Life Hacks: Engaging with Millennials

Last night I lay awake watching lightning illuminate the room and counting up to the booms of thunder, wondering if this was going to be another night of heavy flooding and if I was going to be able to drive back home in the morning. As you may have heard, Texas has been experiencing some pretty heavy storms over the last couple of weeks.

 

Giving into the idea that this would be another sleepless night, I started to think about the floods and how people have been reacting on my Facebook news feed, which is overwhelmed with short video clips of “raging rivers” and people saying “oh my ___ “ while panning over streets that now resemble canals. There are so many tools and apps that make sharing and engaging as simple as a thumb print and a click, and many of my friends have grown up using and improving upon these, making it second nature. All of this sharing and engaging, however, has led to a lot of generalizations. That in turn got me thinking about how the media is flooded with assumptions about my generation – millennials.

 

Back at #IBMAmplify, I attended a panel on millennials – marketing to, managing … everything related. Expert millennials provided insight on differences between the generations, as well as the overwhelming similarities. Realizing how technology, especially social, has influenced behaviors and changed the way we engage, as well as how millennials are stampeding into the workplace, I decided to focus the next edition of the IBM Life Hacks on “Engaging with Millennials,” incorporating advice that may challenge conventional wisdom. After all, you know what they say about ASSumptions.

 

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Delicious Customer Experience One Slice at a Time

What does the man famously known around Finland as “The Pizza Guy” have to do with social business? A whole lot actually!

During IBM’s Amplify conference I found myself in a session listening to Tommi Tervanen, CEO of Finland’s Kotipizza chain of restaurants, as he explained his company’s approach towards creating irresistible customer experiences. It both inspired me and made me quite hungry.

Kotipizza’s commitment to sustainability, great service, and a seamless digital experience were more than impressive to learn about. What blew me out of the water, however, was the company’s dedication to being a social business.

Not only does Kotipizza have a strong presence on social platforms, but learning that the CEO Tervanen personally ran his company’s Twitter account for several years made me want to jump out of my seat and hug him! Talk about a leader who truly believes and understands the power of social business!

Tervanen and his team create a more personalized customer experience by responding to any and all tweets that mention Kotipizza. They let customers know that the company cares about what they have to say and ensure that all customer feedback is channeled to the right people at the company.

Tervanen and his team also mine social conversations for food trends. For example, Terevan mentioned that avocados were being added to the Kotipizza topping menu next month after social listening determined that avocados were becoming popular with Kotipizza’s customers.

Tommi Teravan is known as “The Pizza Guy” in Finland for a reason – he rules pizza conversations in the social universe in order to provide the best possible customer experience to fans of Kotipizza. To a Social Business marketer, that’s a slice of heaven!

 

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IBM Digital Experience 2015: Make Your Digital Presence Stand Out

Because there are so many new ways for customers to engage with businesses, and so many businesses to engage with, it is essential to make your digital presence stand out from the crowd. Targeted content, consistent multi-channel experiences, and interactive user interfaces are no longer exceptional―they’re expected. And while it’s critical to provide an engaging digital experience in order to maintain relationships and reach new clients, delivering dynamic content across multiple channels can seem like a daunting task, especially to non-technical employees.

Don’t be discouraged! Digital Experience solutions like IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager enable users―even those without technical backgrounds―to create and manage content, as well as build customized and highly-interactive user interfaces for enterprise applications on any device.

IBM Digital Experience 2015, June 1-4 in Atlanta, GA, offers a unique opportunity for you to explore the latest Digital Experience solutions, gain an understanding of the tangible business benefits, and find the best ways to optimize solutions that you may already use. With over 120 unique sessions across six tracks, and presenters ranging from IBM experts, IBM Business Partners, and successful Digital Experience clients, businesses from every industry and employees at every level will find applicable insights about the latest strategies and innovations. The sessions are supplemented by a broad range of educational forums, hands-on labs, demonstrations and technical certifications, all designed to build your skills and put you in touch with experts that will positively influence the success of your projects. Whether you’re looking for practical experience or guidance on strategy and methodology, IBM Digital Experience 2015 will give you the power to transform the way you engage with your clients and employees to drive loyalty and growth.

One of the featured products you’ll be able to explore at the conference is IBM Web Content Manager. With this web experience management software, you can create and manage content without taking control away from IT professionals. The software’s personalization support, site builder, rich text editing tools and content templates make delivering targeted and dynamic content in multiple languages fast and easy.

IBM Digital Experience solutions like IBM Web Content Manager can help you make an impact with each business interaction, which can lead to enhanced customer satisfaction, competitive differentiation and profitable growth. Register now for IBM Digital Experience 2015 and gain the knowledge, strategy, and hands-on experience you need to maximize the business value of your digital experience platform deployments.

 

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The Mentor Resurgence

As I reviewed my social activity from my past week spent in San Diego at the IBM Amplify conference I noticed that it wasn’t the Twitter videos of me and my colleagues rocking out to Aloe Blacc’s performance that drove the most engagement with my followers. It wasn’t even the quotes from Deepak Advani’s incredibly exciting keynote presentation or the photos I took of the delicious Chef Watson-prepared drinks. Instead, it was a tweet I sent out with a quote about mentorship from one of my favorite social influencers, Daniel Newman, that drove the most RTs, favorites and responses.

The quote was as follows: “Mentorship isn’t a generational thing, it’s an everybody thing.” Why did something so simple blow my other tweets out of the water? I would like to think that the message itself answers that question: mentorship is something EVERYONE can agree on.

Daniel made this statement during the millennial panel he participated in during the “Reinvention in the Age of the Millennial” session. Fellow millennials on the panel agreed along with all of the Gen Xers, millennials and Boomers in the audience. But this wasn’t the only time the word “mentorship” was brought up during my time at Amplify.

Alex Banayan, one of the world’s youngest venture capitalists, spoke about mentorship and its correlation to success numerous times during his talk at the Opening General Session. Mara Winans focused on the power of mentorship during the Women’s Networking Panel and Lunch. I had a lively discussion during a break between sessions with two of my colleagues about what characteristics make for an ideal mentor.

For a term that’s existed for as long as we know, it sure feels like it’s having a resurgence.

I personally have many mentors in my life – some who help guide my professional development and some whom I speak to purely about personal matters. When I think back to how I met each of my mentors, all but one of them were people I met via social.

Ted Rubin, another incredible social influencer, is a mentor of mine whom I look to for career advice. I met Ted by tweeting to him four years ago to ask if he’d be open to mentoring a millennial marketer. From that one tweet came four years of unparalleled advice and business knowledge.

Brian Williams (no not THAT Brian Williams), an IBMer I met via IBM Connections, has guided me through the ins and outs of the IBM universe. I met him in a Connections community the week I started at the company and he volunteered to mentor me since he knew IBM like the back of his hand. I’m not sure how I would’ve survived my first six months at the company without him.

No wonder so many diverse followers of mine were attracted to Daniel’s quote! Social has truly brought mentorship to the next level and the relationships formed from a simple tweet or direct message often have a lasting effect on all generations.

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5 Ways to Get Closer to Your Remote Team

What comes to mind when you think of Teleworking? Slack? Cloud deliverables? Mobile mail? Video meetings? A New Way to Work?

What about flexibility? Cost effectiveness? Work-life balance? While productivity-related technology is growing at a rapid pace and enabling companies to get work done in creative ways, companies like IBM are also pioneering the concept of teleworking to promote health and well-being for its employees. With less time spent commuting, 40 percent of IBM employees currently work from a remote environment, with the number expected to increase dramatically in the next five years.[1]

Because the nature of teleworking is heavily virtual, there can also be a downside: For those managing teams, the absence of direct communication and interpersonal contact can be a tough barrier. It’s hard to build empathy and gauge morale in an environment that is focused mostly on results and tangible output behind screens. As a manager, you’re not running into employees in break rooms or actively seeing what people are working on in real time. You don’t know how the rest of your team is interacting when they are on their own time. It’s difficult to manage conflict or intervene when there is less transparency.

While this can lead to management mistrust, worker isolation and concerns about career impact, there are many proactive steps managers can take in the short term to ensure that a teleworking strategy considers both the bottom line of the company and social relationships of all involved.

Having worked with several managers on remote projects, I have been able to see how personal investment, understanding and appreciation can be truly transformational. Here are five things managers can start doing immediately to improve teleworking team dynamics:

 

• Build a culture of appreciation and recognition. Write down your company values and make a note when you see another employee embracing those values. Note this with them. IBM uses the BlueThanx platform, a virtual sharing system for appreciation that takes values into consideration. According to Gallup, 65 percent of people receive no appreciation in the workplace.[2] One small shift in your practices could mean a large shift for your employees.

• Encourage sharing of personal stories, goals, and accomplishments between team members. Take a minute or two to do this when starting meetings or calls. Small talk is a byproduct of a physical work environment but easily gets overlooked in the virtual world. Ensure that you care about their goals beyond their work at IBM and recognize the humanity they have beyond being a corporate employee.

• Listen to your colleagues. Build a process to gather feedback from the team. Allow them to vent once in a while. Encourage them to explain their frustrations. See which programs they like best for virtual work. Crowd-source new ideas for organizing work. People will appreciate having input and will be more motivated to contribute more input in the future.

• When you see something go wrong, stay positive. Start emails with phrases like “Thanks so much,” “You’ve put in a lot of effort” or “I see where you stand” instead of resorting to condemning or complaining. Taking an extra second to filter in positivity can gradually help you win over more distant colleagues in a virtual environment, especially over conflict-inducing situations.

• Connect with others over social media channels. You can connect through various tools like Twitter and LinkedIn (the accounts they keep public) to better understand their interests, goals, background, and personality. It gives you more understanding of their point of view on certain issues and also provides you more depth into how they function. It also gives you a filter to talk about more fun things such as sports, music, food, and more.

 

It doesn’t have to be complex; simply using human tactics, showing personal investment and establishing appreciation can go a long way. Have any new ideas that have brought your team together over a remote working unit? Feel free to share! 

 

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[1] http://ift.tt/1c2E1Cj

[2] http://ift.tt/1Pvcufo

 

 

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For Moosejaw, Social + Email Is a Laughing Matter

There are about 2 billion people active social network users around the world today¹. The largest network, Facebook, alone has 1.44 billion monthly active users². These are staggering numbers. Yet, they still pale in comparison to email. There are an estimated 4.35 billion business and consumer email users today, and that number is expected to reach 5.24 billion by 2018³. Marketers and advertisers contemplating where to spend their digital budget shouldn’t take an either-or approach to social and email, though—they need to take an and-both approach.

This is the lesson shared by Moosejaw Mountaineering’ Beckley Stover and IBM Silverpop’s Loren McDonald during their Amplify 2015 session in San Diego last week, and one Moosejaw lives by with their unique brand of off-beat marketing. As McDonald put it, “Social’s power is really driving that engagement, driving that conversation about your brand. … Email’s greatest power is getting people to do things, driving people to convert, to take action.” For Moosejaw, that means making email and social work together in a synergistic relationship that too many companies are neglecting. The outdoor apparel and gear retailer knows that social and email aren’t competing channels, but two parts of a framework that includes sharing, engagement and growth.

During the session, Moosejaw’s Stover gave examples of the humor her company delivers via email and social to set itself apart from the competition. With one campaign featuring a Moosejaw truck driver posing naked (with a discreetly placed black censor bar) by his truck, the company saw its Facebook page engagement more than double for the entire week following the posts. Another campaign asked fans to count how many times the word “gumball” appeared in a crossword puzzle for a chance to win 1000 gumballs. Moosejaw promoted the contest to its email subscribers but announced the winner on its Facebook page, giving those email subscribers a “soft nudge,” as Stover said, to like the company on Faceboook. The campaign had absolutely nothing to do with outdoor gear, but it’s the type of engaging Moosejaw content that fans have come to expect and love, and one that makes expert use of multiple channels.

By learning from and planning for both social and email, Stover and McDonald said, and with some savvy cross-promoting, retailers can reap benefits greater than even the sum of utilizing the two channels separately. Here are ten tips McDonald shared to help companies realize their own multi-channel success:

10 Tips for Combining Social & Email to Drive Interaction

1. Add an email opt-in form on your company’s Facebook page.
2. Use social to promote email opt-ins.
3. Use email to promote social campaigns.
4. Promote your company’s social following via a welcome email.
5. Promote your company’s social following via a regular email.
6. Use popular Pinterest pins.
7. Promote videos and blogs via newsletters, etc.
8. Create fun and crazy emails that get talked about!
9. Use Facebook custom audiences for ad re-targeting.
10. Offer social options on unsubscribe/preference pages.

You can view the slides from this session on Slideshare:

 

1. Simon Kemp, “Digital, Social & Mobile Worldwide in 2015,” We Are Social, January 2015
2. Statista, “Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 1st quarter 2015 (in millions),” http://ift.tt/1uS13AG
3. The Radicati Group, Inc., “Email Statistics Report, 2014-2018,” April 2014

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Living in the Age of Digital Transformation

Exciting times lay ahead as system of records and engagement are digitally transformed!

Organizations in all industries are undertaking digital transformation as their mandate in order to sustain and excel in the future. Digital transformation is the re-alignment or new investment in both technology and business models to improve the effectiveness of digital engagement of consumers, employees and citizens at every touch point.

Digital transformation is not just a strategy that’s nice to have—it is necessary in order to reach tech-savvy users of current and future generations, who will grow and mature over the years as they experience hands-on engagement with digital, mobile, cloud and social platforms.

The following scenarios illustrate how people of all ages are experiencing rapid digital transformation across a wide array of everyday experiences, and provide some insight into how industries are adapting in order to serve their customers better.

Public utilities

The way cities provide their residents with electricity, water and sewage services has changed over time. It once took a lot of time-consuming in-person legwork to sign up for these services, and paying for them was often a hassle too. Now many of these transactions can be accomplished with just a few mouse clicks online. Organizations that dispense and monitor these services will need to continue down this path of digital transformation to improve the user experience by engaging in process automation and by implementing integrated technology and a collaborative exchange of transactions. Improving the System of Records is a definitive first step toward implementing a comprehensive System of Engagement.

Sports and games

Children and adults can learn new sports, play online video games, and following sports teams and events through a variety of digital platforms, including interactive content across desktop, handheld and exclusive gaming devices. Those dynamics provide a challenge and a huge opportunity for organizations today to capture the mindshare of users of all ages who understand concepts like user experience, personalization and responsive design.

Education

From blackboards to smart boards, educational institutions are seeking new ways to reach more people by improving and extending the delivery of education beyond brick-and-mortar boundaries. The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), open schooling, online tutoring and online corporate trainings are everyday examples of this. They are essentially web-enabled social education models that operate in secure, scalable cloud-based platforms that offer advanced analytical capabilities and provide enhanced participation, engagement, assessment and certification.

Banking

The financial services industry has been rethinking whether to maintain branch banking and how best to provide personalized, value-added services. Thanks to advanced technologies that can provide 360-degree views of customers, forward-thinking payment integration and collaborative commerce, the adoption of online banking and kiosk-based services is skyrocketing. Financial institutions can now provide customers with proactive SMS alerts and personalized financial recommendations on their phones or computers faster and more efficiently than they can at brick-and-mortar locations. Banks now understand that user intimacy is a key point for continued growth and expansion, and they have begun to create strategic social platforms for marketing and customer service that provide user-friendly interfaces and are available 24/7.

Healthcare

The healthcare industry has been witness to some of the most massive digital transformation so far this century. Considerable innovation in the field means that comprehensive patient histories and medical records are available instantly at any time, consultative patient diagnosis can take place remotely, medical transcription is easier and quicker to accomplish, and equipment and lab data can be synchronized for improved diagnoses. These scenarios can help to make healthcare affordable and available to everyone.

In each of these industries, new solutions that deliver unique digital experiences act as compelling user interfaces on the front end and dynamic content management systems on the back end of the digital transformation wave.

 

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