Companies today are under increasing pressure to change the way they interact with customers and community management platforms like the one provided by Lithium Technologies can be an important part of that initiative. With customers insisting that companies interact "when, where and how" the customer chooses and not, as in the past, only where the company chooses, customer support is more important than ever. Because of this, many companies are opening up social channels to their customers. Now these Social CRM efforts are definitely business critical, but in my opinion there's an associated issue that some companies are overlooking, their own siloed organizations. As I often tell audiences, just opening up channels to the customers without making sure their own employees can actually collaborate with ... Read the article

IBM’s goal is to promote the vision of social business by embedding it into the digital activities and everyday thinking of employees. The challenge is to inspire already technically savvy and digitally motivated employees to become ‘digital citizens’, enthuse them about the value social media can add and motivate them to start exploring the online world.

With this objective in mind, IBM BeNeLux enlisted the aid of global marketing agency, Ketchum Pleon, to help them transition from not just doing social media, but to transform  their daily business through social technologies. A pool of best technical minds and leading innovators – who believe in building a smarter planet – decided to move IBM and its clients well beyond social media into a new era of collaboration they call Social ... Read the article

I don’t like reading things like this, I really don’t.  But today I came across a report released by Modern Survey which found that we have a lot of work to do around engaging our employees.  Modern Survey isn’t the first firm to report low engagement numbers, Gallup and Blessing White (along with others) have all found low engagement rates within our organizations.  The questions, approaches, methodology, and data that all of these firms get is different but the trend and overall findings remains the same.  I don’t think we realize how crucial employee engagement within our organizations really is.

Modern Survey measures engagement by asking employees five...  Read the article

Curated from: 12 Top Community Managers Share Their Tips for Better Engagement by Lauren Drell

---

Engagement is one of the most talked about metrics for ROI.

Mashable gathered tips from top community managers to help you boost activity on your social platforms —they’re grouped into various engagement-inducing “actions” below. The individuals we spoke with have built up engaged audiences for brands, such as Gap, JetBlue, Instagram and Jetsetter, so they know a thing or two about community building. ...

Read the article

My, how times have changed. Two years ago, people were scoffing at the term social learning. Three years ago, social learning was solely for the nerds like me, whereas four years ago it was a term used solely in academic circles. But during the past year and a half or so, social learning has become cotton candy at the fair. Everybody wants some.

In particular, there has been a fair amount of shuffling, repositioning, flanking and acquiring going on in the vendor space as it relates to our fluffy, sugary ...

Read the article

“Sometime reality is too complex. Fiction gives it form.” Jean Luc Godard

Sitting on a Greek island, I am reminded of how historically, stories have played a key role in transferring knowledge; the epic poems and ancient parables are evidence of this ageless capability. Before text was invented, stories were the main form of knowledge recording and sharing, as the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic (Havelock, 1976). Stories are still easier to remember than prose and any good speaker uses them to this advantage.

Research into great leaders suggests that a leader who truly enables change is one who creates a story; a vision that significantly affects... Read the article

A little while ago I wrote an article on how employee collaboration and customer collaboration initiatives solve different problems.  I kept hearing about how one was more valuable or had a greater impact on the organization than the other but the truth was that they indeed addressed different needs for the ...  Read the article

In a typical large organization everybody is a long way away from everybody else. As a result the individual perception of the world is narrow and confined to a small group of immediate acquaintances.

That did not matter in factory type of settings because physical tasks could be broken up. Bigger tasks could be divided by assigning people to different smaller, fairly independent parts of the whole. Hierarchies made sense as a way to modularize work. The worker did not need to communicate with many people. The downside was lack of flexibility. Reconfiguring a hierarchy always created a mess for a long time. And if you had a lot of interaction going on in a ...  Read the article

Facebook has over 850 million users worldwide. Out of that, a total of 194 million users are from Asia at the end of March 2012. Most of these users from the Southeast Asia region – 97 million or 54% of the total Facebook users in Asia. Some other observations on the latest Facebook in Asia statistics:

1. In early February 2012, Indiasurpassed Indonesia to become Facebook No. 1 Nation in Asia. Back in January 2011, India has16.9 million Facebook users. Now, the country has over 45.9 million Facebook users.
2. In addition to India, Japan has been growing impressively in the past 1 year or so. Japan started the year 2011 with 1.8 million Facebook users. Today, there are over 8 million users in Japan.
3. South Korea has been growing with double digits figure. The country is now ahead of Pakistan in the Facebook in Asia list. ...

Read the article

Around 30 years ago James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente (professors at the University of Rhode Island) were studying how smokers were giving up their addictions.  During their observations they developed a model called the “Stages of Change Model” or “Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change.”  I remember reading and hearing about this when I studied economics and psychology at UCSC and thought it actually applies quite well to enterprise collaboration.  This model has in fact been applied to all sorts of behavior changes, not just quitting smoking.

There are five stages: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance.  When describing the stages I will refer to ... Read the article