Published November 17, 2011byamelielaunayonNovember 17, 2011inPress Releases
blueKiwi offers online tools and guidance based on end user study results
Reading, UK, 17 November, 2011 –
Anecdotal evidence is not enough
Social networking has become an integral part of our lives – the culture of sharing and collaborating is changing how we react with one another. Within the workplace, Enterprise Social Networks are similarly reshaping how employees engage with each other, within an organisation, as well as with external partners and customers.
Anecdotal evidence stacks up, but during tough times, hard facts are more often required to convince organisations to invest in such tools. blueKiwi’s White Paper explains in simple terms how an ESN can have a real impact on productivity and more importantly, the bottom line.
A solid point that needs to come across more clearly as we launch anther round of autumn events on how mainstream Social Business has become. There are still plenty of CFO and CEOs out there that have a hard time trying to see the business value and since an investment is needed, more often than not so is a justification.
It will be interesting to see if the use of an ROI calculator can be good enough in a real world scenario to show financially quantifiable benefits !
Published November 14, 2011In my last post, I walked through some of the reasons why compliant social business is so challenging. In this post, I want to take a look at the four steps organizations need to take in order to give themselves the best chance of solving the compliance challenges of going social.
The four steps to getting compliant are:
- Create a cross-functional body to ‘own’ the problem of social media compliance
- Find out what’s happening with social media at all levels of your organization
- Focus on creating a reasonable, defensible social media compliance strategy
- Manage social media compliance the way you manage traditional compliance
Let’s look at each in detail:
As we are approaching he Social Business / Enteprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, I really hope the terminology will finally be made clear. Is Social Business and Social Media really the same thing?
I am pretty sure that when I talk to clients I see them differently and so do most of them. So what are we talking about, Social Business, or Social Media.
The content of the piece is still very valid for Social Media and a good read to get up to speed on the subject. So go and read the rest online over at CMSWire.
Published September 15, 2011Why are we hanging “-aaS’s” off the backend of almost everything we write?
by Tom Austin | April 12, 2011 | Comments Off
We are being overrun by -aaSs. They’re being stuck on everything from Software to Storage (SaaS versus SaaS) and virtually everything in between..I know it’s too much to ask that we disrupt the -aaSification of the industry too soon. Everyone is doing it these days (much like sticking e before everything a dozen years ago was seen as the cool, must-do thing). But we’re about to suffocate from excessive suffixes, a form of suffixation-suffication..I will persist in thinking that sticking aaS on the tail end of everything will, in a few years time, be viewed as a really silly aas affectation. We will get over it..This penchant for suffixation-suffocation was originally driven by a search for a middle-ground between selling software versus delivering a service that doesn’t require you buy software..Please deliver us from excess -aaS!
Comments after my own heart. we do not need e’s or i’ in front of everything, or “aaS” at the end of everything… oh, and we do not need “Social” in front of everything either !
Published July 19, 2011To debunk : –verb (used with object) to expose or excoriate (a claim, assertion, sentiment, etc.) as being pretentious, false, or exaggerated: to debunk advertising slogans.
After reading the following 2 posts from fellow AIIM bloggers “Content isn’t Social, You are” by Laurence Hart and “Social: Bugger All New to See Here” by Chris Walker, as well as “Social business or Enterprise 2.0 – or a different term altogether?” by Stefan Pfeiffer; I must coe to the clear conclusion that we have reached a turning point in how we talk, tweet, blog about Social Business. While only 1-2 years ago, it was considered cutting edge and in many ways the way of the future for organizations that want to improve upon many collaborative or innovative ways of working, this time it feels almost like we (those that wese ahead of the curve 3 years ago) have gone mainstream.
Social Business is no longer the wave of the future, but the way of the present. We are living in interesting times ! Any guesses on what is going to be the next big thing?
Published May 9, 2011(This post was originally published on the AIIM Blogger Community here)
Well, for the last 6 months I have been cloistered away, well actually it has been a lot longer, trying to get the AIIM Social Business Buyers Guide together. After initial decisions about who should be in the list and who should not be for this time, the long search / research started. Now I have worked for vendors in the past and have some idea about some of the strange emails they get.
But something still baffles me and this is one for the customer. Vendors if you want to be taken seriously in a business world, behave like business, not like a bunch of developers who do not want to sell anything.
Some lessons learned, which would turn me off completely if I were a customer;
Make it clear what you are offering / selling. Some products look cool, but if your website does not make it clear what you are actually offering.
Make contact details easily findable ! – I live in Germany, and all German websites need to have an “Impressum”, which lists full address and contact details of the person or organisation responsible for the content.
Have someone monitor the accounts! – Great, you have given an Email account, now let someone answer it !
Answer the question: As part of the survey to be included, I send out a questionnaire, where it was clear or not is beside the point. Answer the question you were asked… do NOT copy & paste a piece from your won website. I’d rather you send me the link then.
Stop trying to sell me something: It is amazing. Some vendors will schedule a product demo with a sales person,. This is fine.. but then do not try to keep sell me the product.
Do not offer me a job- Although flattering to some extend, once I have identified myself as an analyst writing a buyers guide, offering me a commission-based job on representing your product is just bad form. Don’t !
Keep your promises – If you promise to send me something, or make a recording of a conference-call and promise to make it available to me afterwards so I do not have to take a lot of notes, then make sure I get it!
All of these would turn off any potential customer trying to find out whom to shortlist!
But there was also a lot of good information delivered by the vendors. Some showed me their roadmaps for upcoming changes and expansions. It is good to see how many vendors are moving into more professional delivery mechanism, business models and professional service organizations as well as a worldwide channel network. We have come a long way from simple collaboration capabilities early this century and the Web 2.0 wave that made Andrew McAfee to call it Enterprise 2.0 in 2006. So as much as I had to struggle to get some information, the information that I did get made me hopeful for great things to come in this market space.
Watch this space for more information as well as some excerpts here in the near future… and if you are a vendor who thinks that they might have missed a trick when talking to me, please feel free to contact me. It is never too late to improve on a mediocre first impression! 