In the early morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving through downtown Los Angeles, shocked at what I was hearing on the radio, and awestruck by the police and military helicopters circling and protectively watching over the City of Angels skyline.

Like many of you, as that day progressed, I watched the news intermittently, contemplating what these events might mean for the world, our country, friends and loved ones in New York City, and my new bride and me (We had just purchased our first house the night before).

What I didn’t know until just a few days ago , is that while I was somberly working at a client site, comfortably detached from the horror of the collapsed skyscrapers, hundreds of thousands had fled away from the burning twin towers and found themselves trapped on the South side of Manhattan. In the chaos that ensued, bridges, tunnels, roads, and other public transportation were shut down. There was no way off one of the world’s most densely populated islands.

It was in those circumstances that the largest maritime evacuation in all of history took place without any previous planning, infrastructure, or dedicated staff.

Yes, this was larger than the Dunkirk evacuation (commonly known as the Miracle of Dunkirk) in WWII where 339,000 Allied soldiers (British, French, and... Read the article

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Even though there is a growing amount of information on the web on enterprise social computing a concise guide for executives is needed to outline the benefits and challenges of deploying it to your business.

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Before you can pull insights from your data, you need data, but I'm hearing more concerns about data quality in social media analysis lately. Before, people asked about the traditional tradeoff in text queries: finding relevant content while excluding off-topic content. Lately, I'm hearing more about social data that's intentionally tainted. If you're looking for meaning in social media data, you may have to deal with adversaries.

Yes, and you've been playing without an opponent, which is, as you may have guessed, against the rules.
— "Anton Ego," Ratatouille

Ask a company with three initials as a name how many three-letter... Read the article

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

(Picture by Peter Farago & Inkela Klemetz-Farago)

This is something I’ve been thinking of for quite a while now.

Actually, since 2011 edition of the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. And this telling quote by Jamie Pappas : Social Business is more about soft skills than about tech skills. I’ve ben having this impression that ...  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

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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. ...

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I managed a few minutes out of my schedule last week to stop by the Yammer Tour event in San Francisco. I was in San Francisco doing a keynote for sugarCRM's user event and luckily the events overlapped. As I was listening to Yammer CEO David Sacks talk about some of the new Yammer features and interview some customers, I was struck by how much social tools like Yammer are changing businesses. Yes, I know that's almost all I've talked about for the last 4-5 years, changing businesses with social technologies and driving real cultural changes, but seeing that transformation really makes an impression. It's easy to get lost in all of the forward looking research and discussion on technology when in fact, what really matters is what businesses are actually doing with the tools to get some real business benefits. Does using social tools for business really make any difference? There are all sorts of ways to measure value when it comes to technology, we wrote a whitepaper on the ROI of social that has some ideas. Social business impacts business processes across the company and is having some interesting and very positive returns. Not all are as obvious as others though, and some of the less obvious are perhaps the most transformative.

First I should say that for me, social initiatives need to be clearly tied to increasing revenue, increasing margin, fostering innovation and/or increasing ... Read the article