SOCIAL BUSINESS SPECIAL....... IBM: These Are The Top 7 Social Trends That Will Emerge In 2014

IBM: These Are The Top 7 Social Trends That Will Emerge In 2014

Social Business has few advocates of change more vocal than one of its leading protagonists, Michael Krigsman of ZDNet. “With few exceptions, every company will face new challenges, competitors, and opportunities, as every company will face new challenges, competitors, and opportunities, as our society grows more connected,” he said in a recent article, and called on executives to, “step up your own skills and lead the vague.charge!” Indeed, business is changing rapidly, but some argue that ‘social business’ is too broad or too

. So given Krigsman’s call to action and the need for more clarity, I asked IBM’s Scott Hebner, VP of Social Business to think about the trends in social business that he’s seeing and to provide his predictions as to what we can expect to see in 2014

1. Social business is not just about collaboration, it’s about unlocking the engines of collective knowledge, differentiated expertise and rapid learning
Social is no longer just about collaboration. Social today is enabling businesses to break down organizational and hierarchal silos and barriers. It’s providing employees an opportunity to share knowledge and locate expertise. In 2014, we’ll see social transform into an organization’s enablement and learning platform, social learning, that is able to offer the ability to share knowledge and expertise through real-time videos and interactive social capabilities.

Social’s new role will be helping to build a smarter enterprise. For example, doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital are already moving in this direction with social; doctor’s across the globe are sharing peer-reviewed training videos and on-demand curricula to demonstrate the latest life-saving techniques in child care, building an ecosystem of well-trained healthcare professionals.

2. Social Businesses will begin to tap behavioral data to help drive decision making
In the past, business has relied on instrumented data — machine generated data — to help drive decision making. With the emergence of social and all the activity taking place over social networks, both internal and external, we now have access to behavioral data that is allowing organizations to analyze sentiment, listen and learn from customer experiences and behaviors and tap into the social pulse of their employees and customers.

With this information we can understand how, why, who, and what of our employees and consumers. This is a unique and groundbreaking capability, tapping into social behavioral analytics to build resilient and secure social business fabrics that collectively deliver value for both consumers and employees alike. In 2014, social behavioral data will be king.

3. The rise of the individual & “marketing as a service”
For most organizations social networking has been a marketing machine, providing the ability to build armies of advocates for your brand. As we enter into the next phase of social, it will be less about how many likes you can get, and more focused on the quality of those likes and who is doing the liking. Social, driven by the new behavioral data, will allow organizations to capitalize on this trend and individualize consumers.

Looking at customers as individuals instead of segments, marketers will now be able to deliver personalized experiences customized to individual or community needs. Social will transform marketing from a function to a service and consumers will reap the benefits.

4. Social takes on talent management
Similar to how marketers will personalize consumers’ experiences, human resource departments will also begin to capitalize on the power of social by integrating it into their Human Capital Management systems in order to deepen loyalty and engagement with employees. In a world where employees move from job to job at a rapid pace, when it comes to human capital, loyalty trumps everything. Organizations are searching for a means to not only recruit the right candidates, but more importantly retain and nuture that talent to become passionate, engaged and loyal.

In 2014, we’ll begin to see organizations tapping social and behavioral data to better understand what is important to employees, what motivates them, why they stay with an organization and much more. Say good-bye to the traditional HR survey and embrace a new set of social behavioral assets to build your elite workforce.

5. The customer activated social enterprise will drive innovations that really matter
For the past several years, social has been laser focused on internal collaboration or pushing out messages to clients and partners. In 2014, enterprises of all types will open up to customer influence, pioneering social and digital innovation and building engaging customer experiences. We’ll see workplaces and marketplaces fusing together like never before; enterprises will be thinking and acting differently in the context of social.

IBM's  recent C-Suite study reveals that 70 percent of C-suite recognize the importance of shifting to new models of social and digital interaction to reach customers and new markets. In 2014, we’ll see that the highest performing businesses are those that recognize that digital and social technologies have spawned a new kind of consumer behavior and new ways to work that are highly intertwined.

6. The true convergence of Social, Mobile, Analytics and the Cloud
This coming year will bring the true convergence of social business, big data, the mobile workforce, and cloud computing as ‘business as usual.’ An organization’s social business platform will become the universal foundation for how the enterprise works and engages in the marketplace.

The platform must securely connect, empower and energize the workforce without anyone noticing the technology (i.e., performance, it’s bullet proof and it’s secure). The platform should enable self-service, it should process integrity; it should be intelligent and accessible anywhere, anytime.  Equally important is the ability to harvest data of all types and origins, as that is what fuels the personalized experiences that are so critical.  Bringing all these enterprise technologies together in a highly dynamic, ever-changing environment like a social business requires a well architected solution. Thus, organizations consider which platforms to build their social businesses upon, they will want a highly integrated, holistic platform that is based on SMAC – social, mobile, analytics and cloud.

7. Brand journalism will begin to gain traction

This 7^th prediction doesn’t come from Hebner, but based on my observations of IBM. They have a reported 40,000+ content producers and brand journalists within IBM, some of which are writing for their industry’s most well-known publications. IBM is becoming a powerful media house and does not rely on the media to tell their story.

But volume is only part of the story, as more and more content is being produced, quality and social distribution matter – and that is usually derived from professionals with large social followings. Brands are starting to realize that hiring journalists or professional bloggers with large followings to create content for them will not only give them high profile attention, but provide myriad revenue opportunities as well.

Yahoo provides an example of how companies are starting to capitalize on the trend. They recently persuaded New York Times tech columnist David Pogue to lead their consumer tech reporting. Another example is Jesse Noyes, who was a business reporter for the Boston Business Journal and the Boston Herald and now Oracle’s (Eloqua‘s) managing editor.

So for me, not only are Hebner’s predictions something to closely watch, but also watch what IBM is doing closely. Take one of their latest hires, Andrew Grill (former CEO of social scoring site Kred). They hired him to be their Global Social Business Partner lead, but I suspect there’s something bigger going on beyond the scenes. I’ve recently interviewed Grill and will expand more in the next few weeks.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2013/11/18/ibm-these-are-the-top-7-social-trends-that-will-emerge-in-2014/