Understanding Social Media and the Statistics

The Holy Grail of Social Media is justifying the outlay and effort spent, on a business level.

There are no shortage of statistics that prove the value of Social Media. Here are some of them:

• Social media users revenue grew at 19% vs. non-SM users 6% 
• Client base of SM users grew at 21% vs. non-SM users 
• 61% of LinkedIn users gained a client through SM,
• 35% of Facebook users gained a client,
• 47% of blog owners gained a client,
• 36% overall gained clients, through a social network. 

The sources were a 2011 Hubspot Report, 2010 Socialware Survey, and a 2009 Pershing-Aite Study. Most businesses realize the potential of social media to enhance their bottom line.

Even the largest companies understand that the investment in manpower (social media work is labor intensive) is vital.

In fact, "research conducted by Buddy Media shows that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are always considered while making marketing strategies in bigger companies.

94% of the participating companies said that Facebook was the top priority when it came to social media marketing." Other statistics that this study ferreted out were more telling.

The respondents in this particular study were Chief Marketing Officers, and when asked what their purpose for using social media was, only 38% said for sales.

Another telling stat is that 35% of these CMOs reported they had no strategic plan for social media use. These study results were reported in a recent Geeks4Share article.

Another report, this one a Forrester study, reported by Mashable, concluded that just 49% of CMOs and Marketing VPs had fully integrated social media in to their brand building efforts.

Just about all of them realized the potential and the change that social media has made in how consumers and brands engage, but almost half were baffled about how to use it to make a dollars and sense difference.

There has been a lot of talk about the effectiveness of social media this week as GM pulled their advertising dollars from Facebook on the eve of their IPO.

On Social Media Today, Steve Olenski addressed it in The Real Reason GM Left Facebook.

If you are a GM fan, and have frequented their fan pages, you can attest that they never seemed to engage much--using them generally as broadcast tools.

This is too much like traditional media--one way communication, instead of the more personal dialogue that social media offers. So their strategy needs tweaking.

Overall, the numbers in this article seem to tell us that companies know they should market with social media, but do not know how to do it. In fact, half of the business to consumer marketers surveyed agreed with the statement “Social media has the potential to build my brand, but I’m not sure how to capitalize on it.”

That last statement excites me for the future we can expect from social media. Most social media devotees, like myself, realize that companies often do not understand how to implement social media-- at all!

The larger ones, of course, have figured out some things, but it seems there is a lot of opportunity to help businesses put an effective social media plan in place that drives traffic, engages customers, and encourages brand loyalty.

Crowd-Sourcing - cartoon

We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'

Read more: xkcd Cartoons

The most Important Elements of Business Analytics

Five key elements of a modern business analytics strategy can help businesses position themselves for growth in the new economy and continue to work and be smarter, especially in managing costs, improving profit, identifying new opportunities, driving cash flow and managing risk for more effective decision-making.

1. Scorecards/dashboards.
By using scorecards and dashboards, executives are able to monitor data efficiently, better understand performance gaps and quickly drive opportunities with more strategic decision-making.

Understanding how business is performing against predetermined targets is crucial. As companies become increasingly agile, executives simply do not have the time to sift through stacks of reports to discover how their business is performing. Business leaders can look to measurement tools, such as scorecards and dashboards, to monitor data and help manage strategy and performance goals.

There are different scorecard types that provide distinct characteristics to help decision-makers, including those focused on strategy management, business process performance management and basic performance monitoring. Regardless of structure, their impact on decision-making is even more significant.

Scorecards let executives link individual and team performance to organizational strategies. This helps employees understand at a glance how their individual roles drive company-wide performance. With digital scorecards that are tied to key financial and operational data, business leaders don’t have to sift through spreadsheets or paper-based reports. They are effectively able to monitor and manage their strategies as well as make smarter decisions to execute company objectives.

2. Reporting and analysis.
Reporting and analysis abilities allow decision-makers to assess and communicate how their company is performing in the industry and take immediate action accordingly.

Reporting and analysis helps executives see how they are operating in different regions or across product categories, as well as better understand the state of their market sector and industry competition.

With business analytics, Web-based reporting sits on top of core transaction systems so decision-makers can take immediate action on recent financial or operational information. Reporting and analysis creates a common context for decision-making across departments and staff levels and helps companies make data more actionable.

3. Financial performance management.
Deep insight into financial and operational data helps companies streamline business operations in order to increase profitability and sustainability.

Business analytics software for financial performance management helps executives streamline the complex process of tough decision-making by enabling users to evaluate financial results across countries, currencies, general ledger systems and legal entities. This deep insight helps finance make smarter decisions about which assets, resources, initiatives, locations, products or customer relationships may no longer be sustainable.

Armed with detailed financial analytics, business leaders can quickly evaluate how results change over time, in different regions and across various product categories. The ability to identify key financial and operational trends is always vital. By drilling down to transactional-level detail, trends can be spotted more easily so decision-makers can better understand resource requirements and plan accordingly.

4. Continue the planning cycle.
Replacing rigid planning cycles with business analytics software enables businesses to build intelligent plans for future development and growth.

Business analytics software for enterprise planning can help companies replace and revamp rigid annual budgeting and planning processes that tend to make minimal impact on business growth. This type of business analytics technology fosters continuous planning on a monthly, weekly or daily basis, positioning companies to achieve higher performance in both strong and weak economies.

With real-time visibility into up-to-date data, executives can create rolling forecasts that consider a broad range of potential future scenarios. This type of what-if analysis enables business leaders to develop intelligent action plans for variable future outcomes, thus boosting the agility and responsiveness of the company.

5. Continuous monitoring of performance targets.
Monitoring performance targets on an ongoing basis lays the foundation for future growth, providing organizations with a realistic performance outlook based on actual business and industry developments.

Companies should not seek shelter from the stormy clouds brought on by the recession, but rather take careful, intelligent steps to better manage costs, improve efficiencies, reallocate resources and streamline supply chains so that the foundation for future growth is established. Instead of setting targets at specific numbers, company decision-makers need to link performance targets to events, trends and risk factors.

This allows for more realistic performance targets based on actual business and industry developments and provides more flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions. The strategy will require a commitment to rid the company of inefficient processes in favor of intelligent systems capable of driving continuous performance.

For the past four years, BI software, a key component of the business analytics market, has ranked as the number one priority of executive managers surveyed by Gartner. Why? Because choosing the right strategy, executing against it, and ensuring you’re on the right path demands the access to the information and insight that modern business analytics delivers.

This is especially true during uncertain economic times, businesses of all sizes need to analyze operations and performance in an effort to identify the best ways to improve business processes, reduce or optimise enterprise costs and improve overall enterprise workforce effectiveness.

Smart companies need a modern, intelligent business analytics strategy that gives them the ability to understand past performance, get an immediate pulse on what is happening now, and both plan and model the future to gain more predictability and control.

This type of strategy is driven by the business in collaboration with the IT department and combines the elements of scorecards/dashboards, reporting and analysis, financial performance management, continuous planning and performance targets.

Together, this modern business analytics strategy fosters better control over information and visibility into how the new intelligence gained will impact the business value chain. Moreover, an inclusive business analytics strategy is pervasive across lines of business and employee roles, helps organizations find opportunity amidst economic turmoil, accurately measures efficiencies, streamlines the decision-making process, revolutionizes planning, budgeting and forecasting and lays a solid foundation for sustainable 21st century growth.

The Economist: Three Habits of Irritating Management Gurus

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14698784

Alas, Business Information (BI) practitioners can analyse, criticise and debunk the works of popular management gurus till the cows come home, but the demand for expert wisdom grows unabated.

The gurus fill a need of business leaders to provide the magic formulas and quick fixes, for management. Even if we criticise them, they often deliver “...their failures only serve to stoke the demand for their services....the very fact that (management) defies easy solutions, leaving managers in a perpetual state of angst, means there will always be demand...”

Your Leaders are in Chains: Let loose the Hounds!

Have you got the measure of your Senior staff? Well, why are you not giving your senior people the opportunity to lead and to deliver better value on their projects. Playing safe is not the same as scoring points!

Currently, modern business-driven organisations have wrapped within them (and without them), an extensive, complex and multi-layered IT Infrastructure that is expected to take-on a more defensive exo-skeletal role than it's intended 'growth enablement' and 'capability enhancement' role, for which it is greatly suited.

The energy lost in defending and maintaining the status quo, could be better spent on more effective expansion and stronger growth.

It would appear that most organisations are favouring the 'wait and see' strategy and find themselves burning precious fuel and time simply hovering above the ground instead of plotting a new course and moving ahead, albeit at a 'steady as she goes, Captain' pace.

So it's no wonder that there is some confusion of the role of the 'gung-ho!' multi-functional, assertive Project Managers and Business Analysts in this stabilising environment that 'maintains the status quo' at all costs.

PMs and BAs alike are confused about the skills and efforts required in these circumstances and are therefore equally unsure about what value they can deliver, while confined to their seemingly passive roles.

"I think our wagons have been formed into a defensive circle for so long, we have forgotten which way is forward!"

Senior people, in particular have become very frustrated and feel restricted in their implementation of new ideas and innovative projects. They know they can deliver more: more value to the clients and more value to the organisation. Certainly more value than the situation allows and they know this because they have already proved it in the past.

There is a very real risk that career advancement paths will quickly stall, especially for senior people. Once you have learned the basic skills of project management and business analysis and have had a number of opportunities to try, fail and put it into practice successfully, what next?

The Clock is Ticking!
Unfortunately from here, it can be a downward spiral. As time flies by, more and more Senior people are moved into low level positions, where they stagnate and then they don’t have the opportunity to show what they can really do. Everybody looses. Experienced PMs and BAs are marginalised, morale suffers, projects suffer, and the company don’t get the results they want from their efforts.

One option being considered, is to come up with new titles for senior people in the PM and BA roles to differentiate them from the crowd and to accentuate the increased value that they can deliver but I fear that this is just another example of 'name magic' and the acquisition of status and respect without undergoing the arduous task of earning it.

Risks or Benefits of Letting Senior People lead
Project success rates will increase if you have Senior people running your projects. People who are abley assisted by Business System Designers who can synthesise or simulate as well as analyse and calculate, to create effective system designs and applications that users like.

When Senior Project Managers have the assertive authority and sound experience to address and resolve problems and issues as they arise, with timely and focussed solutions, then ICT and development projects stay on track and deliverables will meet company expectations.

Let’s untie our Senior project managers and business analysts and see what happens. Take the brakes off! Loosen their shackles and give them more P&L responsibility. Plot a course for your next challenge and into the future growth of your organisation.

Leveraging the talents of senior people in project management and business analysis roles is going to make a huge improvement in project success rates and will take your organisation out of a hovering status quo, with an ICT exo-skeleton and into an assertive forward-thinking leadership, that is capable of creating and managing growth, innovation and business capability. Chocks away and full steam ahead!

The Sacred Cows of Roles, Process and Metrics

A View on Sacred Cows

There has long been some academic argument, theoretical disconnect and the occasional raised tension between the dedicated followers of business intelligence /performance management (BI) and those that stand behind business process management (BPM).

KPI and data evangelists sometimes view process advocates as bureaucrats no longer tuned to the dynamics of changing businesses, and are now more interested in outcomes than processes.

Meanwhile, the process faithful have worked incrementally and under a long-held premise that 'where business/technology initiatives fail, there’s normally a clumsy process to blame'.

Inside Process Initiatives
By their very nature, inside process initiatives draw little attention, being as they are usually secretive. The greater effect of business process outsourcing (BPO) has already shifted workforces for scale.

What started with call centre outsourcing, sooner or later touched internal departments for travel, payroll, time and expense, software development/maintenance and even CRM or other customer-facing applications.

Process and Data Converge

In the last few years we’ve seen the process and data worlds merge to the point where process conference speakers actually discuss business intelligence and vice versa. It’s that tentative connection of processes and KPIs (or service levels for BPO providers) that has led to some recent rationalising thoughts on soft skills and the beginning of what might someday become a wider and mor comprehensive use of on-demand employment.

Executive Ambitions and Goals

We have been learning about executive ambitions and goals inside global corporations. These normally culminate in the establishment of internal priorities for employees and the outsourcing of everything else. We have to be more thoughtful now and need to consider that data centre managed service offerings are replacing not only IT infrastructure, but also their discrete IT functions.

Where is this leading?
Well, as service based infrastructure and process providers move deeper up and into the enterprise, old roles are slowly moving towards silo containment and tiers of competence. This leads more and more towards the virtual external providers whose value has becomes more nad more commoditised over time.

Driving or Steering SMEs
This use of comoditised outsourced suppliers is what is driving or steering small and mid-sized organisations and feed the continuous discussions to appraise and determine if even key undertakings like business intelligence are effectively outsourced to service providers.

Corporations' Citadel Approach

The larger corporations are not going to be outsourcing business intelligence or even key data functions anytime soon. Having said this, the previous years of rapid organic growth has created a jumble of capital assets, business architecture and roles in enterprises, which are becoming less controllable and therefore less defensible to maintain in-house.

Proven Competency
If you accept that BPO vendors have demonstrated and proven their competency, it may be more likely that core competencies will be begrudgingly and tentatively handed over to process owners inside the organisation, to manage internal and external resources.

Controlled Handover
This handover is already happening in a controlled way at companies like HP, Ford and Cisco. We already have people managing this transition, in the form of project and program managers, whose roles are enjoying elevated backing and status.

The Future

There is still some work to be done but there is good reason to believe that, improved operational metrics, performance management and business intelligence, will bring with it the mover and shakers of the process and on-demand movements. We just have to keep to the path, fight the fight and hold the faith.

Change and Business Analysis

What makes a good and effective Business Analyst in these days of economic storms, tightened belts and changing political tides.

While strong abilities in communication, collaboration and analysis will always be the mainstays of strong business analysts, our changing technology environment is altering the world in which business analysts commonly work and therefore, their skills have to change in line with this and meet current business requirements.

While a Business Analyst's traditional skill set is still king, those decidedly non-technical leadership, communication and business-process understanding traits, the changes in software delivery methods have altered what business analysts need to offer right now.

The Rise of Agile Methodologies and Lean Concepts
It's the end of traditional software delivery as we know it, thanks to Agile and Lean. A recent survey found that 41 percent of respondents are using Agile techniques and 10 percent are exposed to Lean concepts.

Organisations are planning and implementing new, lighter-weight software delivery processes on a large scale, and this is largely changing the world of the business analysts. The BA's need to stay up to date with recent approaches and changes in methodologies, understand the subtle changes to their roles, and modify their practices accordingly.

Agile Approaches Change the Business Analyst Role
Requirements look very different in an Agile project than they do in a traditional waterfall endeavour. With Agile, the team typically describes requirements at a high level early on in the process and only elaborates on them when it's time to implement them.

The team uses different artifacts such as user stories, and the requirements definition process is much more collaborative and iterative.

Agile Methodologies

With an increase in the adoption of Agile methodologies inside businesses today, BAs need to understand what's changed and what's different in the methodologies so that they can help guide the transformation of their role and practices.

If their CIOs and business-unit leaders aren't already adapting the business analyst role to new software delivery methods and process changes, then the BAs might need to do it themselves.

Cross-Functional Knowledge

Business analysts need to obtain cross-functional knowledge and experience by being exposed to new technologies and different business units. Cross-training in project management, software development and quality assurance would help.

As with most roles in technology, it's never safe to rely on the skills you already possess. Effective business analysts are constantly seeking to improve their core skills and staying up to date with technology changes to add the most value to their organisation.