ibm

Ethan McCarty, Director, Enterprise Social Programs IBM

Last week I had the privilege of touring IBM’s Design Lab. My tour guides, Ethan McCarty and Laurie Friedman, showed me how IBM, at one time one of the biggest spenders in B2B advertising and marketing, has created an entirely new model for its marketing strategy.[read more]

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Social media at CES, Twitter inching toward profitability, IBM predicts steampunk to grow, and more.[read more]

While many new technology trends, like public social media platforms and mobile technology, have reached a certain maturity level, there is still significant upside potential with respect to both growth and opportunity. We are nowhere near saturation.[read more]

Source: IDC

What’s particularly interesting about this chart is that currently, the vast majority of the enterprise social software space is not being dominated by big players, instead it’s being dominated by the smaller and perhaps lesser known players. We haven’t broken the billion dollar mark yet so we’re not exactly talking about large sums of money here but around $340 million dollars is sitting with the smaller guys.[read more]

Paul Greenberg

In which Paul and I discuss social justice, the human condition, the future of social media, and also IBM, Intuit, Salesforce, Sandvik, Skype, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle. We look at what it means to be a company with social customers, and if you can find a bit of time to watch the whole interview, Paul also talks about which vendors understand how to serve the companies that serve social customers. As Paul notes, "The only difference with social now and social throughout human history is that now it scales." Enjoy.[read more]

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, The New York Public Library courtesy of The New York Times

The tasks that go into creating the best, readable content are exceedingly hard to "scale," yet the demand is increasing. Enter the Skyword platform, that brings together clients and their agency partners to design and develop a content marketing strategy and campaign.[read more]

Kat Mandelstein, Ant's Eye View

While we enjoyed brain-storming with her when she was at IBM, leading the charge for social business solutions, we're delighted to see Kat Mandelstein join the great team at Ant's Eye View, which helps major brands like American Express, Adobe, Microsoft, Starbucks, and a ton of others take their customer interactions to a new level....[read more]

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These ten practices will increase your video storytelling success and augment your digital marketing campaigns.[read more]

Peter Korsten at IBM Customer Center in New York yesterday briefing analysts on the newest CEO study.

IBM’s newest CEO study, which canvassed over 1700 CEOs from around the world, reports that CEOs see social media growing to 57% of their important customer interactions from 16% today. The survey, called "Leading Through Connections," is in its fifth year and while many of the responses were not substantally different from prior years, there were some significant surprises, according to the researchers, particularly the tilt toward social media.[read more]

James Steidl/shutterstock.com

We’re going to need scalable, reliable technologies, but we’re going to need to offer, yes, all you hippies out there I’m sorry to tell you this, greater control. Will B2B social be the same? Yes, I think so, and I think the rewards will be more efficient, accountable, and innovative (if not so disruptive) enterprises.[read more]

Boris Bulychev/shutterstock.com

Ikea did a funny video. B2B has to kick it up a notch. What Ikea did was make it look like an improv troop. They did these funny short vignettes around an office or a kitchen set-up. It was phenomenal. Now, you have Madison Avenue agencies doing this stuff.[read more]

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Thoughts on IBM's Lotusphere conference as well as IBM's social-collaboration tool IBM Connections. "...the absence of consumer-facing social media and networks at Lotusphere should be viewed less of an indictment on IBM Software and other collaboration providers and more on the consumer social networks’ refusal to develop products and services that improve collaboration and productivity in the workplace. "[read more]

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We doubled our staff, hiring some cracker-jack former journalists and energetic, customer-focused community marketing staff. We ended the year decidedly in the black, but making sure that we delivered value through our team and not through a lot of wasted expense.[read more]

"Ofer Guetta of IBM says that 'innovation is one of the primary benefits of a social business. It’s about bringing people into that conversation around concepts like new business process or how to improve a product or design.'"[read more]

"What we tend to forget however, is that social networks are merely platforms for people to connect with friends, family and peers. Businesses are not the primary beneficiary of connections, but they can certainly benefit once they realize that a Like or follow does not equate to an opt-in for marketing communiqué."[read more]

Social Media Today, with IBM, hosted a breakfast interchange with author and digital visionary Clay Shirky and IBM Global Business Services (GBS leader and author Saul Berman at the Yale Club.  Part of PivotCon and Social Week, the breakfast included an audience of CEO's, CMO's, investors and top bloggers to participate in a conversation about how to monetize in the era of "freemium."[read more]

"Simply put, no organization can become a social business unless its social strategy and tools are woven into that organization's underlying business processes and content, as Salesforce is attempting to do. Otherwise, social is simply a nice-to-have tool rather than a must-have-platform and transformational opportunity."[read more]

Sandy Carter is IBM’s Vice President of Social Business and Collaboration Solutions Sales and Evangelism. We talked about “social business” and how she regards the organizational changes that give meaning to the term.[read more]

"Is your business ready to embrace and live the Circular Economy? Do you think it’s worth while trying? Do we have a choice any longer? After all, what would we lose not trying it, right? Probably not much, but a lot to gain, for sure! Our very own survival as a species."[read more]

"Can Social Media Boost Sales," an exclusive, live webinar on Wednesday, July 20, presents a great opportunity for sales leaders to learn from IBM and Microsoft about reaching Web-savvy customers.[read more]