Are you a part of the social trust revolution?

Rachel Botsman, one of the speakers at this June’s TEDGlobal conference. She says that the currency of the new economy is trust and reputation in your most valuable asset.  Botsman writes, speaks and consults on “the power of collaboration and sharing through network technologies, and on how it will transform business, consumerism and the way we live,” according to her TED bio.

As examples of the real value of reputation, intention, capabilities and values, Botsman references the following in her talk:

• Uberhosts at Airbnb

High scorers draw more overnight visitors and make more money

• Super rabbits at TaskRabbit

Popular and efficient part-time workers are more likely to find jobs and command higher rates.

How will the social revolution-  a trust revolution – impact your business in the future? What are you doing about it?

[ted id=1572 lang=en]

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• Dreamforce 2012 Keynote (slideshare.net)

It is a social revolution. And it isn't going away.

It is a full scale social revolution. So some questions:

• Do you have accounts on all the current social media?


• Are you active and post content?


• Do you respond to others?


• Do you use rich media like photos and video?

This where we are headed fast. For leaders of organizations, do your employees see that you get it? Are you there and relevant? Are you willing to be open?

The future is here and now. Imagine it is the year 2017. Other leaders have been part of the social revolution for years. You decide to start. Will it be too late then?

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Does your org chart lead to complacency or disruption?

You have to love this funny chart but also Seth Godin's great questions in his blog.

Is it because it was built when geography mattered more than it does now? Is it an artifact of a business that had a factory at its center? Does the org chart you live with every day leverage your best people or does it get in their way?

At the end of the day, it may be helpful to think through where your org chart is taking you. Does it lead to complacency? Does it lead to disruption?

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As a great leader, do you pay attention to politics?

Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback, authors of "Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader," describe the three types of networks you need to succeed. Harvard Business Review video with Linda A. Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Kent Lineback who has spent many years as a manager and an executive in business and government.

A very honest conversation about politics in organizations and why it is important not to ignore it. You may be a CIO or a part of the C-Suite, a VP, a Director, a manager or team player. Should you ignore the politics of relationships?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGdRyPN3IRk&feature=g-vrec

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Is hope a good strategy?

Is hope a good strategy? For many of us in business, it seems to be on some days. We can break out of that vicious cycle though. With business technology, we can bring clarity to the business goal and help with a workforce computing strategy that enables the business goal.When thinking of the workforce computing strategy, some questions to answer are:

• What is the measurable business goal?


• What capabilities are needed to reach the goal?


• What strategies is the business focused on?


• What culture is our business creating?


• What people, processes and information is needed?


• What are the current gaps that exist with our employee computing environment?

David Johnson at Forrester Research has just published Forrester's Workforce Computing Strategic Plan research. He  has some great insights.

How strange it seems then, that thousands of IT projects begin every day, but more than one third of them crash enroute. Why? I would argue that it's because there is seldom a clear destination in mind, a rational plan to get there, nor a viable system approach in place to execute the plan. Most of the time, the destination and the means to get there are only vague estimates, and the elements of the strategy are rooted in hope.

via What Is A Workforce Computing Strategic Plan...And Why Do You Need One? | Forrester Blogs.

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Tools for "life tracking". Who would have thought?

Who would have thought of a whole category of applications called “life tracking”. Here is a compilation of 20 tools you may want to take a gander at.

Ari Meisel is co-founder at Less Doing, where he works on making every task in life and business more efficient. He used self-tracking to overcome Crohn’s Disease and compete in Ironman France. You can follow him on Twitter @liontex and read his blog at arimeisel.com.

Optimizing your life can help free up time to enjoy more activities. One of the best ways to start is by figuring out exactly how you spend your time. Self-tracking has become something of a craze thanks to movements such as the Quantified Self, which allow you to track everything in your life and, in some cases, take action.

Here is a list of the top 20 resources for monitoring the most salient aspects of your life. What you do with the information is only limited by your imagination.

20 Life-Tracking Tools for Better Health, Wealth and Productivity

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What accounts for 54% of global IP traffic?

This is amazing. Ever-increasing download speeds, file sharing and the growing adoption of high quality online video are expected to lead to a surge of global IP traffic in the next few years. Cisco expects global traffic to almost quadruple between 2011 and 2016.

After file sharing had been the main contributor to global traffic for many years, online video is now the biggest data hog. In 2012, video (excluding video communication) is expected to account for 54 percent of global IP traffic. Web browsing and email only make up 13 percent of traffic, while voice over IP services and online gaming add less than one percent to the total.

This chart shows Cisco’s forecast of global monthly IP traffic from 2011 to 2016.



http://www.statista.com/markets/21/topic/193/reach-traffic/chart/624/global-ip-traffic-per-month-from-2011-to-2016/

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What are the new rules of engagement for nonprofits?

Peppers and Rogers have some great thoughts on how non-profits can create and sustain superior customer experiences.

Nonprofits that have any degree of success in creating a unique and memorable experience for the constituent base they engage have spent time, energy, and money implementing the right technologies and understanding the right processes that pay significant dividends at the end of the day.

Check out the article: Customer Engagement | New Rules of Engagement for Nonprofits

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How often does the social media monster swallow you whole?

How often does the social media monster swallow you whole?

More than you may think, according to Red e App, which lets consumers get notifications from businesses without having to provide their personal information.

The company developed an infographic that details how interruptions impact employee productivity.

“Is it possible to be too connected in this digital age?” Red e App asks. “Research data indicates, yes.”

Among the findings, the infographic shows that workers are interrupted approximately once every 10.5 minutes, and that it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to an assigned task. The impact of these interruptions is staggering — costing the American economy almost $650 billion dollars a year, it says.

The infographic then breaks down the amount of time that Facebook, Twitter and email suck out of your day.

For years, productivity experts have suggested what I call segmenting your time with strict limits on the amount of time you spend in email. It seems logical to extend that to social media as well.

What do you think of the data?

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Mapplegate: A Brief Take On Apple Vs. Google Maps

The mobile world is very fickle. Apple consumers are throwing a fit because of the change in map providers. I must admit I was reluctant to download myself but jumped in anyway. Others don't seem too inclined. On our internal Yammer feed there was a lot of chatter about what a good alternative was to the Apple offering. This was before the IOS was released.

Maps are strategic IP because they capture consumers' intent of where they want to go, which creates the opportunity to intervene and shape consumers' paths. Apple doesn't want Google to have that data on its users and doesn't want to give Google the opportunity to serve location-based guidance. The problem is that maps are difficult to build -- Nokia and Google (the two main map providers) have been building their map IP for years. Nokia maps, for example, are on nine of 10 in-car GPS systems, each of which acts as a probe that continuously improves Nokia's maps. Apple can't catch up overnight, and it seems as if Apple was premature in pulling the plug on Google Maps -- it has produced a consumer backlash, at least among early adopters.

via Mapplegate: A Brief Take On Apple Vs. Google Maps | Forrester Blogs.

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Are you a hyperspecialist?

Tom Malone, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the HBR article "The Age of Hyperspecialization," explains why breaking jobs into tiny pieces yields better, faster, cheaper work -- and greater flexibility for employees.

Is this a good thing or not? Are you taking advantage of it? What are the implications for managers?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slK1RbPPGqY&feature=relmfu

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Is it a technical problem? Or is it a human problem?

Eric Ries, entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School, explains how to find the human causes of technical problems. He suggest using the five why's to go beyond what seems like the root cause. He also suggests making incremental investments at all five levels that avoid all or nothing investments.

Very powerful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmrAkHafwHI&feature=g-vrec

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Can disrupting routines create innovation?

Frank Barrett, author of "Yes to the Mess," describes why being uncomfortable spurs creative thinking. I love it because he uses examples from Jazz innovators to describe how disrupting routines creates innovation.

There is a great story about Miles Davis and an innovation he brought to jazz. What was the result of this innovation? The highest selling jazz album in history to this date. And this was in 1959.

Worth a quick 3 minutes of you time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSrt9UbIrsQ&feature=g-all-u

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What is the internet, really?

Great video from Andrew Blum on what is the internet, really? He is an architect and went on a journey to discover the physical reality of the internet.

[ted id=1576]

Bad news for Windows Phone Development

Market research firms, such as Gartner and IDC, publish estimates of global smartphone shipments on a quarterly basis. While these numbers are very helpful to determine who's currently on top of the smartphone market, there is one other metric that is just as important, if not more. Let's say you're an app developer. Of course you're interested in short term trends, because they give you an idea which platform has a future. But if you want to know if a platform is worth developing for NOW, what's at least as important is the installed base of that platform, i.e. the number of phones that are actually in use at a given point of time.

Former Nokia executive turned consultant Tomi Ahonen has recently published his estimates for the global smartphone market and the message is clear: if you're planning to develop apps for Windows Phone, you might want to think again. Why, Windows Phone has a global installed base of 14 million units. A number ridiculously small compared to Android's 427 million and Apple's 198 million. Even Bada, a low-end operating system pretty much left for dead by Samsung, has a larger installed base than Windows Phone does. So if Microsoft really wants to establish Windows Phone as the "third ecosystem" in the mobile game, the Redmond-based company has a rocky road ahead of it.

This chart shows the global installed base of smartphones at the end of Q2 2012, broken down by operating system.

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50 year view of newspaper advertising - This is not good for them

Two weeks ago, the Newspaper Association of America published its quarterly advertising report. The results were not good. In fact it was the worst quarter in thirty years when accounting for inflation.

Looking at annual numbers, the outlook is even more dramatic: if nothing extraordinary happens in the last few months of this year, 2012 will be the worst year for American newspapers since 1950. Professor Mark J. Perry of the University of Michigan estimates print advertising revenues of $19 billion this year. Taking inflation into account that is a 71 percent decline from the peak in 2000 and below the level of 1950!



http://www.statista.com/markets/14/topic/113/books-publishing/chart/612/newspaper-advertising-revenue-from-1950-to-2012/

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Just the facts ~~ Please!!

Dragnet's Sgt. Joe Friday character frequently implore informants to provide 'Just the facts'. We have all kinds of "facts", data from analytic platforms and internal operational systems. Take the call center or a website. There is so much there that can help improve digital experiences dramatically because it separates fact from fiction.

To mine this data for experience improvement opportunities, focus our efforts in examining the actual behavior of customers. We use Google analytics on our website. It helps us understand where visitors are going and what they do when they get there. Nothing like the facts. One company I know of used web analytics to prove a 65% customer drop-off rate at a point where login was required, prior to checkout. And when analysts at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) mined web analytics data for design opportunities, they found users pogo-sticking between search results and hotel landing pages, which tipped them off to the fact that users were digging for specific information.

Here are some other things to look for:

• Study customers' mobile and tablet behavior


• Examine customer behavior across channels


• Look at the moments that matter

This is powerful for improving the customer experience. We have the facts.

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Am I communicating with simplicity?

Technology can very complex. Like every profession, technologists use lots of acronyms and jargon.

So, after coming up with ideas, we need develop simple messages and language to test our ideas with folks from the business. Avoiding all technical jargon and concepts has two benefits: first and most important, it forces us to think clearly and crisply; second, simplicity increases the chances that the business audience will understand our intent and see the benefits.

Does the average marketing person understand what I am saying? If not, I need to go back to the drawing board.

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The Twitter or the hare?

It seems like Twitter, a company once notoriously slow on monetization, has finally figured out a way to convert its growing user base into advertising dollars. Market research firm eMarketer expects Twitter’s advertising revenue to reach $288 million this year, a 107 percent increase over last year. Moreover, eMarketer predicts that the microblogging service could surpass $800 million in ad revenue in 2014.

This chart shows Twitter’s estimated advertising revenue from 2010 to 2014.



http://www.statista.com/markets/21/topic/194/social-media/chart/608/twitter-s-ad-revenue-tipped-to-double-this-year/

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Are you tracking prospects from social media contacts?

This is interesting. It also seems fundamental. I am sure way to many of us are guilty of "believing the buzz about social media and aren't paying attention to a basic premise. It is about establishing relations and then generating sales.

I would be interested in your experience. Any thoughts? Are you converting social media contacts into prospects? Prospects into customers?

The University of Massachusetts released its annual survey of social media usage at Fortune 500 companies. The report revealed that in the past year, these business giants have increased their adoption of blogging by 5%, their use of Twitter for corporate communications by 11% and their use of Facebook pages by 8%. Sixty-two percent of the 2012 F500 have corporate YouTube accounts and 2% (11 companies) are posting on Pinterest. Sixty-six % of the F500 are now on Facebook. 73% of the F500 have active corporate Twitter accounts.

However, what caught my attention was another recent survey that the University was also promoting on the same web page. This survey examined how universities use social media to attract students to their MBA programs. The study showed the same sort of increases that the F500 survey revealed. However, the headliner take-away from this research was “The Missing Link in Social Media Use Among Top MBA Programs: Tracking Prospects” The report concluded that “the missing link appears to be tracking those who first become interested in the program through one of the program’s social media sites. Being able to measure whether these prospects actually apply to the program is something schools may be looking to do, but have not yet mastered. Without this piece of information it is difficult to really assess the effectiveness of the social media plan and to know where future investments should be made.”

via The Missing Link in Social Media Use: Tracking Prospects | Forrester Blogs.

 

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How often does this happen and how difficult is it to do right?

I called a company I do business with a lot yesterday. I was calling from my cell phone. I knew it would be about a 30 minute conversation. My fear was that the call would drop. At the start of the call, the representative took my phone number so I thought, OK, I'll be fine if the call drops. They can call me back.

So, sure enough, the call dropped after about 20 minutes and I had given them lots of information. I waited for the representative to call me back. Nothing.

I call back and get a different representative and have to start all over again. Really?

This doesn't seem to difficult to enable. Seems like something you would empower your representatives to do. Unfortunately, I've never seen it done.

Should be a basic of a better experience at a call center. I need to check and see how we do it at my own service (call) center. I hope we do better.

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I will NEVER forget

My experience on September 11, 2001.

Mobile internet browsing takes off

Mobile internet browsing continues to take off. It certainly highlights the need to make sure everything is mobile ready. Our internal data shows essentially the same trend.

In September 2012, mobile phones and tablets will for the first time be responsible for ten percent of internet browsing. For the calculation of usage development, Statista has taken figures from web analytics provider NetMarketShare. By the end of 2013, the share of mobile end devices will increase to over 17 percent.

URL: http://www.statista.com/topics/779/mobile-internet/chart/598/mobile-market-share-on-the-rise/

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What is the single most important business technology trend?

What is the single most important business technology trend? I think it is fair to say we have entered the age of the customer. Customers have amazing choices (and technology) at their fingertips. From a competitive point of view it can be disruptive. It can mean the difference between thriving economically or failing.

In an age where customers are so empowered by easy access to information, they are taking control of processes companies are used to controlling. Hard wired strategic plans are going out the window as we are forced to become more flexible and nimble. So some things to think about:

• Are we customer obsessed?


• Can we master the customer data flow when existing data integration projects have failed?


• Will we provide new services quickly based on emerging customer needs?


• Are we on the "technology side" ready to partner with business teams to remove complexity and create lean, nimble solutions?

Hard questions but our customers expect no less since they have so many choices.

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Is our strategic plan called "doing things"?

I don't think I would advocate not having a strategic plan but they probably could be simpler than we make most of them. Regardless of what you call it, the focus should be on getting something done, on doing things. The focus should be execution.

In the world of business technology, speed is huge. Executing is huge. Results reign supreme. Experiments are the norm. We ought to obsess about the customer and sweat the details about executing what helps them. We should keep moving and never stop thinking of what the customer experience is like. No stone should be left unturned in our pursuit of amazing customer service. It is in fact the small courtesies that great an emotional connection to our products and services. Is every contact with us memorable? Did we add value?

Are we doing it? Are we getting it done today?

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called ‘doing things.’ ” —Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines CEO and Founder

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What should you obsess over?

In this day and age, we all should obsess over the customer experience. That is the focus that brings us great joy in our work.

Some questions to think about. How enjoyable are we to do business with? Was the experience fun? Did my needs get met? Would I recommend this company to a friend? There are several approaches we can take with these type of questions but just asking "real customers" what they think gives feedback for a business obsessed with the customer and their experience with us.

They use stopwatches at McDonald's. They know, to the second, how long it should take to make a batch of fries. And they use spreadsheets, too, to whittle the price of each fry down by a hundredth of a cent if they can. They're big and it matters.

Small businesspeople often act like direct marketers. They pick a number and they obsess over it. In direct mail, of course, it's the open rate or the conversion rate. For a freelancer or small business person, it might be your bank balance or the growth in weekly sales.

I think for most businesses that want to grow, it's way too soon to act like a direct marketer and pick a single number to obsess about.

The reason is that these numbers demand that you start tweaking. You can tweak a website or tweak an accounts payable policy and make numbers go up, which is great, but it's not going to fundamentally change your business.

I'd have you obsess about things that are a lot more difficult to measure. Things like the level of joy or relief or gratitude your best customers feel. How much risk your team is willing to take with new product launches. How many people recommended you to a friend today...

What are you tracking? If you track concepts, your concepts are going to get better. If you track open rates or clickthrough, then your subject lines are going to get better. Up to you.

via Seth's Blog: What to obsess over.

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Are workers who can and do work anywhere (including home) more engaged?

I am a remote, or as I prefer to believe, an anywhere worker. I can work anywhere. And I do. It works for me and a lot of my colleagues and friends. We are a very productive and motivated group. I love it when I find evidence to support what I do and believe.

What do you think? Are you more productive being an "anywhere" worker?

If you work from home, you've probably gotten an eye roll or two from your office-bound friends. But as consultant Scott Edinger explains, working from home or in a remote office can lead to increased productivity, more effective communication, and better teamwork.

Who is more engaged and more committed to their work and rates their leaders the highest?

A. People who work in the office

B. People who work remotely

If you picked A, you might be as surprised as the investment firm I worked with recently, which found in reviewing results of a 360-degree feedback process that the answer was, in fact, B.

The team members who were not in the same location with their leaders were more engaged and committed— and rated the same leader higher—than team members sitting right nearby. While the differences were not enormous (a couple of tenths of a point in both categories), they were enough to provoke some interesting speculations as to why this might be happening.

via Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged.

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The decline of newspaper advertising revenue continues

The decline of newspapers continues. In a digital world it is very predictable for all forms of traditional media. The Newspaper Association of America published its quarterly advertising report this week and the results are not good.

Whoever hoped that Newspaper advertising had already hit rock bottom was disappointed. In the second quarter, advertising revenues of American newspapers declined another 6 percent to $5.7 billion. Since the second quarter of 2003 print ad revenues have declined by more than $6 billion, a loss that the $500 million raise in online ads is nowhere near covering. Accounting for inflation, the past quarter marks a 30-year low in newspaper advertising.

 http://www.statista.com/markets/14/topic/113/books-publishing/chart/596/the-decline-of-newspaper-advertising-continues/

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How comfortable are you at participating in business strategy conversations?

The job of a CIO is a tough one. Understanding and being able to communicate highly technical concepts in plain business language isn't easy. We all recognize that strategic planning is probably the most important thing we do. How good are we at it?

The business world today is extremely complex. Increased globalization; heightened merger activity; competition from nontraditional sources; shortened product life cycles; and a tightened regulatory environment are just a few of the items affecting a company’s strategic plan. Information technology can affect all of these things… and more.

In addition, many companies use technology as the strategic weapon necessary to survive in the fierce competitive environment. It is the job of the CIO to understand all of the aspects of the marketplace in which the company participates to help it effectively use information technology to address these challenges.

How comfortable are you at participating in business strategy conversations? A great question to think seriously about.

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• Busy Planning Strategy Without Thinking Strategically (relationship-economy.com)


• Hey IT! Get with the Program and Make Operations a Strategic Weapon (cloudcomputing.sys-con.com)


• CIO Alert: Questions Your CFO Should Be Asking in 2013 (spendmatters.com)

How not to miss a beat all day long.

You know technology is moving fast. So are customer expectations. Adoption of multiple devices is now the norm. I connect from my work laptop, iPad, iPhone, and home iMac on any given day. Most of what I connect to is pervasive from device to device. Just today I have used a "to do" manager on the web via a laptop, my iPhone and my iPad. Everything I need to do is always synched and up to date. I love it. But that is also my expectation now for how things work.

Consider this from Forrester Research:

• Thirty-two percent of US online adults accessed the Internet from multiple physical locations using a PC only; for example, from home, work, and the sidelines of a son's soccer game.


• Forty-five percent of all US mobile subscribers owned a smartphone in 2011, slightly less than doubling from just two years before, when only 24% owned one. Forrester forecasts that more than half of US mobile subscribers will own smartphones by the end of 2012. And, in Western Europe, they expect smartphone penetration to jump from 34% in 2011 to 67% by 2016.


• Thirty-six percent of US adults with a mobile phone access the mobile Internet at least monthly or more often. In 2010, only 23% engaged in this behavior. Western European adults with a mobile phone accessing the mobile Internet at least monthly or more often grew from 9% to 18% from 2009 to 2011.

We can all connect and interact from multiple devices all day long without missing a beat. What opportunities does this present for us to improve the customer experience?

Related articles

• Intel partners with LG on mobile Internet devices (reviews.cnet.com)


• Keep Your Mobile Internet On When Visiting France (prweb.com)


• Cord Cutting: Has Your Home Gone Mobile? (mycricket.com)

What medium is king of the social world?

Video is becoming king of the social world. Studies indicate that over 50% of Americans watch user-generated video at least once a month. That is more than any other vehicle, including blogs, music, and photos on photo sharing sites. As video becomes an effective way to communicate with consumers, several emerging technologies allow you to target video content to your audience.

One technology to look at allows you to forge one-to-one customer relationships with real-time, personalized video using StarGreetz. If you were sent a video that was instantly personalized for you based on a number of factors, would you watch it? StarGreetz (www.stargreetz.com) helps brands create one-to-one personalized video messages that use the actual voices and images of brand spokespeople, popular celebrities and iconic characters to increase engagement. The videos are personalized to address the recipient by name, gender, location, date/time, and dozens of other potential attributes, and are delivered via messages and quick-response (QR) codes on Facebook, email, Twitter, mobile, point of purchase, on-package, outdoor, and print.

Quaker's Chewy Granola Bars used StarGreetz to put QR codes on packaging that led consumers to personalized video messages, via Facebook API, starring Nick Jonas, delivering 88% opens, 74% click-through rates, as well as 5 minutes and 10 seconds of engagement. Toyota Racing sent NASCAR fans that registered for the Pit Pass an email containing a personalized video of Kyle Bush and experienced open rates that were five times higher than those of traditional emails.


This is very exciting for businesses who are obsessed with the customer experience.

Who will be the largetst SmartPhone market?

Now this makes sense. According to market research firm IDC, China will overtake the United States this year to become the world’s largest smartphone market. China’s share of global smartphone shipments is expected to grow from 18.3 percent in 2011 to 26.5 percent in 2012. China’s market share is forecast to decline slightly until 2016, as smartphone adoption will accelerate in other emerging markets, such as India.

Smartphone adoption in the United States is starting to slow down and as emerging markets are quickly growing, the U.S. share of global shipments is expected to decline from 21.3 percent in 2011 to 14.5 percent in 2016.

Meanwhile, India could become the third largest market by 2016. IDC projects an average annual growth rate of more than 50 percent for the Indian smartphone market in the next five years.

The chart shows the five largest smartphone markets, based on their share of global smartphone shipments.

 

Source: http://www.statista.com/topics/840/smartphones/chart/585/china-to-become-the-largest-smartphone-market-in-2012/