Social business has massive potential to change how your organisation operates.  As with many social based work however, the failure rate remains unduly high.  IBM have released a new report that aims to change that by sharing some of the things that the best organisations do.

The document is concise at only 12 pages, but provides a nice introduction to social business.  It says how many organisations are using social tools and philosophies to improve their customer service, product development and HR functions, not to mention of course the more traditional sales and marketing.

Where the report comes into its own however is in explaining how these improvements have been made.  IBM introduce the concept of social business patterns.  These are akin to business process flows, and IBM discovered several key patterns in successful organisations.

• Finding expertise
• Gaining external customer insights
• Increasining knowledge sharing
• Improving recruiting and on-boarding
• Managing mergers and acquisitions
• Enabling and improving workplace sanity

Lets look at each in turn.

Finding expertise

Old school knowledge management has been a core component of its modern incarnation of social business.  With KM being a mature field, the report has a good back catalogue of issues that need to be overcome, but also some good strategies for overcoming them if you want to achieve the outcomes IBM believe are possible in this area.

• quickly locate the right people, or published content containing, the expertise needed to solve a problem
• connect the best possible resources to effectively respond to customer needs
• document and share reusable solutions to common issues
• create highly-engaged and productive employees

Gaining external customer insights

To many organisations persist in being ‘make and sell’ types, where little customer feedback is sought.  For them, social media is merely another tool by which to flog their wares.  Social business tools allow you not only to listen to what customers are openly saying about you online however, but also to invite them into your own communities to share their feelings.

• quickly learn customers’ opinions and preferences related to existing and potential products and services
• identify and connect with key customer influencers to aid marketing efforts

Increasing knowledge sharing

This pattern is very similar to pattern #1 in that both very much fall under the knowledge management umbrella.  Whilst IBM do state some benefits from this, such as fewer meetings and higher employee engagement, it would have been nice had they shared some more tangible successes from knowledge sharing, such as whether it helped produce more new products or better processes.

• more efficiently and effectively capture, share and access knowledge
• increase innovation through wider reach of ideas
• reduce excessive, unproductive time spent searching and exchanging information

Improving recruiting and on-boarding

Getting the best talent into your organisation is as much of a no brainer as ensuring that talent is then utilised effectively.  Sadly of course, a great many companies screw up their recruitment, and as with dating, the first weeks are crucial.  Research earlier this year revealed that organisations with low employee turnover scored around 4x as much profit as those with high turnover.

• collaboratively find and connect the right candidate to the right position
• streamline assessment and hiring processes
• better connect, engage and retain new hires
• contextually recommend expertise to increase new hires’ productivity

Managing mergers and acquisitions

This is another knowledge management pattern in that you’re both looking to improve the transfer of experiences learned from past mergers to current staff, whilst also helping to better communicate the shared values and cultures expected of the newly merged group.  With the track record of successful mergers being pretty poor, this is clearly an area that is very difficult to concquer.

• increase overall success rate of merger and acquisition activities
• raise effectiveness of vision setting and communication before, during and after merger or acquisition
• accelerate creation of “one company” community and culture

Enabling and improving workplace safety

An interesting final area the report explores is in improving health and safety.  It’s an area that isn’t often covered or trumpeted as a social business success.  Nevertheless, IBM believe that social tools can help spread both the explicit and tacit understanding of health and safety procedures and behaviours.

• speed communication of new or changed safety regulations, policies and procedures
• minimize or eliminate project execution delays arising from actual or potential safety issues
• improve innovation in safety procedures by increasing dialog between safety experts and workers

As mentioned at the start, it is only a short report, with content amounting to 10 pages at most.  As such the limitations are plain.  It won’t be something that provides all the answers to your social business questions, nor indeed does it cover all of the things that social business can achieve.  It is a very IBM-centric publication, in that it focuses very much on the things IBM can help you with.  There is no mention for instance of crowdfunding or strategy formulation and dissemination.  If you’re new to the field though it provides a good introduction to the kind of things social business can do, whilst also providing some potential metrics to measure success.

Last week I wrote about a novel project being run in Bogota, Columbia that is attempting to crowdsource the funding of a new skyscraper.  The Prodigy Network, who are running the scheme, offer crowdfunding opportunities for a whole host of retail projects around the world.  It’s the tip of an ever growing iceburg.

We’ve all heard of Kickstarter, but a growing number of sites are looking to crowdsource local community projects.  For instance, in Rotterdam a new pedestrian walkway is being funded by crowdsourcing, with people being asked to contribute €25 to help fund the project.  In return they get a message etched into the bridge.  Within a few months the project had reached its intended amount.

Spacehive is a similar site here in Britain.  They claim to be the very first crowdfunding site for civic projects and offer people the chance to invest in a range of projects around the country.  Recently funded projects have included a project to bring free wi-fi to Mansfield city centre, and to build a rock climbing facility in Minehead.

What makes it fascinating is that unlike the projects organised by Prodigy Network, investors in Spacehive projects don’t receive anything in return (other than a sense of goodwill obviously).  Other civic crowdfunding sites offer investors/donors small gestures of gratitude, be that some kind of mention ala the bridge in Rotterdam, or even something as seemingly trivial as a poster to say thank you.

Such sites are certainly growing in number however, with the likes of Neighbor.ly in America and UrbanKIT in Chile all offering people the chance to help fund projects that matter to them.

Thinkers such as Steven Johnson believe this kind of civic involvement is merely the beginning.  He points to the participatory budgeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre as an example of what can happen when you give people control over how their money is spent.  The system allows citizens direct input into how their tax money is spent.  The success of the system in Porto Alegre has prompted another 70 Brazilian cities to follow suit.

It’s a model that clearly chimes with the civic crowdfunding organisations.  They bemoan that the present mechanism for deciding on projects is often beholden to NIMBYs who stalk planning meetings with the intention of blocking projects they disapprove of.  Very few people stalk local government to get something do.  The crowdfunding groups see this as a chance to change that, and to get local people involved in crafting the local environment they want to live in.

Johnson was also a staunch champion of the Finnish organisation Brickstarter.  They’re hoping to release a book chronicalling their adventures in crowdfunding this month.  They intend to make it freely available as a PDF and it should make fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in this kind of mechanism for funding projects.

With Deloitte estimating that crowdfunding will generate around $3 billion for projects this year it’s certainly a growing area.  They also estimate that $500 million of that will be going towards civic projects where donors expect no financial return.  I’ve long believed that the Internet has the potential to change how society operates in a fundamental way.  It’s something Johnson refers to as peer progressivism.  Civic crowdfunding on a large scale could well be a fundamental part of that.  Exciting times indeed.

Last year an employee was sued for taking the Twitter followers he’d amassed with him when he left his company.  The case focused attention on just how much a Twitter follower was worth.  Suffice to say that since then, a good deal of effort has gone into highlighting just how many followers are fakes.  So it’s clear that not all followers are of equal value to you.

What about the ones that really engage with you on social media though?  How much are they worth?  That was the question asked by new research into the profitability of social media users.

It found that engaged social media customers spend significantly more (as in 5.6% more) than those customers that aren’t engaged.  Yet more evidence if any were needed as to the important role social media should play in any corporate effort.

The researchers studied a large wine retailer in the north-east of America.  The company first jumped into social media in 2009, and has since grown its presence there, posting a mixture of promotional material, local information and advice on wine selection.

The research team began analysing the companies customer database in early 2011 to determine who amongst them were regularly engaging with the company on social media, and combined this with both their demographic profile and spending habits.  All in all they analysed nearly 400 customers over a three year period.

To provide a good comparison between those that were engaged online, the researchers found customers of a similar demographic profile and with similar spending habits from the time before the social presence was launched, but who didn’t go on to become engaged online with the company.

Before the launch of the social media stuff, both groups of customers would visit the companies stores as frequently as each other, also spending a similar amount when in them.  That picture changed however once the company jumped into social media.  At that point, the engaged online customers began outstripping their offline brethren.  They began visiting stores more often and spending more money when in them.

The researchers also began to identify particular types of customers by their social habits.  For instance, those who posted regular content online (the fabled 1%), bought wine in larger volumes than anyone else.  They also tended to go for the more expensive products, and were more loyal to the company.  This goes against the impression that social is merely home to those looking for bargains or items on sale.

It underlines the importance of both knowing your customers, and tailoring your social communities to serve those segments.  Whilst some customers may hunt down your special offers, there will be others that are passionate about what you do and crave the premium end of your offering.  Both should have communities tailored to their specific needs and interests.

“It is vital that managers integrate their knowledge about customers from both offline transactions and online social media sources in order to better serve them,” the authors write.

Last week I shared research that can predict the movements of people within a disaster area by analysing their mobile phone usage in the months prior to the disaster.  Such uses for big data are becoming commonplace.  Google Flu Trends has largely been a success, albeit with a well publicised mishap during the latest American flu season.  Indeed such has been the success that they have taken the approach and applied it to Dengue.

With Twitter being so potent a source of updates on what we’re all up to, one would think it would be just as useful as our mobile phone behaviour or our search engine requests.  First though we have to understand how often people make reference to their location in their messages.  There are two ways for Twitter to identify the location of a tweet.  The first is the use of Places, where tweeters actually identify the location they’re in from within the tweet.  The second uses the GPS data from the mobile device they used to send the tweet.

Due to security concerns however, this latter option is disabled by default, with users having to manually allow it again.  Recent research has looked at the number of tweets that allow observers to identify the location from which it was sent, and indeed how many of these tweets were from the two forms of identifying source.

They analysed the Twitter decahose over a period of 39 days towards the end of 2012.  They found that 2.02% of all tweets included geographic metadata, with 1.8% having a Place indicator, 1.6% having Exact Location, and 1.4% having both (these sum to more than the total because tweets can have both).  Closer inspection found another 1.1% of tweeters who had manually entered their location.  So 3.04%, or roughly 46.5 million tweets contained some kind of identifying information, with over 600,000 unique places on Earth captured each day.

You can see below how these were distributed around the world.

It is of course worth pointing out that georeferenced tweets were made by just 8.2% of total Twitter users, with 1.1% making 66% of all location based tweets, so it is not a large proportion by any means.  Does that curtail any hopes of utilising this data for meaningful work?  That was a question unfortunately the researchers didn’t explore, instead choosing to focus purely on the number of georeferenced tweets and the geographic spread of retweets (location was found to have no bearing on our likelyhood of sharing something).  Hopefully the research will open the door for more digging around in this fascinating area.

The role of social media in civic engagement has been a hot topic ever since the Arab Spring brought the role it can play to the attention of the world.  Earlier this year the Pew Research Center produced a report into how social media impacts civic engagement.

It found that 40% of adults used social media as part of a political campaign during the 2012 presidential election.  Interestingly, online engagement was largely found to have been done by the well-educated and affluent amongst us.

I have doubts about the nature of this engagement however.  Whilst attending an event at Facebook earlier in the year, we heard from the Facebook employee responsible for their work with both presidential candidates, and it was telling how it wasn’t really engagement at all.  He spoke almost exclusively about the advertising power of Facebook.  In other words, it was a great platform for talking at voters rather than listening to and engaging with them.

Given the interesting projects being done around the world on participatory democracy it was all a bit disappointing.

Some new research took a deeper look into how social media influences our civil engagement and perhaps explains why Facebook was used just for preaching to the converted.  It explored how different personality types react to social media in a political context.  It found that there were distinct differences between how extraverts and introverts used social media politically.

Extraverted people, whilst open to new experiences, were found to use social media to reduce the heterogeneity of their social network.  In other words, they used social media to engage with people just like them, thus further entrenching their views.

Introverted people by contrast were found to do the opposite, utilising social media to increase the heterogenity of their social network and thus take in a more diverse range of opinions.

Report abstract

“Using original national survey data, we examine how social media use affects individuals’ discussion network heterogeneity and their level of civic engagement. We also investigate the moderating role of personality traits (i.e., extraversion and openness to experiences) in this association. Results support the notion that use of social media contributes to heterogeneity of discussion networks and activities in civic life. More importantly, personality traits such as extraversion and openness to experiences were found to moderate the influence of social media on discussion network heterogeneity and civic participation, indicating that the contributing role of social media in increasing network heterogeneity and civic engagement is greater for introverted and less open individuals.”

So given that Facebook tends to attract the more extraverted type, it’s perhaps not all that surprising that there aren’t too many floating voters lurking about the place. Of course, this doesn’t get away from the failure of many in political life to do real engagement rather than one way communicating, but that’s for another discussion.