Big Data Predictions for 2012
Blog PostOver the last several years, the desire to understand the surging rivers of digital data forming all around us has led inexorably towards something more meaningful than simple analysis.
Emerging Tech Trends That Will Impact Social Business in 2012
Blog PostWhile social media remains one of the single largest demographic changes of our time, over the last year or so the field has been accompanied by an entire generation of new technology advancements that are starting to reshaping the industry. In 2012, we’ll see many of these tech changes — some merely evolutionary, others more
Social Business Predictions for 2012
Blog PostIt’s that time of year again. Enterprise social media has had an impressive ramp-up in 2011 as well as being well-poised for a banner year in 2012. However, along the way, social business has become a very broad topic indeed, covering a wide range of topics that ranges from social marketing and Social CRM to
The Disruptive Shifts: Calling Out Social Business Amongst Mobile, Cloud, Consumerization, and Big Data
Blog PostThere’s a sense of profound change in the air in the large companies I speak to these days. The rapidly changing consumer technology world, along with a huge helping hand from the Web, is fundamentally changing how business gets done. Most of us have either witnessed this or have read it the press. We see
Social Business Moves to Workflow, Manufacturing, and Money
Blog PostI receive e-mail frequently from PR people promoting the latest IT tools and new Web applications. These days a common thread I see is the addition of social features to software to make it easier for users to share information and collaborate with others. Personally, I believe it's largely beneficial to 1) find ways to take advantage of the social graphs that users have been building in recent years, and 2) add the techniques and channels of the social world to make traditional software more effective and usable in general.
Connecting Employees to Social Media: New Possibilities
Blog PostRecently I've been exploring the best ways for companies to establish their workers successfully in the use of social media, both internally and externally to their organizations. Driving adoption and effective uptake of social tools varies rather widely in how easy and quickly it is to for a given business to realize. For example, this process is the most challenging for regulated industries as I deconstructed at length on ZDNet this week. Yet it's the same issue for all firms: How do we quickly and effectively deal with issues surrounding risk, control, and trust so that we can get to the good part and reap the rewards of social media engagement?
A Social Business Index Round-Up
Blog PostBy now many of my colleagues and a decent part of the tech press has had a chance to kick the tires and post their points of view on the grand opening of our new Social Business Index (SBI). For those that haven’t heard much about it yet, I’ll go through their useful contributions below.
Converging on the Social Enterprise
Blog PostI was in San Francisco last week for Dreamforce, the yearly confab for Salesforce that has had a major focus on social business the last couple of years. There's little doubt that Marc Benioff clearly sees the very near future of business, and it's something he calls the social enterprise. While you can read my blow-by-blow of the opening presentation, which was one of the most impressive cases for becoming a social enterprise yet made in my opinion, the process of social business transformation is a complex one and isn't going to be made so explicitly by many firms.
Social Business Intelligence: Positioning a Strategic Lens on Opportunity
Blog PostRecently I've been tracking the growth of social analytics and the means of delivering well on it. Connecting it to the needs of the business is the next step beyond basics of collating, aggregating, and identifying patterns in what the world is doing that affects your organization. On ZDNet recently, I explored the rapidly growing trend of big data. Collectively, big data represents a set of highly innovative new ways that companies are developing to distill value from the sheer scale, richness, and complexity of today's vast networks of people and their data, of which the Internet is just the biggest example. It is social media in particular, however, where big data and business value intersect.
The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business: The Early Adoption Phase
Blog PostThe figures vary but in the last several years a major change has begun in organizations around the world. Sometimes the efforts are small and unsanctioned, sometimes they are big and bold, but increasingly businesses are employing social media strategically to engage deeply with both their workers and customers. We see this all the time