Just come across this excellent Youtube video by David Armano (Senior Vice President of Edelman Digital) presented at TEDxPennQuarter.  A more  appropriate title might be Reinventing Social Media.  Enjoy …

Just come across this great video on Social Media. It originates from Social Media World Forum 2010 – a SixDegs’s Channel on YouTube.  There are some 15 related videos.  Enjoy …

As part of this month exploration of Twitter I’ve come across a really smart intuitive on-line tool for reporting Social Media metrics: SWIX (Social Web Index).

SWIX allows you track several Social Media Campaigns.  It simply enables you to track how you are doing, and where to focus your attention.  It very easy to configure the tracking “pods” for RSS Subscribers, or RSS Hits of your Blogs; or track the number of Twitter Followers or Friends over This Week, This Month, Last 3 months, … all constantly updated.  There’s also a  whole batch of different tracking pods available.  So you can track Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, Flickr, … SWIX also provides a Social Media Dashboard to which you can choose which metrics you have reported – numbers and charts.  Well worth exploring!

There’s also the obligatory YouTube video – enjoy …

What the hell is Social Media – in 2 minutes. Enjoy …

(Found this YouTube video on James Russo site – well worth a visit if your interested in CRM, Social Media, …)

This has been a title for a post since well before January – I’ll now delete the draft!  Enjoy …

Charityhowto.com have further video training guides for nonprofits on YouTube (here)

Today (Tuesday 2 Feb.) an enterprise collaboration tool from SAP, that is based on Google Wave, will enter public beta.  With the informative beta name 12Sprints, the application will allow “users to collaborate on solving business problems in real time.”

Being dependent on Google Wave, SAP will be following Google’s classic approach with 12Sprints having a beta period that will “never end.”  In acknowledgement of this, David Meyer (senior vice president of emerging technologies, SAP) has stated that the “… whole idea is to learn from [its] usage.”

Why is this interesting?  Software giant SAP have plans to launch web-based sales management software (i.e. SaaS) in the middle of 2010 – they will be competing directly with their long term rival salesforce.com.

Of course, there’s the obligatory YouTube video’s (there are 13 in all) for 12Sprints:

And, you can become a friend on Facebook, and follow the beta on Twitter …

12Sprints is an example of an Enterprise 2.0 tool – a tool that enables decisions based on the response from multiply persons within the organisation.  But, essentially it employs the same tools used to make a decision as “normal” business group might.  However, SAP appear to be taking Enterprise 2.0 serious.  Below is a brief video of part of a round-table held by SAP titled “Enterprise 2.0 – A Look into the Crystal Ball” (this video is about Gravity a forerunner of 12Sprints).

Observe, 12Sprints is an excellent example of the use of Google’s Wave within the organisation, but it’s not a replacement for Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, etc (i.e. unlike salesforce.com’s Chatter – which is yet to become available in the wild.  In beta, or otherwise!).

Just stumbled upon this YouTube video – essential viewing for when your preparing your strategy … enjoy!

In a rather superficial Q&A in Computer Business Review (CBR), late last year, Parker Harris (executive VP of Technology, and co-founder of salesforce.com) identifies what salesforce.com will be concentrating on in 2010.

The majority of the article focuses on Cloud Computing gaining acceptance, salesforce.com competitors, and [Cloud] Security.  Then, in the final paragraph, Parker not surprisingly states that the Service Cloud, to which he is actually referring to salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2, “will be the next billion dollar business”, but, then there’s no surprise there.  Similarly, and maybe more significantly, he acknowledges that Collaboration (Wikipedia: “a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals”) is not fully understood by business.  Here Parker is referring to salesforce.com’s pending collaborative layer/tool Chatter.  Parker, or Janine Milne the author of the Q&A, then slip into verbal melt down and end the Q&A with “instead of being data-driven your data will come alive … the whole concept of viral communication will take off.”  Now, I’m familiar with the phrase Viral Marketing, and one of my favourites (below) is the Cadbury’s (should that now be Kraft?) Gorilla Advert of 2007, but viral communication?  With definition’s like “is the dissemination of information (either true facts or plain rumours) between individuals by self replication” (Behavioral Finance Group) – Oh, come on!

As a stark comparison in the same edition of CBR there’s another related Q&A.  Rob Howard, founder and CTO of enterprise collaboration firm Telligent (“a pioneer of social media platforms”) explains how social media is becoming the established way for businesses to communicate – Rob also has a blog Enterprise 2.0 and social computing.  Rob’s reply to “will 2010 be year of social media?“, is that he doesn’t think we are there yet, and that we have some 12 to 18 months for the market to mature.  More pertinently he warns against the misguided belief that Social media replaces the way business work – and that it’s all about “integration”.

As an act of due diligence I searched for the phrase “viral communication”.  For your amusement here are some of the references I found:  from the MIT Media Lab of 2005 a disturbing claim that “Viral Communications focuses on constructing agile, scalable, collaborative systems that permit uncontrolled growth, minimal power use, and maximum ability to intercommunicate, with viral architectures moving the intelligence from the trunk to the leaves.” [Aargh!] And, in Changeworksblog, written by Sue Tupling, you’ll find several posts listed against the keyword/s “viral communication” – but only one post, from 2008, includes the phrase.  And, finally in an Abstract of the IIW Institute of Information Management, “The paradigm of viral communication” (published in 2002!), which apparently identifies “… viral messages as a new paradigm of communication …”  So, now you know.

Dell launched Storm Sessions in December 2009.

Background: Dell’s IdeaStorm was launched in early 2007 “as a way to talk directly to our customers“, and “to have on-line brainstorm sessions to allow you the customer to share ideas and collaborate with one another and Dell.”

The model is a simple one: users of the Direct2Dell site post suggestions and requests.  As these posts are promoted, by other users of the site, their score is increased.  Dell then uses this ranking to identify which ideas are the most important.  It has proven to be a very successful model with some “2,000 ideas submitted within the first few weeks,“  and, over the three intervening years of use, Dell claim to have “implemented almost 400 ideas.”

IdeaStorm is therefore an extremely successful example of crowdsourcing (and what a horrendous term that is!) – which Wikipedia (another model of crowdsourcing!) insightfully defines as “the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community.”

So why has Dell changed this successful formula?  What does Storm Sessions bringing to the equation?

Vida Killian‘s (VidaK: Twitter Bio “Idea girl at Dell“) in her Direct2Dell blog post “Storm Sessions Launch on IdeaStorm” suggests that Storm Sessions is the “next level“.  Essentially, Dell will now be choosing the topics!  Driven by Dell’s current business needs Dell will post “targeted, relevant, and time bound ideas” and seek the users comments.  Dell even offer to provide, when the “time bound” is up, feedback on “how and when the idea will be put into action.”

Now this sounds like something worth monitoring …

IdeaStorm and Storm Sessions are powered by salesforce.com

See salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange.  On the IdeaExchange site salesforce.com users can “suggest new products, promote favorite enhancements, interact with product managers and customers.”  Similarly, all editions of salesforce.com CRM come with an in-house “on-line suggestion box” called Ideas – where “a community of users [can] post, vote for, and comment on ideas.“

Working on Setting Your Social Media Strategy?  Then this video, from salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2009 (the “Global Gathering” of nearly 16,000 people in San Francisco – http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/), is a must

The presenters are Jamie Grenney (Sr. Director of Social Media at salesforce.com), and Vida Killian (Social Media and Community Technology Manager at Dell – with some 10 years experience of Social Media at Dell).  Dell are a salesforce.com user

In the video Jamie presents a slide showing some quite astronomic growth in Social Media usage.  This includes:

• Facebook: 124 million “actual users” with 202% growth rate year on year
• Twitter: 26 million “actual users” with 660% growth rate year on year

(source: complete.com 2009, growth rate Oct. 2008- Oct. 2009)
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