Data: What the Fortune Global 100 are doing (and not doing) on social media

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A recent study from Burson-Marsteller looks in depth at what the Fortune Global 100 are currently doing on social media.

Some of the interesting insights from the study include:
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Insights into the evolution of Klout’s algorithm

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The rise of the reputation economy is one of the most important trends of our time. As such, like it or hate it, Klout’s role as probably the most prominent influence engine today means it is useful to track its structure and mechanisms.

Klout today unveiled a major change to its algorithm and scores. Here are some thoughts on the changes.
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Study: Increased customer expectations are driving corporate uptake of social media

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Yesterday I spoke at a business leaders lunch event in Darwin on the Future of Business organized by the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce and Optus.

Following my keynote John Paitaridis, Managing Director of Optus Business, shared some of the highlights of a recently released Optus Future of Business report, based on an extensive survey of corporate Australia.

One of the pointed themes that emerged from the study was that customer expectations are driving uptake of social media and digital intiatives. This happens to be highly aligned with my perspective that increased expectations are at the heart of social change, as expressed in my Transformation of Business framework.

Here is some of the interesting data from the report:


Source: Optus
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Creating a consistent online voice and identity

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I have recently been running a series of social media workshops for retailers in a franchise chain.

The workshop starts with a big picture view and then runs through detailed guidance on establishing a presence, building engagement, and driving success, interspersed with group exercises to set objectives, think through stratgies, and set action plans.

One of the exercises I take the participants through in the workshops is thinking through their online voice and identity.
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Scenarios for the downfall of Facebook and a new landscape for social networks

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Today I gave the keynote on Social Media and the Future at Marcus Evans’ CIO Summit.

In question time after my keynote I was asked whether Facebook will still be the dominant social network in 5 years.

I think the degree of uncertainty on this front is too high to make a firm prediction. However given the current market landscape and trends over the last couple of years, the most likely outcome is that Facebook will still dominate.

In structured futures studies, one of the most powerful tools is trying to build plausible scenarios for how alternative outcomes to what is expected could come to pass.

In this case, we need to tell a credible story on how Facebook loses its predominant position in social networks.
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Social Media and the Future: Keynote slides at CIO Summit

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This afternoon I am giving a keynote on Social Media and the Future at the Australian CIO Summit in the Gold Coast.

Here are the slides from my presentation. As always, my keynote slides are shared with the proviso that they are designed to accompany my presentation and are NOT intended to be useful on their own. However you might find them of interest.

To provide just a little context on the flow of my keynote:
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Moving the CIO to the heart of strategy

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My recent European speaking tour was divided around equally between deep dives into crowdsourcing and where it is going, and keynotes and workshops for Chief Information Officers on shifts in the business environment and how that will shape the future of the IT function.

A key theme of the CIO workshops was their opportunity and responsibility to move to the center of strategy within their organizations.

My Transformation of Business Framework provides an overview of some of the driving forces and how they are playing out across the business landscape.


Click on the image for full-size pdf

I think it is often useful to consider what the business environment might be in say five years from now, and the characteristics of organizations that will be successful in that world.

Some of the ways we are likely to describe those successful organizations include:
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MIT global study on social business: Executives increasingly understand the value and success drivers

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MIT Sloan Management Review together with Deloitte have just launched 2012 Social Business Global Executive Study and Research Project, drawing out some very interesting insights from a survey of almost 3,500 executives from 115 countries.

Below the slides of the report I have selected several of the interesting slides with brief commentary.

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Every business document should be in the cloud and concurrently editable

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I’m at the Melbourne Google Enterprise Atmosphere on Tour event, the first of 25 events around the world. I am doing the keynote on The Evolution of Business at the Melbourne and Sydney events, giving an external perspective which happens to be highly aligned with the Google vision.

The event included a Google Apps demo. Since in my organizations we have used Google Apps for several years the demo initially seemed very straightforward to me, though in fact I did see a number of features that we are not yet using that would be useful.

The demo seemed to be over-emphasizing the concurrent editing and collaboration features of Google Docs, which I think of as pretty basic. However it struck me that in fact the vast majority of organizations represented in the audience still store most of their business documents on a hard disk somewhere. The number of documents being emailed between people inside companies today is still massive.

That is crazy. Emailing documents back and forth is fraught with staggering problems, not least version control.
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Themes of the day: Consumerization of IT, Crowdsourcing for small business, Crowdsourcing in PR

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These are frantically busy days, which is squeezing my ability to blog and capture some of the fascinating stuff flying by. In coming months I think I’ll try to do more ‘mini-blogging’, just capturing quick thoughts and impressions rather than writing up every interesting speaking engagement or media appearance I do.

Yesterday I gave three presentations, and I’d love to write (at least) a full blog post about what we covered for each one. However that’s not possible, so I’ll just share quick thoughts about each topic and what I will try to write more about later.

The day started by giving the keynote at a Consumerization of IT event run by CIO Magazine, supported by HP and Microsoft.
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