Colette Martin over on the Forbes blogs picked up on a thread which has been floating around the net for the last couple of months: whether IBM can be to the enterprise what Facebook is to the consumer space. That is, can IBM be the social network du jour for company intranets?

IBM has been an early innovator of the internal use of many web-based technologies: email, instant messaging and intranet technologies. The question is whether it can extend that innovative thinking into the social networking space.

What would this platform require? Colette suggests:

“The ability to selectively connect, to share information, to respond/comment on information, and to be able to integrate with other company data and systems”

adding:

“The concept of groups would be key – with the ability to create sub-groups within groups, and groups that bring other groups together”

I’d heartily agree with all of these features. On the subject of sub-groups, some years ago I was ready to execute our social networking strategy across the Ning network, only to find that we couldn’t create relationships between groups (hierarchical or otherwise). This was a major hurdle given that we would not be able to link different product sub-groups across a product line group, so we were forced back to the drawing board.

Social email

Another feature I would like to see in an enterprise social network is the ability to make email more ‘social’. By that I mean highlight emails from those with whom you have a relationship on a social network. I’d prefer to see emails first from those in my team and with whom I frequently work. Both Facebook and Google have recently implemented social emailing capabilities. In the enterprise, where email can be such a resource drain, social email capabilities offers the potential for a considerable increase in productivity.

The extra-intranet

As a social media marketer, I spend a significant amount of time trawling our intranet for content that can be exposed externally. This can include product walkthroughs produced for the sales teams or partners, deeper technical information on our customer case studies, intra-departmental communications. Obviously some care has to be taken to ensure nothing confidential seeps out of our walls, but I’m constantly surprised at the amount of content we have that can be exposed. I’m also woefully aware of the duplicate effort our marketing teams go through to make sure their external marketing campaigns are also promoted within the company.

Now, wouldn’t it be great if we could post relevant content simultaneously externally and internally? If I have a blog post talking about a new product release, what if I could just check a box so that this message is pushed across both our internal and external social networks? I’m not suggesting this be the default setting(!), but I can see considerable value in having the ability to share content both internally and externally.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

If you are interested in learning more about the enterprise social networking space, I recommend checking out the 2010 Gartner report on Internal Social Software.

IBM, along with two other vendors, make it into the visionary/leader quadrant: potentially giving them the best shot at becoming the Facebook of the enterprise.

More on IBM social computing solutions

Read Colette Martin’s post on Forbes

Read the source post from Drew Neisser on Fast Company

Or at the very least it needs to adapt or it’s going to die.

Given that an open rate of 20% is considered an industry high (more data from MailChimp, in case you were in any doubt), 80% of the emailed population don’t get around to open these sterling email missives. Now let’s be conservative and say half of them have either switched email, gone on vacation, departed their mortal soul or not reported back the open rate for some technical reason, that still leaves around 40% of all those emailed who consider the message spam.

In the past, that has been a hit the email marketer has been willing to take, given that this was primarily a numbers game and only a small percentage of responses was needed to declare victory on a campaign.

(image courtesy of Google)

However that small percentage is very likely to shrink given a couple of recently announced features. Both Google’s Priority Inbox and Facebook’s updated messaging system prioritize the display of mail from friends and respected sources. This could have a significant impact on bulk mailings: rather than these messages appearing as part of the stream of messages that makes up an inbox, these messages could be considered unwanted and get buried. In effect, this will slash the open rates from email marketing campaigns. Given that the Gmail and Facebook systems are used largely by consumers, you can expect to see a hit on B2C campaigns first.

Now is this only a B2C issue? I suspect not. Most companies acknowledge that email puts a considerable dent into productivity of their workforce. As corporate email vendors start offering companies the ability to make email communications more efficient, expect to see the performance of traditional B2B email marketing campaigns tank.

Earning respect

‘Respect’ is a key buzzword in all of this. Email marketers will have to have more respect for their constituents’ inboxes. They will have to engage through other channels (like social media) to earn the respect of the target audience so their brand hits the priority list.

They will also need to ensure their messages are more relevant. Marketing analytics tools (a subset of the emerging business analytics sector) can be used to look at past data on the behavior of the target audience to pinpoint those most likely to open an email and respond. For instance, a mailing can just be sent to those individuals who have clicked on a related link in a past campaign.

These same tools allow for more customer-centric marketing practices such as creating content using messages that marketers know have proven to have the strongest resonance. Relevance breeds respect and if you can become that ‘respected source’ to your target audience, you stand a much better chance of having continued success with email marketing campaigns in the future.

So, pardon my apocalyptic hyperbole, but be aware that recent developments in the email industry have the potential to shake down the marketing industry in 2011 and beyond.

If you are an IBM partner that is making use of the developerWorks network to build communities and/or relationships with the IBM ecosystem, you could well be the recipient of an IBM 2011 Beacon Award.

What we're looking for are companies that have made outstanding use of various channels available at developerWorks. For instance, you could have authored a number of articles showing how you have integrated IBM technologies into your solution. You may have created a community around an industry specialization. Perhaps you are an expert in an IBM technology area and have helped lesser mortals on our forums.

In addition we require that you show demonstrable results from the work you've put in.

Nomination Guidelines Specific to this award:

• Member-level status in PartnerWorld, Advanced or Premier status not required
• Customer references not required 
• Nominations may also be submitted by Technology Managers and other IBM Partner Representatives

Nominations will be open from November 1 through December 10.

Winners and finalists will be honored at an exclusive IBM leadership conference in Orlando, Florida in February 2011.

Benefits for Winners and Finalists:

• Complimentary registration to an exclusive, invitation only IBM leadership conference
• Exclusive space in IBM's virtual conference center to host client events
• Promotion of your firm's prestigious standing as a Beacon Award winner
• Videotaped testimonial to be distributed through IBM communications channels
• Press and analyst support
• Reference story and case study development by IBM communications teams
• Promotion of winners and finalists on the PartnerWorld web site
• Use of new Beacon Award marks for one year
• Crystal trophy

To submit a nomination, please visit the online nomination form.

A post by Timo Elliot over on the Forbes blogging community posits that we have a tendency to be overoptimistic on our abilities. For instance, 93% of Americans think they have above-average driving skills.

This notion of our egos over-inflating our perceptions of our abilities carries over into the business world: many successful executives have similarly high opinions of their decision making skills and 'hence under-invest in fact-based systems and processes that could help us correct our misperception'. The systems Timo is talking about here are business analytics and business intelligence systems.

Now if this is the case, there would be space for competitive advantage by those execs who put trust in these systems when it comes to making business decisions. And yes, in fact this is exactly the finding of a recent study conducted by IBM and MIT Sloan Management. Here is the bottom line:

Top performing companies are three times more likely to be leading users of analytics.

So the companies that are using analytics have a tendency to perform well in their segments. Michael S. Hopkins, editor-in-chief, MIT Sloan Management Review goes even further and suggests that these top performing companies are reaching to further their use of analytics:

"Interestingly, the top performers also turn out to be the organizations most focused on improving their use of analytics and data, despite the fact that they're already ahead of the adoption curve."

If you are not in this top-performing coterie, beware. These are the companies that also stand to widen that gap in their performance against that of their non-analytics-based competition.

When it comes to implementation of business analytics, Timo's post talks about sharing information and decision-making as widely as possible (garnering the 'wisdom of the crowd'). We are seeing this feature creep into the latest generation of business intelligence tools. For instance, IBM Cognos has added social networking to the latest version of the flagship product. Although, as Timo points out, there needs to be organizational as well as technological change for this to be effective.

The IBM/MIT study offers further advice on rolling out business analytics solutions, such as tackling the biggest obstacles first. For instance, in the online marketing space, you may want to concentrate on implementing analytics on your largest marketing channel, or on the part of your website that receives the most traffic.

You should also determine first what insights you are after, and then figure out which data you need to help you to get to the answers. Again, in the field of marketing (you may have guessed this is my comfort zone), questions could be 'What pages on the site normally lead to sales?' or 'What frequency of email nurturing works best?'. A good vendor should be able to help you frame the questions and get to the meaningful data - don't be afraid to ask: 'what should I be measuring'.  

Read the Timo Elliot post

Read the IBM/MIT study

More on IBM Cognos

In my previous life as a webmaster I was called on to develop monthly web performance reports for consumption by the whole marketing organization. At one time these had been documents that were mailed around, but we decided the best approach was to build a web interface with charts and diagrams that would be updated monthly.

We showed standard metrics. Stuff like this:

Each month I'd send out an email with a link to the latest report with my notes on site performance each month. For instance, I'd point out from looking at the graph on the left that although traffic had dropped this month, this is a seasonal variation. For the graph on the right, I'd say I wasn't sure why our search traffic had grown: this is something I'd investigate with the various individuals running search campaigns (meaning for 90% of the people on the email distribution, the answer would end up in an Inbox far, far away).  

How much smarter we could have been if we'd have had access to a system like Cognos 10 that marries business intelligence/analytics with social networking capabilities that allow you to add that layer of insight on top of the data.

For instance, here's a standard chart:

and here's the same chart with the addition of related Lotus Connections discussions:

Going back to my examples above, if I was showing yearly traffic figures, I can use this discussion area to record what I know about seasonal variations. Now if someone receiving the report didn't agree with my evaluation, they are free to comment on it. As for the discussion I'd need to have with my search marketing folks about why the search traffic has spiked, I can set this up from the same page:

...with the thread of the discussion unfolding below the graphs and charts to which it relates. Anyone wishing to follow up on the status of the question can go to that page and scan the thread to see the outcome.

I should point out that the Cognos folks have taken this a step further: integrating activities as well as discussions. The data is now more 'actionable'. Let's say you are looking at global sales data and you notice a slump in a certain geographic region. You can use the new functionality to setup an Activity to address this, with a number of associated tasks assigned to different sales people or teams. Over time you can evaluate their actions against the performance data all from within the same interface.

And while we're talking about the sales team, another new feature in Cognos 10 makes it easier to access reports while on the go, directly from your smart phone:

One feature I'd love to see in future releases of Cognos is the ability to tie conversations/activities to given points on a graph, as opposed to just having these attached to the page of a report. As an example, the popular SoundCloud music hosting service has gained a lot of traction by allowing music enthusiasts to comment on a particular point in a music track:

(each blue bar represents a separate comment)

Maybe something for a future release?

Delaney Turner has a post with more information on Cognos 10, including a link to an excellent interactive demo.

Also check out the Cognos product pages.

SPSS have put out a case study showing how the Central Iowa Power Cooperative (CIPCO) switched from using Excel spreadsheets to IBM SPSS Statistics to optimize those decisions an energy utility provider has to make: capital planning, utility rate setting, power purchases, emissions tracking and more.

Given that energy requirements: supply, demand, price can shift on an hourly basis, tracking these across the 3,000 power nodes CIPCO provides is no trivial matter. As CIPCO's Lisa Sell points out, "IBM SPSS Statistics gives us the power and flexibility to keep track of everything, with very little manual manipulation." The growing wind farm industry in Iowa adds even more uncertainty into the equation. Sell and her team use Statistics to analyze the dynamic pricing of wind-generated energy and its effect on the rest of the system.

In addition to forecasting and planning the IBM SPSS solution also helps CIPCO keep compliant with the annual power generation and cost reporting required by government agencies, as well as calculating the profitability of the various plants.

Read the full case study

Christopher Hosford over at BtoB Magazine ran an interesting piece on IBM's foray into the field of marketing automation focusing on the recent spate of acquisitions here at IBM. I thought it would be worth expounding on how each of these acquisitions fits into the notion of a holistic marketing automation solution - using an example that hopefully most of us can relate to: internet retail.

Coremetrics

Internet retailers use web analytics to explore which parts of their site are most effective, which channels are driving most visitors and what are the common paths taken by visitors who buy. Conversely, analytics can also highlight problem areas such as product lines that receive heavy traffic but little conversion to sale, expensive marketing channels that provide little revenue-generating traffic and navigational bottlenecks. You can take this further using a solution such as Intelligent Offer, which exposes the analytics to the visitor: much like the recommendation engine used by Amazon bookstore on their individual listing pages to say 'if you like this book, you may be interested in these books too'.

Unica

An internet retailer that exploits different marketing channels, eg. email, web, social networks, can use Unica's Interactive Marketing solution to track responses across the different channels and use this data on past behavior to tailor future messaging. It also allows you to uncover those prospects that have been most responsive and are more likely to cross over and become customers.

Netezza

Netezza can help the internet retailer wherever there are large sets of structured or unstructured business data. For instance you can use Netezza for bid price optimization of search marketing campaigns where you might have 100s or 1000s of keywords covering product inventory, coupled with multiple text ads and landing pages, leading to millions of permutations. Predictive analytics can help you determine what is the optimal paid search campaign structure.

Sterling Commerce

When it comes to order processing, Sterling Commerce can help internet retailers ensure consistency across different channels (eg. keep consistency across different web sites with different experiences). As one example, the system can help dealing with coupons and the correct application of discount codes across all channels.

I should point out that these are only individual examples. Each of these acquisitions have plenty of other offerings, many of which touch on different components of marketing automation.

I'd be remiss not to mention Cognos, SPSS and ILOG, all of whom offer business analytics offerings that can be customized in a marketing automation context.

IBM’s Business Analytics solutions are set to mature as these acquisitions are woven further into the fabric of each other and the expansive IBM quilt of offerings. Early indications are positive however, as IBM's Business Analytics revenue has grown 12% over the last year to a net income of $3.6 billion. This would suggest we're in for some interesting times ahead!

BtoB Magazine article on IBM's marketing automation solutions

As always, some thought-provoking research is coming out of the Altimeter group around the maturing (and increasingly frustrating) role of the social media strategist. At the crux of Jeremiah Owyang’s report is the notion that the growing challenges of the social media strategist role could push him/her into a reactive corner, just responding to the increasingly demanding needs of the business (being little more than a ‘social media helpdesk’). Less strategy, more blind execution.

Here at IBM there are a number of strategists dotted around the organization (although with a strong cluster around the marketing function), and I’m sure most would agree with Jeremiah’s research. Indeed, brand social media strategist Steve Lazarus was one of those interviewed. So, what is it exactly that keeps us so busy? (I say ‘us’ as I hold a tangential role currently). I’d broadly categorize the functions performed as follows, with the caveat that the functions can vary depending on the position in the organization and personal aptitudes:

Training/education

Due to limitations in resource and product knowledge, it’s unrealistic to expect social media strategists to engage in all conversations across all channels. Adopting the ‘teach a man to fish’ maxim, it can make sense for the strategists to engage product experts across the organization and teach them how to become proficient in social media communications. This could take the form of education on the use of tools, the sharing of best practice and what’s worked in the past, discussing how to react to potential scenarios, the list goes on. In fact this post on Bloomberg BusinessWeek does a good job of listing ways of engaging employees. As a trainer and educator, the strategist moves into the role of a facilitator rather than a practitioner.

Analytics – monitoring, ROI and energizing practitioners

There are various components to analytics, each with its own specificities.

Strategists can monitor the social space for conversations around the brand. If there are any conversations requiring immediate attention (eg. a crisis looming), they can pull together the experts/execs that can respond. Monitoring also helps define the social landscape and strategy that makes most sense.

Analytics can also be employed to prove the ROI of social media efforts. This could be looking at increased share of voice on a given topic measuring traffic delivered to a campaign web page from Facebook and Twitter, or calculating the value of the traffic delivered to a blog ranking prominently for target terms on Google (obviating the need for paid advertising).

A further role of the strategist can be to feed analytics back into the organization to help energize practitioners. As an example, showing bloggers how much traffic their posts are attracting can help generate posts more frequently!

Process optimization and workflow

Social media touches many parts of the organization. You may have customer feedback that could help product development and should be forwarded to product management. Maybe there are support issues/discussions happening on external forums which require the input of the support team. Organizational processes should be put in place to deal with these kinds of scenarios. For instance interlocks need to be built between functions like marketing and support which traditionally have existed at opposite ends of the organization.

In addition, workflow tools need to be put in place to track individual conversations and issues to ensure these are dealt with effectively. This could be as simple as a spreadsheet recording each issue together with the response (when deemed necessary), but as these issues grow in number and complexity, more powerful tools will be required.

Web marketing integration

As Jeremiah points out in another part of his analysis, 2011 will see an increase in the integration of social elements into websites[

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/11/07/analysis-2011-corporate-social-strategy-will-focus-on-corporate-website-integration/

]. In its simplest form this could be the addition of Facebook Like or Tweet This buttons on web pages. Whilst some web marketers may be savvy to this, in many cases social media strategists can offer valuable insights on what conversations should be highlighted and the format used to display social elements (eg. a sidebar showing the latest 5 entries from a blog may be more effective than a mere button).

As the mobile space continues to become more important, consistency and tie-ups across mobile, web and social presences will also need to be managed effectively. For instance, adding QR codes on event web pages could help attendees transfer information from the PC to their smartphone.

Corporate sponsorship

With employees engaging more and more in social media on behalf of their company, someone needs to make sure the management/executive team are cool with this and hopefully promote this interactivity. A strategist may propose and promote an incentive program for employees. They may also gently advise the executive on where their involvement would make most sense. As one social media strategist here at IBM explained it, a major part of his role involved keeping the corporate forces out of employee social interactions (unless of course there are policy violations requiring intervention).

Social media campaign marketer

A strategist can help bolster campaigns undertaken by the marketing team. This could take the form of creating a social media kit around around a campaign that is then emailed to experts and evangelists across the organization. Or maybe a YouTube strategy developed in conjunction with an agency would make sense. The role in this instance is one of energizing employees and major stakeholders to supplement the work of the marketing team.

___

These, to my mind, are the core functions of the social media strategist. In addition, a strategist will also have to juggle a number of managerial/administrative demands, as any manager in the organization has to perform: eg. collaborating with internal/external teams, reporting on performance, people management.

It’s worth pointing out that the role of the strategist can be significantly different to that of the social media evangelist. An evangelist tends to be much more hands-on: many in this role excel at using the different social media channels to get the message out. Whilst they may have considerable following on their Twitter account or blog, they may be less proficient at energizing others in the organization to get involved, or analyzing conversations and defining processes to deal with these.

As Jeremiah points out in his report, the role of the strategist is due to change in the near future. We may see something in the social space akin to what has happened to web marketing over the last ten years: a splintering of roles and responsibilities. Some may focus on developing processes and implementing tools to help the organization effectively deal with its social ecosystem. Others may extract value by focussing solely on integration between web and social.  Others could focus more exclusively on training.

On a positive note, this role is definitely not going away. There is a supply imbalance for the social media strategist skillset with more companies chasing the rare individuals who have the requisite skills and experience. Against this, the fact that social strategists are a rare commodity means that they are stretched in their roles and risk falling into becoming what Jeremiah calls the ‘Social Media Helpdesk’.

I can see two main ways the social media strategist can avoid this. One is to facilitate rather than execute. For example, spend time ‘persuading’ knowledgeable experts to blog, rather than blogging yourself. The other is to pick a specialty and follow this. eg. become a trainer and focus on this area. Teach the web marketing department how to integrate social aspects, rather than get buried in the weeds yourself.

Do you agree?

(The original post from Jeremiah)