Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

Crisis preparedness - Are you ready?

It's always interesting to watch how brands deal with a crisis when they arise. As example, JetBlue had their hands full this week with an unfortunate situation at 36k feet. The good news, the brand reacted swiftly and confidently, suggesting they have a well-established crisis response framework in place.

But it seems JetBlue may be in the minority here. There are endless examples of brands seemingly caught completely unprepared for the inevitable. In a study by Burson-Masrsteller, a whopping 79% of business decision makers believe their company will experience a crisis within the next twelve months.

So why then do only 38% of global respondents feel that they are prepared to deal with an emerging crisis through new media?

In our socially-connected world, every customer has a microphone, an audience and an opinion. Brands must be prepared for a potential crisis. In a best-case scenario, crisis planning never sees the light of day. But more often than not, advanced planning can help manage, and often times mitigate, a crisis from causing irreparable damage to your brand.

So what's your level of crisis preparedness? 

@LenDevanna

 

 

What's Your Social Media Strategy?

It was an honor to see EMC's approach to Social Media cited in the July issue of the Harvard Business Review. The article is well worth the read, if you haven't seen it already. Be sure to read the healthy and provocative comments from the community.

What's most interesting to me in reading this piece is the fact that no one size fits all. The authors call out four basic approaches - The 'predictive practitioner', 'creative experimenter', 'social media champion' and 'social media transformer'.

While it's true that we (EMC) continue to embrace the notion of experimenting, our journey has actually taken us to each of the other approaches described (and then some...). The authors note this, suggesting that 'many organizations will progress from one to another' during their journey. That's definitely proven to be the case.

The most important take away is that all of the approaches cited, all of the different behaviors, have one thing in common - These brands have embraced Social Media and are leveraging it to transform their business.

We've seen remarkable results, and have only scratched the surface.

So, what's your strategy?

 

 

Social Connects Companies... To Themselves

One of the things I love most about being part of the social revolution is the unexpected 'ah-ha' moments that surface almost daily. I had one such moment this week, and wanted to share the observation.

Given the command and control structure that remains prominent in the traditional web, there are inherent checks and balances in place to ensure consistent messaging and positioning. In that model, a centralized web team is usually organizationally agnostic, with their focus being on providing a consistent experience to visitors of a traditional .COM site, as example.

As we know very well, social flips that model upside down, providing a direct path from subject matter expert to audience. In effect, it can remove all of the checks and balances that the more traditional model provided.

An Approach to Enterprise Social Media Education

To celebrate Social Media Day, we thought we'd share a little something with the community...

At EMC, we pride ourselves on our approach to Social Media adoption. When we started this journey years back, we chose to focus on employee proficiency - and that strategy has paid us back many times over.

But, the social world is constantly changing. New tools and techniques show up daily. In addition, we've all become so completely ingrained in the digital world that it's easy to lose sight of the larger picture, the incredible reach we have, and the vast diversity of our audience.

To that end, we set out to create an educational video highlighting the opportunities and possible pitfalls of social engagement. While it's designed with our global EMC family in mind, the key points should resonate with just about everyone... Give it a look.

 

 

A Tour of Social City at EMC World

So I'm off to the Big Apple to represent EMC and pick up our first-place award for engagement marketing in BtoB Online's 2011 Social Media awards. The campaign that took the award was a rather large launch (internally known as 'Mega Launch') back in January.

As I sit here staring at the inevitable flight delay board, I reflect on our ongoing evolution in the social realm. One thing that's consistent - When we want to have an impact in Social, we go BIG.

To that end, and with EMC World 2011 now in the rear-view mirror, I thought I'd give you an inside look into our social presence at EMC World - 'Social City'.

Social City was designed to put all of our social engagement points front and center for attendees of the event. Be it EMC's Facebook presence, our EMC Community Network, our roster of industry bloggers - There's a point of engagement for everyone.

It was also designed to help drive EMC World discussions far beyond the physical confines of the event. As you'll see - Social City helped us extend the conversations to hundreds of thousands more via digital channels.

So - See for yourself. Here's your very own tour of Social City - including the now infamous Bloggers Lounge - at EMC World by yours truly. I suspect you'll see what I mean... We like to go BIG with Social.

 

 

Congrats EMC - First Place for Social Media Marketing

Much like the Academy Awards... The winner gets up on stage, is humbled at the recognition, especially given the competition at hand, and ultimately sets out to thank the Academy, a long list of producers, family and friends, actors and the like.

Except for us, it's not about the Academy, the Directors, or anything like that. For EMC, it's about our social voices. It's about the multi-year investment we've made in helping our global workforce become 'socially proficient'.

EMC's been awarded first place in B2B Online's 2011 Social Media Marketing Awards for the technology category. The recognition is based on our supporting social campaign for EMC's record breaking product launch back in January.

There were several components to this social campaign - from driving early speculation as to what EMC was up to, to engaging influential social voices, to a rather addictive Facebook game that went rather viral and helped us grow our Facebook community significantly.

All in all, the 'social' aspects of the campaign ended up realizing 28% of the total audience at the launch event in January... Not bad, eh?

But, as suggested above, what can't get lost here is the power of social proficiency. Since beginning our journey some years back, we've taken an inside-out approach. We invested in ourselves - helping our global workforce of more than 48k become 'proficient' in the social world. These are the folks that ultimately helped us go BIG.

So kudos to EMC, our highly-passionate and always engaged global employees, and a stellar Social Media Team that I'm honored to be a part of.

Oh... There's one more thing... We're honored to now be up for the 'People's Choice Award'... How about casting a vote for your pals at EMC? I hope we can once again show how we EMC'ers like to GO BIG using #SocMed.

Thanks!

 

Opportunity - Manager of EMC's Social Brand

Social Media is, among other things, a catalyst for transformation. On the surface, it represents the move from a uni-directional to a bi-directional web. Now everyone has a voice.

Down a layer, it provides an incredible opportunity to break down traditional barriers and establish meaningful relationships with your customers and other audiences.

But with the rapid expansion of the social universe, it's important to keep a keen eye on your social brand. Via social - are you making it easier for your audience to engage with you, or more difficult? Are you listening and engaging, or just talking? Are your social voices consistent and unified, or all over the map?

There's a new and really cool opportunity here at EMC - Manager of EMC's Social Brand. It's a newly defined role, but I suspect one that will become commonplace in the years ahead.

Click through for the description. This opportunity should be posted up on EMC.com next week, and I'll update this post with specific job code, etc;.

Update - The opportunity is now posted on EMC.com. Head on over to the Careers section - search the openings for Req 71206BR.

The Journey to the Engaged Enterprise

Back in 2007, we set out on a journey to fundamentally transform the way we do business. We knew at the time that this wasn't as simple as flipping a 'social switch', spinning up a community or establishing a brand presence on Facebook.

Rather, we knew that we were embarking on something really big and transformative. We knew that the journey would be challenging, but also exciting, and that the rewards on the other side were simply enormous.

A bit over three years in and I think we're well on track. We've established an extremely high-degree of 'social proficiency' across our global workforce, and use tools such as EMC|ONE, the EMC Community Network, Facebook and many other channels to engage our audiences in new and meaningful ways.

Social in the Enterprise - Convincing the Curmudgeons

I enjoyed a trip to BlogWorld Expo last week, and was honored to sit on a panel of industry-leaders to discuss the impacts of Social Media in the enterprise. Having participated in several such discussions this year, I continue to be stunned by the number of folks still in the 'convincing' or 'selling' mode.

Perhaps I'm just taking our evolution for granted - But I really struggle to understand how the debate persists. Especially with such compelling data around enterprise adoption so readily available.

Given the number of questions around overcoming this particular hurdle, I thought I'd share a few tips and tricks we used along our way. Not that there was ever resistance to the evolution at EMC, but there's always a crowd that needs help understanding the opportunities at hand...

 

Live from VMWorld

No shortage of excitement coming from this years VMWorld.  If you're not fortunate enough to be here, you can follow all the buzz over at VMWorld.com. I'm running around with Flip cam in hand and hope to get some content posted this afternoon. In the meantime, wanted to share a couple of interesting videos coming from the show. First up, Sanjay Mirchandani, Senior Vice President and CIO at EMC, takes some time to talk about the benefits of virtualization, and also discusses EMC's own journey to the private cloud.

Sanjay is among several others who also made an appearnce on the live video feed from the event. Not too late to tune in and catch some of the great information coming out of the show.