Accidentally on Purpose Blog

While SAPPHIRE 08 Orlando is begining next week I wanted to let you know that I will be presenting at the Advanced Learning Institute’s “Social Media Summit: How To Use Blogging, Podcasting & the Latest Web 2.0 Technologies To Engage Your Employees, Reach Your Customers & Build Your Brand,” June 9-12, 2008 in Chicago.

The conference will focus on how to use social media, and leverage the latest interactive tools and techniques to advance your goals.  The organizers were nice enough to offer a conference discount so, if your reading this blog and want to attend, you can save $200 by mentioning the code “SPK” when registering.

My session topic will be: “How To Harness The Power Of Social Media Both Internally And Externally.  I’ll be discussing real world uses of social media inside SAP from; product development, to market intelligence, to sales, to communications (my favorite), to marketing, and even communities.

For more information or to register click here.  Hope to see you in Chicago!

UPDATE:  Due to an unexpected illness — I won’t be presenting or attending.  Sorry!  I won’t be traveling for the next 8 or so weeks.

Jerry Bowles  posted a great interview with IBM’s Luis Suarez.  From his most interesting perch on the Canary Islands, he is perhaps one of the best examples of the social media evangelist trend so many big companies are employing with respect to challenging the status quo.

“I had been playing a very interesting role of evangelist all along, creating lots and lots of demos and tutorials on how to make use of social media in a business environment, including proving its business value and what the corporation gets, as well as what the employees get from all of it,” he says.

Social Media champions inside the enterprise are important agents for change.  The savviest practitioners understand this and take great care to build social sense into their programs.  For example: 

1. Ensuring that people with social skills are chosen – or at least allowed to emerge – to lead the projects
2. Appealing to both the group and individual needs of the participants
3. Where it makes sense, building communities around particular services as a way to scale the population of users. 

Forrester’s Charlene Li touched on this subject last week with her presentation at SxSW.  You can view her slides via slideshare here.  

This past Saturday David Churbuck posted about a new blog authored by Reid Walker, VP of Global Communications at Lenovo.  Walker’s blog is focused on the topic of Worldsourcing.  Reid deserves an “attaboy”  for devoting an entire blog to an increasingly important topic.

“What is Worldsourcing?  Walker defines it as:

Increasingly, we live in a world with just one time zone and business must source materials, innovation, talent, logistics, infrastructure, and production wherever they are best available. And they must sell wherever profitable markets exist, anywhere in the world. In a nutshell, that’s worldsourcing — a business strategy that taps global diversity and resources and distributes management, operations, processes, and production to create more efficiencies wherever they will function best to deliver the best value to customers. Worldsourcing is not about cutting costs, it’s really about growing your company’s value by leveraging the right expertise in the right places to identify and serve markets in both developed and emerging markets.

This got me thinking about the SAP Global Survey and how it was predicated on a similar idea — that being — a global company must understand the global marketplace and all of its diversity to be capable of actively participating in that global marketplace.   The “Survey” is in effect, the Worldsourcing of how social media impacts business and culture around the globe.   With that understanding, we can then leverage our resources in the right ways, in the right places and with the right people to deliver value to all of the markets we serve.

Twitter is one of those things that I CAN see the value in it but, candidly, I’m still having a bit of difficulty extracting that value. You see I’m new to Twitter and while I don’t “tweet” a lot at the moment, I am lurking and learning with the hope and expectation that at some point I’ll be as productive as others — like James Governor for instance.   Last week I was explaining my problem to Susan Getgood and she told me that my problem was normal and that I shouldn’t be discouraged.   You see, Susan believes that the value of Twitter starts to really become apparent once you approach the 120/150 range of following/followers.

Laura Fitton wrote a great post on twitter where she too reaffirmed Susan’s point:

How does Twitter shift from idiotic to amazing? It takes a village - a critical mass of interesting people - to read and write to. When my brain started to connect with the brains (and hearts) of others, it got really, REALLY cool for me. You may be looking for like minds, or you may want to be totally shaken up by new ideas. Both work. One day I suddenly realized this was, for me, tribe-finding. For arguably the first time in my life I didn’t feel as weird and different.

Everyone connects to a different array of tweets and tweeters, so there aren’t discrete villages per se. But, the degrees of separation and connection create layers around each individual that hint at a very sketchy (and Twitter-specific) “social map.” (Often highly removed from who you actually know).

I know I’m not alone in this — I’ve heard countless times “I tried it but I just didn’t get it” or conversely “its the single greatest social network.”  I You can follow me on twitter here, perhaps someday soon Twitter will be my village too.

I’m really very interested in your thoughts:  What makes Twitter so valuable for you?

PCWorld has an article about Jeff Mann’s take on the business value of social software.  Mann, a Gartner analyst, is not just a proponent of social software.  He’s elevating the category above others.

Shrinking returns from business automation and the impact of Web 2.0 are conspiring to revolutionize the workplace and change the way we do business forever, according to Jeff Mann, research vice-president at Gartner.

Mann said that social interaction is the way most value is delivered in the modern work environment and predicted that by 2012, the primary role of business networks will be to support social interactions, not routine business transactions.

It’s refreshing to see social software getting this kind of side-by-side comparison with other business technology.  But my guess is that social software will be embedded in the fabric of everything we do, rather than dueling for a better position in the “software stack.”  It’s about the socialization of the enterprise, which will always rely on the automation of processes but also always depend on the autonomy of its people.

Shel Holtz submitted a great piece on an emerging trend — the increasing number of businesses that are blocking employee access to 2.0 services.

According to surveys from Barracuda Networks, two-thirds of companies plan to restrict access to the Net over the next year, an increase of nearly 23% over this year. About half of the company’s customers already block access to social networking sites (25% block just MySpace, 6.3% block just Facebook, and 19.3% block both).

At the same time, notes Shel, many businesses are investing in social media platforms for collaboration “inside the firewall.”

What should we make of this “split-personality” disorder?  Says Shel:  “At some point, companies are going to have to come to terms with the fact that networks cross organizational boundaries and that open access?governed by clearly-communicated policies?will produce benefits that far outweigh the costs and risks.”  I agree. But there’s something else here.  While the business benefits of many internally facing tools are fairly well known — or better known — the benefits of all things 2.0 are not.  And in the meantime, the onus is on vendors that provide the externally-facing stuff. 

It’s a tough sell, when many of these services are not designed for work.  But it doesn’t mean they don’t have value.  In my opinion, those organizations that do block access do so at their own peril.  If you move toward using these tools now, you will become proficient at using them by the time most competing companies begin working with them.  You would be surprised how well this will teach people not only the ins-and-outs of the tools but more importantly, the values of listening and participation!