Talking Through The Cosmos

What day is it again?

Oh, yes, Wednesday.  Hump day.

I’ve been so busy this week on back-to-back phone calls that I’ve hardly had an opportunity to lift my head and see what’s going on in the world.

I finally took a few moments this morning to do so, and discovered a couple of tidbits on the mobile front. One, the new Samsung Galaxy IV is now available, and two, the QWERTY keyboard version of the new BlackBerry, the Q10, is also available.

On the former, it’s a mixed bag according to the Verge, though a mostly positive bag but one that suggests Samsung Galaxy has plenty of “good enough” competition not to warrant the steeper price of entry for the IV.

And on the latter, TechCrunch writes the Q10 is “a QWERTY keyboard smartphone comeback worth waiting for,” which I’ll consider at least a semi-positive endorsement.

Me, I’m sticking with my LG Cosmos 2 feature phone.

Being a social and digital media guru of sorts, people look at me like I’m from another planet when carrying this phone.  That alone is a good reason to do so, as it’s a great conversation starter: “What the hell are you doing with that phone??!”

The other is, I like having a phone that works as a phone.  I have an HTC Android device, a Kindle, an iPod Touch 5th gen, an iPod Touch 2nd gen, and an iPad 1st gen for all my tablet needs. But for all the time I spend on the phone, good battery life and strong signal reception are key, and the Cosmos 2 continues to deliver day after day without fail.

“Can you hear me now?” are words rarely spoken through the Cosmos.

Speaking of the cosmos, in the social media realm IBM just announced that for the fourth consecutive year that IDC ranked them number one in worldwide market share for enterprise social software.

Yay team.

Fact is, social networking adoption continues to soar as businesses look to transform their organization into a smarter enterprise that is capable of empowering a global workforce and transforming client experiences.

According to IDC, the worldwide enterprise social market segment reached 1.0 billion in 2012, representing growth of 25 percent over 2011.

As this demand grows, organizations are looking to introduce social capabilities into all key areas, from marketing and research innovation to sales and human resources. The challenge is that many lack the ability to capture and share the unique insights from each employee and use it to help drive real value to the business.

IBM’s social business software and services pair powerful social networking capabilities with analytics that help companies engage all key stakeholders whether an employee, customer or partners in order to accelerate innovation and deliver results.

Today, more than 60 percent of Fortune 100 companies have licensed IBM’s solutions for social business, including eight of the top 10 retailers and banks.

IBM’s social networking platform, IBM Connections, allows for instant collaboration with one simple click and the ability to build social communities both inside and outside the organization. We live by it inside IBM these days, and it’s available both on premise and in the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business. IBM currently has three IBM SmartCloud for Social Business facilities based in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

You can learn more about the latest version of IBM Connections in the video below.

Facebook Up Front

There’s nothing like the looming shadow of the largest Internet-related IPO in history to bring out all the Debbie Downers.

Mind you, I’m in a two-day meeting in Raleigh with my teammates, so I’m supposed to be paying attention to what’s going on inside these four walls.  And I mostly am.

But, I simply could not ignore this headline sent to me via email by a fellow colleague (just to demonstrate the continued critical importance of personal word-of-mouth recommendations…I can’t find out everything from watching “The View”, now, can I?): GM To Stop Advertising On Facebook.

This on the first scroll of The Wall Street Journal this afternoon.

It would be easy enough to dismiss this headline considering the source, News Corporation, which owns the Journal, which is competing for essentially the same advertising dollars — never mind that they also own that little used social network, MySpace, which once-upon-a-time was the bell of the social networking ball — but, it’s General Motors, the U.S.’ third largest advertiser in a critical category for advertising (automobiles).

According to the story, GM has spent some $40 million on its Facebook presence and plans to stop advertising there “after the company’s marketing executives determined their paid ads had little impact on consumers.” However, it also points out GM will continue to expand its use of marketing through Facebook’s pages, which is essentially free real estate.

In this case, it seems that the “owned” media is outpacing the “paid.”

On the other side of Madison Avenue, AP-CNBC recently conducted a poll that indicated more than half (57 percent) of Facebook users polled said they never click on ads or other sponsored content when they use the site. Only 4 percent say they often click on ads.

This isn’t exactly a canary in Facebook’s coal mine, however.

As I’ve tried to point out to my own troops, the shift in attention to the Facebook platform cannot be denied — U.S. Internet users now spend 20% of their surfing time there, and as Facebook creates more intersections between entertainment, retail, and commerce, I would expect that number to go up, not down!

So what if people don’t click on an ad for the new Escalade — there’s a pretty good chance a few millions of the right people saw those ads, and quite frankly, if folks’ attention is moving from the big screen to the small (and, via mobile, to the smaller), then the attention deficit economy must eventually witness the transition of ad dollars in some semblance of parity, which heretofore hasn’t happened.

It doesn’t escape my notice that this news emerges the very same week that the big broadcasters are holding their “upfronts,” where they try to sell their $60 billion of inventory as much in advance as possible for the next year to advertisers, their agencies, etc.

The New York Times’ Amy Chozick penned a piece today explaining some of the festivities at this year’s upfronts. An excerpt: “At the Fox Party on Monday, the judges for the show ‘MasterChef,’ Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot, and Joe Bastianich, will personally serve a menu that includes organic salmon ceviche and a deconstructed Caesar salad accompanied by brioche Twinkies.”

Fox will be serving “veal meatballs with black truffles” along with “Manhattan mules,” a combination of vodka, ginger beer, and lime.

Traditional advertising’s Rome is burning, so why not throw a cocktail party and drink mint juleps as the last vestiges of appointment programming disappear into the Nielsen viewer diary of history?

The dirty little secret is this: We’re entering into a world where the absence of data is going to be replace by an abundance of data.  Moving forward, Facebook’s problem with advertisers will not be whether or not they can share information about the platform’s advertising performance, but more importantly, which data, about which demographic, on what platform, etc.?

There will be more information than most advertisers can consume effectively, particularly those more schooled in Nielsen “set meters” than A/B splits and multivariate testing.

Yeah, sure, go ahead and pile on the new kid on the block.  Mark Zuckerberg’s about to take away those truffles and Manhattan mules and your annual party is moving from up front to out back.  I’d be mad, too.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the advertising world is changing, and the big screen is about to be replaced by one that will get smaller and smaller, but one that will be more and more valuable to marketers.

Risky Business: Results From The First-Ever IBM Global IT Risk Study

IBM recently undertook its first-ever Global IT Risk Study to uncover the challenges associated with IT risk, and the steps IT managers and CIOs are taking to better understand, confront, and resolve this concern.

This survey was conducted in May and June of this year, in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit. The survey was conducted online with 556 IT managers and others involved in their business’s IT function, and included 131 CIOs. Regions throughout the globe were included, including North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

Survey Says…

To get the flavor of the full report, I would encourage you to register and download the full report — there are way too many important details to cover here.

But in terms of big picture results, the survey provided some key directional indicators on where IT managers and executives’ concerns mostly lay, and just as important, what they should consider doing about them.

First, in terms of risk maturity.  Few of today’s organizations are “risk mature,” or fully prepared for all risk situations that may occur.  The lack of a risk-aware culture plays a big part in this lack of maturity.

Second, culture.  Without a risk-aware culture, even the best efforts to mitigate risk may not succeed.

The 2010 IBM Global IT Risk Study provides detailed results on risk management questions that run the gamut, including important questions about risk preparedness in a variety of physical and virtual infrastructure scenarios like the ones in this graphic.

Third, and no major surprise, data protection and privacy.  Data is the unifying concern across all IT risk management domains.

And finally, emerging trends. Clearly on the radar is the need to incorporate cloud computing, mobile technology, and social networking into the existing infrastructure.

In fact, the risks surrounding social networking technologies was near the top of the list of IT respondents’ concerns, with some 64% of them indicating it was “Extremely risky/risky”.

IT security was also prevalent in the study as a primary concern, with some 78 percent of IT professionals concerned about vulnerability to hackers and unauthorized access/use of company systems.

Providing Actionable Intelligence For IT Risk

After reading through the data and responses from the IBM Global IT Risk study, you may develop an inclination to set out for the closest tall building and jump.

That would be foolhardy and simply add insult to injury where your company’s risk profile is concerned. They need you — whether they know it or not is another story.

No, the good news amidst all the bad is that the IBM report also provides some actionable intelligence, recommendations for how to improve your risk situation based on the concerns expressed by IT managers worldwide.

Starting with the simplest, but most obvious, advice: Examining and assessing your organization’s IT risk maturity so you can focus on the areas that will best help your business.

Learning how to “sell” the benefits of risk mitigation, helping your colleagues understand it’s a means by which you can help bolster business growth and improve brand perception.

Or determining how to raise the level of risk awareness throughout the organization, so the burden doesn’t fall on a single set of organizational shoulders (read: Yours!).

You’ll find a wealth of this and other valuable information and counsel in the report. And on Wednesday, September 29th, 2010, you can watch a full virtual event on the presentation of the findings and their implications.

Visit here to get all the details of the Webcast and to download the full report.

And please, in the meantime, stay away from tall buildings.

@ Pulse 2010: Getting Things Going

I have too many friends I work with in Canada to gloat about the U.S. team’s win over Canada in men’s hockey last evening at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.

So, that’s all I’ll say on the subject.

Hee hee hee.

One of the great things about attending IBM’s major customer events like Pulse is the opportunity to visit face to face with customers and also to see some familiar and friendly faces from across IBM.

We’re a distributed global organization these days at IBM (my team and I joke with one another that we only see each other on other continents…more truth to that than I care to admit) so face-to-face time is a precious commodity in an organization fluent in using Lotus Sametime and Notes to conduct so much of its business.

I ran into one such IBM old friend last night in the hallways of the MGM, Harriet Pearson.

Harriet is IBM’s Chief Privacy Officer and Vice President, Security Counsel, and someone with whom I collaborated with many moons ago to help formulate IBM’s Internet privacy policy.

Harriet has continually been a guiding beacon and thought leader for IBM and the industry around privacy concerns, including the challenging subject of privacy in the social media — view this recent and thoughtful interview as part of SuperNova on the subject of balancing the need for sharing with online privacy.

Harriet will be partnering with IBM System and Technology Group general manager Helene Armitage in Tuesday’s general session here at Pulse to explore how integrated service management can meet the needs of a smarter planet, with a particular eye on the practical concerns of managing growth, reducing costs and ensuring security.

Harriet and Helene will provide valuable insight into how to manage these concerns, and will be joined by a variety of IBM clients who are deploying integrated service management solutions using Tivoli software.

Of course, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

This morning, just after breakfast, expect to see Tivoli Software general manager Al Zollar officially get things kicked into full gear before handing off the podium to the other Al, former U.S. vice president, Al Gore.

I’m looking forward to it all, and plan to provide some real-time updates via Twitter, as are so many of my colleagues, customers, and the press/analyst community…follow the hashtag #ibmpulse to monitor the real-time stream from this morning’s general sessions starting around 11 AM EST.

Live from Lotusphere: Rawn Shah Interview On Social Networking for Business

Scott Laningham and I tracked down noted IBM social software guru, Rawn Shah, yesterday afternoon here at Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando, Florida to talk about social software and collaboration, including inhibitors to adoption by businesses.

Rawn leads the IBM Center of Excellence investigating best practices and understanding behavior in social software systems on behalf of the IBM Social Software Programs & Enablement team, and used to lead a distributed team at IBM developerWorks that was focused on community initiatives.

His new book, Social Networking for Business, will be published next week by Wharton School Publishing.

Podcast Q&A: Live from Lotusphere 2010: Interview with Rawn Shah (17:21)