. And the advent of social and mobile technologies is shifting the competitive edge from having workers who amass knowledge to having workers who impart it.

I've seen this in practice at IBM. The transparency created enables the organization to become agile an connect a remote workforce (e.g. enabling them to live in cool places like Puerto Rico). In the essay, we highlight some of the organizations that have achieved tremendous value from becoming a social business, such as Cemex and Lowe's. So again, make sure that you go ahead and read it.

The op-ad is very well timed as South by Southwest (SXSW) kicks off tomorrow. Speaking of SXSW, if you are going to be there, make sure that you check out these sessions presented by IBM speakers:

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I Know Where You're Going: Location as Biometric

- Jeff Jonas, IBM Fellow & Chief Scientist

The Large Enterprise of Social Media - Meet Up

- Noah Kuttler, Market Segment Manager, IBM Enterprise Content Management

Mentor Session

- Rawn Shah, Social Business Strategist, IBM

Engaging Government for Fun, Profit & Meaning

- Gadi Ben-Yehuda, Innovation & Social Media Director – IBM Center for the Business of Government

Making Accessible Transportation Modern & Cool

- Bill Curtis Davidson, Accessible Transportation Solutions & Business Development Lead, IBM

Just Add Followers – The Key Ingredient to Telling Your Brand Story and Getting Results

Panel Discussion with Shoutlet, Bare Escentuals & IBM, Moderated by TechCrunch
- Sandy Carter, Vice President, Social Business Evangelism and Sales

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As a reminder, make sure that you don't miss next week's webcast: "From Liking to Leading": Transforming Your Business with a Next Generation Platform for Social Business

In the webcast Ray Wang, Principal Analyst & CEO, Constellation Research and speakers from organizations like Prudential, Genworth, Czarnowski and Celina Insurance to learn how the right platform for social business can drive competitive advantage. The broadcast will also include a demo of IBM Notes and Domino and IBM Connections Content Manager (and I hear that it's going to be an awesome demo!).

Replay: Luis Suarez, Louis Richardson and I at Pardon the Interruption

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At IBM Connect two weeks ago I had the opportunity to co-present with Luis Suarez and Louis Richardson for the first time ever. Thinking back, I'm surprised we hadn't gotten together and done a session earlier.

In any case, in this session we wanted to talk about various social business topics and we had asked the audience to submit them ahead of time. The format was to address the question in 3 minutes: 1 minute for each one of us. I thought that was pretty good since it keeps us flowing pretty quickly through topics, though at the same time can be *looong* for 60 minutes.

We also kept the order of answers the same throughout, thus I was always the first one to answer, then Louis, then Suarez. The great thing about this was that it gave me 2 minutes to stay quiet, and live tweet during the session:

Doing #ptisocialbiz with @elsua and @inter_vivos at #ibmconnect [pic]: 4sq.com/TTyEfs

— Luis Benitez (@lbenitez) January 29, 2013

If you missed the session at #IBMConnect, maybe you had a chance to catch up via Michael Sampson's blog. Otherwise, you can listen to the replay below (unfortunately, no video available):

Pardon the Interruption: Social Biz Hot Topics from Louis Richardson

Enjoy!

IBM Connect 2013: The Can't Miss Social Business Conference of the Year !

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We are about 4 weeks away for IBM Connect 2013 to kick off!

#IBMConnect promises the conference to be at if you are in the midst of becoming a social business or have already become a social business and want to share your story.

I'm especially looking forward at the large amount of customer sessions that are scheduled during the conference. I personally find that customer sessions are the best since it gives everyone the opportunity to learn from each other. As I mentioned last week, I'll be presenting the roadmap for all things IBM Connections at the conference. Certainly, a can't miss session .

Also last week, Alistair Rennie also posted a video where he shares what he's looking forward to at the IBM Connect conference.f

Here's a preview of the technical content you will find at the conference from IBMers and partners.

IBM Connect 2013 invitation lotusphere speakers dec 20 from Luis Benitez

Earlier today I booked my travel for the conference. So don't hesitate and register today!

The Benefits of Becoming a Social Business

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A quick video that was shared at the opening keynote of the Leadership Alliance conference two weeks back.

Are you ready to reap the benefits of becoming a social business ?

Go ahead and share and this video with your network.

Infographic: The ROI of Social Business with IBM Connections

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I stumbled upon this infographic on Twitter yesterday and since I'm a big fan of infographics, I wanted to share this one. Thanks to my colleague Pierre Fevrier for creating this one (and check out the others too!).

Make sure you also check out the other Infographics posted in Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ibmsocialbizeurope/with/7988127813/#photo_7988127813

Social Streams Help Me Stay Focused and Productive

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At your job, you have access to a lot of information throughout many systems. That means that you are probably switching between many applications to get your job done: your email client, your intranet portal, your various line of business applications, etc, etc, etc.

Now, imagine if you had a single, social stream of updates from all the applications you worked with that enabled you to get your work done quickly and efficiently. Wouldn't that be awesome? Imagine if you could sign off on an expense report or submit your travel request or even get notified when your colleague finished a task all while you browse a single stream of status updates and more.

All of this you can do today with IBM Connections. Using open standards, enterprise applications can be surfaced into a social stream to enable people to work in one single place.

Next week I'm going to be participating in the Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference and I would like to invite you to attend. This will be a great opportunity for you to find out what types of processes you can socialize by leveraging the market leading social platform for major productivity gains

As a teaser for the virtual Enterprise 2.0 conference, we have prepared the following video:


To register and view the agenda, click here and you'll be entered to win a Kindle.



See you there!

Grow Revenue By Using the IBM Social Collaboration Platform [VIDEO]

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And the demo movies for IBM Connections v4.0 keep coming in.  Let me tell you a little about this one.

Before using IBM's Social Collaboration Platform, Greenwell's profits were not growing and they were losing market share.

Greenwell's marketing manager decided to leverage the IBM's Social Collaboration Platform and from that point on, the successes kept piling in.

Check out the success story:


The ROI of using IBM's Social Collaboration Platform is clear. Greenwell was able to:

• Discover new opportunities
• Rebuild brand recognition
• Increase market share
• Invigorate its customer base

Congrats to the team at Greenwell! (By the way, in case you didn't attend our conference earlier this year, Greenwell is a fictional company).

This is a great video that you can use to drive adoption and clearly understand the business value of using a Social Collaboration Platform powered by IBM Connections.

What do you think? If you are not using the IBM Social Collaboration Platform, you should start today!

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!

Social Media Club Boston on The Evolution of Social Business

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Last week, the Social Media Club of Boston and IBM partnered up to talk about the Evolution of Social Business. While I couldn't assist in person for obvious reasons, I liked the ability to catch up via the uStream replay (below). The club celebrated its 5th anniversary and the outgoing president started the meeting with a re-cap of the club. This was very interesting to me in various levels. First, as you may know, I lead the Social Media Club of Puerto Rico so I like to learn about how other clubs structure their events. Second, the event was sponsored by my employer, and, third, my big boss was one of the panelists .

The following participated in the panel:

• Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Social Business, IBM
• Andrew Carusone, Director of Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) and Community Governance, Lowe’s Home Improvement (you may remember Lowe's awesome story on how they use IBM Connections to increase sales by million$ )
• Ric Fulop, Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners

Following the tweets generated by the event over at #SMCBoston, I knew I had to watch the replay. I specially liked these tweets:

"Awesome #SMCBoston event, "The Evolution of Social Business," last night at IBM Innovation Ctr. Learned a TON!" --Kirk Hazlett, Curry College Communication Professor; PRSA Fellow, and PRSA Director (2011-2012)

"This is not a tool discussion." @alistair_rennie at #smcboston --@jimstorer (principal at The Community Roundtable)

"Glad to see IBM support #smcboston & the local Boston community by having @alistair_rennie join us tonight #IBMsocialbiz" --Rachel Happe, former IDC analyst and principal at The Community Roundtable

"IBM has been great supporting #smcboston and other great Boston innovation communities like @MassInno Thx @#IBMSocialBiz" --Bob Collins, Partner at Human 1.0 / Digital Media & PR Strategist. Content Creator and Host of Boston's Social Media Breakfast

"Interesting demo of internal IBM employee search directory "Faces" @IBMWaltham. Very cool #SMCBoston pic.twitter.com/YOljxNeT" --Dave Cutler, Blogger, columnist and social media strategist.

The event was also highlighted by Bill Ives and in Mass High Tech.

Andrew from Lowe's did a fantastic job introducing how and why Lowe's embarked in the Social Business path. As part of his introduction Andrew told the amazing story of how they were able to increase sales at their retail stores by using social software behind the firewall (in their case IBM Connections). The specific example was about how an employee was having a challenge replenishing a specific type of pain tray. They had gone from selling 2 paint trays per week per store, to more than 15 trays per week per store. The employee didn't know how to get more trays in so they could sell more. As other employees saw the question, they wondered how this particular store was selling so many paint trays since the average was just 2 per week. The employee shared how they configured the display for the tray and all stores followed suit and they saw the same increase in sales, nationwide!

Ric is an entrepreneur and gets to read to hundred of business plans per year and has identified three trends: 1) consumerazation of the enterprise, 2) conversational web, and 3) next generation optimization. I don't want to spoil all the details so watch the recording.

Here's the video recording of the event (1 hour and 20 minutes):

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10 Social Business Myths - Busted!

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Today, a colleague shared this video which was posted to YouTube a couple of hours ago as well. The video features Louis Richardson while doing a keynote in Denmark. I blogged about Richardson's presentation last week where he shows how to increase the value of email by embracing social software.

Richardson follows the format of the famous TV Show MythBusters. For those of you who haven't seen the show (which by the way is one of my favorite shows, always on my TiVo and one of my dream jobs!), 2 Hollywood special effects experts take myths for a test and prove whether or not they are real (or plausible). For example, the MythBusters once demonstrated that it doesn't make sense to run in rain as you'll get wetter that way. But I digress.

In the video, Richardson talks about the following myths:

1. Social is "new"
2. Social is a waste of time
3. Social will get out of control
4. You can prove social during a pilot
5. People love to share all they know
6. Social will replace email completely
7. Microblogging is useless
8. You know what your people want in a social solution
9. Social is just noise
10. Adoption is the measure of success

Here's the 30 minute keynote. The talk is about 24 minutes and there's about 8 minutes of questions towards the end. This video is a MUST watch:

Is there a myth that you've heard that wasn't addressed here?

Email Driving Your Business Crazy? Embrace Social Software!

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A lot of my colleagues express amusement when I tell them that I've been able to reduce my inbox from 100+ emails/day to ~20 emails/day. The first question they always ask is: "How did you do it?"
It wasn't easy and it has taken time, but I was motivated by Luis Suarez. Luis was was interviewed by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur in their Net@Night show last year and is living the dream: a world without email. It was one of Luis' webinars that introduced me to the concept of moving away from email and embracing social software.
After seeing a significant reduction in my email, I decided it was time to get others to "see the light". I found, however, that a lot of people love their email and it's not always easy to get them to move away from it.
Today, I ran into a presentation from Louis Richardson that he posted in Slideshare. In the presentation, he encourages business users to get their "heads out of the inbox". I really liked the simplicity of the presentation and its style and wanted to share it with others.
Richardson summarizes why a business should embrace social software and properly use email:

• Open the conversation, leverage the wisdom of the crowds
• Use networks and communities to target the conversation
• Easily capture intellectual capital and avoid re-inventing the wheel
• And most of all: It's Easy. Low Impact. High Value!

Towards the end of the presentation, Richardson re-emphasizes that it's not easy and the change won't happen overnight. However, the benefits are definitely worth it!
Here's the presentation:

Get your head out of your inbox

View more presentations from Louis Richardson

Updated on 24/Oct/2011: Here's the recording:

What do you think? Are you ready to embrace social software in your organization?