All you need to do is burn the boats!

I was recently presenting strategies for social networking to an executive team at a software company and someone asked this question. "Couldn't we just do a couple of these things...won't that be enough?" Now I should qualify that up to this point in my presentation I had only covered very elementary steps to implementing a corporate social strategy so I was concerned that he was feeling overwhelmed so early on the process or perhaps apathetic (I couldn't really tell which). My greater concern was several others in the meeting where nodding in agreement and I could see that the growing consensus was "lets make a list of a couple action items and get the hell out of here"

I remembered that a good friend of mine (Bob E) had recently mentioned that most companies he had encountered were in social networking for a penny not a pound. Many enterprises just want to be able to report back to the board that they are active in the space or that they are testing channels or that they have a Twitter presense. This lack of commitment reminded me of the story of Cortez who went into battle back in 1519 and once on the beach instructed his men to Burn the Boats! because if we are to survive we will use our opponents boats to return home. 

Now that's motivation!!! that's commitment!!! and that's what companies need to do to be successful when they make a change of this magnitude Burn the damm boats!!! For every company those boats are different things, culture, naysayers, antiquated thinking, fear, lack of information or strategy. Whatever it is just find it, and burn it and when your done reach down in your pocket skip over the pennies and find that pound because that's what it takes to change how your company does business.

Just to be sure my rant about commitment isn't taken out of context I do believe in a methodical and consistent approach to social networking. You don't have to be on every platform and chase every trend but in the end the commitment to the culture and direction has to be there.

 Interesting speech on commitment and the Cortez story

The Intersection of Business Intelligence and Social CRM

This past week analysts at the Altimeter Group released their study titled "Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management" The study outlines 18 use cases for putting the customer first and the technologies that you need to get that job done. Authors R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang did a great job creating what will become the play book for social media integration in the enterprise. In the report they discuss the 5M's of Social CRM as a framework to guide your processes and strategy as you integrate Social CRM into the seven key categories (Customer Insights, Social Marketing, Social Sales, Social Service and Support, Social innovation, Collaboration and Customer Experience) that connect you to your customers.

 

Enterprise business intelligence tools play a key role in successfully integrating and measuring the unstructured and semi-structured data that drives the social space. SAS, SAP Oracle, Purisma, IBM, DataFlux, Information Builders and others are already addressing the challenges that Social CRM delivers. Its still very early in the adoption process but BI vendors are starting to see the growing opportunity. The interesting thing will be to see who puts a clear end to end offering together first. Monitoring is the popular technology for now but as companies gain better access to the social landscape they will demand integration and measurement. The Social CRM market is moving so fast I can't help but think that the larger slower moving "big stack guys" may be at a disadvantage and susceptible to an innovative upstart. 

Friday Funny - Analytics at their best

Social networking by the numbers

Jesse Thomas does an excellent job of rolling the numbers of social media in to a fast paced video. Its crazy how fast these numbers keep growing!

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Top Trends in Business Intelligence

One of the great things about the TDWI World Conference series is that you get to see your friends every 90 days and for the last year or two Vickie Farrell, Strategic Marketing Manager for HP’s BI Solutions business and I have had a chance to visit and discuss the trends in BI. Vickie and her team do an excellent job surveying business intelligence end users to compile the annual whitepaper titled HP’s Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence a comprehensive look at the industry.

I'll list a couple here but you should follow the link to get the full document.

Trend #10: Growing interest in cloud computing for business intelligence.
Trend #9: Social computing and the next frontier for business intelligence.
Trend #8: Growing importance of integrating and analyzing unstructured/semi-structured data.
Trend #7: Growing impact and opportunity of Complex Event Processing.
Trend #6: Data warehousing and business intelligence: A new generation drives new priorities.

To get the rest follow the link!